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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

Funeral program for Arthur Boyd Winn, Jr., born October 29, 1930 and died October 16, 2000. The funeral was held October 20, 2000 at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Terrence K. Hayes. Funeral arrangements were made by Sutton-Sutton Mortuary, Inc., and he was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Data sharing among federal agencies that run federal benefit and loan programs is important for determining the eligibility of applicants and beneficiaries. A GAO symposium on data sharing highlighted various issues facing federal agencies in their efforts to prevent abuse of federal programs. Symposium speakers focused on the number of program dollars saved by interagency data exchanges. Agencies using computer matching have detected undisclosed income and welfare recipients who receive benefits from more than one state. Improved technologies offer agencies the opportunity to expand their data sharing efforts. Such technologies include computer systems that can communicate directly with other systems and computer networks that can obtain information directly from financial institutions. Symposium speakers agreed that applicants' privacy should be protected when personal information is shared among agencies, but they disagreed about the extent to which data sharing threatens it. Privacy laws and security-related technology provide individuals with some protection against the possible misuse of personal information, but symposium participants differed on whether these protections are adequate."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Through the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), Congress has sought to improve federal management and instill a greater focus on results. Congress and the executive branch recognize, however, that performance improvements do not take place merely because a set of management requirements has been put in place. In 1997 and 2000, GAO surveyed agencies' progress towards establishing a focus on results. GAO found that progress has been uneven in building the organizational cultures to create and sustain a focus on results governmentwide. A significantly higher percentage of managers in 2000 than in 1997 reported that their agencies had provided, arranged, or paid for training that would help them accomplish two results-oriented management-related tasks: setting performance goals and implementing the requirements of GPRA. Overall, the survey results show that, in some keys areas, agencies may be losing ground in their efforts towards building organizational cultures that support a focus on results. In GAO's view, the Senate confirmation process must ensure that political nominees have the appropriate management and leadership skills needed to continue to transform federal agencies into high-performing organizations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed several amendments to its 1993 Corrective Action Management Unit (CAMU) rule. The CAMU rule currently allows agencies to set aside part of their hazardous waste site to deposit wastes without triggering the requirements of the Recovery Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). EPA's action is in response to a lawsuit alleging that the CAMU rule would allow for the management of wastes in violation of RCRA's land disposal restrictions. The 1993 rule and recently proposed rules governing the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste onsite in CAMUs differ primarily in the requirements for waste treatment and facility design. According to EPA, the proposed rules will increase the time and the costs of site cleanups using CAMUs because it is less flexible than the 1993 rule and adds technical and process requirements. Several state representatives expressed concern that the proposed requirements could be applied to cleanups done under their programs, regardless of whether they were using CAMUs, thereby deterring the progress states have been making in cleaning up sites."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A cookie is a short string of text, not a program, that is sent from a web server to a web browser when the browser accesses a web page. GAO reviewed 65 federal web sites to determine: (1) which of the selected federal sites were using cookies, (2) the type of cookies used, and (3) whether the privacy policy disclosed that the site may or does use cookies."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998 authorizes Haitian nationals and their dependents to apply to change their status to legal permanent residence. This report, the fourth done in response to the act, contains a breakdown on the numbers of Haitians who applied and the number who were approved as asylum applicants, parolees, children without parents, orphaned children, abandoned children, or as the eligible dependents of these applicants (i.e., spouses, children, and unmarried sons or daughters). The Immigration and Naturalization Service had received a total of 35,257 applications under the act and had approved 263 of these applications. The Executive Office for Immigration Review had 95 applications filed and had approved 65 of them."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General (IG) provided training to its staff during fiscal years 1998 and 1999. GAO found that the training is part of a quality control system providing reasonable assurance that staff conform with professional standards. The reported cost of this training was about $630,000 in fiscal year 1998 and about $970,000 in fiscal year 1999. The courses covered topics such as leadership, quality, effectiveness, and performance. The IG plans to include additional management-related and technical training courses for the staff over the next two years and to conduct a skills inventory of the staff to identify any gaps that training can address."

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

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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In this paper an optimization-based method of drift prevention is presented for learning control of underdetermined linear and weakly nonlinear time-varying dynamic systems. By defining a fictitious cost function and the associated model-based sub-optimality conditions, a new set of equations results, whose solution is unique, thus preventing large drifts from the initial input. Moreover, in the limiting case where the modeling error approaches zero, the input that the proposed method converges to is the unique feasible (zero error) input that minimizes the fictitious cost function, in the linear case, and locally minimizes it in the (weakly) nonlinear case. Otherwise, under mild restrictions on the modeling error, the method converges to a feasible sub-optimal input.

For many nuclei beyond the proton drip line in the Z>72, N>82 region, both proton and a emission are energetically allowed. In the case of some proton emitters, there are {alpha}-decay chains emanating from both parent and daughter nuclei. This means that if the mass excess of one member of an {alpha}-decay chain is known, then the mass excesses for all members of both chains can be obtained. In addition, proton separation energies may be derived for nuclei in the {alpha}-decay chain of the proton emitter. The method of time- and space-correlations also allows the identification of isomeric states in these nuclei. As an example, a large number of mass excesses and proton separation energies for ground and metastable states have been derived from Q{sub a} and Q{sub p} values obtained from the proton emitters {sup 165,166,167}Ir, {sup 171}Au, {sup 177}Tl, and their daughters.

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The thermal-hydrologic (TH) and coupled process models describe the evolution of a potential geologic repository as heat is released from emplaced waste. The evolution (thermal, hydrologic, chemical, and mechanical) of the engineered barrier and geologic systems is heavily dependent on the heat released by the waste packages and how the heat is transferred from the emplaced wastes through the drifts and through the repository host rock. The essential elements of this process are extracted (or abstracted) from the process-level models that incorporate the basic energy and mass conservation principles and applied to the total system models used to describe the overall performance of the potential repository. The process of total system performance assessment (TSPA) abstraction is the following. First is a description of the parameter inputs used in the process-level models. A brief description is given hereof past inputs for the viability assessment (e.g., for TSPA-VA) and current inputs for the site recommendation (TSPA-SR). This is followed by a highlight of the process-level models from which the abstractions are made. These include descriptions of TH, thermal-hydrologic-chemical (THC), and thermal-mechanical (TM) processes used to describe the performance of individual waste packages and waste emplacement drifts as well as the repository as …

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Monte Carlo is an extremely powerful method of simulating complex, three dimensional environments without excessive problem simplification. However, it is often time consuming to simulate models in which the source can be highly varied. Similarly difficult are optimization studies involving sources in which many input parameters are variable, such as particle energy, angle, and spatial distribution. Such studies are often approached using brute force methods or intelligent guesswork. One field in which these problems are often encountered is accelerator-driven Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) for the treatment of cancers. Solving the reverse problem of determining the best neutron source for optimal BNCT treatment can be accomplished by separating the time-consuming particle-tracking process of a full Monte Carlo simulation from the calculation of the source weighting factors which is typically performed at the beginning of a Monte Carlo simulation. By post-processing these weighting factors on a recorded file of individual particle tally information, the effect of changing source variables can be realized in a matter of seconds, instead of requiring hours or days for additional complete simulations. By intelligent source biasing, any number of different source distributions can be calculated quickly from a single Monte Carlo simulation. The source description can …

Jefferson Lab, Hampton University and the Riverside Regional Medical Center are collaborating in a clinical study employing a dual modality imaging system utilizing scintimammography and digital radiography. The purpose of the study is to obtain clinical data on the reliability of scintimammography in predicting the malignancy of suspected breast lesions with the ultimate goal to reduce the number of false positives associated with conventional x-ray mammography. The scintimammography gamma camera is a custom built mini gamma camera with an active area of 5.3 cm x 5.3 cm based on a 2x2 array of Hamamatsu R7600-C8 position sensitive photomultiplier tubes. The spatial resolution of the gamma camera at the collimator surface is <4 mm FWHM and the sensitivity is 4000 cps/mCi. Preliminary results are that of the six cases that indicated a lesion with high uptake of MiraLuma ({sup 99m}Tc-sestamibi) five were positive for cancer. Out of a total of 25 patients in the study, all cases negative for MiraLuma uptake were confirmed negative via the biopsy pathology. The scintimammography results indicate that the lesions become visible with the mini gamma camera within 3 minutes post injection of MiraLuma.

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