This report contains information on the pay procedure and recent adjustments. It also contains historical information on the rate of pay for Members of Congress since 1789.

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Islamic religious schools known as madrasas (or madrassahs) in the Middle East, Central, and Southeast Asia have been of increasing interest to U.S. foreign policy makers. This report provides an overview of madrasas, of their role in the Muslim world and issues related to their alleged financing by Saudi Arabia and other external donors.

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

Weekly student newspaper from McMurry University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

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.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "More than 34 million participants in 30,000 single-employer defined benefit pension plans rely on a federal insurance program managed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) to protect their pension benefits, and the program's long-term financial viability is in doubt. Over the last decade, the program swung from a $3.6 billion accumulated deficit (liabilities exceeded assets), to a $10.1 billion accumulated surplus, and back to a $3.6 billion accumulated deficit, in 2002 dollars. Furthermore, despite a record $9 billion in estimated losses to the program in 2002, additional severe losses may be on the horizon. PBGC estimates that financially weak companies sponsor plans with $35 billion in unfunded benefits, which ultimately might become losses to the program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last decade, a series of educational reforms have increased opportunities for private companies to play a role in public education. For instance, school districts have sometimes looked to private companies to manage poorly performing schools. The accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 may further increase such arrangements because schools that continuously fail to make adequate progress toward meeting state goals are eventually subject to fundamental restructuring by the state, which may include turning the operation of the school over to a private company. GAO determined the prevalence of privately managed public schools and what could be learned about student achievement in these schools from publicly available sources. To do so, GAO examined existing data on the number and location of privately managed schools and reviewed a variety of reports on student achievement. In addition, GAO compared standardized test scores of students attending privately managed public schools with scores of students attending similar traditional public schools. GAO identified privately managed schools that had been in operation for four years or more in 6 large cities and matched these schools with …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last few years, the total underfunding in the defined-benefit pension system has deteriorated to the point where the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the federal agency responsible for protecting private sector defined benefit plan benefits, estimates that total plan underfunding grew to more than $400 billion as of December 31, 2002, and still exceeded $350 billion as of September 4, 2003. PBGC itself faced an estimated $8.8 billion accumulated deficit as of August 31, 2003. Deficiencies in current funding and related regulations have contributed to several large plans recently terminating with severely underfunded pension plans. This testimony provides GAO's observations on a variety of regulatory and legislative reforms that aim to improve plan funding and better protect the benefits of millions of American workers and retirees while minimizing the burden to plan sponsors of maintaining defined-benefit plans."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 (FFMIA) requires Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies to implement and maintain financial management systems that comply substantially with (1) federal financial management systems requirements, (2) federal accounting standards, and (3) the U.S. Government Standard General Ledger. Most federal agencies face long-standing challenges, which are discussed in greater detail in our mandated September 2003 report, Sustained Efforts Needed to Achieve FFMIA Accountability (GAO-03-1062). In light of these circumstances, Congress asked GAO to testify about recurring financial management systems problems and agencies' efforts to upgrade their systems."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since its inception, the International Space Station has experienced numerous problems that have resulted in significant cost growth and assembly schedule slippages. Following the Columbia accident and the subsequent grounding of the shuttle fleet in February 2003, concerns about the future of the space station escalated, as the fleet has been key to the station's assembly and operations. In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board drew a causal link between aggressive space station goals--supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) current culture--and the accident. Specifically, the Board reported that, in addition to technical failures, Columbia's safety was compromised in part by internal pressures to meet an ambitious launch schedule to achieve certain space station milestones. This testimony discusses the implications of the shuttle fleet's grounding on the space station's schedule and cost, and on the program's partner funding and agreements--findings we reported on in September 2003. The testimony also proposes a framework for providing NASA and the Congress with a means to bring about and assess needed cultural changes across the agency."

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

Weekly Czech and English language newspaper from Temple, Texas published as the official organ of the Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas that includes news of interest to members along with advertising.

In support of accelerated mission goals, glass formulation efforts have been focused on melt rate, waste loading, and waste throughput for the DWPF. With respect to melt rate, the general trend to improve melt rate has been to enhance the total alkali concentration in the glass system by increasing the alkali concentration in the frit, utilizing (or targeting) a less washed sludge, or using a combination of the two. Cozzi et al. (2002) defined thirty-one glasses that intentionally challenged either the current durability model over an extremely broad compositional region or the Salkali and Al2O3 criteria proposed by Herman et al. (2002). These glasses were batched, melted, and subjected to the PCT. In this report, the results of both compositional analysis and PCT response are discussed.

Novel CMOS active pixel structures for vertex detector applications have been designed and tested. The overriding goal of this work is to increase the signal to noise ratio of the sensors and readout circuits. A large-area native epitaxial silicon photogate was designed with the aim of increasing the charge collected per struck pixel and to reduce charge diffusion to neighboring pixels. The photogate then transfers the charge to a low capacitance readout node to maintain a high charge to voltage conversion gain. Two techniques for noise reduction are also presented. The first is a per-pixel kT/C noise reduction circuit that produces results similar to traditional correlated double sampling (CDS). It has the advantage of requiring only one read, as compared to two for CDS, and no external storage or subtraction is needed. The technique reduced input-referred temporal noise by a factor of 2.5, to 12.8 e{sup -}. Finally, a column-level active reset technique is explored that suppresses kT/C noise during pixel reset. In tests, noise was reduced by a factor of 7.6 times, to an estimated 5.1 e{sup -} input-referred noise. The technique also dramatically reduces fixed pattern (pedestal) noise, by up to a factor of 21 in our tests. …

Specific permeabilities and diffusion constants for H have been measured in a series of Pd-Al alloy membranes using a new method for activation of the membranes. The membranes have been partially internally oxidized at an elevated temperature before inserting into the apparatus for measuring H2 permeabilities. It has been observed that the kinetics of H2 absorption are faster for internally oxidized Pd-Al alloys than for pure Pd foil [1] and, in addition, the partially internally oxidized alloys offer a greater resistance to poisoning by CO(g) [2].

The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to build a Waste Solidification Building (WSB) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. The project is currently in the preliminary design phase. In this scoping study surrogate radioactive concrete waste forms were prepared at water-to-cement mass ratios (w/c) of 0.2 and 0.3 and sealed in pressure vessels. Pressure and temperature were recorded electronically for the duration of the test. After about 11 days, the headspace gas of each vessel was sampled and analyzed by gas chromatography for hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen content. The data collected during these tests were used to estimate hydrogen gas generation rates and hydrogen G-values (molecules of hydrogen produced per 100 eV radioactive decay energy deposited) for waste forms prepared at each w/c ratio.

Quantitative analysis of uptake and washout of cardiac single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) radiopharmaceuticals has the potential to provide better contrast between healthy and diseased tissue, compared to conventional reconstruction of static images. Previously, we used B-splines to model time-activity curves (TACs) for segmented volumes of interest and developed fast least-squares algorithms to estimate spline TAC coefficients and their statistical uncertainties directly from dynamic SPECT projection data. This previous work incorporated physical effects of attenuation and depth-dependent collimator response. In the present work, we incorporate scatter and use a computer simulation to study how scatter modeling affects directly estimated TACs and subsequent estimates of compartmental model parameters. An idealized single-slice emission phantom was used to simulate a 15 min dynamic {sup 99m}Tc-teboroxime cardiac patient study in which 500,000 events containing scatter were detected from the slice. When scatter was modeled, unweighted least-squares estimates of TACs had root mean square (RMS) error that was less than 0.6% for normal left ventricular myocardium, blood pool, liver, and background tissue volumes and averaged 3% for two small myocardial defects. When scatter was not modeled, RMS error increased to average values of 16% for the four larger volumes and 35% for the small …

The CEC approved funding on April 9, 2003 for $1,000,000.00 instead of the $1,500,000.00 COPE requested for the project. A kickoff meeting with the California Energy Commission (CEC) was held on Monday, April 14, 2003, in their Sacramento, CA offices. Mark Carl, IOGCC project manager for the DOE grant, attended this meeting, along with Bob Fickes with COPE, Edan Prabhu, Mike Merlo and CEC officials. The change in funding by the CEC required a modification in the scope of work and an amended form DOE F 4600.1. The modifications were completed and the IOGCC received approval to commence work on the project on May 9, 2003. On May 29, 2003, Virginia Weyland with DOE/NETL, Mark Carl with IOGCC, and Bob Fickes with COPE, Edan Prabhu and Mike Merlo, consultants with COPE, participated in a teleconference kick-off meeting. During May, 2003, COPE canvassed its membership for potential locations for the four test sites. They received a very good response and have identified at least two potential sites for each of the four test sites. COPE has been obtaining gas samples from the various potential lease sites for analyses to verify the chemical properties analyses which the oil and gas producers provided …

No abstract prepared.

Foster Wheeler Power Group, Inc. is working under US Department of Energy contract No. DE-FC26-00NT40972 to develop a partial gasification module (PGM) that represents a critical element of several potential coal-fired Vision 21 plants. When utilized for electrical power generation, these plants will operate with efficiencies greater than 60% and produce near zero emissions of traditional stack gas pollutants. The new process partially gasifies coal at elevated pressure producing a coal-derived syngas and a char residue. The syngas can be used to fuel the most advanced power producing equipment such as solid oxide fuel cells or gas turbines, or processed to produce clean liquid fuels or chemicals for industrial users. The char residue is not wasted; it can also be used to generate electricity by fueling boilers that drive the most advanced ultra-supercritical pressure steam turbines. The amount of syngas and char produced by the PGM can be tailored to fit the production objectives of the overall plant, i.e., power generation, clean liquid fuel production, chemicals production, etc. Hence, PGM is a robust building bock that offers all the advantages of coal gasification but in a more user-friendly form; it is also fuel flexible in that it can use alternative …

CO{sub 2} emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels have been linked to global climate change. Proposed carbon management technologies include geologic sequestration of CO{sub 2}. A possible, but untested, sequestration strategy is to inject CO{sub 2} into organic-rich shales. Devonian black shales underlie approximately two-thirds of Kentucky and are thicker and deeper in the Illinois and Appalachian Basin portions of Kentucky than in central Kentucky. The Devonian black shales serve as both the source and trap for large quantities of natural gas; total gas in place for the shales in Kentucky is estimated to be between 63 and 112 trillion cubic feet. Most of this natural gas is adsorbed on clay and kerogen surfaces, analogous to methane storage in coal beds. In coals, it has been demonstrated that CO{sub 2} is preferentially adsorbed, displacing methane. Black shales may similarly desorb methane in the presence of CO{sub 2}. The concept that black, organic-rich Devonian shales could serve as a significant geologic sink for CO{sub 2} is the subject of current research. To accomplish this investigation, drill cuttings and cores were selected from the Kentucky Geological Survey Well Sample and Core Library. Methane and carbon dioxide adsorption analyses are being performed …

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