A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) determines the staffing level for its toll-free telephone customer service operations. GAO found that IRS lacks a long-term telephone customer service goal that reflects the needs of taxpayers and the costs and benefits of meeting that goal. Rather, IRS annually determines the level of funding it will seek for its customer service workforce, using its judgment of how to best balance service and compliance activities. IRS then calculates the level of service that funding levels will provide. This approach is inconsistent with the Government Performance and Results Act and the practice of selected public and private call centers that field questions. IRS recognizes the shortcomings of its personnel management and will include performance measures and goals in its 2002 strategic plan. According to IRS officials, the agency also faces challenges in recruiting, training, retaining, and scheduling customer service representatives. IRS is developing a strategy to address each of these issues."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "With the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) implementation of a prospective payment system, efforts to protect patients from potential underprovision of care and to hold home health agencies (HHA) accountable are essential. Instituting the collection and reporting of Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) data is an important step in that direction. The use of OASIS data enhances consistency in the performance and documentation of patient assessments for home health services. As a result, information on patient outcomes will become available for the first time. Collecting such data is not without its costs. To varying degrees, the requirement to collect OASIS data on all home health patients increases the amount of staff time devoted to collecting and reporting patient assessment information. HHAs have been compensated for some of these costs through adjustments made to their payment rates. Moreover, because prospective payment system episode payment rates are based on historically high utilization levels, which have since declined, these rates should allow the completion of OASIS assessments. Protecting the privacy of home health care patients is also important. HCFA has made progress in this area by enhancing protections …

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This report consists of the amending process in the house of representatives.

This report describes a pilot study conducted by Tom Carlson of PNNL and Mark Weiland of MEVATEC Corp to test the feasibility of using light-emitting tags to visually track objects passing through the turbine environment of a hydroelectric dam. Light sticks were released at the blade tip, mid-blade, and hub in the MGR turbine and a Kaplan turbine at Bonneville Dam and videotaped passing thru the dam to determine visibility and object trajectories.

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A brief summary of the important results and a listing of publications which have resulted from the Iowa State University Very High Energy Gamma-ray Astrophysics Program for the decade 1991-2000 are given.

The facilities that became Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) were created in 1943 during the United States' super-secret World War II project to construct an atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project). During World War II and for several years thereafter, essentially all ORNL activities were classified. Now, in 2000, essentially all ORNL activities are unclassified. The major purpose of this report is to provide a brief history of ORNL's major classified activities from 1943 until the present (September 2000). This report is expected to be useful to the ORNL Classification Officer and to ORNL's Authorized Derivative Classifiers and Authorized Derivative Declassifiers in their classification review of ORNL documents, especially those documents that date from the 1940s and 1950s.

In-situ transmission electron microscopy is an established experimental technique that permits direct observation of the dynamics and mechanisms of dislocation motion and deformation behavior. In this paper, we detail the development of a novel specimen goniometer that allows real time observations of the mechanical response of materials to indentation loads. The technology of the scanning tunneling microscope is adopted to allow nanometer scale positioning of a sharp, conductive diamond tip onto the edge of an electron transparent sample. This allows application of loads to nanometer-scale material volumes couple with simultaneous imaging of the material response. The emphasis in this paper is experimental and descriptive, with particular attention given to sample geometry and other technical requirements. Examples of the deformation of aluminum and titanium carbide as well as the fracture of silicon will be presented.

The overall project objective is the development and validation of an innovative combustion system, based on a novel coal preheating concept prior to combustion, that can reduce NOx emissions to 0.15 lb/million Btu or less on utility pulverized coal (PC) boilers. This NOx reduction should be achieved without loss of boiler efficiency or operating stability, and at more than 25% lower levelized cost than state-of-the-art SCR technology. A further objective is to make this technology ready for full-scale commercial deployment by 2002-2003 in order to meet an anticipated market demand for NOx reduction technologies resulting from the EPA's NOx SIP call.

The total system performance assessment for site recommendation (TSPA-SR), on Yucca Mountain, as a site (if suitable) for disposal of radioactive waste, consists of several models. The Waste Form Degradation Model (i.e, source term) of the TSPA-SR, in turn, consists of several components. The Inventory Component, discussed here, defines the inventory of 26 radioisotopes for three representative waste categories: (1) commercial spent nuclear fuel (CSNF), (2) US Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (DSNF), and (3) high-level waste (HLW). These three categories are contained and disposed of in two types of waste packages (WPs)--CSNF WPs and co-disposal WPs, with the latter containing both DSNF and HLW. Three topics are summarized in this paper: first, the transport of radioisotopes evaluated in the past; second, the development of the inventory for the two WP types; and third, the selection of the most important radioisotopes to track in TSPA-SR.

The primary objective of the Monitored Geologic Repository Project Description Document (PDD) is to allocate the functions, requirements, and assumptions to the systems at Level 5 of the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS) architecture identified in Section 4. It provides traceability of the requirements to those contained in Section 3 of the ''Monitored Geologic Repository Requirements Document'' (MGR RD) (YMP 2000a) and other higher-level requirements documents. In addition, the PDD allocates design related assumptions to work products of non-design organizations. The document provides Monitored Geologic Repository (MGR) technical requirements in support of design and performance assessment in preparing for the Site Recommendation (SR) and License Application (LA) milestones. The technical requirements documented in the PDD are to be captured in the System Description Documents (SDDs) which address each of the systems at Level 5 of the CRWMS architecture. The design engineers obtain the technical requirements from the SDDs and by reference from the SDDs to the PDD. The design organizations and other organizations will obtain design related assumptions directly from the PDD. These organizations may establish additional assumptions for their individual activities, but such assumptions are not to conflict with the assumptions in the PDD. The PDD will serve …

A brief summary of the experimental objectives and a listing of publications which have resulted from the Iowa State University High Energy Physics Alpha Group / Program for the period of 1985 - 2000 are given.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a principle Department of Energy (DOE) Research Institution operated by the Union Carbide Corporation - Nuclear Division (UCC-ND) under direction of the DOE Oak Ridge Operations Office (DOE-ORO). The Laboratory was established in east Tennessee, near what is now the city of Oak Ridge, in the mid 1940s as a part of the World War II effort to develop a nuclear weapon. Since its inception, disposal of radioactively contaminated materials, both solid and liquid, has been an integral part of Laboratory operations. The purpose of this document is to provide a detailed description of the ORNL Solid Waste Storage Areas, to describe the practice and procedure of their operation, and to address the health and safety impacts and concerns of that operation.

The lifetime of optics in high-fluence UV laser applications is typically limited by the initiation of damage and its subsequent growth. We have measured the growth rate of laser-induced damage on fused silica surfaces in both air and vacuum. The data shows exponential growth in the lateral size of the damage site with shot number above a threshold fluence. The concurrent growth in depth follows a linear dependence with shot number. The size of the initial damage influences the threshold for growth; the morphology of the initial site depends strongly on the initiating fluence. We have found only a weak dependence on pulse length for growth rate. Most of the work has been on bare substrates but the presence of a sol-gel AR coating has no significant effect.

This report summarizes major demographic and spending trends that characterize the on-going conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and Angola.

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

Photograph of Gay and Danielle Connor.

Photograph of Gay and Danielle Connor.

Photograph of Gay and Danielle Connor.

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

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