Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the data, assumptions, and conclusions reached by the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) on the acquisition of about two million square feet of leased space for the consolidation of PTO activities. This build-to-suit lease, valued at approximately $1.2 billion over its 20-year term, was signed in June 2000. this report responds to allegations and questions from two public interest groups about the PTO lease acquisition. One public interest group alleged that during the procurement process for the lease (1) GSA improperly awarded the lease to an offeror who had not complied with the solicitation's stated requirements, (2) GSA failed to compete the construction of the interior finishes phase of the project as required by law, and (3) GSA used an illegal cost-plus-a-percentage-of-cost contract. The second public interest group asked (1) whether the requirements in GSA's Solicitation for Offers for the PTO lease transformed the lease from an operating lease to a capital lease under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-11; (2) whether the new facility will be able to house all PTO employees and contractors throughout the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report discusses the U.S. Custom Service's expenditure plan for its Automated Commercial Environment System (ACE). GAO found that (1) Customs' expenditure plan satisfies the legislative conditions specified in the 2001 Consolidated Appropriations Act, (2) activities described in the plan are consistent with GAO's two open recommendations regarding the need for Customs to justify and make ACE investment decisions incrementally and strengthen ACE software acquisition management, and (3) there are two areas needing improvement. Customs has not adequately justified investing in the International Trade Data System (ITDS) pilot project parallel with, and separate from, planned ITDS efforts under ACE modernization. Also, Customs has defined conflicting roles and responsibilities for its independent verification and validation (IV&V) contractor."

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 commissioner may serve as a voluntary fire fighter(RQ-0335-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; Collection of payments assessed by a public improvement district (RQ-0336-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 573.012 of the Health and Safety Code authorizes a municipal peace officer to execute an emergency-detention warrant (RQ-0345-JC)

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is now under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The Power Conditioning System (PCS) for NIF, when completed will consist of a 192 nearly identical 2 megajoule capacitor storage banks driving 7680 two meter long flashlamps. A fully integrated single-module test facility was completed in August of 2000 at LLNL. The purpose to the Test Facility is to conduct Reliability and Maintainability (RAM) testing of a true ''First Article'' system (built to the final drawing package as opposed to a prototype). The test facility can be fired once every ten minutes with a total peak output current of 580kA with a pulse width of 400us. To date over 4000 full power shots have been conducted at this facility.

This paper describes design and operation of the flashlamp test system, used to evaluate the primary laser flashlamps on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California. The tester delivers repetitive high voltage pulses to a series pair of flashlamps at levels closely simulating those encountered in normal operation. Each lamp pair is subjected to a pre-ionization and main pulse shot sequence, with two minute intervals between shots. This capability allows the manufacturer to test and evaluate the flashlamps for infant mortality and longevity before delivery to NIF. All operations are under computer control with fully automated test and data acquisition capabilities requiring minimal operator input. The system is designed to operate continuously. Typical pre-ionization and main pulse outputs are: (1) Pre-ionization Pulse--V{sub chg} = 27kV, I{sub peak} = 3kA, E = 2.4kJ; Pulse Width--(10%-90%) - 200us; Main Pulse--V{sub chg} = 23kV, I{sub peak} - 24kA, E - 78.6kJ; and Pulse Width--(10%-90%) - 350us.

The purpose of this analysis/model report (AMR) is to assess the potential for uranium (U) (VI) compounds, formed during the oxidative corrosion of spent uranium-oxide (UO{sub 2}) fuels, to sequester certain radionuclides and, thereby, limit their release. The ''unsaturated drip tests'' being conducted at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) provide the basis of this AMR (Table 1). The ANL drip tests on spent fuel are the only experiments on fuel corrosion from which solids have been analyzed for trace levels of radionuclides. Brief summaries are provided of the results from other selected corrosion and dissolution experiments on spent UO{sub 2} fuels, specifically those conducted under nominally oxidizing conditions. Discussions of the current understanding of thermodynamic and kinetic properties of U(VI) compounds is provided in order to outline the scientific basis for modeling precipitation and dissolution of potential radionuclide-bearing phases under repository-relevant conditions. Attachment I provides additional information on corrosion mechanisms and behaviors of radionuclides in the tests at ANL. Attachment II reviews occurrence, formation, and alteration (collectively known as paragenesis) of naturally occurring U(VI) minerals because natural mineral occurrences can be used to assess the possible long-term behaviors of U(VI) compounds formed in short-term laboratory experiments and to extrapolate experimental results …

Pinhole-assisted point-projection backlighting with 10{micro}m and 5 {micro}m pinholes placed a small distance of order 1 mm away from the backlighter produces images with large field of view and high resolution. Pinholes placed closely to high-power backlighter sources can vaporize and close due to x-ray driven ablation, thereby limiting the usefulness of this method. A study of streaked 1-D backlit imaging of 25 {micro}m W wires using the OMEGA laser is presented. The pinhole closure timescale for 10 {micro}m pinholes placed 0.45 mm and 1 mm distant from the backlighter is 1.3 ns and 2.2 ns, respectively. Similar timescales for 5 {micro}m pinholes is also presented. Successful wire imaging prior to pinhole closure is clearly demonstrated.

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We review recent work on how the superfluid state of three flavor quark matter is affected by non-zero quark masses and chemical potentials. The study of hadronic matter at high baryon density has recently attracted a lot of interest. At zero baryon density chiral symmetry is broken by a quark-anti-quark condensate. At high density condensation in the quark-anti-quark channel is suppressed. Instead, attractive interactions in the color anti-symmetric quark-quark channel favor the formation of diquark condensates. As a consequence, cold dense quark matter is expected to be a color superconductor. The symmetry breaking pattern depends on the density, the number of quark flavors, and their masses. A particularly symmetric phase is the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase of three flavor quark matter. This phase is believed to be the true ground state of ordinary matter at very large density.

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

A series of 101mm diameter gas gun experiments was fired using manganin pressure gauges embedded in the HMX-based explosive PBX 9501 at initial temperatures of 20 C and 50 C. Flyer plate impact velocities were chosen to produce impact pressure levels in PBX 9501 at which the growth of explosive reaction preceding detonation was measured on most of the gauges and detonation pressure profiles were recorded on some of the gauges placed deepest into the explosive targets. All measured pressure histories for initial temperatures of 25 C and 50 C were essentially identical. Measured run distances to detonation at several input shock pressures agreed with previous results. An existing ignition and growth reactive flow computer model for shock initiation and detonation of PBX 9501, which was developed based on LANL embedded particle velocity gauge data, was tested on these pressure gauge results. The agreement was excellent, indicating that the embedded pressure and particle velocity gauge techniques yielded consistent results.

Traditional algorithms for automatic target cueing (ATC) in hyperspectral images, such as the RX algorithm, treat anomaly detection as a simple hypothesis testing problem. Each decision threshold gives rise to a different set of anomalous pixels. The clustered Rx algorithm generates target cues by grouping anomalous pixels into spatial clusters, and retaining only those clusters that satisfy target specific spatial constraints. It produces one set of target cues for each of several decision thresholds, and conservatively requires {Omicron}(K{sup 2}) operations per pixel, where K is the number of spectral bands (which varies from hundreds to thousands in hyperspectral images). A novel ATC algorithm, known as ''Pixel Cluster Cueing'' (PCC), is discussed. PCC groups pixels into clusters based on spectral similarity and spatial proximity, and then selects only those clusters that satisfy target-specific spatial constraints as target cues. PCC requires only {Omicron}(K) operations per pixel, and it produces only one set of target cues because it is not an anomaly detection algorithm, i.e., it does not use a decision threshold to classify individual pixels as anomalies. PCC is compared both computationally and statistically to the RX algorithm.

The performance of object-oriented applications in scientific computing often suffers from the inefficient use of high-level abstractions provided by underlying libraries. Since these library abstractions are not part of the programming language itself there is no compiler mechanism to respect their semantics and thus to perform appropriate optimizations, e.g., array semantics within object-oriented array class libraries which permit parallel optimizations inconceivable to the serial compiler. We have presented the ROSE infrastructure as a tool for automatically generating library-specific preprocessors. These preprocessors can perform sematics-based source-to-source transformations of the application in order to introduce high-level code optimizations. In this paper we outline the design of ROSE and focus on the discussion of various approaches for specifying and processing complex source code transformations. These techniques are supposed to be as easy and intuitive as possible for the ROSE users, i.e. for the designers of the library-specific preprocessors.

Simulations of plasmas with a DIII-D shape indicate plasma drifts are important at power levels near the L- to H-mode plasma transition. In addition to enhancing plasma flows in the divertor region, drifts are found to play a key role in establishing highly sheared radial electric fields in the edge of the confined plasma, for the physics of the high confinement operating mode (H-mode). Measurements of the plasma structure in the vicinity of the X-point of DIII-D indicate the importance of drifts on plasma flow between the scrape-off layer (SOL) and closed field lines. The large electric fields provide large flows around the X-point, and these are conjectured to play a role in the transition from L- to H-mode confinement. These results indicate the relevance of modeling the edge and SOL plasmas of present tokamak devices using models which include E x B, {del}B, and pressure gradient drifts. The results of simulation of specific DIII-D discharges is reported in this paper. They start with discussion of the simulation of an Ohmic discharge in Section 2, including a study of the effect of varying several operational parameters. Simulation of a higher triangularity L-mode discharge is discussed in Section, and a summary …

The shock initiation properties of pure ultrafine grade triaminotrinitrobenzne (UF-TATB) pressed to an initial density of 1.80 g/cm{sup 3} and fired at ambient temperature and 250 C are reported. Embedded manganin pressure gauges are used to measure the pressure histories during the buildup to detonation at several input pressures. The ambient temperature results confirm previous run distance to detonation versus shock pressure results. UF-TATB at 250 C is shown to be much more shock sensitive than it is at ambient temperature. At high impact pressures, the shock sensitivity of UF-TATB at 250 C approaches that of HMX-based explosives under ambient conditions. Ignition and Growth reactive flow models are developed for UF-TATB at both temperatures to allow predictions to be made for other scenarios.

The Power Conditioning System (PCS) of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) like many pulse power systems relies on large numbers of inductively isolated high voltage capacitors configured in parallel for energy storage. When an energy storage capacitor fails in such a capacitor bank, there is often little or no external indication showing which capacitor failed. Identifying the failed component can be a time consuming and potentially hazardous operation. Conventional methods using capacitance meters require that each capacitor be disconnected and tested independently. They have developed a new non-invasive technique (i.e. no dismantling of the bank is required) that greatly improves personnel safety as well reducing troubleshooting time.

This report mainly focuses on The Gender Wage Gap and Pay Equity. Women's participation in the labor market has undergone considerable change in the last few decades. The majority of today's married women have forsaken the traditional role of full time child care givers for the dual role of unpaid homemakers.

Standardized formats for atomic data used in calculating emission from a collisionally-ionized plasma are described. The formats use the astronomical-standard FITS format, and are extendible to other purposes, such as photoionization data. The formats emphasize storing references to the original data source and keeping the data in as-received form, to aid in checking against the original literature.

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

Student newspaper of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma that includes national, local, and campus news along with advertising.

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

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