A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Employees at the Social Security Administration's (SSA) Region X--which covers Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington--expressed concern about the Region's equal employment opportunity (EEO) process for employment discrimination complaints. GAO was asked to (1) provide information for fiscal years 1997 through 2001 on the composition of the Region X workforce and for personnel actions such as promotions, awards, and adverse actions by EEO group; (2) describe the EEO complaint process in Region X and any changes to it; (3) assess whether the Region's process is consistent with federal regulations and related guidance; and (4) assess the familiarity with the EEO process of the Region's employees and their attitude toward it."

A statement of record issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Hospitals have increasingly relied on purchasing intermediaries--GPOs--to keep the cost of medical-surgical products in check. By pooling purchases for their hospital customers, GPOs'in awarding contracts to medical-surgical product manufacturers--may negotiate lower prices for these products. Some manufacturers contend that GPOs are slow to select products to place on contract and establish high administrative fees that make it difficult for some firms to obtain a GPO contract. The manufacturers also express concern that certain contracting strategies to obtain better prices have the potential to limit competition when practiced by GPOs with a large share of the market. GAO was asked to examine certain GPO business practices. It focused on seven large GPOs serving hospitals nationwide regarding (1) their processes to select manufacturers' products for their hospital customers and the level of administrative fees they receive from manufacturers, (2) their use of contracting strategies to obtain favorable prices from manufacturers, and (3) recent initiatives taken to respond to concerns about GPO business practices."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "No government should waste its taxpayers' money, whether we are operating during a period of budget surpluses or deficits. Further, it is important for everyone to recognize that fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement are not victimless activities. Resources are not unlimited, and when they are diverted for inappropriate, illegal, inefficient, or ineffective purposes, both taxpayers and legitimate program beneficiaries are cheated. Both the Administration and the Congress have an obligation to safeguard benefits for those that deserve them and avoid abuse of taxpayer funds by preventing such diversions. Beyond preventing obvious abuse, government also has an obligation to modernize its priorities, practices, and processes so that it can meet the demands and needs of today's changing world. More broadly, the federal government must reexamine the entire range of policies and programs--entitlements, discretionary, and tax incentives--in the context of the 21st century."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The five Great Lakes, which comprise the largest system of freshwater in the world, are threatened on many environmental fronts. To address the extent of progress made in restoring the Great Lakes Basin, which includes the lakes and surrounding area, GAO (1) identified the federal and state environmental programs operating in the basin and the funding devoted to them, (2) evaluated the restoration strategies used and how they are coordinated, and (3) assessed overall environmental progress made in the basin restoration effort."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Comptroller General formed the Employee Advisory Council (EAC) about 4 years ago to be fully representative of the GAO population and advise him on issues pertaining to both management and employees. The members of the EAC represent a variety of employee groups and almost all employees outside of the senior executive service (more than 3,000 of GAO's 3,200 employees or 94 percent). The EAC operates as an umbrella organization that incorporates representatives of GAO's long-standing employee organizations including groups representing the disabled, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, veterans, and women, as well as employees in various pay bands, attorneys, and administrative and professional staff. As established in our charter, the Employee Advisory Council serves as an advisory body to the Comptroller General and other senior executives by: seeking and conveying the views and concerns of the individual employee groups it represents while being sensitive to the mutual interests of all employees, regardless of their grade, band, or classification group; proposing solutions to concerns raised by employees, as appropriate; providing input by assessing and commenting on GAO policies, procedures, plans, and practices; and, communicating issues and concerns …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization, House Committee on Government Reform seeks GAO's views on its latest human capital proposal that is slated to be introduced as a bill entitled the GAO Human Capital Reform Act of 2003."

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Several authorities govern the daily chamber work of the Senate: the standing rules, the "standing orders," unanimous consent agreements, precedent, and tradition. Because these authorities have different influence at certain times, no Senate session day is truly typical. This report discusses procedures and business that usually occur every session day, and refers to certain business items that may occur less frequently.

Geophysical models are increasingly recognized as an important component of regional calibrations for seismic monitoring. The models can be used to predict geophysical measurements, such as body wave travel times, and can be derived from direct regional studies or even by geophysical analogy. While empirical measurements of these geophysical parameters might be preferred, in aseismic regions or regions without seismic stations, this data might not exist. In these cases, models represent a 'best guess' of the seismic properties in a region, which improves on global models such as the PREM (Preliminary Reference Earth Model) or the IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior) models. The model-based predictions can also serve as a useful background for the empirical measurements by removing trends in the data. To this end, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has developed the WENA model for Western Eurasia and North Africa. This model is constructed using a regionalization of several dozen lithospheric (crust and uppermost mantle) models, combined with the Laske sediment model and 3SMAC upper mantle. We have evaluated this model using a number of data sets, including travel times, surface waves, receiver functions, and waveform analysis. Similarly, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) …

Irradiation embrittlement in nuclear reactor pressure vessel steels results from the formation of a high number density of nanometer sized copper rich precipitates and sub-nanometer defect-solute clusters. We present positron annihilation spectroscopy (PAS) results to characterize the compositions and magnetic character of these defects in model A533B reactor pressure vessel steels. The results confirm the presence of copper-rich precipitates after irradiation. The measured orbital electron momentum spectra indicate the precipitates are alloyed with Mn and Ni. The copper precipitates larger than R {approx} 1.2 nm (from SANS measurements) are non-magnetic, which limits the possible Fe content of the precipitates to at most a few %. Notably, large vacancy clusters observed in neutron irradiated Fe-Cu alloys were not observed in the steels after irradiation.

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Current plans for Extreme Adaptive Optics systems place challenging requirements on wave-front control. This paper focuses on control system dynamics, wave-front sensing and wave-front correction device characteristics. It may be necessary to run an ExAO system after a slower, low-order AO system. Running two independent systems can result in very good temporal performance, provided specific design constraints are followed. The spatially-filtered wave-front sensor, which prevents aliasing and improves PSF sensitivity, is summarized. Different models of continuous and segmented deformable mirrors are studied. In a noise-free case, a piston-tip-tilt segmented MEMS device can achieve nearly equivalent performance to a continuous-sheet DM in compensating for a static phase aberration with use of spatial filtering.

Recent technical advances have made it possible to obtain very useful spectroscopic information about simple molecules at temperatures and pressures exceeding 2000K and 10 GPa inside a diamond-anvil cell, which is well above any melting point for such systems. This is accomplished by obtaining vibrational spectra via Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy in conjunction with CW laser heating using a tungsten toroid as a laser target. By the simultaneous use of these techniques, vibrational spectra with relatively high signal to noise can be obtained despite the enormous thermal background generated by the incandescence of extremely hot laser heated material. Temperatures can be measured not only by fitting the Planck radiation to a graybody, but by the spectroscopic evidence of a Boltzmann distribution of molecules in their vibrationally excited quantum levels. Additionally, this technique allows for obtaining data at pressures and temperatures outside the region between the shock hugoniot and isentrope, complementing shock wave experiments.

A decision support system(DSS)is under development to assistin the control and management of episodes of dissolved oxygen sag in aDeep Water Ship Channel (DWSC), located in Stockton, California. The DWSCwas formed by excavating the bed of the San Joaquin River in the 1950'sto allow navigation by ocean-going cargo ships to the Port of Stockton.The deepened channel has the effect of increasing hydraulic residencetime by a factor of ten. allowing accumulation of decaying algae andother oxygen demanding substances - which creates a barrier to themigration of anadromous fish. This problem, which manifests itself inlate summer and early autumn, is an impediment to a multimillion dollarhabitat restoration effort for the salmon fishery in the San JoaquinRiver basin (SJRB). A hydrodynamic and water quality model of the Deltaand San Joaquin River forms the basis of the DSS which will provideforecasts of dissolved oxygen sag in the DWSC and provide modelingsupport for management actions such as forced aeration to improvedissolved oxygen concentrations in the Ship Channel. A graphical userinterlace, currently used for displaying flow and salinity forecasts onthe San Joaquin River, is being adapted to allow the display of dissolvedoxygen forecasts and to encourage the formation of a stakeholder-ledentity or institution to adaptively manage …

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Traffic flow on a unidirectional roadway in the presence of traffic lights is modeled. Individual car responses to green, yellow, and red lights are postulated and these result in rules governing the acceleration and deceleration of individual cars. The essence of the model is that only specific cars are directly affected by the lights. The other cars behave according to simple follow-the-leader rules which limit their speed by the spacing between it and the car directly ahead. The model has a number of desirable properties; namely cars do not run red lights, cars do not smash into one another, and cars exhibit no velocity reversals. In a situation with multiple lights operating in-phase we get, after an initial startup period, a constant number of cars through each light during any green-yellow period. Moreover, this flux is less by one or two cars per period than the flux obtained in discretized versions of the idealized Lighthill, Whitham, Richards model which allows for infinite accelerations.

In this paper we focus on melting and solidification processes described by phase-field models and obtain rigorous estimates for such processes. These estimates are derived in Section 2 and guarantee the convergence of solutions to non-constant equilibrium patterns. The most basic results conclude with the inequality (2.31). The estimates in the remainder of Section 2 illustrate what obtains if the initial data is progressively more regular and may be omitted on first reading. We also present some interesting numerical simulations which demonstrate the equilibrium structures and the approach of the system to non-constant equilibrium patterns. The novel feature of these calculations is the linking of the small parameter in the system, {delta}, to the grid spacing, thereby producing solutions with approximate sharp interfaces. Similar ideas have been used by Caginalp and Sokolovsky [1]. A movie of these simulations may be found at http:www.math.cmu.edu/math/people/greenberg.html.

In a previous paper the author and Demay advanced a model to explain the melt fracture instability observed when molten linear polymer melts are extruded in a capillary rheometer operating under the controlled condition that the inlet flow rate was held constant. The model postulated that the melts were a slightly compressible viscous fluid and allowed for slipping of the melt at the wall. The novel feature of that model was the use of an empirical switch law which governed the amount of wall slip. The model successfully accounted for the oscillatory behavior of the exit flow rate, typically referred to as the melt fracture instability, but did not simultaneously yield the fine scale spatial oscillations in the melt typically referred to as shark skin. In this note a new model is advanced which simultaneously explains the melt fracture instability and shark skin phenomena. The model postulates that the polymer is a slightly compressible linearly viscous fluid but assumes no slip boundary conditions at the capillary wall. In simple shear the shear stress {tau}and strain rate d are assumed to be related by d = F{tau} where F ranges between F{sub 2} and F{sub 1} > F{sub 2}. A strain …

Current theoretical understanding of the coherent beam-beam effect as well as its experimental observations are discussed: conditions under which the coherent beambeam modes may appear, possibility of their resonant interaction (coherent resonances), stability of beam-beam oscillations in the presence of external impedances. A special attention is given to the coherent beam-beam modes of finite length bunches: the synchro-betatron coupling is shown to provide reduction in the coherent tuneshift and--at the synchrotron tune values smaller than the beam-beam parameter--Landau damping by overlapping synchrotron satellites.

In this paper we examine new ''phase-field'' models with semi-diffuse interfaces. These models have the property that the -1/+1 planar phase transitions take place over a finite interval. The models also support multiple interface solutions with interfaces centered at arbitrary points L{sub 1} < L{sub 2} < ... < L{sub N}. These solutions correspond to local minima of an entropy functional rather than saddle points and are dynamically stable. The classical models have no such exact solutions but they do support solutions with N equally spaced transition points where the order parameter transitions between valves p{sub min}(N) and p{sub max}(N) satisfying -1 < p{sub min}(N) < 0 < p{sub max} (N) < 1. These solutions of the classical model are saddle points of the entropy functional associated with those models and are not dynamically stable.

In this note we investigate a new model for the behavior of ferroelectric materials. This model is analogous to one used in [1] to describe the dynamics of elastic materials which exhibit phase changes.