A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on a wide variety of topics related to the permanent provisions (phase II) of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, focusing on: (1) statistics on background checks, denials, and appeals; (2) enforcement actions; (3) the National Instant Criminal Background Check System's (NICS) operations; and (4) pawnshop issues."

A statement of record issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Department of Defense's (DOD) fiscal year (FY) 2001 budget as it relates to readiness needs, focusing on: (1) identifying the aggregated differences between the amounts Congress initially designated for the operation and maintenance (O&M) subactivities and those DOD reported as obligated for the same subactivities; (2) identifying those O&M subactivities where DOD obligated funds differently than congressionally initially designated in each year of the 5-year period GAO examined (1994 through 1998); and (3) assessing information available to Congress to track DOD's movement of funds among O&M subactivities."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO analyzed the potential budgetary and economic effects of Nick Smith's proposal to reform Social Security."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the reasonableness of the Customs Services' underlying costs supporting its merchandise and air and sea passenger processing user fee."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the extent to which the Department of Defense (DOD) has moved funds that directly affect readiness to pay for real property maintenance and base operations, focusing on: (1) the net differences between the initial congressional designations of operation and maintenance (O&M) funding for real property maintenance and base operations and the amounts the services reported as obligated; (2) the net differences between the initial congressional designations of O&M funding for unit training and the amounts the services reported as obligated; and (3) determining from available DOD reports whether O&M funds were moved from unit training to pay for real property maintenance and base operations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the National Railroad Passenger Corporation's (Amtrak) use of funds, focusing on: (1) how much Amtrak has spent in Taxpayer Relief Act (TRA) funds and what types of activities it has funded; (2) whether Amtrak has used TRA funds in accordance with the act; (3) what the roles of the Amtrak Reform Council and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been in monitoring Amtrak's use of TRA funds; and (4) whether Amtrak fully reports its use of TRA funds."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the results of its fiscal year (FY) 1999 financial statement audit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the progress of the Small Business Administration's (SBA) efforts to implement its loan monitoring system, focusing on: (1) SBA's progress in completing the mandated actions of the Small Business Reauthorization Act of 1997; (2) GAO's evaluation of SBA's products completed thus far; (3) the processes used to develop these products and manage key activities; and (4) actions SBA needs to take to manage risks."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) creation of the Center for Rural Studies (CRS) Trust, focusing on: (1) the significant events pertaining to the creation, funding, and operation of CRS as well as any investigations of CRS; (2) how TVA accounted for the funds returned to TVA; and (3) the oversight of TVA activities."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO audited the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) fiscal year (FY) 1999 financial statements."

The Project provides for the design, procurement, construction, assembly, installation, and acceptance testing of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), an experimental inertial confinement fusion facility intended to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion in the laboratory by imploding a small capsule containing a mixture of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The NIF will be constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California as determined by the Record of Decision made on December 19, 1996, as a part of the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. Safety: The Incident Analysis and Construction Management Safety Review Teams were formed to review the January 13, 2000, accident in which a worker received a back injury when a 42-in.-diameter duct fell during installation. One action is to contract DuPont to review the Safety Program. Technical Status: The general status of the technologies underlying the NIF Project remains satisfactory. The issues currently being addressed are (1) cleanliness for installation, assembly, and activation of the laser system by Systems Engineering; (2) laser glass--a second pilot run at one of the two commercial suppliers is ongoing successfully; and (3) operational costs associated with final optics assembly (FOA) optics components--methods are being developed to mitigate …

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

OAK-B135 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION FISSION REACTOR FOR THE PERIOD DECEMBER 1,1999 THRIUGH FEBRUARY 29,2000

The MCO is designed to facilitate the removal, processing and storage of the spent nuclear fuel currently stored in the East and West K-Basins. The MCO is a stainless steel canister approximately 24 inches in diameter and 166 inches long with cover cap installed. The shell and the collar which is welded to the shell are fabricated from 304/304L dual certified stainless steel for the shell and F304/F304L dual certified for the collar. The shell has a nominal thickness of 1/2 inch. The top closure consists of a shield plug with four processing ports and a locking ring with jacking bolts to pre-load a metal seal under the shield plug. The fuel is placed in one of four types of baskets, excluding the SPR fuel baskets, in the fuel retention basin. Each basket is then loaded into the MCO which is inside the transfer cask. Once all of the baskets are loaded into the MCO, the shield plug with a process tube is placed into the open end of the MCO. This shield plug provides shielding for workers when the transfer cask, containing the MCO, is lifted from the pool. After being removed from the pool, the locking ring is …

The goal of this LDRD project has been to create LATIS3D--the world's premier computer program for laser-tissue interaction modeling. The development was based on recent experience with the 2D LATIS code and the ASCI code, KULL. With LATIS3D, important applications in laser medical therapy were researched including dynamical calculations of tissue emulsification and ablation, photothermal therapy, and photon transport for photodynamic therapy. This project also enhanced LLNL's core competency in laser-matter interactions and high-energy-density physics by pushing simulation codes into new parameter regimes and by attracting external expertise. This will benefit both existing LLNL programs such as ICF and SBSS and emerging programs in medical technology and other laser applications.

A series of experiments is described in which a novel prescription for the identification of plastic strain is tested to determine its validity in the context of the strain-space formulation of rate-independent plasticity. Biaxial experiments were performed on several thin-walled aluminum 1100-O cylindrical specimens.

None

Semiweekly newspaper from Boerne, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

Ultra-thin oxynitride films were grown on Si by direct rapid thermal processing (RTP) oxynitridation in NO/O{sub 2} ambients with NO concentrations from 5% to 50%. During oxynitridation, nitrogen accumulated at the Si/dielectric interface and the average concentration of in N through the resulting films ranged from 0.3 to 3.0 atomic percent. The average concentration of N in the films increased with increasing NO in the ambient gas, but decreased with longer RTP times. The maximum N concentration remained relatively constant for all RTP times and a given NO/O{sub 2} ambient. Re-oxidation following oxynitridation altered L the N profile and improved the electrical characteristics, with an optimal NO/O{sub 2} mixture in the range of 10% to 25% NO. Re-oxidation by RTP improves the electrical characteristics with respect to the films that were not re-oxidized and produces only slight changes in the N distribution or maximum concentration. The electrical results also indicate that oxynitride films are superior to comparably grown oxide films.

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

This is the final report on the LDRD SI-funded Sustained Spheromak Physics Project for the years FY1997-FY1999, during which the SSPX spheromak was designed, built, and commissioned for operation at LLNL. The specific LDRD project covered in this report concerns the development, installation, and operation of specialized hardware and diagnostics for use on the SSPX facility in order to study energy confinement in a sustained spheromak plasma configuration. The USDOE Office of Fusion Energy Science funded the construction and routine operation of the SSPX facility. The main distinctive feature of the spheromak is that currents in the plasma itself produce the confining toroidal magnetic field, rather than external coils, which necessarily thread the vacuum vessel. There main objective of the Sustained Spheromak Physics Project was to test whether sufficient energy confinement could be maintained in a spheromak plasma sustained by DC helicity injection. Achieving central electron temperatures of several hundred eV would indicate this. In addition, we set out to determine how the energy confinement scales with T{sub c} and to relate the confinement time to the level of internal magnetic turbulence. Energy confinement and its scaling are the central technical issues for the spheromak as a fusion reactor concept. …

Data warehousing is an approach for managing data from multiple sources by representing them with a single, coherent point of view. Commercial data warehousing products have been produced by companies such as RebBrick, IBM, Brio, Andyne, Ardent, NCR, Information Advantage, Informatica, and others. Other companies have chosen to develop their own in-house data warehousing solution using relational databases, such as those sold by Oracle, IBM, Informix and Sybase. The typical approaches include federated systems, and mediated data warehouses, each of which, to some extent, makes use of a series of source-specific wrapper and mediator layers to integrate the data into a consistent format which is then presented to users as a single virtual data store. These approaches are successful when applied to traditional business data because the data format used by the individual data sources tends to be rather static. Therefore, once a data source has been integrated into a data warehouse, there is relatively little work required to maintain that connection. However, that is not the case for all data sources. Data sources from scientific domains tend to regularly change their data model, format and interface. This is problematic because each change requires the warehouse administrator to update the …

Faculty recital performed at the UNT College of Music.