A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Credit cards offer clear advantages to college students because they provide an interest free loan until the payment is due and a convenient noncash payment option for both routine transactions and emergencies. If used responsibly, credit cards allow students to build up credit histories that will increase their access to credit in the future. However, if college students have not learned sound financial management skills in high school or from their parents, the disadvantages of credit cards can outweigh the advantages. GAO found that more than one-third of students had credit cards before they entered college, and another 46 percent acquired them during the first year. Except for charges for tuition and fees, their spending patterns resembled those of nonstudents. GAO did not find a uniform response to the controversial issue of on-campus credit card marketing among the universities GAO visited. In response to complaints about aggressive marketing techniques, a few universities have restricted credit card solicitation on campus. The credit card issuers that responded to GAO's inquiries participated actively in the student market, but they did not have a uniform set of policies or practices."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) X-33 and X-34 reusable launch vehicle programs. The two programs experienced difficulties achieving their goals primarily because NASA did not develop realistic cost estimates, timely acquisition and risk management plans, and adequate and realistic performance goals. In particular, neither program fully (1) assessed the costs associated with developing new, unproven technologies, (2) provided for the financial reserves needed to deal with technical risks and accommodate normal development delays, (3) developed plans to quantify and mitigate the risks to NASA, or (4) established performance targets showing a clear path leading to an operational reusable launch vehicle. As a result, both programs were terminated. Currently, NASA is in the process of taking steps in the Second Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle Program to help avoid problems like those encountered in the X-33 and X-34 programs."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has issued about 50 products during the last five years that include information on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) operations and activities. When GAO initiates work with federal agencies, it formally notifies key officials about the planned review and meets with them to discuss objectives. In the course of its work, GAO routinely receives large amounts of information, some of it highly sensitive, and has an excellent record when it comes to safeguarding sensitive and classified information. This testimony discusses (1) GAO's statutory access authority to federal records and (2) access problems with the FBI. GAO has broad statutory right of access to agency records in order to conduct audits and evaluations. If agencies do not make information available in a reasonable time, GAO has the authority to demand access by sending the head of the agency a letter stating GAO's authority and its reasons for needing the information. The agency has 20 days to respond, after which the Comptroller General may file a report with the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the head of the agency, and Congress. If …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report discusses the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) contract with Boeing Reusable Space Systems to build the now-canceled follow-on propulsion module for the International Space Station. GAO found that the initial propulsion module project did not meet performance, cost, and schedule goals largely because NASA proceeded with Boeing's proposal without following fundamental processes involving project planning and execution. Once it was determined that Boeing's proposal was inadequate, NASA began to assess alternatives to the Boeing-proposed propulsion module. The assessment team defined mission success criteria, identified key design assumptions, and performed comparative analysis on competing designs. On the basis of its analyses, the team recommended a follow-on design. NASA acknowledged that its initial approach to developing a propulsion module was inadequate and contributed to the project's unsuccessful conclusion. NASA officials sought to learn lessons from the project in order to avoid similar problems in managing future programs."

Fluctuations in the multiplicities and momentum distributions of particles emitted in relativistic heavy-ion collisions have been widely considered as probes of thermalization and the statistical nature of particle production in such reactions. The characteristic behavior of temperature and pion multiplicity fluctuations in the final state has been proposed as a tool for the measurement of the specific heat and, specifically, for the detection of a critical point in the nuclear matter phase diagram.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

We report on the lattice design of the Next Linear Collider (NLC) damping rings. The damping rings are required to provide low emittance electron and positron bunch trains to the NLC linacs, at a rate of 120 Hz. We present an optical design, based on a theoretical minimum emittance (TME) lattice, to produce the required normalized extracted beam emittances gex = 3 mm-mrad and gey = 0.02 mm mrad. An assessment of dynamic aperture and non-linear effects is given. The positron pre-damping ring, required to reduce the emittance of the positron beam such that it may be accepted by a main damping ring, is also described.

Wood properties influence pulp and paper quality. Certainly, overall pulp yields are directly related to the cellulose content, changes in hemicellulose content are associated with changes in pulp cohesiveness, and pulping efficiency is related to lignin content. Despite the importance of wood properties on product quality, little progress has been made in improving such traits because current methods of assessing wood and fiber characteristics are time-consuming, expensive, and often imprecise. Genetic improvement of wood and fiber properties has been further hampered by the large size of trees, delayed reproductive maturity and long harvest cycles. Recent developments in molecular genetics will help overcome the physical, economic and biological constraints in assessing and improving wood properties. Genetic maps consisting of numerous molecular markers are now available for loblolly pine and hybrid poplar. Such markers/maps may be used as part of a marker-aided selection and breeding effort or to expedite the isolation and characterization of genes and/or promoters that directly control wood properties. The objectives of this project are: (1) to apply new and rapid analytical techniques for assessing component wood properties to segregating F2 progeny populations of loblolly pine and hybrid poplar, (2) to map quantitative trait loci and identify molecular markers …

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, 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.

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

Funeral program for Dr. Hubert Glen Lovelady, born 1927 and died June 13, 2001. The funeral was held June 20, 2001 at Second Baptist Church, officiated by Dr. Robert L. Jemerson. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

Depth-resolved measurements of the two-dimensional angular correlation of annihilation radiation (2D-ACAR) were performed at the high-intensity slow-positron beam of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We studied the formation of positronium in thin films of methyl-silsesquioxane (MSSQ) spin-on glass containing open-volume defects in the size of voids. Samples with different average void sizes were investigated and positronium formation could be found in all cases. The width of the angular correlation related to the annihilation of parapositronium increased with the void size indicating the annihilation of non-thermalized parapositronium.

The fracture and plastic deformation mechanisms of a Zr-Ti-Ni-Cu-Be bulk metallic glass and a composite utilizing a crystalline reinforcement phase are reviewed. The relationship between stress state, free volume and shear band formation are discussed. Positron annihilation techniques were used to confirm the predicted increase in free volume after plastic straining. Strain localization and failure were examined for a wide range of stress states. Finally, methods for toughening metallic glasses are considered. Significant increases in toughness are demonstrated for a composite bulk metallic glass containing a ductile second phase which stabilizes shear band formation and distributes plastic deformation.

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This report outlines the terms of the Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA), identifies U.S. and Vietnamese motivations for entering into the deal, analyzes the reasons for Vietnam's delay in signing the agreement, and explains Congress' role in the process of restoring normal trade relations treatment to Vietnam.

We are developing a novel high-efficiency, high-temperature steam electrolyzer. Although water or steam electrolysis is well known to be one of the cleanest ways to produce hydrogen, widespread utilization is hindered by high operational costs because of high electricity consumption. To decrease the electrical power input requirements in electrolysis, our approach uses natural gas as an anode depolarizer. This approach essentially replaces one unit of electricity with one equivalent-energy unit of natural gas at much lower cost. The direct use of natural gas on the electrolyzer enables very high system efficiency with respect to primary energy. Experiments performed on single cells have shown a voltage reduction as much as 1 V when compared to conventional electrolyzers. System efficiency has been estimated to be 50 to 80%, depending on the electrolytic current. A 200-W prototype unit is being developed.

In FY 2000 Livermore Computing took delivery of serial number one of the Compaq Sierra high performance cluster product. The Sierra product employs a derivative of the Tru64 UNIX operating system called Tru-Cluster, which provides a cluster-wide parallel file system called PFS. This report documents the observed performance of PFS along with the performance of some of the underlying file system components. Testing reveals that the underlying AdvFS file system does a good job of read-ahead and write-behind I/O performance enhancement at the expense of a high CPU utilization. On the other hand, PFS performs at only a fraction of the speed that the underlying I/O and communication hardware allow.

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

In order to meet certain production goals, the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) has focused on implementing a more temporally efficient method of waste vitrification. Changes in frit composition and alterations in the feed preparation process were investigated to determine if melt rate could be improved. The addition of sugar as an alternative reductant to formic acid was investigated for Macrobatch 3 (MB3).

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.