Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 2001 and 2002, federal prosecutors indicted the Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a dozen conspirators on charges of racketeering, extortion, mail fraud, and tax evasion. In March 2003, the mayor was found guilty on 16 counts, and most of the others indicted have pleaded guilty. While the indictment did not refer to any misuse of federal funds, some of the corrupt activities were associated with projects that had received some federal funding in the past. This corruption has raised concerns about the adequacy of monitoring and oversight of the more than $82 million in federal funds Bridgeport has received in recent years. Congress asked us to examine federally funded programs operated by the city of Bridgeport and determine whether and to what extent the respective federal agencies, including program officials and Offices of Inspector General, have heightened program monitoring and oversight in light of the corruption."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) contracts with not-for-profit universities and private companies to operate its facilities. As part of the cost of operating these facilities, DOE can reimburse its contractors for the litigation costs associated with cases brought against them. Each year the department spends millions of dollars in such reimbursements. For the most part, litigation expenses involve the costs of outside counsel and resulting judgments and settlements for a variety of types of cases, such as equal employment opportunity, radiation and/or toxic exposure, personal injury, wrongful termination of employment, and whistleblower protections. Rep. Edward J. Markey asked GAO to study the extent to which DOE reimburses its contractors' litigation costs and the process for doing so. GAO obtained information on (1) how much DOE spends to reimburse litigation costs for its contractors, (2) what major criteria DOE uses to reimburse its contractors for litigation costs and how it implements these criteria, (3) what major criteria the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration use to reimburse their contractors for litigation costs, (4) the extent to which a state university that is a DOE contractor …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In April 2003, Congress enacted the Postal Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) Funding Reform Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-18), which\ lowered the Postal Service's (Service) annual payment for its CSRS obligation by over $2.5 billion beginning in fiscal year 2003. P.L. 108-18 includes requiring (1) the Service to begin making payments into an escrow account in fiscal year 2006, (2) the Service to issue a report on its proposed use of "savings" resulting from the lower CSRS payments, and (3) GAO to evaluate the Service's report and present its findings to Congress. GAO evaluated whether the Service's proposals were consistent with P.L. 108-18; the impact of the escrow account; and whether the proposals were fair to current and future ratepayers, affordable, and helped achieve transformation goals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Postal Civil Service Retirement System Funding Reform Act of 2003 (the Act) required the United States Postal Service, Department of the Treasury, and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to prepare proposals detailing whether and to what extent the Treasury and Postal Service should fund the benefits attributable to the military service of the Postal Service's current and former Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) employees. The Act required GAO to evaluate the proposals. Our objective in doing so was to assess the agencies' positions and provide additional information where it may be useful."

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

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

This report provides an overview and some analysis of the patient safety legislation that is being considered by the 108th Congress. It begins with background information on the nature and causes of medical errors, followed by a brief comparison of the differences between mandatory and voluntary reporting systems. The report then discusses some of the legal and policy issues facing state mandatory reporting systems and major national voluntary reporting systems, and identifies design features of effective reporting programs. It concludes with a discussion and side-by-side comparison of H.R. 663 and S. 720.

This report is intended for grant seekers in districts and states. This report has been expanded to include writing proposals for both government and private foundations grants. The report first discusses preliminary information gathering and preparation, developing ideas for the proposal, gathering community support, identifying funding resources, and seeking preliminary review of the proposal and support of relevant administrative officials.

The impact of possible sources of lepton-flavor mixing on K {yields} {pi}{nu}{bar {nu}} decays is analyzed. At the one-loop level lepton-flavor mixing originated from non-diagonal lepton mass matrices cannot generate a CP-conserving K{sub L} {yields} {pi}{sup 0}{nu}{bar {nu}} amplitude. The rates of these modes are sensitive to leptonic flavor violation when there are at least two different leptonic mixing matrices. New interactions that violate both quark and lepton universalities could enhance the CP-conserving component of {Lambda}(K{sub L} {yields} {pi}{sup 0}{nu}{bar {nu}}) and have a substantial impact. Explicit examples of these effects in the context of supersymmetric models, with and without R-parity conservation, are discussed.

We present a calculable supersymmetric theory of a composite"fat'" Higgs boson. Electroweak symmetry is broken dynamically through a new gauge interaction that becomes strong at an intermediate scale. The Higgs mass can easily be 200-450 GeV along with the superpartner masses, solving the supersymmetric little hierarchy problem. We explicitly verify that the model is consistent with precision electroweak data without fine-tuning. Gauge coupling unification can be maintained despite the inherently strong dynamics involved in electroweak symmetry breaking. Supersymmetrizing the Standard Model therefore does not imply a light Higgs mass, contrary to the lore in the literature. The Higgs sector of the minimal Fat Higgs model has a mass spectrum that is distinctly different from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.

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

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

OAK-B135

GaSb-based semiconductors are of interest for mid-infrared optoelectronic and high-speed electronic devices. Accurate determination of electrical properties is essential for optimizing the performance of these devices. However, electrical characterization of these semiconductors is not straightforward since semi-insulating (SI) GaSb substrates for Hall measurements are not available. In this work, the capability of Raman spectroscopy for determination of the majority carrier concentration in n-GaInAsSb epilayers was investigated. Raman spectroscopy offers the advantage of being non-contact and spatially resolved. Furthermore, the type of substrate used for the epilayer does not affect the measurement. However, for antimonide-based materials, traditionally employed Raman laser sources and detectors are not optimized for the analysis wavelength range dictated by the narrow band gap of these materials. Therefore, a near-infrared Raman spectroscopic system, optimized for antimonide-based materials, was developed. Ga{sub 0.85}In{sub 0.15}As{sub 0.13}Sb{sub 0.87} epilayers were grown by organometallic vapor phase epitaxy with doping levels in the range 2 to 80 x 10{sup 17} cm{sup -3}, as measured by secondary ion mass spectrometry. For a particular nominal doping level, epilayers were grown both lattice matched to n-GaSb substrates and lattice-mismatched to SI GaAs substrates under nominally identical conditions. Single magnetic field Hall measurements were performed on the epilayers …

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

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, 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.

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

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

Designing an adaptive optics (AO) system for extremely large telescopes (ELT's) will present new optical engineering challenges. Several of these challenges are addressed in this work, including first-order design of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems, pyramid wavefront sensors (PWFS's), and laser guide star (LGS) spot elongation. MCAO systems need to be designed in consideration of various constraints, including deformable mirror size and correction height. The y,{bar y} method of first-order optical design is a graphical technique that uses a plot with marginal and chief ray heights as coordinates; the optical system is represented as a segmented line. This method is shown to be a powerful tool in designing MCAO systems. From these analyses, important conclusions about configurations are derived. PWFS's, which offer an alternative to Shack-Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensors (WFS's), are envisioned as the workhorse of layer-oriented adaptive optics. Current approaches use a 4-faceted glass pyramid to create a WFS analogous to a quad-cell SH WFS. PWFS's and SH WFS's are compared and some newly-considered similarities and PWFS advantages are presented. Techniques to extend PWFS's are offered: First, PWFS's can be extended to more pixels in the image by tiling pyramids contiguously. Second, pyramids, which are difficult to manufacture, can …

Coherent scattering is a flavor-blind, high-rate, as yet undetected neutrino interaction predicted by the Standard Model. We propose to use a compact (kg-scale), two-phase (liquid-gas) argon ionization detector to measure coherent neutrino scattering off nuclei. In our approach, neutrino-induced nuclear recoils in the liquid produce a weak ionization signal, which is transported into a gas under the influence of an electric field, amplified via electroluminescence, and detected by phototubes or avalanche diodes. This paper describes the features of the detector, and estimates signal and background rates for a reactor neutrino source. Relatively compact detectors of this type, capable of detecting coherent scattering, offer a new approach to flavor-blind detection of man-made and astronomical neutrinos, and may allow development of compact neutrino detectors capable of nonintrusive real-time monitoring of fissile material in reactors.

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

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with R. Paul Kelly. Kelley was born in Irving, Texas on 21 June 1934. In 1951 he volunteered to join the Navy. After 12 weeks of boot camp in San Diego, he was assigned to the USS LST-887 in Yokosuka, Japan. He spent several months in the Korean theater before being reassigned to LCU-588 in Coronado, California. Sea duty in Korea resumed on the LCU-1273, USS Comstock (LSD-19), and USS Begor (APD-127). He then spent 3 years at the Supply Center in Yokosuka, rated as a yeoman. His next duty was at the 6th Naval District Charleston, the Naval Air Station Guam, went back to sea, then to the 12th Naval District in San Francisco. By now a chief petty officer, one of his duties there was Admiral Nimitz's writer or personal secretary. Most of this work took place in the admiral's home. Kelley relates what a quiet, humble, pleasant man Nimitz was. Kelley then was assigned to the USS Norton Sound (AVM-1), was Master Chief of the Command at Mare Island Shipyard, spent 2 years with US Naval Forces Europe in London, and finished his career at the …