Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The L. Mendel Rivers Financial building (Rivers Building) in Charleston, South Carolina, has been vacant since it sustained damage in 1999 from Hurricane Floyd. For several years, the General Services Administration (GSA) has been working with the City of Charleston to negotiate an exchange of the Rivers Building and its site for land and a building to be constructed by the City. This report responds to a Congressional request for information on the progress of GSA's efforts to exchange the Rivers Building with the City of Charleston."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In May 2003, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a new Circular A-76--which sets forth the government's competitive sourcing process. Determining whether to obtain services in-house or through commercial contracts is an important economic and strategic decision for agencies, and the use of A-76 is expected to grow throughout the federal government. In the past, however, the A-76 process has been difficult to implement, and the impact on the morale of the federal workforce has been profound. Moreover, there have been concerns in both the public and private sectors about the timeliness and fairness of the process and the extent to which there is a "level playing field" for conducting public-private competitions. It was against this backdrop that the Congress enacted legislation mandating a study of the government's competitive sourcing process, which was carried out by the Commercial Activities Panel, which was chaired by the Comptroller General of the United States. This testimony focuses on how the new Circular addresses the Panel's recommendations with regard to providing a better foundation for competitive sourcing decisions, and the challenges agencies may face in implementing the new A-76."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Small businesses, which are important to the U.S. economy for their roles in job creation and technological development, must be able to protect and profit from their innovations. One way to protect their innovations on a global basis is to obtain U.S. and foreign patents. These businesses, however, face numerous impediments when trying to patent their goods or processes abroad. These impediments, which GAO identified in a July 2002 report, include high costs, limited resources, and limited knowledge among small businesses about foreign patent laws and systems. Because of concern that small businesses, particularly high technology firms, were not obtaining patent protection abroad and thus were losing potential sales in foreign markets, GAO was asked to (1) identify the factors that patent law experts believe small businesses should consider as they decide whether to seek patent protection abroad and provide information on how small businesses viewed these factors and (2) identify the steps that small businesses should take to improve their foreign patent efforts, according to our survey of patent law experts."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Minority employees at the EPA reported for a number of years that the agency had discriminated against them based on their race and retaliated against them for filing complaints. These issues were aired at hearings held by the House Committee on Science at which EPA said it would take actions to ensure a fair and discrimination free workplace. GAO was asked to review (1) the accuracy of EPA's equal employment opportunity (EEO) data, (2) various issues about the processes used to resolve discrimination complaints, and (3) the disciplinary actions taken for managers who discriminate."

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, is a public-private partnership intended to attract and rapidly disburse new resources in developing countries for the struggle against infectious disease. Approximately $4.6 billion has been pledged to the Fund, while about $1.5 billion has been received or was in process as of June 13, 2004. A May 2003 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) praised the Global Fund for "noteworthy progress in establishing essential governance and other supporting structures" but noted that the Fund's ability to finance additional grants was threatened by a lack of resources.

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

This report reviews all potentially available Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) data in the Technical Data Management System and compiles all relevant qualified data, including data qualified by this report, on elastic properties, Poisson's ratio and Young's modulus, into a single summary Data Tracking Number (DTN) MO0304DQRIRPPR.002. Since DTN MO0304DQRIRPPR.002 was compiled from both qualified and unqualified sources, this report qualifies the DTN in accordance with AP-SIII.2Q. This report also summarizes the individual test results in MO0304DQRIRPPR.002 and provides summary values using descriptive statistics for Poisson's ratio and Young's modulus in a Reference Information Base Data Item. This report found that test conditions such as temperature, saturation, and sample size could influence test results. The largest influence, however, is the lithologic variation within the tuffs themselves. Even though the summary DTN divided the results by lithostratigrahic units within each formation, there was still substantial variation in elastic properties within individual units. This variation was attributed primarily to the presence or absence of lithophysae, fractures, alteration, pumice fragments, and other lithic clasts within the test specimens as well as changes in porosity within the units. As a secondary cause, substantial variations can also be attributed to test conditions such as the type …

Introduction - This procedure provides instructions for assembling the following CH packaging payload: -Drum payload assembly -Standard Waste Box (SWB) assembly -Ten-Drum Overpack (TDOP).

The authors evaluated the usefulness of nanoscale boehmite crystals as a filler for anti-wear and anti-corrosion polyphenylenesulfide (PPS) coatings exposed to a very harsh, 300 C corrosive geothermal environment. The boehmite fillers dispersed uniformly into the PPS coating, conferring two advanced properties: First, they reduced markedly the rate of blasting wear; second, they increased the PPS's glass transition temperature and thermal decomposition temperature. The wear rate of PPS surfaces was reduced three times when 5wt% boehmite was incorporated into the PPS. During exposure for 15 days at 300 C, the PPS underwent hydrothermal oxidation, leading to the substitution of sulfide linkages by the sulfite linkages. However, such molecular alteration did not significantly diminish the ability of the coating to protect carbon steel against corrosion. In fact, PPS coating filled with boehmite of {le} 5wt% adequately mitigated its corrosion in brine at 300 C. One concern in using this filler was that it absorbs brine. Thus, adding an excess amount of boehmite was detrimental to achieving the maximum protection afforded by the coatings.

Tomographic imaging has been widely used in scientific and medical fields to remotely image media in a nondestructive way. This paper introduces a spectrum of seismic imaging applications to detect and characterize voids in coal mines. The application of seismic waves to detect changes in coal relies on two types of waves: body waves refracted along the interface between coal and bedrock (i.e., refracted P-waves) and channel waves that propagate directly through the coal (dispersive wave trains of the Rayleigh or Love type). For example, a P-wave tomography study to find underlying old mine workings in a coal mine in England, produced velocity patterns that revealed increases in velocity where high stress concentrations occur in the rock, which are most likely connected to old pillars left in support of the old working areas. At the same time, low velocities were found in areas of low stress concentrations, which are related to roof collapses indicating the locations of mined areas below. The application of channel wave tomography to directly image the presence of gaseous CO{sub 2} in a low velocity oil reservoir showed that the injected CO{sub 2} followed an ancient flow channel in the reservoir migrating from the injector to …

The primary objective of this research is to identify the age strengthening mechanism in gray and ductile cast iron, and to quantify the parameters that control it. It is also to contribute to a new predictive model for gray and ductile iron strength and hardness. This work shows that age strengthening occurs on a sigmoidal-logarithmic scale in gray and ductile cast irons, to a statistically significant extent. This is similar to Avrami-Johnson-Mehl kinetics for phase transformations in metals. It occurs in both cupola-melted iron and induction melted iron. However, it does not happen in all compositions. We have developed some understanding of the process. Data suggests that nitrogen and nitride-forming trace elements have a significant role in the process, but that is yet not fully characterized. Also, the time dependence of the bulk hardness and strength increase, the nano-scale precipitation evidence from neutron scattering, differential scanning calorimetry results and matrix micro-hardness increase in ferrite all indicate that age strengthening occurs by a precipitation or pre-precipitate cluster formation mechanism.

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) is a low aspect ratio (R/a approximately equal to 1.3) device with auxiliary heating from neutral beam injection (NBI) and high harmonic fast wave (HHFW) heating. Typical NSTX parameters are R(sub)0 = 85 cm, a = 67 cm, I(sub)p less than or equal to 1.5 MA, B(sub)T = 0.3-0.6 T. Three co-directed deuterium neutral beam sources have injected P(sub)NB less than or equal to 6.2 MW at energies E(sub)b less than or equal to 100 keV. HHFW heating has delivered up to P(sub)RF approximately equal to 6 MW to deuterium and helium plasmas.

Heterogeneity in magnetization (M) is ubiquitous in modern systems. Even in nominally homogeneous materials, domains or pinning centers typically mediate magnetization reversal. Fundamental lengths determining M structure include the domain wall width and the exchange stiffness length, typically in the 4-400 nm range. Chemical heterogeneity (phase separation, polycrystalline microstructure, lithographic or other patterning, etc.) with length scales from nanometers to microns is often introduced to influence magnetic properties. With 1-2 nm wavelengths {lambda}, soft x-rays in principle can resolve structure down to {lambda}/2, and are well suited to study these mesoscopic length scales [1, 2]. This article highlights recent advances in resonant soft x-ray methods to resolve lateral magnetic structure [3], and discusses some of their relative merits and limitations. Only techniques detecting x-ray photons (rather than photo-electrons) are considered [4], since they are compatible with strong applied fields to probe relatively deeply into samples. The magneto-optical (MO) effects discovered by Faraday and Kerr were observed in the x-ray range over a century later, first at ''hard'' wavelengths in diffraction experiments probing interatomic magnetic structure [5]. In the soft x-ray range, magnetic linear [6] and circular [7] dichroism spectroscopies first developed that average over lateral magnetic structure. These large resonant …

In this semi-annual progress report, we describe research results from an ongoing study of fossil hydrogen energy systems with CO{sub 2} sequestration. This work was performed under NETL Award No. DE-FC26-02NT41623, during the six-month period September 2002 through March 2003. The primary objective of the study is to better understand system design issues and economics for a large-scale fossil energy system co-producing H{sub 2} and electricity with CO{sub 2} sequestration. This is accomplished by developing analytic and simulation methods for studying the entire system in an integrated way. We examine the relationships among the different parts of a hydrogen energy system, and attempt to identify which variables are the most important in determining both the disposal cost of CO{sub 2} and the delivered cost of H{sub 2}. A second objective is to examine possible transition strategies from today's energy system toward one based on fossil-derived H{sub 2} and electricity with CO{sub 2} sequestration. We are carrying out a geographically specific case study of development of a fossil H{sub 2} system with CO{sub 2} sequestration, for the Midwestern United States, where there is presently substantial coal conversion capacity in place, coal resources are plentiful and potential sequestration sites in deep saline …

Transition radiation generated by an electron beam, produced by a laser wakefield accelerator operating in the self-modulated regime, crossing the plasma-vacuum boundary is considered. The angular distributions and spectra are calculated for both the incoherent and coherent radiation. The effects of the longitudinal and transverse momentum distributions on the differential energy spectra are examined. Diffraction radiation from the finite transverse extent of the plasma is considered and shown to strongly modify the spectra and energy radiated for long wavelength radiation. This method of transition radiation generation has the capability of producing high peak power THz radiation, of order 100 (mu)J/pulse at the plasma-vacuum interface, which is several orders of magnitude beyond current state-of-the-art THz sources.

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We introduce a multi-layered image cache system that is designed to work with a pool of rendering engines to facilitate an interactive, frameless, asynchronous rendering environment. Our system decouples the rendering from the display of imagery. Therefore, it decouples render frequency and resolution from display frequency and resolution, and allows asynchronous transmission of imagery instead of the compute/send cycle of standard parallel systems. It also allows local, incremental refinement of imagery without requiring all imagery to be re-rendered. Images are placed in fixed position in camera (vs. world) space to eliminate occlusion artifacts. Display quality is improved by increasing the number of images. Interactivity is improved by decreasing the number of images.

Due to their finite lifetime, muons must be accelerated very rapidly. It is challenging to make the magnets ramp fast enough to accelerate in a synchrotron, and accelerating in a linac is very expensive. One can use a recirculating accelerator (like CEBAF), but one needs a different arc for each turn, and this limits the number of turns one can use to accelerate, and therefore requires significant amounts of RF to achieve the desired energy gain. An alternative method for muon acceleration is using a fixed field alternating gradient (FFAG) accelerator. Such an accelerator has a very large energy acceptance (a factor of two or three), allowing one to use the same arc with a magnetic field that is constant over time. Thus, one can in principle make as many turns as one can tolerate due to muon decay, therefore reducing the RF cost without increasing the arc cost. This paper reviews the current status of research into the design of FFAGs for muon acceleration. Several current designs are described and compared. General design considerations are also discussed.