A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Telework--work done at a location other than a traditional office--has gained widespread attention over the past decade as a human capital flexibility offering various potential benefits to employers, employees, and society. Using such flexibilities as management tools can help the federal government address its human capital challenges. GAO did this study in response to a congressional request to assess the federal government's progress in implementing telework programs and to determine what else can be done to give federal employees the ability to telework under appropriate circumstances."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Under section 1308 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (P.L. 106-398), the Department of Defense is to submit an annual report to Congress on its Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program no later than the first Monday in February of each year. The report should include a five-year plan that discusses the amount and purpose of funding needed over the term of the plan and a description of efforts conducted by the United States to ensure that CTR assistance is fully accounted for and used for its intended purposes. The Act requires the Comptroller General to assess this five-year plan and the description of efforts to account for CTR assistance within 90 days of the report's submission to Congress. The Department submitted its CTR annual report for fiscal year 2004 to Congress on April 18, 2003. We analyzed the 2004 report to determine whether (1) the five-year plan addressed the legislative requirements and presents accurate information, (2) the accountability section addressed legislative requirements and presents accurate information, and (3) the presentation and usefulness of the CTR annual report could be improved."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Two types of nonprofit organizations, cooperating associations and friends groups, provide substantial support to the national parks. GAO was asked to report on (1) the number of park units supported by nonprofits and the amount of their contributions, (2) the revenue-generating activities of nonprofits and how they compete with park concessioners, (3) factors that contribute to competition between nonprofits and for-profit concessioners, and (4) how park managers are held accountable for meeting goals for nonprofit financial support."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The circumstances of armed conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan differed in many respects, but in all three cases the United States and the international community became involved in the wars and post-conflict assistance because of important national and international interests. Over the past 10 years, GAO has done extensive work assessing post-conflict assistance in Bosnia and Kosovo and, more recently, has evaluated such assistance to Afghanistan. GAO was asked to provide observations on assistance efforts in these countries that may be applicable to ongoing assistance in Iraq. Specifically, GAO assessed (1) the nature and extent of post-conflict assistance in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; (2) essential components for carrying out assistance effectively; (3) challenges to implementation; and (4) mechanisms used for accountability and oversight."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Data sharing can be a valuable tool for federal agencies in determining applicants' eligibility for benefit and loan programs. Congress has authorized the Department of Education, among others, to have limited access to federal taxpayer information collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Likewise, IRS is able to use personal information collected by outside sources to better ensure that taxpayers are meeting their tax obligations. GAO was asked to determine whether Education uses taxpayer information to verify information provided by student aid applicants, and the benefits of increasing data verification activities, and whether IRS uses personal information maintained by Education to ensure that taxpayers meet their tax obligations, and the benefits of increasing these activities."

Letter from Marcus Goodyear, English teacher at Sandra Day O'Connor High School, to Sterling Houston, prominent San Antonio playwright. He writes to send word of a student literary magazine called Limestone. At the bottom of the letter, he has hand-written a personal note to Sterling thanking him for a writing workshop.

Set from rules and customs, the Senate takes up ways to give more flexibility to the floor agenda.

Our identification research for the past several years has focused on the problem of correctly discriminating small-magnitude explosions from a background of earthquakes, mining tremors, and other events. Small magnitudes lead to an emphasis on regional waveforms. The goal is to reduce the variance within the population of each type of event, while increasing the separation between the explosions and the other event types. We address this problem for both broad categories of seismic waves, body waves, and surface waves. First, we map out the effects of propagation and source size in advance so that they can be accounted for and removed from observed events. This can dramatically reduce the population variance. Second, we try to optimize the measurement process to improve the separation between population types. For body waves we focus on the identification power of the short-period regional phases Pn, Pg, Sn and Lg, and coda that can often be detected down to very small magnitudes. It is now well established that particular ratios of these phases, such as 6- to 8-Hz Pn/Lg, can effectively discriminate between closely located explosions and earthquakes. To extend this discrimination power over broad areas, we developed a revised Magnitude and Distance Amplitude …

This project has built a unique historic database of regional distance nuclear explosion, earthquake, and mine-related digital broadband seismograms for the western United States (US). The emphasis is on data from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-managed stations MNA, ELK, KNB and LAC that recorded many nuclear tests and nearby earthquakes in broadband digital form since 1980, along with a small number of earlier events that were digitized from tapes. Through the generous cooperation of Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) we have also included waveforms from their Leo Brady network (BMN, DWN, LDS, NEL,TON). In addition we include data from other open broadband stations in the western US with long operating histories and/or ties to the International Monitoring System (IMS) (e.g. PFO, YKA, CMB, NEW, DUG, ANMO, TUC). These waveforms are associated with a reconciled catalog of events and station response information to facilitate analysis. The goal is to create a high-quality database that can be used in the future to analyze fundamental regional monitoring issues such as detection, location, magnitude, and discrimination. In the first stage of the project, we collected six different regional network catalogs from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), to provide accurate independent location information for events …

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, 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.

This model and analysis report develops, validates, and implements a conceptual model for heat transfer in and around a ventilated emplacement drift. This conceptual model includes thermal radiation between the waste package and the drift wall, convection from the waste package and drift wall surfaces into the flowing air, and conduction in the surrounding host rock. These heat transfer processes are coupled and vary both temporally and spatially, so numerical and analytical methods are used to implement the mathematical equations which describe the conceptual model. These numerical and analytical methods predict the transient response of the system, at the drift scale, in terms of spatially varying temperatures and ventilation efficiencies. The ventilation efficiency describes the effectiveness of the ventilation process in removing radionuclide decay heat from the drift environment. An alternative conceptual model is also developed which evaluates the influence of water and water vapor mass transport on the ventilation efficiency. These effects are described using analytical methods which bound the contribution of latent heat to the system, quantify the effects of varying degrees of host rock saturation (and hence host rock thermal conductivity) on the ventilation efficiency, and evaluate the effects of vapor and enhanced vapor diffusion on the …

This paper presents a large-scale modeling study characterizing fluid flow and tracer transport in the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the proposed underground repository site for storing high-level radioactive waste. The modeling study is conducted using a three-dimensional numerical model, which incorporates a wide variety of field data and takes into account the coupled processes of flow and transport in Yucca Mountain's highly heterogeneous, unsaturated, fractured porous rock. The modeling approach is based on a dual-continuum formulation. Using different conceptual models of unsaturated flow, various scenarios of current and future climate conditions and their effects on the unsaturated zone are evaluated to aid in the assessment of the repository's system performance. These models are calibrated against field-measured data. Model-predicted flow and transport processes under current and future climates are discussed.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), which produce the nation's coins and currency, provide their own security and have experienced some problems with theft by employees. Although security is necessary to carry out the agencies' missions, their primary function is producing money. In light of these thefts, a congressional committee asked GAO whether the Mint and BEP should continue to provide their own security or whether the United States Secret Service should provide their security. Among the issues that GAO was asked to address were (1) how do the Mint, BEP, and other organizations that produce or handle large amounts of cash provide their security; (2) what thefts have occurred at the Mint and BEP and what steps have they taken to prevent thefts from recurring; and (3) what are the potential benefits and costs of having the Secret Service provide Mint and BEP security? The Mint said it generally agreed with the findings and conclusions that applied to the Mint. BEP and the Secret Service provided technical comments regarding the report, which GAO incorporated where appropriate, but had no overall …

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

A new multi-scale simulation method is formulated for the study of shocked materials. The method combines molecular dynamics and the Euler equations for compressible flow. Treatment of the difficult problem of the spontaneous formation of multiple shock waves due to material instabilities is enabled with this approach. The method allows the molecular dynamics simulation of the system under dynamical shock conditions for orders of magnitude longer time periods than is possible using the popular non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) approach. An example calculation is given for a model potential for silicon in which a computational speedup of 10{sup 5} is demonstrated. Results of these simulations are consistent with the recent experimental observation of an anomalously large elastic precursor on the nanosecond timescale.

We have measured the production of h{nu} {approx}> 4.5 keV x-rays from low-density Ti-doped aerogel targets at the OMEGA laser facility (University of Rochester). The targets were 2.2 mm long by 2 mm diameter beryllium cylinders filled with Ti-doped (3 atomic percent) SiO{sub 2} foam. The doped-foam density was {approx} 3 mg/cc. Forty beams of the OMEGA laser ({gamma} = 351 nm) illuminated the two cylindrical faces of the target with a total power that ranged from 7 to 14 TW. The laser interaction fully ionizes the target (n{sub e}/n{sub crit} {approx}< 0.1), and allows the laser-bleaching wave to excite, supersonically, the high-Z emitter ions in the sample. The heating of the target was imaged with a gated (200 ps time resolution) x-ray framing camera filtered to observe > 4 keV. 2-D radiative hydrodynamic calculations predict rapid and uniform heating over the whole target volume with minimal energy losses into hydrodynamic motion. An x-ray streak camera, also filtered to observe > 4 keV, was used to measure the rate of heat propagation in the target. Ti K-shell x-ray emission was spectrally resolved with a two-channel crystal spectrometer and recorded with a set of calibrated aluminum x-ray diodes. Back-scattered laser energy …

This paper presents experimental results and computational simulations of spherical wave propagation in Danby marble. The experiment consisted of a 2-cm-diameter explosive charge detonated in the center of a cylindrical rock sample. Radial particle velocity histories were recorded at several concentric locations in the sample. An extensively damaged region near the charge cavity and two networks of cracks were evident in the specimen after the test. The first network consists of radial cracks emanating form the cavity and extending about halfway through the specimen. The second network consists of circumferential cracks occurring in a relatively narrow band that extends from the outer boundary of the radially cracked region toward the free surface. The experiment was simulated using the GEODYN code and a multi-directional damage model. The model is developed within the framework of a properly invariant nonlinear thermomechanical theory with damage represented by a second order tensor that admits load-induced anisotropy such as was observed in the experiment.

The success of reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation through physical protection and material control/accounting systems depends upon the development of an effective design that includes consideration of the objectives of the systems and the resources available to implement the design. Included among the objectives of the design are facility characterization, definition of threat, and identification of targets. When considering resources, the designer must consider funds available, rapid low-cost elements, technology elements, human resources, and the availability of resources to sustain operation of the end system. The Siberian Chemical Combine (SCC) is a multi-function nuclear facility located in the Tomsk region of Siberia, Russia. Beginning in 1996, SCC joined with the United States Department of Energy (US/DOE) Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) Program to develop and implement MPC&A upgrades for the Radiochemical, Chemical Metallurgical, Conversion, Uranium Enrichment, and Reactor Plants of the SCC. At the Radiochemical Plant the MPC&A design and implementation process has been largely completed for the Plutonium Storage Facility and related areas of the Radiochemical Plant. Design and implementation of upgrades for the Radiochemical Plant include rapid physical protection upgrades such as bricking up of doors and windows, and installation of security-hardened doors. Rapid material control …

This report presents a brief description of the five methods used to bring proposed legislation to the House floor for consideration.

None

This report discusses the trends in breast-feeding and lifestyle, Health Impacts for Mothers and Infants, state Breast-feeding Statutes and Observations on the Promotion of Breast-feeding.

Photograph of a scene during the International Finals Youth Rodeo.

Photograph of a scene during the International Finals Youth Rodeo.