Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) continues to rely on commercial satellite communications to plan and support operations. DOD use of commercial satellite bandwidth has increased over the past few years, making the department the largest single customer of commercial satellite bandwidth. In recent years, DOD's process for acquiring commercial satellite communications has received criticism for being lengthy, inflexible, and costly. DOD is now reexamining how it procures commercial satellite services to address these issues. Congress asked us to summarize the actions that DOD has taken to date in revising its requirements and acquisition approach for commercial satellite services."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the distribution of federal contract dollars for advertising services to small disadvantaged businesses (SDB), focusing on: (1) the goals established for federal contracting with small minority-owned and women-owned businesses; (2) trend data on the distribution of prime advertising obligations for fiscal years 1994 through 1998; (3) information on the distribution of and competition for advertising contracts with fiscal year (FY) 1998 obligations; and (4) information on the distribution of subcontract awards to SDBs for selected advertising contracts."

A statement of record issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses management shortcomings at the Architect of the Capitol (AOC) in such areas as strategic planning, organizational alignment, strategic human capital, financial management, and information technology. AOC has demonstrated a commitment to change through ongoing management improvements. It is also revisiting its strategic planning efforts, working with a consultant to implement best practices, and implementing a new financial management system. AOC recognizes that change will not come quickly or easily. AOC must ensure that it has the policies, procedures, and people in place to effectively implement the needed changes. GAO believes that AOC must ensure top leadership commitment to change; identify long-term, mission-critical goals through a re-invigorated strategic planning process tied to serving the Congress; develop annual goals and a system for measuring progress; and establish individual accountability and commensurate authority for achieving results."

The purpose of the study is to - based on field measurements - determine the average annual leakage rate of HFC-134a from MACs in the European Union of a "second generation"1 air conditioner. From November 2002, to January 2003 300 measurements of HFC-134a leakage were carried out on air conditioners of cars up to seven years age. The measurements were carried out on vehicles of all EU relevant makes at 19 garages in Germany (Osnabrück), Portugal (Rio Maior) and Sweden (Helsingborg) reflecting different climatic conditions.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, state and local governments formed fusion centers, collaborative efforts to detect, prevent, investigate, and respond to criminal or terrorist activity. Recognizing that the centers are a critical mechanism for sharing information, the federal government--including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE), which has primary responsibility for governmentwide information sharing--is taking steps to partner with fusion centers. This testimony focuses on (1) the characteristics of fusion centers as of September 2007 and (2) federal efforts to help alleviate challenges centers identified. This testimony is based on GAO's October 2007 report on 58 fusion centers and related federal efforts to support them as well as updated information GAO obtained in March 2008 by reviewing plans describing selected federal efforts and attending the second annual national fusion center conference."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "When GAO originally placed the U.S. Postal Service's (the Service) transformation efforts and long-term outlook on its high-risk list in early 2001, it was to focus urgent attention on the Service's deteriorating financial situation. Aggressive action was needed, particularly in cutting costs, improving productivity, and enhancing financial transparency. GAO testified several times since 2001 that comprehensive postal reform legislation was needed to address the Service's unsustainable business model, which assumed that increasing mail volume would cover rising costs and mitigate rate increases. This outdated model limited its flexibility and incentives needed to realize sufficient cost savings to offset rising costs, declining First-Class Mail volumes, unfunded obligations, and an expanding delivery network. This limitation threatened the Service's ability to achieve its mission of providing affordable, high-quality universal postal services on a self-financing basis. This testimony will focus on (1) why GAO recently removed the Service's transformation efforts and outlook from GAO's high-risk list, (2) the Service's financial condition in fiscal year 2007, (3) the opportunities and challenges facing the Service, and (4) major issues and areas for congressional oversight. This testimony is based on GAO's past work, review of …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Transportation's (DOT) Job Access and Reverse Commute (Job Access) Program, has presented implementation challenges for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). In November 1999, DOT's process for selecting Job Access grantees was inconsistent and the basis for some selections was unclear. In response, DOT took steps to improve its process for selecting grantees by developing a standard format for reviewing proposals and providing more detailed guidance to its reviewers. Grantees reported problems in meeting standard grant requirements for obtaining Job Access funding. Half of the respondents GAO surveyed said that it took too long to satisfy standard FTA grant requirements--on average, about nine months from the time an applicant had been selected for a grant until the time the applicant had satisfied the requirements and received its grant. The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century required DOT to evaluate the Job Access program and issue a report by June 2000. However, DOT reportedly has no estimated date for issuing the report. DOT developed a plan and selected an increase in access to employment sites as the sole measure of program success. The use of employment …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The lack of outpatient prescription drug coverage may leave Medicare's most vulnerable beneficiaries with high out-of-pocket costs. Recent estimates suggest that, at any given time, more than a third of Medicare beneficiaries lack prescription drug coverage. The rest have some coverage through various sources--most commonly employer-sponsored health plans. Recent evidence indicates that this coverage is beginning to erode. The short- and long-term cost pressures facing Medicare will require substantial financing and programmatic reforms to put future Medicare on a sustainable footing. In the absence of a drug benefit, many Medicare beneficiaries obtain coverage through health plans, public programs, and the Medigap insurance market. The price, availability, and level of such coverage varies widely, leaving substantial gaps and exposure to high out-of-pocket costs for thousands. Despite pressures to adopt a prescription drug benefit, the rapidly rising cost of current obligations argues for careful deliberation and extreme caution in expanding benefits. GAO's long-term simulations show that the aging of the baby boomers and rising per capita health care spending will, absent meaningful reform, lead to massive fiscal challenges in future years."

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a county may pay accrued vacation or compensatory time to two sheriff’s deputies if, when the time accrued, the county did not permit such payments, and related question (RQ-0324-JC)

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 Calhoun County Navigation District may enact a tax limitation under article VIII, section 1-b(h) of the Texas Constitution.

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 an individual may simultaneously serve as a constable in Goliad County and as a member of the board of directors of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District.

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 certain unauthorized fees collected by counties and municipalities that cannot be returned to the persons who paid the fees constitute taxes that must be remitted to the Comptroller under chapter 111 of the Tax Code or abandoned property governed by the Property Code (RQ-0613-JC)

The goal of this project has been to develop a lossless compression algorithm for message-passing libraries that can accelerate HPC systems by reducing the communication time. Because both compression and decompression have to be performed in software in real time, the algorithm has to be extremely fast while still delivering a good compression ratio. During the first half of this project, they designed a new compression algorithm called FPC for scientific double-precision data, made the source code available on the web, and published two papers describing its operation, the first in the proceedings of the Data Compression Conference and the second in the IEEE Transactions on Computers. At comparable average compression ratios, this algorithm compresses and decompresses 10 to 100 times faster than BZIP2, DFCM, FSD, GZIP, and PLMI on the three architectures tested. With prediction tables that fit into the CPU's L1 data acache, FPC delivers a guaranteed throughput of six gigabits per second on a 1.6 GHz Itanium 2 system. The C source code and documentation of FPC are posted on-line and have already been downloaded hundreds of times. To evaluate FPC, they gathered 13 real-world scientific datasets from around the globe, including satellite data, crash-simulation data, and …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal year 2007, more than 150 million cattle, sheep, and other animals destined for human consumption were slaughtered in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service is responsible for enforcing the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), which mandates that animals are handled and slaughtered humanely. GAO reported on USDA's efforts to enforce HMSA in 2004 (Humane Methods of Slaughter Act: USDA Has Addressed Some Problems but Still Faces Enforcement Challenges, GAO-04-247). More broadly, GAO has also issued many reports that address federal oversight of the U.S. food safety system. This testimony focuses on (1) GAO's 2004 report on the frequency and scope of reported HMSA violations and enforcement actions by USDA, (2) information on trends in staffing and funding for USDA food inspections, and (3) information on overall federal oversight of food safety. To provide this new information, GAO analyzed personnel and funding data from USDA and the Office of Management and Budget, and interviewed USDA food safety inspection officials."

Pebble-bed nuclear reactor technology, which is currently being revived around the world, raises fundamental questions about dense granular flow in silos. A typical reactor core is composed of graphite fuel pebbles, which drain very slowly in a continuous refueling process. Pebble flow is poorly understood and not easily accessible to experiments, and yet it has a ma jor impact on reactor physics. To address this problem, we perform full-scale, discrete-element simulations in realistic geometries, with up to 440,000 frictional, viscoelastic 6cm-diameter spheres draining in a cylindrical vessel of diameter 3.5m and height 10m with bottom funnels angled at 30◦ or 60◦ . We also simulate a bidisperse core with a dynamic central column of smaller graphite moderator pebbles and show that little mixing occurs down to a 1:2 diameter ratio. We analyze the mean velocity, diffusion and mixing, local ordering and porosity (from Voronoi volumes), the residence-time distribution, and the effects of wall friction and discuss implications for reactor design and the basic physics of granular flow.

Handwritten notes from a board meeting of the Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus.

Email with updates about member listings and the abbreviation for the organization.

Agenda for the Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus board meeting held April 17, 2004.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Charles J. Schlag. Schlag was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1922. When he finished high school in 1941, he went to work for the local telephone company. In early 1943, Schalg entered the Navy as a cadet learning to fly. He recalls several anecdotes from his flight training at Maryland, Georgia and at Pensacola. After he was commissioned, he went to Great Lakes for carrier landing training. Eventually, he was assigned to Air Group 10 in New Jersey and learned to fly the Corsair. When he was assigned for overseas duty, his group reported aboard the USS intrepid (CV-11) at Alameda in February 1945. He was aboard the ship when it was hit by a kamikaze. When the war ended, Schlag returned to the US aboard the USS Barnes (CVE-20) and elected to go to celectial navigation school. He ended up staying in the reserves for 20 years.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Richard F. Hoffman. Hoffman was born 7 January 1922 in Seattle, Washington. While in college, he joined the Naval Reserve V-7 program. Upon graduation in June 1943, he reported to Great Lakes Naval Training Center, then to the Midshipman School at Columbia University. In November 1943 he was commissioned an ensign and sent to Antisubmarine Warfare schools in Miami and Key West. He subsequently joined the commissioning crew of the USS Damon M. Cummings (DE-643) as the ASW officer. The Cummings sailed to the Western Pacific in September 1944, escorting a convoy to Eniwetok. She continued to provide patrol and escort duty until March 1945 when she escorted a convoy of LSTs from the Philippines to Okinawa. During the battle for Okinawa, Cummings provided picket duty, shooting down one kamikaze. After the war, she went to Japan where Hoffman was able to go ashore in Tokyo. From Japan, they sailed to Bremerton, Washington for an overhaul. Hoffman was now the Executive Officer. The Cummings crossed the Pacific again to provide services in Mainland China and French Indochina. Hoffman left the ship in May 1946 and was returned to …

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Edward Hyak. Hyak joined the Army Air Corps in August 1940 and received clerical training at Fort Logan. He received glider pilot training in Roswell. Upon completion, he was assigned to the 477th Bomb Group, where he served as a technical clerk assisting the first sergeant. In November 1942 he went to England, where he kept maintenance records and ran troubleshooting for the bomb group as an engineer clerk specialist. He recalls one plane, nicknamed Fuddy Duddy, which flew 90 missions before finally being decommissioned. On D-Day he witnessed thousands of American planes overhead, which came as a total surprise to him. While in England he met his brother and cousin at the Imperial Hotel. Hyak returned home in July 1945 and was discharged. He joined the inactive reserves and was called to Nevada to participate in nuclear bomb experiments in 1950. He recalls being knocked down by the blast from his post in a trench. He attributes numerous lifelong ailments and disabilities to his exposure to radioactivity, including blindness. Hyak was discharged a second time in September 1952.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Thomas Young. Young joined the Army and served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, and participated in the Normandy landings. In September, Young made the invasion in Holland.

A brief article in remembrance of a Vickery Place Neighborhood Association past president, Bill Nelson.

Application materials submitted to the Texas Historical Commission requesting a historic marker for the Howard E. and Mary Butt House, in Harlingen, Texas. The materials include the inscription text of the marker, original application, narrative, maps, floor plans, and photographs.