A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a cooperative program between the Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. allies for developing and producing next generation fighter aircraft to replace aging inventories. As currently planned, the JSF program is DOD's most expensive aircraft program to date, costing an estimated $200 billion to procure about 2,600 aircraft and related support equipment. Many in DOD consider JSF to be a model for future cooperative programs. To determine the implications of the JSF international program structure, GAO identified JSF program relationships and expected benefits and assessed how DOD is managing cost sharing, technology transfer, and partner expectations for industrial return."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996 established minimum health and safety standards for professional boxing and provided for limited federal oversight by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. In 2000, the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act amended the act to better protect boxers' economic well-being and enhance the integrity of the sport. However, reports of problems continue, including permanent and sometimes fatal injuries, economic exploitation, and corruption. GAO was asked to (1) identify fundamental elements considered important to protect professional boxers and enhance the integrity of the sport; (2) assess the extent to which provisions of the Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996, as amended (the act), cover these elements and determine whether selected state and tribal boxing commissions have documentation indicating compliance with the act's provisions; (3) determine whether selected states and tribes have provisions that cover additional elements; and (4) identify federal actions taken under the act."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a cooperative program between the Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. allies for developing and producing next generation fighter aircraft to replace aging inventories. As currently planned, the JSF program is DOD's most expensive aircraft program to date, costing an estimated $200 billion to procure about 2,600 aircraft and related support equipment. Many in DOD consider JSF to be a model for future cooperative programs. To determine the implications of the JSF international program structure, GAO identified JSF program relationships and expected benefits, and assessed how DOD is managing challenges associated with partner expectations, technology transfer, and recent technical concerns."

This report discusses certain provisions of law that commonly are known as “fast-track” or expedited procedures. They are so labeled because these statutory provisions contain special legislative procedures that apply to one or both houses of Congress and that expedite, or put on a fast track, congressional consideration of a certain measure or a narrowly defined class of measures. This report first presents the nature, purpose, and elements of fast-track procedures. Then the report discusses some of the most important ways in which these procedures differ from the normal procedures of the House and Senate and, therefore, how the use of expedited procedures can affect the legislative process in Congress.

We present novel approach to discover the rules that govern gene regulation mechanisms. The method is based on supervised machine learning and is designed to reveal relationships between transcription factors and gene promoters. As the representation of the gene regulatory circuit we have chosen a special form of IF-THEN rules associating certain features (a generalized idea of a Transcription Factor Binding Site) in gene promoters with specific gene expression profiles.

The objective of this project is to calibrate regional travel-times and propagation characteristics of seismic waves in Turkey and surrounding areas in the Middle East in order to enhance detection and location capabilities in the region. Important data for the project will be obtained by large calibration shots in central and eastern Turkey. The first, a two-ton shot, was fired in boreholes near Keskin in central Anatolia on 23 November 2002. The explosives were placed in 14 holes, each 80 m deep, arranged in concentric circular arrays. Ninety temporary seismic stations were deployed within a 300 km radius around the shot. The permanent stations of the Turkish National Seismic Network provided a good azimuthal coverage as well as three radial traverses. Most stations within a radius of 200 km recorded the shot. Travel-time data have been analyzed to obtain a detailed crustal model under the shot and along the profiles. The model gives a 35 km thick crust, characterized by two layers with velocities of 5.0 and 6.4 km/s. The P{sub n} velocity was found to be 7.8 km/s. The crustal thickness decreases to the north where the profile crosses the North Anatolian fault. There is a slight increase in …

In this study, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is performing a technology review to assess the market for commercially available power electronic converters that can be used to connect microturbines to either the electric grid or local loads. The intent of the review is to facilitate an assessment of the present status of marketed power conversion technology to determine how versatile the designs are for potentially providing different services to the grid based on changes in market direction, new industry standards, and the critical needs of the local service provider. The project includes data gathering efforts and documentation of the state-of-the-art design approaches that are being used by microturbine manufacturers in their power conversion electronics development and refinement. This project task entails a review of power converters used in microturbines sized between 20 kW and 1 MW. The power converters permit microturbine generators, with their non-synchronous, high frequency output, to interface with the grid or local loads. The power converters produce 50- to 60-Hz power that can be used for local loads or, using interface electronics, synchronized for connection to the local feeder and/or microgrid. The power electronics enable operation in a stand-alone mode as a voltage source or …

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

This eighth quarterly technical report discusses the progress made on a machine vision technique for determining coal content and preparations for Year-3 system deployment. Classification maps for coal have been generated and shown to two coal-mining executives. An application for licensing high-speed hyperspectral data analysis software from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been made. Both Western Energy and Stillwater Mining Company have offered platforms for Year-3 deployment. Barretts Minerals has expressed renewed interest in using Resonon's machine vision system for identifying dolomite in their talc ore and have agreed to provide samples to the Montana Tech team.

This paper presents a fast and stable imaging scheme using the localized nonlinear (LN) approximation of integral equation (IE) solutions for inverting electromagnetic data obtained in a crosswell survey. The medium is assumed to be cylindrically symmetric about a source borehole and to maintain the symmetry a vertical magnetic dipole is used as a source. To find an optimum balance between data fitting and smoothness constraint, we introduce an automatic selection scheme of Lagrange multiplier, which is sought at each iteration with a least misfit criterion. In this selection scheme, the IE algorithm is quite attractive in speed because Green's functions, a most time-consuming part in IE methods, are repeatedly reusable throughout the inversion process. The inversion scheme using the LN approximation has been tested to show its stability and efficiency using both synthetic and field data. The inverted image derived from the field data, collected in a pilot experiment of water flood monitoring in an oil field, is successfully compared with that of a 2.5-dimensional inversion scheme.

A transient heat balance model was developed to assess the impact of a Submersible Mixer Pump (SMP) on waste temperature during the process of waste mixing and removal for the Type-I SRS tanks. The model results will be mainly used to determine the SMP design impacts on the waste tank temperature during operations and to develop a specification for a new SMP design to replace existing long-shaft mixer pumps used during waste removal. The model will also be used to provide input to the operation planning. This planning will be used as input to pump run duration in order to maintain temperature requirements within the tank during SMP operation.

For hydrogen economy to become a reality, hydrogen production will have to be greatly increased from what it is today. Hydrogen will have to be recovered from a variety of gas streams including low concentration streams with efficient methods. Efficient process for recovering hydrogen in low concentration streams is not available today. Powder of LaNi4.25Al0.75 was encapsulated in a porous silica matrix to produce a stable composite material. The material was packed in a column and tested for hydrogen absorption from streams containing nitrogen, methane or carbon monoxide. The composite material removed hydrogen from nitrogen containing methane very well, but suffered decrease in capacity and rate when carbon monoxide was present. Using fluorinated metal hydride powder improved the kinetics but not the tolerance to carbon monoxide.

Worker dose estimates have been made for various exposure scenarios resulting from the relocation of soil from the H Area Retention Basin (HRB) to the Old Radioactive Waste Burial Ground (ORWBG) at the Savannah River Site (SRS). Estimates were performed by hand calculations and using RESRAD (Yu et al. 2001) and MAXDOSE (Simpkins 1999). Doses were estimated for the following pathways: (1) shine and inhalation as a result of standing on contaminated soil at HRB and ORWBG; (2) exposure to off-unit receptors due to soil disturbances from excavation type activities at HRB and ORWBG; (3) exposure to off-unit receptors due to soil disturbances from dumping of soil from bucket and from roll-off pan; and (4) exposure to off-unit receptors from wind driven dust from contaminated area. The highest dose estimates (0.25 mSv hr-1) resulted from the receptor standing on HRB. The Savannah River Site (SRS) processes and stores nuclear materials in support of the national defense and U.S. nuclear non-proliferation efforts. The site also develops and deploys technologies to improve the environment and treat nuclear and hazardous wastes from the Cold War.

The primary objective of the present work is to model Tank 18 with the existing ADMP mixer for various pump elevations and tank liquid levels when the mixer is submerged at the center of the tank. The computational models will be used to estimate the cleaning capabilities of the ADMP for sludge removal and to evaluate flow evolutions of waste slurry under various operating conditions in Tank 18. The basic CFD model for the Tank 18 system was developed and benchmarked against the TNX test data and literature data in the previous work . The analysis results will be used to evaluate hydraulic cleaning operations for waste removal. This information will also assist in the operating plan for Tank 18 waste removal and in identifying special requirements for sampling and monitoring the sludge suspension.

We report systematic investigations of the mutual passivation effects of Si hydrogenic donors and isovalent nitrogen in dilute InGaAs{sub 1-x}N{sub x} alloys. Upon thermal annealing at temperatures above {approx}650 C, the Si atoms diffuse assisted by the formation and migration of Ga vacancies. When they find nitrogen atoms, they form stable Si{sub Ga}-N{sub As} nearest-neighbor pairs. As a result of the pair formation, the electrical activity of Si{sub Ga} donors is passivated. At the same time, the effect of an equal number of N{sub As} atoms is also deactivated. The passivation of the shallow donors and the N{sub As} atoms is manifested in a drastic reduction in the free electron concentration and, simultaneously, an increase in the fundamental band gap. Analytical calculations of the passivation process based on Ga vacancies mediated diffusion show good agreement with the experimental results. Monte Carlo simulations have also been performed for a comparison with these results. The effects of mutual passivation on the mobility of free electrons are quantitatively explained on the basis of the band anticrossing model. Optical properties of annealed Si-doped InGaAs{sub 1-x}N{sub x} samples are also discussed.

A thermodynamic model has been proposed to predict solids formation in the SRS evaporators from measured feed compositions using a commercially available software package, the Geochemist's Workbench (GWB). In support of this work, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have performed experiments to evaluate solids formation under evaporator-like conditions in the laboratory. The purpose of this report is to compare these experimental results to the calculated results from GWB. Researchers at PNNL conducted experiments to evaluate the thermodynamic boundary between the precipitation of the deleterious sodium aluminosilicate gel (NASgel) and the field of benign potential precipitation of aluminum hydroxide formation. Several solutions were prepared and held at several temperatures to evaluate solids formation over various periods of time. Observed solids compared well to GWB calculations. Researchers at ORNL prepared several mixtures of simulated SRS Tank 43 (high aluminum) and DWPF recycle (high silicon) solutions. These solutions were then evaporated, and precipitated solids were examined by XRD. Again, there was good agreement between observations and GWB calculations. No NASgel was identified, and none was predicted to form. Researchers at ORNL also prepared several high caustic solutions, additional mixtures of simulated SRS Tank 43 and …

The author discusses quarkonium spectral functions at finite temperature reconstructed using the Maximum Entropy Method. The author shows in particular that the J/{psi} survives in the deconfined phase up to 1.5T{sub c}.

This report discusses the United States free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile that include labor provisions.

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This report contains policy issues and organizational alternatives of counterintelligence reform at the department of energy.

This report provides brief summaries of five types of tax-advantaged accounts for healthcare and compares them with respect to characteristics such as eligibility, contribution limits, and use of funds.

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This report provides appropriations of Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs for FY2004

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Ivan Haselby. Haselby joined the Army in July of 1944. He completed Officer Candidate School and served as a first lieutenant in the First Cavalry Division, Eighth Cavalry Regiment. He worked at Camp Wolters in Mineral Wells, Texas through May of 1945. Beginning in July, he was deployed to Japan and served with the occupation forces. He was stationed in the Chiba Prefecture, occupying and investigating schools. Haselby returned to the US and was discharged in 1946.