This report presents a working definition for the term “cyber terrorism”, plus background information describing how current technology and management processes may leave computers exposed to cyber-attack, and a discussion of possible effects of a cyber-attack. Potential issues for Congress are presented in the second section, including: whether appropriate guidance exists for a DOD information warfare response to a cyber-attack; whether the need to detect possible cyber terrorist activity interferes with individual privacy; whether the roles and responsibilities for protecting against a possible cyber terrorist attack need more clarity for government, industry, and home users; and, whether information sharing on cyber threats and vulnerabilities must be further increased between private industry and the federal government. The final section describes possible policy options for improving protection against threats from possible cyber terrorism.

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This report begins with a comprehensive presentation of current economic conditions focusing on income growth, unemployment, and inflation. The posture of monetary and fiscal policy is surveyed as are the forecasts of economic activity. It concludes with data on the factors important for economic growth.

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This report discusses issues regarding genetically engineered soybeans in South America. U.S. soybean growers and trade officials charge that Argentina and Brazil–the United States’ two major export competitors in international soybean markets–gain an unfair trade advantage by routinely saving genetically-engineered (GE), Roundup Ready (RR) soybean seeds from the previous harvest (a practice prohibited in the United States) for planting in subsequent years.

Supplement to the Yellow Jacket, a weekly student newspaper from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising. This supplement contains 2003 Home Coming information.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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

Tri-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Community economic development (CED) lenders serve the credit needs of nonconventional borrowers and economically distressed areas across the nation. However, little is known about this industry, its ability to tap private sources of capital, and loan performance and volume in the industry. To provide information that would be helpful in considering the role that the federal government might play in facilitating the creation of a secondary market for CED loans, GAO was asked among other items to (1) determine the barriers to more widely securitizing CED loans and (2) identify options for overcoming these barriers and the likely implications of these options."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Improper payments are a longstanding,widespread,and significant problem in the federal government.This past April, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)estimated these payments to be about $35 billion annually for major federal benefit programs. Importantly, this estimate does not account for all federal programs and activities and considers less than half of the $2.3 trillion net cost of the federal government for fiscal year 2002. Because of its continued interest and concerns regarding financial management in the federal government, Congress asked GAO to follow-up on the implementation of the recommendations contained in our August 2002 report (GAO-02-749). Our 2002 report recommended that Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) agencies take actions to minimize improper payments in their programs and activities and for OMB to assist agencies in developing methods to identify and implement those actions. OMB described our report as largely fair and accurate. It characterized the administration's current efforts to reduce erroneous payments as the most comprehensive assessment of the government's payment processes in history."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Almost half of all Americans over the age of 65 will rely on nursing home care at some point in their lives, and two in three nursing home residents have their care covered at least in part by Medicaid. Under Medicaid, states set nursing home payment rates and the federal government reimburses a share of state spending. According to the most recently available data, Medicaid nursing home expenditures exceed $43 billion, and total Medicaid spending for fiscal year 2003 is expected to double by 2012. Such projections of increased Medicaid spending come as most states are confronting their third consecutive year of fiscal pressure. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), in fiscal year 2003, 30 states collected less revenue than they budgeted for, and 37 states reduced enacted budgets by almost $14.5 billion. In light of concerns about the adequacy of nursing home resources, GAO was asked to examine how state Medicaid programs determine nursing home payment rates and whether these payment methods or rates have changed given recent state fiscal pressures. GAO interviewed state and nursing home industry officials in 19 …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report responds to certain requirements of the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA) of 1998 that authorized certain Haitian nationals and their dependents to apply to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. Section 902(k) of the act requires the Comptroller General to report every 6 months on the number of Haitian nationals who have applied and been approved to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. The reports are to contain a breakdown of the number of Haitians who applied and the number who were approved as asylum applicants, parolees, children without parents, orphaned children, or abandoned children; or as the eligible dependents of these applicants, including spouses, children, and unmarried sons or daughters. Reports are to be provided until all applications have been finally adjudicated. This is our tenth report."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO performed the procedures requested by the Secretary of the Senate to assist in determining whether the Senate Office of Public Records revolving fund's reported fiscal year 2001 through 2002 receipts and disbursements and fund balances at the beginning and the end of the review period are complete and accurate. The procedures included reviewing documentation supporting the the Senate Office of Public Records revolving fund's recorded receipt and disbursement transactions for evidence that the transactions were properly authorized, recorded, and reported on the Senate Disbursing Office's monthly Statement of Funding Authorization and Expense Activity reports. In addition, we reviewed the fund balance at the beginning and end of the fiscal years under review. As a result of performing agreed-upon procedures, we identified on instance in which a cash disbursement was not forwarded to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration prior to payment. This occurred during the displacement of staff from Senate Disbursing Office as a result of the anthrax incident in the fall of 2001. Additionally, we found that the beginning and ending fund balances for fiscal years 2001 and 2002 recorded in the Senate Disbursing Office's …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a request from the Chairman, Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census, House Committee on Government Reform, GAO responded to posthearing questions. At the subject hearing, GAO discussed effective patch management practices for mitigating the risks to critical information systems posed by exploits of vulnerabilities in widely used commercial software products. GAO specifically discussed the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Patch Authentication and Dissemination Capability (PADC). PADC is a service offered by DHS's Federal Computer Incident Response Center (FedCIRC) that provides federal agencies with information on trusted, authenticated patches for their specific technologies without charge."

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.

The caustic precipitation of plutonium (Pu)-containing solutions has been investigated to determine whether the presence of 3:1 uranium (U):Pu in solutions stored in the H-Canyon Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) would adversely impact the use of gadolinium nitrate (Gd(NO3)3) as a neutron poison. In the past, this disposition strategy has been successfully used to discard solutions containing approximately 100 kg of Pu to the SRS high level waste (HLW) system. In the current experiments, gadolinium (as Gd(NO3)3) was added to samples of a 3:1 U:Pu solution, a surrogate 3 g/L U solution, and a surrogate 3 g/L U with 1 g/L Pu solution. A series of experiments was then performed to observe and characterize the precipitate at selected pH values. Solids formed at pH 4.5 and were found to contain at least 50 percent of the U and 94 percent of the Pu, but only 6 percent of the Gd. As the pH of the solution increased (e.g., pH greater than 14 with 1.2 or 3.6 M sodium hydroxide (NaOH) excess), the precipitate contained greater than 99 percent of the Pu, U, and Gd. After the pH greater than 14 systems were undisturbed …

The BTeV silicon pixel detector contains 30 planar stations that reside inside the vacuum of the Tevatron machine close to the beam. The detector sits within the analysis magnet. The location of the detector leads to unique constraints on the mechanical support, cooling systems, RF shielding, flex-cable feedthrough, and vacuum system.The design is based on these constraints and a number of technical specifications required of the detector. The baseline design was presented at the Pixel 2002 Conference.

An incident in an Savannah River Site (SRS) plutonium processing line (FB-Line) in 1999 highlighted the fact insoluble forms of plutonium exist at SRS that may not be readily monitored with the routine bioassay programs traditionally used at this site. To address this issue, a study was conducted in FB-Line with 21 participants for a year ending in July 2002. The purpose of the study was to examine the use of three non-traditional monitoring methods and, based on this experience, recommend a routine bioassay program that is capable of monitoring workers potentially exposed to insoluble plutonium. These non-traditional monitoring methods are personal air sampling (PAS), thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) of urine samples, and routine fecal bioassay. The main conclusions and recommendations of the study are: (1) A routine TIMS urine bioassay program, which is called the enhanced bioassay program (EBP), is recommended for workers in SRS facilities that have a reasonable potential for exposure to insoluble forms of plutonium. (2) Under certain conditions the EBP could result in onerous work restrictions. A contingency plan involving the use of PAS is recommended in this case. PAS is also recommended for workers who have had historic intakes of plutonium that interfere …

Pixel detectors proposed for the new generation of hadron collider experiments will use bump-bonding technology based on either indium or Pb/Sn solder to connect the front-end readout chips to the silicon pixel sensors. We have previously reported large-scale tests of the yield using both indium and Pb/Sn solder bump [1]. The conclusion is that both seem to be viable for pixel detectors. We have also carried out studies of various effects (e.g. storage over long period, effect of heating and cooling, and radiation) on both types of bump bonds using daisy-chained parts on a small scale [2], [3]. Overall, these tests showed little changes in the integrity of the bump connections. Nevertheless, questions still remain on the long-term reliability of the bumps due to thermal cycle effects, attachment to a substrate with a different coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), and radiation.

The Syntroleum plant is mechanically complete and currently undergoing start-up. The fuel production and demonstration plan is near completion. The study on the impact of small footprint plant (SFP) fuel on engine performance is about half-completed. Cold start testing has been completed. Preparations have been completed for testing the fuel in diesel electric generators in Alaska. Preparations are in progress for testing the fuel in bus fleets at Denali National Park and the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority. The experiments and analyses conducted during this project show that Fischer-Tropsch (FT) gas-to-liquid diesel fuel can easily be used in a diesel engine with little to no modifications. Additionally, based on the results and discussion presented, further improvements in performance and emissions can be realized by configuring the engine to take advantage of FT diesel fuel's properties. The FT fuel also shows excellent cold start properties and enabled the engine tested to start at more the ten degrees than traditional fuels would allow. This plant produced through this project will produce large amounts of FT fuel. This will allow the fuel to be tested extensively, in current, prototype, and advanced diesel engines. The fuel may also contribute to the nation's energy security. The …

An integrated modeling approach was developed to investigate long-term coupled thermal, hydrological, and chemical (THC) processes that could take place around nuclear waste emplacement tunnels (drifts). The approach involves the development of process models, followed by numerical implementation and validation against field and laboratory experiments before conducting long-term predictive simulations. An outcome of this work was the refinement and validation of an existing reactive transport numerical code for applications specific to the geologic storage of nuclear waste. The model was applied to the case of the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to evaluate the chemistry of waters potentially seeping into drifts and the effect of water-rock interaction on long-term hydrological behavior around the repository. At liquid saturations significantly larger than residual, no extreme pH or salinity values were predicted. Mineral precipitation around drifts consists mainly of silica with minor calcite, trace zeolites and clays. The effect of mineral precipitation on flow depends largely on initial fracture porosity, and results in negligible to significant diversion of percolation around the drift. Further analyses of model uncertainty are under way to improve confidence in model results.

High Energy Nuclear Physics (HENP) experiments such as STAR at BNL and ATLAS at CERN produce large amounts of data that are stored as files on mass storage systems in computer centers. In these files, the basic unit of data is an event. Analysis is typically performed on a selected set of events. The files containing these events have to be located, copied from mass storage systems to disks before analysis, and removed when no longer needed. These file management tasks are tedious and time consuming. Typically, all events contained in the files are read into memory before a selection is made. Since the time to read the events dominate the overall execution time, reading the unwanted event needlessly increases the analysis time. The Grid Collector is a set of software modules that works together to address these two issues. It automates the file management tasks and provides ''direct'' access to the selected events for analyses. It is currently integrated with the STAR analysis framework. The users can select events based on tags, such as, ''production date between March 10 and 20, and the number of charged tracks > 100.'' The Grid Collector locates the files containing relevant events, transfers …