Considerable national interest has centered on merit pay for elementary and secondary school teachers since the recent release of the educational reform reports. This merit pay paper contains a background discussion, description of alternatives, summary of current and proposed programs, and analysis of evaluation and implementation implications.

Federal involvement in the education of the handicapped increased significantly with the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (P.L. 94-142) in the 94th Congress. This legislation amended the provisions for State assistance under Part B of the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA, P.L. 91-230, title VI, as amended) to require that a "free appropriate public education" be available for all handicapped children age 3 through 21 by September 1980. P.L. 94-142 authorized increased Federal financial assistance along with new requirements for participating State agencies and local school districts. Current issues relating to Federal policy for the education of the handicapped include concerns about costs and responsibilities in educating the handicapped, about the level of Federal financial support, about the characteristics of handicapped children actually identified and served, about the implementation of P.L. 94-142 requirements by State and local school districts, and about Administration proposals to revise Part B regulations.

This report discusses the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) used car rule, which aims to prevent and discourage oral misrepresentations and deceptive omissions of material facts by those selling used cars concerning warranty coverage and mechanical condition.

This report provides an assessment of Supreme Court cases from the 1983-85 Term that involve issues involving the free exercise of religion. It provides a detailed review of the case Lynch v. Donnelly, and brief descriptions of twelve other cases that have not been reviewed.

There is an extra copy in the ESD files. Not appropriate for OSTI submission.

None

Eleven binary and ternary alloys of uranium and very low concentrations of iron, silicon, and aluminum were prepared and tested for room-temperature tensile properties after various heat treatments. A yield strength approximately double that of high-purity derby uranium was obtained from a U-400 ppM Si-200 ppM Fe alloy after beta solution treatment and alpha aging. Higher silicon plus iron alloy contents resulted in increased yield strength, but showed an unacceptable loss of ductility.

Ab initio calculations of valence shell ionization potentials have shown that orbital relaxation and correlation differences usually make contributions of comparable magnitude. In marked contrast to this observation is the situation for deep core ionization, where correlation differences (approx. 1 eV) play a relatively minor role compared to orbital relaxation (approx. 20 eV). Theoretical calculations have shown that this relaxation is most easily described if the 1s-vacancy created by a K-shell excitation is allowed to localize on one of the atomic centers. For molecules possessing a center of inversion, this means that the molecular orbitals that best describe the final state do not transform as any irreducible representation of the molecular point group. Recent experimental work by Shaw, King, Read and Cvejanovic and by Stefani and coworkers has prompted us to carry out further calculations on N/sub 2/, as well as analogous investigations of 1s/sub N/ ..-->.. ..pi..* excitation in NO and N/sub 2/O. The generalized oscillator strengths display a striking similarity and point to the essential correctness of the localized hole picture for N/sub 2/. The theoretical calculations are briefly described, followed by a summary of the results and comparison to experiment, followed by a short discussion.

Commonly, abatement of hydrogen sulfide emission from a geothermal powerplant requires that hydrogen sulfide dissolved in the cooling water be eliminated by chemical reaction. Oxidation by atmospheric oxygen is the preferred reaction, but requires a suitable catalyst. Nickel is the most potent and thereby cheapest catalyst for this purpose. One mg/L nickel in the cooling water would allow 99% removal of hydrogen sulfide to be attained. A major drawback of catalytic air oxidation is that colloidal sulfur is a major reaction product; this causes rapid sludge accumulation and deposition of sulfur scale. We studied the kinetics and product distribution of the reaction of hydrogen sulfide with oxygen, catalyzed by nickel. Adding sodium sulfite to the solution completely suppresses formation of colloidal sulfur by converting it to thiosulfate. The oxidation reaction is an autocatalytic, free radical chain reaction. A rate expression for this reaction and a detailed reaction mechanism were developed. Nickel catalyzes the chain initiation step, and polysulfidoradical ions propagate the chains. Several complexes of iron and cobalt were also studied. Iron citrate and iron N-hydroxyEDTA are the most effective iron based catalysts. Uncomplexed cobalt is as effective as nickel, but forms a precipitate of cobalt oxysulfide and is too …

Environmental monitoring efforts spanned air, water, vegetation and foodstuffs, and radiation doses. Monitoring data collection, analysis, and evaluation are presented for air, soils, sewage, water, vegetation and foodstuffs, milk, and general environmental radioactivity. Non-radioactive monitoring addresses beryllium, chemical effluents in sewage, noise pollution, and storm runoff and liquid discharge site pollutants. Quality assurance efforts are addressed. Five appendices present tabulated data; environmental activity concentration; dose calculation method; discharge limits to sanitary sewer systems of Livermore; and sampling and analytical procedures for environmental monitoring. (PSB)

Correcting the dispersion function in the SLC north arc it turned out that backleg-windings (BLW) acting horizontally as well as BLW acting vertically have to be used. In the latter case the question arose what is the best representation of a defocusing magnet with excited BLW acting in the vertical plane for the computer code TURTLE. Two different schemes, the 14.-scheme and the 20.-scheme were studied and the TURTLE output for one ray through such a magnet compared with the numerical solution of the equation of motion; only terms of first order have been taken into account.

A very sophisticated method for calculating the stability and pulsations of stars which make contact with actual observations of the stellar behavior, hydrodynamic calculations are very simple in principle. Conservation of mass can be accounted for by having mass shells that are fixed with their mass for all time. Motions of these shells can be calculated by taking the difference between the external force of gravity and that from the local pressure gradient. The conservation of energy can be coupled to this momentum conservation equation to give the current temperatures, densities, pressures, and opacities at the shell centers, as well as the positions, velocities, and accelerations of the mass shell interfaces. Energy flow across these interfaces can be calculated from the current conditions, and this energy is partitioned between internal energy and the work done on or by the mass shell. We discuss here only the purely radial case for hydrodynamics because it is very useful for stellar pulsation studies.

A technique was developed to determine the rate and equilibrium constants for the base-catalyzed exchange of tritium from ehavy water to deuterochloroform. An activation energy and entropy were also calculated. These quantities are comparable with those reported in the literature for a similar reaction involving the exchange of deuterium from deuterochloroform to water. It was found that the exchange reaction occurred predominately between the dissolved reactants in the D/sub 2/O and CDCl/sub 3/ phases. The rate constant is a strong direct function of temperature while the equilibrium constant is a weak inverse function.

Moving down the main sequence from the ..beta.. Cephei variables, we come to later B-type stars. The suspicion of variability for these stars goes back to Vogel in 1891 who studied the radial velocities of Vega. Since that time there have been numerous studies of Vega (Wisniewski and Johnson 1979, Fernie 1981) and other B and early A stars which hint at variability in both radial velocity and light. Since Struve (1955) discussed these stars 28 years ago, they have been called the Maia stars after the Pleiades star that he thought was the prototype. The uncertainty in their actual variability has led Breger (1980) to call them the mythical Maia variables.