Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the Department of State's electronic signature system."

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a state agency that is the subject of a public hearing before the Sunset Advisory Commission must post notice under the Open Meetings Act when its members attend the hearing (RQ-0193-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a county court at law judge who seeks the nomination of the executive committee of a political party to be the party's general election candidate for a new office automatically resigns from office by operation of article XVI, section 65 of the Texas Constitution (RQ-0195-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: The proper disposition and use of motor vehicle registration fees allocated to county (Rq-0182-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether section 681.009, Transportation Code, which relates to designation by a municipality of parking spaces for the disabled, conflicts with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (RQ-0191-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a municipal park board may authorize a hotel under its management and control pursuant to section 306.032 of the Local Government Code to offer memberships in the hotel's health and fitness center to non-hotel guests, including local residents (RQ-0194-JC)

Neoclassical tearing modes have now entered the mainstream of tokamak research. One indication of this was the featuring of it in the ITER MHD instabilities paper at the 1998 Yokohama meeting, of which we (along with many colleagues throughout the world) were co-authors. In addition, this past year a number of talks were given on various aspects of neoclassical tearing modes and their impacts in tokamak plasmas. At present, we are anxiously awaiting the DIII-D electron cyclotron heating and current drive feedback experiments to see if neoclassical tearing modes can be stabilized according to our theoretical model, or if the theory needs to be modified. A major question in the application of neoclassical tearing mode theory to realistic aspect ratio toroidal plasmas such as DIII-D is: what is the effect of shear in the toroidal flow velocity on toroidicity-induced mode coupling? Both differential rotation between surfaces and flow shear at the rational surfaces can be important both in determining the linear growth rates of tearing modes and in the nonlinear excitation of tearing modes induced by sawtooth crashes. To explore these effects we have been developing an efficient new code NEAR that is based on the FAR code and the …

The 1D performance of laser or X-ray driven targets to study phenomena such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in a single, steady shock, step down in density system has been described by a simple model based on 1D hydrodynamics. It is shown that the distance the interface travels under constant velocity conditions is a multiple of the separation between the ablation and shock front, and that this multiple depends on the density ratio at the interface, and the equations of states of the two materials. The model is applied to NIF with the aid of 1D hydrocode simulations to predict the ablation-shock separation. It is found that if adequate interface planarity can be maintained over an experimental length equal to the focal spot diameter, direct drive may out-perform indirect drive by up to {approx} factor 2 at the same pulse length and typically {ge} 2 at the same ablation pressure. This depends on the ability to control 2D effects in the directly driven targets (critically), and on the optimum hohlraum performance achievable for these experiments, rather than the achievable performance used for the study. It is predicted that several mm of constant velocity interface travel are potentially achievable on NIF, and …

Multi-resolution techniques and models have been shown to be effective for the display and transmission of large static geometric object. Dynamic environments with internally deforming models and scientific simulations using dynamic meshes pose greater challenges in terms of time and space, and need the development of similar solutions. In this paper we introduce the T-DAG, an adaptive multi-resolution representation for dynamic meshes with arbitrary deformations including attribute, position, connectivity and topology changes. T-DAG stands for Time-dependent Directed Acyclic Graph which defines the structure supporting this representation. We also provide an incremental algorithm (in time) for constructing the T-DAG representation of a given input mesh. This enables the traversal and use of the multi-resolution dynamic model for partial playback while still constructing new time-steps.

The optimum goal of this study is to develop a single decontamination system for chemical and biological agents which is non-toxic, non-corrosive, and easily deployable. The specific objective of this work was to evaluate oxidizer systems as reagents for detoxification and/or degradation to non-toxic environmentally acceptable components rather than necessitate complete destruction. Detoxification requires less reagent material than total oxidation, thereby reducing the logistic burden for a decontamination team. One of the goals is to develop decontamination systems for use by first responders as well as more complete systems to be used by specialized decontamination teams. Therefore, the overall project goal is to develop better decontamination methods that can be quickly implemented by these organizations. This includes early demonstrations and field work with companies or other government agencies who can identify implementation concerns and needs. The approach taken in this work is somewhat different than the standard military approach to decontamination. In a battlefield scenario, it is critical to decontaminate to a useful level in a very short time so the soldiers can continue their mission. In a domestic, urban scenario, time is of less consequence but collateral damage and re-certification (public perception and stakeholder acceptance) are of much greater …

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

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.

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Direct numerical simulation and large eddy simulations are powerful tools for studying turbulent flows. Unfortunately, they are computationally demanding in terms of run times, storage, and accuracy of the numerical method used. In particular, high order methods promise high accuracy on a given grid, but they often fail to deliver the expected accuracy due to dispersive truncation errors that appear as unphysical oscillations in the numerical solutions. This report describes a nonlinear flux limiter that has been applied to the second-order tensor viscosity method and markedly reduces the dispersive truncation errors. A Rayleigh-Taylor instability is simulated to show how well the flux limiter works.

Newsletter of the Texas Department of Health discussing the news, activities, and events of the organization and other information related to health in Texas.

Some Members of Congress have expressed interest in the feasibility of using a value-added tax (VAT) to either replace all or part of the income tax or finance health care reform. A VAT is imposed at all levels of production on the differences between firms' sales and their purchases from all other firms. Policymakers may be interested in the following aspects of a VAT: revenue yield, international comparison of composition of taxes, vertical equity, neutrality, inflation, balance-of-trade, national saving, administrative cost, intergovernmental relations, size of government, and public opinion.

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

This paper describes a new concept for economically producing power without atmospheric emissions of regulated or greenhouse gases. A 5-MW to 10-MW experimental electric power generating plant is being designed for installation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to perform research to develop the new technology and to demonstrate its reliability. The research electric power generating plant will burn any gaseous fuel, including syngas derived from coal, with oxygen. Natural gas and oxygen will be used initially to produce a mixture of steam and carbon dioxide. The mixture will be delivered to three turbines in series to produce electricity. After leaving the low-pressure turbine, the gaseous mixture will be cooled in a condenser where the carbon dioxide separates from the steam. The carbon dioxide will be pumped into a local oil formation, which is located at a depth of 460 m below ground adjacent to the Laboratory. In the more general siting case, the carbon dioxide would be pumped into deep underground permeable strata. The natural gas will be combusted with oxygen in a gas generator to produce the turbine working fluid. Three turbines will drive an electric generator to generate electricity. In the first phase of the research, the …

Multi-resolution data-structures and algorithms are key in Visualization to achieve real-time interaction with large data-sets. Research has been primarily focused on the off-line construction of such representations mostly using decimation schemes. Drawbacks of this class of approaches include: (i) the inability to maintain interactivity when the displayed surface changes frequently, (ii) inability to control the global geometry of the embedding (no self-intersections) of any approximated level of detail of the output surface. In this paper we introduce a technique for on-line construction and smoothing of progressive isosurfaces. Our hybrid approach combines the flexibility of a progressive multi-resolution representation with the advantages of a recursive sub-division scheme. Our main contributions are: (i) a progressive algorithm that builds a multi-resolution surface by successive refinements so that a coarse representation of the output is generated as soon as a coarse representation of the input is provided, (ii) application of the same scheme to smooth the surface by means of a 3D recursive subdivision rule, (iii) a multi-resolution representation where any adaptively selected level of detail surface is guaranteed to be free of self-intersections.

This paper will present a method and program to precisely calculate the coordinates in a positioner coordinate system from given sample position coordinates with a minimum number of neutron surface scans for three possible circumstances in stress and texture measurement using neutron diffraction.

A z-pinch radiation source has been developed that generates 60 {+-} 20 KJ of x-rays with a peak power of 13 {+-} 4 TW through a 4-mm diameter axial aperture on the Z facility. The source has heated NIF (National Ignition Facility)-scale (6-mm diameter by 7-mm high) hohlraums to 122 {+-} 6 eV and reduced-scale (4-mm diameter by 4-mm high) hohlraums to 155 {+-} 8 eV -- providing environments suitable for indirect-drive ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) studies. Eulerian-RMHC (radiation-hydrodynamics code) simulations that take into account the development of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in the r-z plane provide integrated calculations of the implosion, x-ray generation, and hohlraum heating, as well as estimates of wall motion and plasma fill within the hohlraums. Lagrangian-RMHC simulations suggest that the addition of a 6 mg/cm{sup 3} CH{sub 2} fill in the reduced-scale hohlraum decreases hohlraum inner-wall velocity by {approximately}40% with only a 3--5% decrease in peak temperature, in agreement with measurements.

The real time processing of very large volumetric meshes introduces specific algorithmic challenges due to the impossibility of fitting the input data in the main memory of a computer. The basic assumption (RAM computational model) of uniform-constant-time access to each memory location is not valid because part of the data is stored out-of-core or in external memory. The performance of most algorithms does not scale well in the transition from the in-core to the out-of-core processing conditions. The performance degradation is due to the high frequency of I/O operations that may start dominating the overall running time. Out-of-core computing [28] addresses specifically the issues of algorithm redesign and data layout restructuring to enable data access patterns with minimal performance degradation in out-of-core processing. Results in this area are also valuable in parallel and distributed computing where one has to deal with the similar issue of balancing processing time with data migration time. The solution of the out-of-core processing problem is typically divided into two parts: (i) analysis of a specific algorithm to understand its data access patterns and, when possible, redesign the algorithm to maximize their locality; and (ii) storage of the data in secondary memory with a layout consistent …

Modern diesel engines produce far less mass of particulate matter than their predecessors, but this advance has been achieved at the expense of a significant increase in the number of sub-micron sized particles. This change in soot morphology has created the need for new instrumentation capable of measuring small volumes and sizes of particulate matter in a reasonable period of time, and preferably in real-time. Laser-induced incandescence and laser elastic scattering are complementary techniques suitable for this task. Optical measurements are presented for a diesel engine exhaust and compared with measurements performed using a scanning mobility particle sizer. This study investigates the effects of exhaust dilution and temperature control of the sampling system. It is also shown that laser-induced vaporization of low temperature volatile material is a potentially valuable technique for measuring the volatile component of exhaust particulate matter.