Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs requested GAO's views on various competitive sourcing issies, including the recent revisions made by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to its Circular A-76. GAO answered questions on (1) making "best value" instead of "lowest cost" the factor that agencies must use in determining who will win a public-private competition; (2) agencies' capability to effectively manage public-private competitions and overseeing contracts; and (3) whether the 12-month time limit placed on competitions in the revised OMB Circular A-76 is appropriate and how much of the time taken to conduct competitions in the past was used to do things that could be handled before the competition begins."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (Fund) is a $1 billion fund authorized by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA) to pay for (1) federal removal actions, (2) certain claims for uncompensated removal costs and damages,and (3) natural resource damage and restoration activities resulting from oil spills or the substantial threat of oil spills to the waters or shorelines of the United States. The Fund is administered by the National Pollution Funds Center (NPFC) of the U.S. Coast Guard. In May 2002, our Office of General Counsel reported on legal issues and limitations of the Fund and concluded that certain administrative costs were inappropriately being paid out of the Fund. In light of this conclusion, we reviewed the internal controls over disbursements from the Fund. Specifically, we reviewed the Fund to determine whether (1) the design of internal controls over the claims process provides reasonable assurance that improper payments will not occur or will be detected in the normal course of business and (2) internal controls over the claims process are operating as designed to help ensure proper payment of claims."

The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code provides rules for the construction of nuclear power plant components. The Code specifies fatigue design curves for structural materials. However, the effects of light water reactor (LWR) coolant environments are not explicitly addressed by the Code design curves. Existing fatigue strain-vs.-life ({var_epsilon}-N) data illustrate potentially significant effects of LWR coolant environments on the fatigue resistance of pressure vessel and piping steels. This report provides an overview of the existing fatigue {var_epsilon}-N data for carbon and low-alloy steels and wrought and cast austenitic SSs to define the effects of key material, loading, and environmental parameters on the fatigue lives of the steels. Experimental data are presented on the effects of surface roughness on the fatigue life of these steels in air and LWR environments. Statistical models are presented for estimating the fatigue {var_epsilon}-N curves as a function of the material, loading, and environmental parameters. Two methods for incorporating environmental effects into the ASME Code fatigue evaluations are discussed. Data available in the literature have been reviewed to evaluate the conservatism in the existing ASME Code fatigue evaluations. A critical review of the margins for ASME Code fatigue design curves is presented.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a home-rule city may ban the sale of alcoholic or other beverages in glass containers (RQ-0036-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the Kempner Water Supply Corporation is subject to the Local Government Records Act (RQ-0049-GA)

Laboratory and field demonstration results obtained as part of the DARPA-sponsored Coherent Communications, Imaging and Targeting (CCIT) program are reviewed. The CCIT concept uses a Phase Conjugation Engine based on a quadrature receiver array, a hologram processor and a spatial light modulator (SLM) for high-speed, digital beam control. Progress on the enabling MEMS SLM, being developed by a consortium consisting of LLNL, academic institutions and small businesses, is presented.

Weekly student newspaper from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes campus news along with advertising.

Student newspaper of Harper Independent School District in Harper, Texas that includes school news and information along with advertising.

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.

SCOR (http://scor.lbl.gov), the Structural Classification of RNA, is a database designed to provide a comprehensive perspective and understanding of RNA motif three-dimensional structure, function, tertiary interactions, and their relationships. SCOR 2.0 represents a major expansion and introduces a wholly new classification system. The new version represents the classification as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which allows a classification node to have multiple parents, in contrast to the strictly hierarchical classification used in SCOR 1.2. SCOR 2.0 supports three types of query terms in the updated search engine: PDB or NDB identifier, nucleotide sequence, and keyword. We also provide parseable XML files for all information. This new release contains 511RNA entries from the PDB as of 15 May 2003. A total of 5,880 secondary structural elements are classified; 2,104 hairpin loops and 3,776 internal loops. RNA motifs reported in the literature, such as ''Kinkturn'' and ''GNRA loops,'' are now incorporated into the structural classification along with definitions and descriptions.

Bechtel National l, Inc. (BNI) has been contracted to design a Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) to stabilize liquid radioactive waste that is stored at the Hanford Site as part of the River Protection Project (RPP). Because of its experience with radioactive waste stabilization, the Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) is working with BNI to help design and test certain parts of the waste treatment facility. One part of the process is the separation of radioactive solids from the liquid wastes by cross- flow ultrafiltration. This task tested a cross- flow filter, prototypic in porosity, length and diameter, with a simulated radioactive waste, made to prototypically represent the chemical and physical characteristics of a Hanford waste in tank 241-AN-102 (AN-102) and precipitated under prototypic conditions. This report discusses the results of cross- flow filter operation in a pilot-scale experimental facility. This filter technology was evaluated for its inclusion in the pretreatment section of the nuclear waste stabilization plant being designed by Bechtel National, Inc. The waste treatment plant will be built at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site as part of the River Protection Project.

We conducted several scoping tests with both Tank 50H surrogate materials (KTPB and phenol) as well as with actual Tank 50H solids. These tests examined whether we could destroy the tetraphenylborate in the surrogates or actual Tank 50H material either by use of Fenton's Reagent or by hydrolysis (in Tank 50H conditions at a maximum temperature of 50 degrees C) under a range of conditions. The results of these tests showed that destruction of the solids occurred only under a minority of conditions. (1)Using Fenton's Reagent and KTPB as the Tank 50H surrogate, no reaction occurred at pH ranges greater than 9. (2)Using Fenton's Reagent and phenol as the Tank 50H surrogate, no reaction occurred at a pH of 14. (3)Using Fenton's Reagent and actual Tank 50H slurry, a reaction occurred at a pH of 9.5 in the presence of ECC additives. (4)Using Fenton's Reagent and actual Tank 50H slurry, after a thirty three day period, all attempts at hydrolysis (at pH 14) were too slow to be viable. This happened even in the case of higher temperature (50 degrees C) and added (100 ppm) copper. Tank 50H is scheduled to return to HLW Tank Farm service with capabilities of …

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Thanks to the rapid increase of computing power in recent years, simulations of plasmas and particle beams based on direct solution of the Vlasov equation on a multi-dimensional phase-space grid are becoming attractive as an alternative to Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. Their strength lies essentially in the fact that they are noiseless and that all parts of phase space, including the tail of the distribution, are equally well resolved. Their major drawback is that, for inhomogeneous systems, many of the grid points (where no particles are present) are wasted. This is especially the case for beam simulations where the beam moves rapidly through the phase space (due to varying alternating-gradient focusing forces, for example). This inefficiency has made such Vlasov simulations unsuitable for those cases. One of the methods which has proven very efficient for the direct resolution of the Vlasov equation is the semi-Lagrangian method [1, 3]. It consists in updating the values of the distribution function at the grid nodes by following the characteristics ending at these nodes backwards and interpolating the value at the bottom of the characteristics from the known values at the previous time step. In general the interpolation grid is fixed, but this is not …

NUREG 1400 contains an acceptable methodology for determining the uncertainty associated with retrospective air sampling. The method is a fairly simple one in which both the systemic and random uncertainties, usually expressed as a percent error, are propagated using the square root of the sum of the squares. Historically, many people involved in air sampling have focused on the statistical counting error as the deciding factor of overall uncertainty in retrospective air sampling. This paper looks at not only the counting error but also other errors associated with the performance of retrospective air sampling.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Airline travel is one of the safest modes of public transportation in the United States. Furthermore, there are survivors in the majority of airliner crashes, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Additionally, more passengers might have survived if they had been better protected from the impact of the crash, smoke, or fire or better able to evacuate the airliner. As requested, GAO addressed (1) the regulatory actions that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has taken and the technological and operational improvements, called advancements, that are available or are being developed to address common safety and health issues in large commercial airliner cabins and (2) the barriers, if any, that the United States faces in implementing such advancements."

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

Funeral program for Mrs. Geneva R. Fuller, born August 5, 1908 and died September 29, 2003. The funeral was held October 3, 2003 at Jacobs Chapel United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Howard Mims. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and she was buried in Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

We test the new VRT(ASP-W)II and VRT(ASP-W)III potentials by employing Diffusion Quantum Monte Carlo simulations to calculate the vibrational ground-state properties of water clusters. These potentials are fits of the highly detailed ASP-W ab initio potential to (D{sub 2}O){sub 2} microwave and far-IR data, and along with the SAPT5s potentials, are the most accurate water dimer potential surfaces in the literature. The results from VRT(ASP-W)II and III are compare to those from the original ASP-W potential, the SAPT5s family of potentials, and several bulk water potentials. Only VRT(ASP-W)II and the spectroscopically ''tuned'' SAPT5st (with N-body induction included) accurately reproduce the vibrational ground-state structures of water clusters up to the hexamer. Finally, the importance of many-body induction and three-body dispension are examined, and it is shown that the latter can have significant effects on water cluster properties despite its small magnitude.

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Article showing that knockdown Arabidopsis plants with suppressed expression of the key water-water cycle enzyme, thylakoid-attached copper/zinc superoxide dismutase (KD-SOD), are suppressed in their growth and development. This article provides e genetic evidence for the importance of the water-water cycle in protecting the photosynthetic apparatus of higher plants from photooxidative damage.