This assessment responds to a joint request from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to analyze the military and commercial opportunities presented by new structural materials technologies, and to outline the Federal policy objectives that are consistent with those opportunities.

This survey was conducted as part of an Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) assessment on medical testing and health insurance that will be published at a later date. OTA is also monitoring AIDS-related developments for the U.S. Congress, and the survey results are being published by OTA as the second in a series of Staff Papers on AIDS-related issues.

This report discusses the use of technology in education of students K-12 and university.

Annual report detailing the progress and budget of the Office of Technology Assessment.

Annual report of the progress and budgets of the Office of Technology Assessment.

This special report presents 10 case studies of recent Superfund decisions at sites which OTA believes, from surveying over 100 recent cleanup decisions, to be representative of a broad range of contamination problems and cleanup technologies.

This background paper presents the results of a study of physician and sperm bank practice of artificial insemination in the United States. It documents the number of women undergoing artificial insemination each year, the annual cost, medical and social screening criteria for women seeking artificial insemination and men who donate semen, the genealogical recordkeeping available to the resulting children, and physician attitudes toward possible changes in artificial insemination practice.

This report discusses risk assessment as a analytic process by which the nature and magnitude of risk is identified.

This special report considers the implications of new developments in biological sciences for the freedoms and protections embedded in our Bill of Rights. It is one of a series of publications coming from OTA’s Constitutional Bicentennial Project, begun in 1987 at the request of the House Committee on the Judiciary and its Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice.

This assessment analyzes the problem of acid deterioration of books and the program underway at the Library of Congress. The program at the Library involves the chemical treatment of books in a unique and effective process that, however, also presents some new engineering and safety concerns. Because of these concerns, the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations requested this independent review of the Library’s system and other available or potential processes.

This report discusses Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the ways to prevent those not infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from becoming infected with it.

This report discusses classification and aggregation of patients according to differential needs for care that have bee accepted as normal features of contemporary hospital practice.

Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS), research laboratories around the world have pushed the temperature limits steadily upward, opening the way to commercial applications with potentially revolutionary impacts. The scientific race is becoming a commercial race, one featuring U.S. and Japanese companies, and one that the United States could lose. Indeed, American firms may already be falling behind in commercializing the technology of superconductivity.

This report discusses the role of computer in utilizing learning process.

This report responds to a request from the Technology Assessment Board—the congressional oversight body for the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)–prompted by the balance-of-trade and other economic implications of these events. The report describes the conditions the domestic and world copper industry faced during the early 1980s. It documents the steps U.S. copper companies took to improve their position so dramatically in the mid-980s, and evaluates the industry’s present and possible future status, including relative costs of production and the elements of those costs.

This report describes the new technologies being used in criminal justice and, as in all of the reports of this series, addresses that delicate balance to be maintained between the national interest and individual rights.

This special report is the first product of that assessment. It provides an overview of the subject, including specific concerns about the health of the defense technology base and the related issues before Congress. Subsequent reports will probe aspects of this immense problem in greater detail.

This report examines the problems if distributive justice and the allocation of technological resources to the elderly. The second part of this report looks more narrowly at the specific question of the use of age as a criterion in the allocating of technological resources. The third part provides a closer examination of health care resources seeing whether the nature of the resources may have a bearing on how they are distributed.

This report is divided into an Executive Summary and four chapters. These chapters examine Federal subsidies to virgin materials, the potential for Federal subsidies for recycled materials, Federal subsidies for alternative energy sources, and state efforts at increasing recycling through tax incentives.

This report examines how and why students are drawn toward or deterred from pursuing a career in science or engineering. Schools, families, peers, informal education efforts-such as museums, science centers, special programs, and television— all play a role. The subtitle of this report—Grade School to Grad School—emphasizes that many factors and institutions must be understood as all one system.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential effectiveness of “educational” programs for preventing the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS among IV drug users.

This report reviews the research on AIDS and sex education programs. It examines the more significant studies that have evaluated the actual impact of those programs upon various outcomes, including knowledge, attitudes, skills and sexual behaviors.

This report discusses the necessity of quality health care information, the access to health information and the intentions of providing such information.

This report presents the results of a survey concerning state transmission line certification and sitting procedures, and state energy planning processes.