Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "For a number of years, the Department of Defense (DOD) has been promoting departmentwide use of purchase cards, and their use has dramatically increased. DOD reported that in fiscal year 2001, more than 230,000 civilian and military cardholders made 10.7 million purchase card transactions valued at more than $6.1 billion. The Navy has the second largest purchase card program in DOD. As was previously reported, there were significant breakdowns in internal control at two Navy sites that left those units vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. These weaknesses are representative of systematic Navy-wide purchase card control weaknesses that have left Navy vulnerable to fraudulent, wasteful, and abusive use of purchase cards. Since the original report, the Navy has been taking actions to improve the purchase card control environment and improve cardholder adherence to key purchase card control procedures. The Navy has also taken more aggressive actions to identify fraudulent, improper, and abusive or questionable purchase card acquisitions."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of the Navy's internal controls over the government travel card program. The Navy's average delinquency rate of 12 percent over the last 2 years is nearly identical to the Army's, which has the highest delinquency rate in the Department of Defense, and 6 percentage points higher than that of federal civilian agencies. The Navy's overall delinquency and charge-off problems, which have cost the Navy millions in lost rebates and higher fees, are primarily associated with lower-paid, enlisted military personnel. In addition, lack of management emphasis and oversight has resulted in management failure to promptly detect and address instances of potentially fraudulent and abusive activities related to the travel card program. During fiscal year 2001 and the first 6 months of fiscal year 2002, over 250 Navy personnel might have committed bank fraud by writing three or more nonsufficient fund checks to Bank of America, while many others abused the travel card program by failing to pay Bank of America charges or using the card for inappropriate transactions such as for prostitution and gambling. However, because Navy management was often not aware of these …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Because of population growth, resulting real estate development, and rising real estate values in hazard-prone areas, our nation is increasingly exposed to higher property casualty losses--both insured and uninsured--from natural catastrophes than in the past. In the 1990s, a series of natural disasters, including Hurricane Andrew and the Northridge earthquake, raised questions about the adequacy of the insurance industry's financial capacity to cover large catastrophes without limiting coverage or raising premiums. Recognizing this greater exposure and responding to concerns about insurance market capacity, participants in the insurance industry and capital markets have developed new capital market instruments as an alternative to traditional property-casualty reinsurance, or insurance for insurers. GAO's objectives were to (1) describe catastrophe risk and how the insurance and capital markets provide coverage against such risks; (2) describe how risk-linked securities, particularly catastrophe bonds, are structured; and (3) analyze how key regulatory, accounting, tax, and investor issues might affect the use of risk-linked securities."

Results are presented from experiments relating to magnetic field generation and current amplification in the SSPX spheromak. The SSPX spheromak plasma is driven by DC coaxial helicity injection using a 2MJ capacitor bank. Peak toroidal plasma currents of up to 0.7MA and peak edge poloidal fields of 0.3T are produced; lower current discharges can be sustained up to 3.5msec. When edge magnetic fluctuations are reduced below 1% by driving the plasma near threshold, it is possible to produce plasmas with Te > 150eV, <{beta}{sub e}>-4% and core {chi}{sub e} {approx} 30m{sup 2}/s. Helicity balance for these plasmas suggests that sheath dissipation can be significant, pointing to the importance of maximizing the voltage on the coaxial injector. For most operational modes we find a stiff relationship between peak spheromak field and injector current, and little correlation with plasma temperature, which suggests that other processes than ohmic dissipation may limit field amplification. However, slowing spheromak buildup by limiting the initial current pulse increases the ratio of toroidal current to injected current and points to new operating regimes with more favorable current amplification.

In preparation for ignition on the National Ignition Facility, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Inertial Confinement Fusion Program, working in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Commissariat a lEnergie Atomique (CEA), and Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, has performed a broad range of experiments on the Nova and Omega lasers to test the fundamentals of the NIF target designs. These studies have refined our understanding of the important target physics, and have led to many of the specifications for the NIF laser and the cryogenic ignition targets. Our recent work has been focused in the areas of hohlraum energetics, symmetry, shock physics, and target design optimization & fabrication.

We have applied our simulation code "POSINST" to evaluatethe contribution to the growth rate of the electron-cloud instability inproton storage rings. Recent simulation results for the main features ofthe electron cloud in the storage ring of the Spallation Neutron Source(SNS) at Oak Ridge, and updated results for the Proton Storage Ring (PSR)at Los Alamos are presented in this paper. A key ingredient in our modelis a detailed description of the secondary emitted-electron energyspectrum. A refined model for the secondary emission process includingthe so-called true secondary, rediffused and backscattered electrons hasrecently been included in the electron-cloud code.

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

The objective of this work was to understand the limitations of the conventional methods of calculating relative permeabilities from data obtained from displacement experiments.

This work was undertaken to optimize the solvent used in the Caustic Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) process and to measure key chemical and physical properties related to its performance in the removal of cesium from the alkaline high-level salt waste stored in tanks at the Savannah River Site. The need to adjust the solvent composition arose from the prior discovery that the previous baseline solvent was supersaturated with respect to the calixarene extractant. The following solvent-component concentrations in Isopar{reg_sign} L diluent are recommended: 0.007 M calix[4]arene-bis(tert-octylbenzo-crown-6) (BOBCalixC6) extractant, 0.75 M 1-(2,2,3,3-tetrafluoropropoxy)-3-(4-sec-butylphenoxy)-2-propanol (Cs-7SB) phase modifier, and 0.003 M tri-n-octylamine (TOA) stripping aid. Criteria for this selection included BOBCalixC6 solubility, batch cesium distribution ratios (D{sub Cs}), calculated flowsheet robustness, third-phase formation, coalescence rate (dispersion numbers), and solvent density. Although minor compromises within acceptable limits were made in flowsheet robustness and solvent density, significant benefits were gained in lower risk of third-phase formation and lower solvent cost. Data are also reported for the optimized solvent regarding the temperature dependence of D{sub Cs} in extraction, scrubbing, and stripping (ESS); ESS performance on recycle; partitioning of BOBCalixC6, Cs-7SB, and TOA to aqueous process solutions; partitioning of organic anions; distribution of metals; solvent phase separation at …

During this reporting period, research was continued on characterizing and modeling the behavior of naturally fractured reservoir systems. This report proposed a model to relate the seismic response to production data to determine crack spacing and aperture, provided details of tests of proposed models to obtain fracture properties from conventional well logs with actual field data, and verification of the naturally fractured reservoir simulator developed in this project.

In this report, the thrust areas include the following: Internal drives, vapor-liquid flows, combustion and reaction processes, fluid displacements and the effect of instabilities and heterogeneities and the flow of fluids with yield stress. These find respective applications in foamy oils, the evolution of dissolved gas, internal steam drives, the mechanics of concurrent and countercurrent vapor-liquid flows, associated with thermal methods and steam injection, such as SAGD, the in-situ combustion, the upscaling of displacements in heterogeneous media and the flow of foams, Bingham plastics and heavy oils in porous media and the development of wormholes during cold production.

We simulate lattice QCD at a finite chemical potential {mu}{sub I} for isospin (I{sub 3}) at zero and finite temperatures. At some {mu}{sub I} = {mu}c QCD has a second order transition with mean-field critical exponents to a state where (I{sub 3}) is broken spontaneously by a charged pion condensate. Heating the system with {mu}{sub I} > {mu}{sub c} we find there is some temperature at which this condensate evaporates. This transition appears to be second order and mean-field at lower {mu}{sub I} values, and first order for {mu}{sub I} sufficiently large. We are determining the dependence of the finite temperature crossover T{sub c} on {mu}{sub I} for {mu}{sub I} < {mu}{sub c}. This is expected to be identical to T{sub c}'s dependence on quark-number chemical potential {mu}{sub q} for small {mu}{sub q}.

During the period major accomplishments were in (1) characterization of facies and cyclicity in subsurface cores and in outcrop, (2) construction of a preliminary stratigraphic framework, (3) definition of rock fabrics, and (4) correlation of 3-D seismic data.

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

Funeral program for Alton Gerald Johnson, Jr., born July 1, 1938 and died October 3, 2002. The funeral was held Tuesday, October 8, 2002 at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, officiated by Rev. Andrew Wilson. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Meadowlawn Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas.

The threat of terrorist attacks against US civilian populations is a very real, near-term problem that must be addressed, especially in response to possible use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Several programs are now being funded by the US Government to put into place means by which the effects of a terrorist attack could be averted or limited through the use of sensors and monitoring technology. Specialized systems that detect certain threat materials, while effective within certain performance limits, cannot generally be used efficiently to track a mobile threat such as a vehicle over a large urban area. The key elements of an effective system are an image feature-based vehicle identification technique and a networked sensor system. We have briefly examined current uses of image and feature recognition techniques to the urban tracking problem and set forth the outlines of a proposal for application of LLNL technologies to this critical problem. The primary contributions of the proposed work lie in filling important needs not addressed by the current program: (1) The ability to create vehicle ''fingerprints,'' or feature information from images to allow automatic identification of vehicles. Currently, the analysis task is done entirely by humans. The goal is to …

The physical processes that govern the gun-voltage and give rise to field generation by helicity injection are surveyed in the Sustained Spheromak Physics experiment (SSPX) using internal magnetic field probes and particular attention to the gun-voltage. SSPX is a gun-driven spheromak, similar in many respects to CTX, although differing substantially by virtue of a programmable vacuum field configuration. Device parameters are: diameter = 1m, I{sub tor}-400kA, T{sub e}{approx}120eV, t{sub pulse}{approx}3ms. SSPX is now in its third year of operation and has demonstrated reasonable confinement (core {chi}{sub e}{approx}30m{sup 2}/s), and evidence for a beta limit (<{beta}{sub e}>{sub vol}{approx}4%), suggesting that the route to high temperature is to increase the spheromak field-strength (or current amplification, A{sub I} = I{sub torr}/I{sub inj}). Some progress has been made to increase A{sub I} in SSPX (A{sub I} = 2.2), although the highest A{sub I} observed in a spheromak of 3 has yet to be beaten. We briefly review helicity injection as the paradigm for spheromak field generation. SSPX results show that the processes that give efficient injection of helicity are inductive, and that these processes rapidly terminate when the current path ceases to change. The inductive processes are subsequently replaced by ones that resistively dissipate …

A major difficulty with wavefront slope sensors is their insensitivity to certain phase aberration patterns, the classic example being the waffle pattern in the Fried sampling geometry. As the number of degrees of freedom in AO systems grows larger, the possibility of troublesome waffle-like behavior over localized portions of the aperture is becoming evident. Reconstructor matrices have associated with them, either explicitly or implicitly, an orthogonal mode space over which they operate, called the singular mode space. If not properly preconditioned, the reconstructor's mode set can consist almost entirely of modes that each have some localized waffle-like behavior. In this paper we analyze the behavior of least-squares reconstructors with regard to their mode spaces. We introduce a new technique that is successful in producing a mode space that segregates the waffle-like behavior into a few ''high order'' modes, which can then be projected out of the reconstructor matrix. This technique can be adapted so as to remove any specific modes that are undesirable in the final reconstructor (such as piston, tip, and tilt for example) as well as suppress (the more nebulously defined) localized waffle behavior.

This report discusses State programs under the Child Care and Development Fund related to Child Care.

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A main objective of adaptive optics is to maximize closed-loop Strehl, or, equivalently, minimize the statistical mean-square wavefront residual. Most currently implemented AO wavefront reconstructors and closed-loop control laws do not take into account either the correlation of the Kolmogorov wavefronts over time or the modified statistics of the residual wavefront in closed loop. There have been a number of attempts in the past to generate ''predictive'' controllers, which utilize wind speed and Cn2 profiles and incorporate one or two previous time steps. We present here a general framework for a dynamic controller/reconstructor design where the goal is to maximize mean closed-loop Strehl ratio over time using all previous data and exploiting the spatial-temporal statistics of the Kolmogorov turbulence and measurement noise.

A key atmospheric gas is ozone. Ozone in the stratosphere is beneficial to the biosphere because it absorbs a significant fraction of the sun's shorter wavelength ultraviolet radiation. Ozone in the troposphere is a pollutant (respiratory irritant in humans and acts to damage crops, vegetation, and many materials). It affects the Earths energy balance by absorbing both incoming solar radiation and outgoing long wave radiation. An important part of the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere involves ozone, through a photolysis pathway that leads to the hydroxyl radical (OH). Since reaction with OH is a major sink of many atmospheric species, its concentration controls the distributions of many radiatively important species. Ozone in the troposphere arises from both in-situ photochemical production and transport from the stratosphere. Within the troposphere, ozone is formed in-situ when carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), and non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) react in the presence of nitrogen oxides (NO, = NO + NO2) and sunlight. The photochemistry of the stratosphere differs significantly from that in the troposphere. Within the stratosphere, ozone formation is initiated by the photolysis of 02. Stratospheric ozone may be destroyed via catalytic reactions with NO, H (hydrogen), OH, CI (chlorine) and Br (bromine), or photolysis. …

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Malcolm Young. Young joined the Army in March 1941 and received basic training at Fort Sill. He received rifle training at Fort Ord. Upon completion, he was assigned to field artillery in the 7th Infantry Division, where he served as an artillery gunnery corporal. He deployed to the Aleutians. Despite being on combat duty, the highest number of casualties there came from frostbite. At Kwajalein, Young suggested to his sergeant that the best way to fight the Japanese snipers was to clear the trees, an idea which was adopted by higher officials. His unit landed in the Marshalls on an island a few miles away and fired day and night until the trees were cleared. In the Philippines, he landed on the east side of Leyte and finished in the west, at Ormoc. He began to show signs of jaundice at that time. Okinawa was the first time that Young recalls being matched in strength by the Japanese artillery, which were much weaker than his unit in previous campaigns. He had specific orders to leave caves untouched, as Japanese civilians were known to hide there. As he was …

Federal agencies have had performance contracting authority since 1985, when Congress first authorized agencies to enter into shared energy savings agreements with Public Law 99-272, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. By the end of FY 2001, agencies had used energy savings performance contracts (ESPCs) to attract private-sector investment of over $1 billion to improve the energy efficiency of federal buildings. Executive Order 13123 directs agencies to maximize their use of alternative financing contracting mechanisms such as ESPCs when life-cycle cost effective to reduce energy use and cost in their facilities and operations. Continuing support for ESPCs at the Administration and Congressional levels is evident in the pending comprehensive national energy legislation, which repeals the sunset provision on ESPC authority and extends ESPC authority to water savings projects. Despite the Congressional and Presidential directives to use ESPCs, some agencies have been reluctant to do so. Decision makers in these agencies see no reason to enter into long-term obligations to pay interest on borrowed money out of their own operating budgets if instead Congress will grant them appropriations to pay for the improvements up front. Questions frequently arise about whether pricing in ESPCs, which are negotiated for best value, is as …