Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Beginning in the 1980s, the National Park Service spent $11 million to develop and implement a maintenance management system. The system was eventually terminated because it failed to provide park managers with all the information they needed to manage their deferred maintenance workload. In 1998, the Park Service started a new asset management process to provide a systematic method for documenting deferred maintenance needs and tracking progress in reducing the amount of deferred maintenance. GAO found that the Park Service has made progress in developing a new asset management process. When finally implemented, the process should provide the agency with a (1) reliable inventory of its assets; (2) process for reporting on the condition of each asset; and (3) systemwide methodology for estimating deferred maintenance costs for each asset. Although the new process is promising, its success cannot be determined until staff in each of the park units are trained and the new asset management process is fully and properly implemented."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, concerns have been raised that new courtrooms continue to be built for district judges, even though existing courtrooms appear to be under used. The judiciary wants to maintain its one-judge, one-courtroom policy because of concerns about the effect of shared courtroom space on judicial administration. The judiciary has not, however, determined whether courtroom sharing may be possible among senior judges--the likeliest candidates for such an arrangement because of their reduced caseloads. Some active and senior judges in areas with a courtroom shortage are currently sharing space. Many of these judges oppose courtroom sharing because they believe that it interferes with the courts business and harms the judicial process. The judiciary plans to have some senior judges share space in future courthouse projects. Significant courtroom sharing appears unlikely in the near future, even among senior judges."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Subtitle A of Title V of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999 requires that each financial institution, which is defined to include most insurance providers or companies, has "an affirmative and continuing obligation to respect the privacy of its customers and to protect the security and confidentiality of those customers' nonpublic personal information." This prohibits the disclosure of consumers' nonpublic personal information to any entity that is not an affiliate of, or related by common ownership or control, to the institution unless the consumer is given an opportunity to opt out of such disclosure. Also, financial institutions must provide consumers with privacy notices that explain the institution's policies and practices for disclosure. Subtitle A calls upon federal regulators to (1) issue regulations implementing disclosure-related requirements and (2) establish standards for safeguarding the privacy and integrity of customer information and records. The act also requires state insurance authorities to enforce its provisions by adopting regulations for both information disclosure and information safeguards. As of March 2002, all of the states and the District of Columbia have acted to ensure that insurance companies under their jurisdiction meet Subtitle …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In light of its continuing financial deterioration and its stated goal of eliminating federal operating assistance by December 2002, Amtrak undertook several steps to improve its financial condition, including changing in its routes and services. Amtrak has been unsuccessful in implementing its Network Growth Strategy to shift its route and service plans for new routes and expanded services on the freight tracks over which it operates. Two years after announcing the new strategy, Amtrak has only implemented three routes, one of which was later canceled. Amtrak still plans to implement the remaining three routes, although later than planned. Increased mail and express revenues were the cornerstone of the new strategy. However, Amtrak overestimated the mail and express revenue expected. According to Amtrak, this overestimation occurred because (1) it had no empirical basis for its revenue estimates and (2) express shippers were reluctant to enter into contracts for service that did not yet exist. Six of the planned route actions were canceled because Amtrak overestimated the revenues associated with them. Amtrak was unable to reach agreement with freight railroads because they were concerned about (1) Amtrak's plans …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) studied 401(k) plan compliance with Internal Revenue Code requirements for tax-qualified plans. GAO found that IRS's estimates of noncompliance were inaccurate. The study, which audited a sample of 401(k) plans, did not provide information on the severity of the compliance violations identified and did not determine the number of plan participants or the amount of assets associated with noncompliance errors. Only 27 of the 73 study questions identified as compliance indicators conclusively demonstrated whether a plan was compliant or not. Consequently, the 44 percent reported to have one or more instances of noncompliance is at best an upper limit on the extent of noncompliance found. IRS has chosen specific types of private pension plans to study in a manner similar to the one conducted on 401(k) pension plans. The data that IRS collects will be analyzed to determine the prevalence and types of noncompliance among the plans studied."

Semiweekly newspaper from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas that includes local, national, and campus news along with advertising.

Funeral program for Mr. Weldon Bullard, born May 4, 1927 and died April 4, 2002. The funeral was held Friday, April 12, 2002 at Calvary Baptist Church, officiated by Pastor Kevin Nelson. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

Typical state of the art atmospheric general circulation models used in climate change studies have horizontal resolution of approximately 300 km. As computing power increases, many climate modeling groups are working toward enhancing the resolution of global models. An important issue that arises when resolution of a model is changed is whether cloud and convective parameterizations, which were developed for use at coarser resolutions, will need to be reformulated or re-tuned. We propose to investigate this issue and specifically cloud statistics using ARM data. The data streams produced by highly instrumented sections of Cloud and Radiation Testbeds (CART) of ARM program will provide a significant aid in the evaluation of cloud and convection parameterization in high-resolution models. Recently, we have performed multiyear global-climate simulations at T170 and T239 resolutions, corresponding to grid cell sizes of 0.7{sup 0} and 0.5{sup 0} respectively, using the NCAR Community Climate Model. We have also a performed climate change simulation at T170. On the scales of a T42 grid cell (300 km) and larger, nearly all quantities we examined in T170 simulation agree better with observations in terms of spatial patterns than do results in a comparable simulation at T42. Increasing the resolution to T239 …

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.

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Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) are under development for hot-gas path components to allow higher gas-firing temperatures in advanced (high-efficiency, low-emission) gas turbines. Increasing dependence on the reliability of TBC and EBC components has driven the need for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods to assess the condition, or ''health status,'' of these coatings. NDE methods based on elastic optical scatter and thermal imaging have been applied to TBC-coated test specimens that were thermally cycled and to EBC-coated SiC/SiC components that were run in 4.5 MW(e) field-test turbines. One primary interest is to develop NDE methods that can predict a prespall condition. Resulting data suggest a correlation between laser scatter data and thermal cycles for TBC-coated specimens, and thermal imaging results have demonstrated prespall detection for an EBC-coated SiC/SiC combustor liner.

Since January 2000, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, the Chicago Department of Environment, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection (now part of the Office of Energy Assurance) have been collaborating on the development and implementation of guidelines that municipal governments can use in preparing for electric power disruptions. On March 5, 2002 Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the electric company serving the Chicago metropolitan area, held a drill to test its emergency preparedness procedures. ComEd invited three communities in the metropolitan area--Buffalo Grove, Oak Brook, Riverside--to participate in the drill as part of their own emergency planning efforts to respond to electric power disruptions. Although ComEd had held joint exercises with the City of Chicago, this was the first time that a cooperative exercise with the suburban communities was conducted. The Infrastructure Assurance Center of Argonne National Laboratory, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Assurance helped facilitate the drill in the communities. A series of meetings involving ComEd, community controllers (who helped organize the drill but did not participate directly), and Argonne personnel was held to lay out the ground rules for the drill and determine how it would operate. Attachment 1 …

Numerical simulation of water injection in discrete fractured media with capillary pressure is a challenge. Dual-porosity models in view of their strength and simplicity can be mainly used for sugar-cube representation of fractured media. In such a representation, the transfer function between the fracture and the matrix block can be readily calculated for water-wet media. For a mixed-wet system, the evaluation of the transfer function becomes complicated due to the effect of gravity. In this work, they use a discrete-fracture model in which the fractures are discretized as one dimensional entities to account for fracture thickness by an integral form of the flow equations. This simple step greatly improves the numerical solution. Then the discrete-fracture model is implemented using a Galerkin finite element method. The robustness and the accuracy of the approach are shown through several examples. First they consider a single fracture in a rock matrix and compare the results of the discrete-fracture model with a single-porosity model. Then, they use the discrete-fracture model in more complex configurations. Numerical simulations are carried out in water-wet media as well as in mixed-wet media to study the effect of matrix and fracture capillary pressures.

This report summarizes models for the prediction of failure pressures and leak rates under normal operation and design-basis accident conditions in steam generator tubes with axial and circumferential cracks. These models were first validated through failure and leak rate tests at room temperature and at 282 C on tubes with rectangular, triangular, and trapezoidal notches fabricated by electrodischarge machining. They were then compared with failure and leak rate tests conducted on tubes with laboratory-generated outer-diameter stress corrosion cracks and steam generator tubes with field-induced stress corrosion cracks, which have highly complex morphology. Complex crack profiles are addressed using a model based on the concept of equivalent rectangular cracks. The predictions of the models are in reasonable agreement with test results, the time-dependent initiation and increase of leak rates observed in some tests cannot be predicted by the model.

Stable isotope and tritium analyses of shallow ground waters in the Eastern Desert of Egypt showed that the waters were derived largely by evaporation of regional precipitation and at least partly from precipitation in the past 45 y. To estimate the ground water recharge rate, we developed an integrated hydrologic model based on satellite data, geologic maps, infiltration parameters, and spatial rainfall distribution. Modeling indicated that during a severe 1994 storm, recharge through transmission loss in Wadi El-Tarfa was 21% of the precipitation volume. From archival precipitation data, we estimate that the annual recharge rate for the El-Tarfa alluvial aquifer is 4.7 x 10{sup 6} m{sup 3}. Implications for the use of renewable ground waters in arid areas of Egypt and in neighboring countries are clear.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

In connection with the authors work on the apparent Iris Effect, they have acquired 2 years of additional data, and are redoing their analysis with the larger amount of data. So far, the results duplicate earlier results with greater statistical significance. They have also responded (successfully) to a number of criticisms of the initial publication. In particular, while differing estimates of cloudy and clear emissivity may be correct, they have shown that they reduce feedback factors by no more than 20%. The resulting feedback factors remain negative and large. Moreover, current data analyses suggest that the earlier estimates may be low for other reasons. They have also shown that all cloudy regions in the region covered by the GMS satellite are convective in origin. They are, however, continuing their work on an improved measure of cumulus activity. In particular, they are using TRMM data to determine thresholds in the T11 channel of GMS that are functions of time, position and SST. They have confirmed that the previous results had a very high statistical significance. However, they expect that the use of the improved measure of cumulus will improve this still further. They have completed their study of the possible reconciliation …

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

This report presents the results of a large-scale settling test conducted with a K Basin sludge simulant that included metallic tungsten/cobalt (W/Co) fragments (density {approx}14.5 g/cm3) as a surrogate for uranium metal (density 19 g/cm3). The objective of the testing was to gain insight into how uranium metal is likely to be distributed within the K Basin sludge loaded into the large-diameter containers (LDCs) that will be used for storage at T Plant. In the LDCs, uranium metal will react with water and generate heat and hydrogen gas. During loading, transportation, and storage operations, the uranium metal distribution in the LDCs will have an impact on the thermal stability. Approximately 50 m3 of K Basin sludge have accumulated during the storage of more than 2100 metric tons of N Reactor fuel elements in two water-filled concrete pools (K East and K West Basins) in the 100K Area of the Hanford Site.

The authors have designed and fabricated a 355 x 150 mm multilayer dielectric diffraction grating, 1800 l/mm for 1030 nm light, that exhibits >99% diffraction efficiency and a diffracted wavefront flatness of <0.15 {lambda}. This grating is an enabling component of a 1 ps, high rep-rate machining laser currently in operation at LLNL.

Development of manufacturing infrastructure is required to ensure a commercial source of mask substrates for the timely introduction of EUVL. Improvements to the low thermal expansion materials that compose the substrate have been made, but need to be scaled to production quantities. We have been evaluating three challenging substrate characteristics to determine the state of the infrastructure for the finishing of substrates. First, surface roughness is on track and little risk is associated with achieving the roughness requirement as an independent specification. Second, with new flatness-measuring equipment just coming on line, the vendors are poised for improvement toward the SEMI P37 flatness specification. Third, significant acceleration is needed in the reduction of defect levels on substrates. The lack of high-sensitivity defect metrology at the vendors' sites is limiting progress in developing substrates for EWL.

This report introduces selected basic sources that are useful in obtaining background information or specific facts on the status of federal legislative or regulatory initiatives. It includes telephone, online, and media sources are included, as well as pertinent directories, such as those of organizations that track areas of interest. Annotations describing each source's contents and organization are included so that researchers can select those that most closely fit their needs. Internet addresses usually provide information about the items, rather than access to them.

Interview with Floyd Mumme, a medic during World War II. He discusses boot camp, being deployed to Saipan, Japanese trying to steal food, working in the Army Medical Corps, and treating wounds in combat.