Testing activities on the Prototype Vertical Denitration Calciner at Plutonium Finish Plant (PFP) were suspended in January 1997 due to the hold on fissile material handling in the facility. The restart of testing activities will require a review through an activity based startup process based upon Integrated Safety Management (ISM) principles to verify readiness. The Activity Based Startup Plan for the Prototype vertical Denitration Calciner has been developed for this process.

A personalized letter from The School of Visual Arts' Admissions Committee extending an invitation to an applicant for graduate study. The document outlines the applicant's options, conditions for admittance, and provides crucial information to guide their next steps in this exciting academic journey.

A recent revision of the US. Department of Energy privatization contract for the immobilization of high-level waste (HLW) at Hanford necessitates the investigation of alternative waste feed sources to meet contractual feed requirements. This analysis identifies wastes to be considered as HLW feeds and develops and conducts alternative analyses to comply with established criteria. A total of 12,426 cases involving 72 waste streams are evaluated and ranked in three cost-based alternative models. Additional programmatic criteria are assessed against leading alternative options to yield an optimum blended waste feed stream.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Newsletter of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service discussing topics related to economic aspects of raising dairy cows, dairy production, and managing dairy operations.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO evaluated the role the Department of Defense (DOD) training is playing in implementing best practices in weapon system programs, focusing on the: (1) contribution DOD training makes to program offices' ability to apply best practices; (2) different methods used by DOD and leading commercial firms in training on best practices; and (3) strategic approaches that underlie DOD's and leading commercial firms' training methods for best practices."

Pyranometers are used to measure the global and diffuse components of solar irradiance. One of the methods to calculate the unshade (global) responsivity of a pyranometer is the standard shading method, described in the Annual Book of ASTM Standards, section 14, volume 14.02. In this paper, the standard method is used to calculate the shade (diffuse) responsivity of a pyranometer by accounting for the zenith and azimuth response of the pyranometer. A discussion of the effect of pyranometer offset on the calculated responsivity is also presented.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the coordination of federal research and development (R&D) efforts to develop nonmedical technology related to chemical and biological (CB) defense, focusing on: (1) federal programs that conduct nonmedical CB defense-related R&D; and (2) the existing mechanisms for coordinating these programs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the extent to which the Department of Defense (DOD) has applied the Government Performance and Results Act's outcome-oriented principles to the Chemical and Biological (CB) Defense Program, focusing on whether: (1) CB Defense Program goals are explicit and measurable; (2) the CB Defense Program has performance measures that assess outcomes and impacts rather than outputs and activities; and (3) organizations executing the CB Defense research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) activities have incorporated Results Act principles in their program planning and evaluation."

Statistical concepts, methods, and tools are often used in the implementation of statistical thinking. Unfortunately, statistical tools are all too often misused by not applying them in the context of statistical thinking that focuses on processes, variation, and data. The consequences of this misuse may be ''data torturing'' or going beyond reasonable interpretation of the facts due to a misunderstanding of the processes creating the data or the misinterpretation of variability in the data. In the hope of averting future misuse and data torturing, examples are provided where the application of common statistical tools, in the absence of statistical thinking, provides deceptive results by not adequately representing the underlying process and variability. For each of the examples, a discussion is provided on how applying the concepts of statistical thinking may have prevented the data torturing. The lessons learned from these examples will provide an increased awareness of the potential for many statistical methods to mislead and a better understanding of how statistical thinking broadens and increases the effectiveness of statistical tools.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO updated its previous report on the policies governing the use of the 89th Airlift Wing Aircraft, focusing on whether: (1) changes to executive branch policies since 1992 addressed the intent of GAO's previous recommendations; and (2) reimbursements have been made for the use of the 89th Airlift Wing aircraft."

In March 1999, staff at Lockheed Makn Hanford Company (LMHC) were asked to make a presentation to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) about the safety of the waste tanks at the Hanford Site and the necessity for further tank sampling. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provided a statistical analysis of available tank data to help determine whether additional sampling would in fact be required. The analytes examined were total alpha, energetics, total organic carbon (TOC), oxalate as TOC and moisture. These analytes serve as indicators of the stability of tank contents; if any of them fall above or below certain values, further investigation is warranted (Dukelow et al. 1995). PNNL performed an analysis of the data collected on these safety screening analytes with respect to empirical distributions and the established Safety Screening Data Quality Objectives (SS DQO) thresholds and Basis for Interim Operations (BIO) limits. Both univariate and bivariate analyses were performed. Summary statistics and graphical representations of the data were generated.

The 12th Amendment to the Constitution requires that candidates for President and Vice President receive a majority of electoral votes (currently 270 or more of a total of 538) to be elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the President is elected by the House of Representatives, and the Vice President is elected by the Senate. This process is referred to as contingent election and is the topic of discussion in this report.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) complaint caseload, focusing on: (1) trends in the size of inventories and the age of cases in inventory at various stages of the EEO complaint process; (2) trends in the number of complaints filed by federal employees and the time taken by agencies and EEOC to process them; and (3) implications of these trends and how future caseloads may be affected by EEOC's regulatory changes to the complaint process."

The equilibrium properties of anisotropic molecular fluids can be in principle calculated in a statistical mechanics framework, but the theory is generally too cumbersome for many practical applications. Fortunately, at high densities and temperatures the anisotropy can be averaged-out by means of a density and temperature independent potential (the median) that produces reliable thermodynamics [1,2]. The proposal of Shaw and Johnson [1], which turns out to be the so-called median potential [2], is very successful in predicting the thermodynamics of simple fluids such as N{sub 2} and CO{sub 2} at reasonable high pressures and temperatures [3]. Lebowitz and Percus [2] pointed out some time ago that the success of this approximation could perhaps be understood in terms of a simple theory that treats the asphericity as a perturbation. The median appears to be the best choice for hard nonspherical potential [4], which may explain its success for fluids at high densities, where the hard core contribution is known to be dominant.

The basis is described that establishes a pressure criterion for casks received at the canister storage building.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

System safety as a technical field faces numerous opportunities, and some challenges, in the high technology, low cost future. As a relatively small field best known in high consequence domains (defense, aviation, space) it may have to tailor its messages and approaches to influence organizations (both private and public) pressured by incessant competition and ''Internet time.'' We present a model of organizations as cultures that carefully ration attention and reward personnel who successfully pursue goals. These evolving goals result from a fusing of both external influences (market share: regulation) and internal influences (dominant group identities such as marketers or engineers). In the context of organizational goals, these same influences cause people to search narrowly and quickly for technologies and ideas that can fit through ''influence gates'' in the organization and that will likely grow there. System safety must thus compete with all manner of cost-cutting and quality management approaches, in an environment currently obsessed with short-term value and return on investment. From this model we develop some ideas for the communication and promotion of system safety that could increase the net impact and effectiveness of the field.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO audited the Capitol Preservation Fund for the fiscal years ended September 30, 1998, and 1997."

Funeral program for Mrs. Otha Jewel Williams, born December 6, 1929 and died October 22, 1958. The funeral was held at Bethel A.M.E Church, officiated by Reverend Doctor Sarah F. Davis. Funeral arrangements were made through Carter-Taylor Williams Mortuary and she was buried in Fort Sam Houston Nationals Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas.

Our objective in the characterization of sediments from Seaplane Lagoon at the Alameda Naval Air Station (NAS) was to determine the geochemical interactions that control the partitioning of cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, and zinc between the sediments and the porewaters. Our approach was to collect several cores at the east outfall location of the Seaplane Lagoon. We determined the porewater chemistry by (1) making in situ micro-electrode measurements, (2) extracting porewaters, and (3) modeling geochemical reactions. We determined the sediment chemistry by measuring (1) elemental abundance, (2) mineralogy, and (3) trace-element speciation. This information should help the US Navy determine the long-term hazard of the sediments if they are left in place and the short-term hazard if they are dredged. We did not fully examine the geochemistry of sediments from the West Beach Landfill Wetlands site, because these sediments were distinct from the Seaplane Lagoon sediments. Our initial motivation for studying the Landfill Wetlands site was to determine the trace-element geochemistry in Seaplane Lagoon sediments that had been dredged and then disposed in the Landfill Wetlands. Unfortunately, the location of these dredged sediments is unknown. The cores we sampled were not from the Seaplane Lagoon.

The objective of this Class III project is to demonstrate that detailed reservoir characterization of slope and basin clastic reservoirs in sandstones of the Delaware Mountain Group in the Delaware Basin of West Texas and New Mexico is a cost-effective way to recover a higher percentage of the original oil in place through geologically based field development. The project focused on reservoir characterization of the East Ford unit, a representative Delaware Mountain Group field that produces from the upper Bell Canyon Formation (Ramsey Sandstone). The field, discovered in 1960, is operated by Oral Petco, Inc., as the East Ford unit: it contained an estimated 18.4 million barrels (MMbbl) of original oil in place.