A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Congress has been seeking to increase federal agency purchases of equipment and services on line. The General Services Administration's (GSA) Advantage Internet-based ordering system is meant for conducting market research and ordering all types of products and services on line. About $84 million has already been invested in this endeavor. GAO was asked to assess how effectively GSA has managed this investment."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO prepared this report in response to its basic legislative responsibilities. Its objectives are threefold: (1) to examine the historical funding trends and their impact on the condition of the active forces' facilities, (2) to evaluate the consistency of the services' information on facility conditions, and (3) to assess the Department of Defense's (DOD) long-term strategic plan and objectives to improve facility conditions."

Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to honoring the Everman High School Bulldogs football team on their championship season.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to granting permission to the YMCA Youth and Government Program to use the chambers of the senate and house of representatives, auditorium, and committee rooms in the State Capitol on February 6-9, 2003, and February 5-8, 2004.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to congratulating Lou Edna Musquiz on earning the Skills USA-VICA Advisor of the Year award.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to congratulating John Younger of Midland, on being named Top Hand by the Permian Basin Petroleum Association.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

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 Department of Public Safety is authorized to inspect a rebuilt vehicle for which a Texas Salvage Certificate has been issued before the Department of Transportation issues a regular certificate of title for the vehicle (RQ-0588-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 use of motor-vehicle-registration fees to fund trauma facilities contravenes article VIII, section 7-a of the Texas Constitution (RQ-0589-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 a county clerk may issue a marriage license to two absent applicants.

The proliferation of expensive technology in diagnostic medicine demands objective, meaningful assessments of diagnostic performance. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is now recognized widely as the best approach to the task of measuring and specifying diagnostic accuracy (Metz, 1978; Swets and Pickett, 1982; Beck and Schultz, 1986; Metz, 1986; Hanley, 1989; Zweig and Campbell, 1993), which is defined as the extent to which diagnoses agree with actual states of health or disease (Fryback and Thornbury, 1991; National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, 1995). The primary advantage of ROC analysis over alternative methodologies is that it separates differences among diagnostic decisions that are due to actual differences in discrimination capacity from those that are due to decision-threshold effects (e.g., ''under-reading'' or ''over-reading''). An ROC curve measures diagnostic accuracy by displaying True Positive Fraction (TPF: the fraction of patients actually having the disease in question that is diagnosed correctly as ''positive'') as a function of False Positive Fraction (FPF: the fraction of patients actually without the disease that is diagnosed incorrectly as ''positive''). Different points on the ROC curve--i.e., different compromises between the specificity and the sensitivity of a diagnostic test, for a given inherent accuracy--can be achieved by adopting different …

Weekly newspaper from Wylie, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Seminole, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

Light Water reactor (LWR) fuel performance is currently limited by thermal, chemical and mechanical constraints associated with the design, fabrication, and operation of the fuel in incore operation. Corrosion of the zirconium based (Zircaloy-4) alloy cladding of the fuel is a primary limiting factor. Recent success at the University of Florida in developing thin ceramic films with great adhesive properties for metal substrates offers an innovative breakthrough for eliminating a major weakness of the Zircaloy clad. ?The University of Florida proposes to coat the existing Zircaloy clad tubes with a ceramic coating for corrosion protection. An added bonus of this approach would be the implementation of a boron-containing burnable poison outer layer will also be demonstrated as part of the ceramic coating development. In this proposed effort, emphasis will be on the ceramic coating with only demonstration of feasibility on the burnable outer coating approach. This proposed program i s expected to give a step change (approximately a doubling) in clad lifetime before failure due to corrosion. In the development of ceramic coatings for Zircaloy-4 clad, silicon carbide and zirconium carbide coatings will first be applied to Zircaloy-4 coupons and cladding samples by thermal assisted chemical vapor deposition, plasma assisted …

The theme of the work in this quarter was community-based wind and locally owned wind projects. The work Windustry has done is just beginning to touch the heart of the matter for a hugely interested audience of rural landowners and rural communities. We revised and published a Windustry Newsletter on two farmer owned wind projects called Minwind I and Minwind II. This article was largely researched and written last quarter but the principal individuals that organized the wind projects didn't want any more farmers calling them up than they already had, so they urged us to put a hold on the article or not publish it. This presented a unique problem for Windustry. Up to this point, we had not dealt with generating too much attention for a wind energy project. The story of a group of farmers and individuals pooling their resources for two locally owned commercial-scale wind projects is very compelling and the organizers of the projects were getting a great deal of attention from other farmers that want more details on the project. However, the organizers committed a large amount of their own resources toward the set up of this project which took many hours with their …

Neutrino oscillations are experimentally observable only as a result of interference between neutrino states with different masses and the same energy. All interference effects between neutrino states having different energies are destroyed by the interaction between the incident neutrino and the neutrino detector. Erroneous results are frequently obtained by neglecting the neutrino-detector interactions.

The goal of this task was to develop the methodology for producing a suitable simulant for waste solids and the fabrication of an initial simulant for use in the demonstrations and testing performed as part of the down-select process for disposition of INTEC tank waste. The analytical results from WM-182 and WM-183 tank samples were used as the basis for this work.

The goals of this study were to determine if trace levels of chemical additives could be used to reduce the rheological characteristics of radioactive waste slurries, identify potential chemical additives for this work and future testing, test a limited set of chemical additive candidates on simulated radioactive wastes, and develop advanced techniques to visualize the internal slurry structure and particle-particle interaction within the slurry.

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A study performed in FY01 recommended that the Defense Waste Process Facility (DWPF) replace Frit 200 with Frit 320 for the processing of sludge batch 2 (SB2) to improve melt rate (Lambent et al., 2001) contingent upon additional testing which included slurry feeding. The FY02 melt rate program was developed to support this recommendation as well as to investigate alternative methods of improving melt rate above and beyond a change in frit composition. The integrated program was primarily based on a sound testing methodology from which the frit change was recommended. In addition, the program included the development of additional tools to provide further insight into melt rate enhancements. The overall strategy of the FY02 testing program was to design suites of melt rate tests based on recommendations from previous work that provided insight into other methods of improving melt rate for the DWPF. The objectives of the FY02 testing program included how melt rate might be influenced by increases in waste loading, differences in frit particle size, the use of batch chemicals rather than a pre-fabricated frit, and the impact of uranium. This report summarizes the equipment development and setup, procedures, and results of this testing, and includes recommendations …