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Michigan Technological University, together with The Robbins Group, Advanced Ceramic Research, Advanced Ceramic Manufacturing, and Superior Rock Bits, evaluated a new process and a new material for producing drill bit inserts and disc cutters for the mining industry. Difficulties in the material preparation stage slowed the research initially. Prototype testing of the drill bit inserts showed that the new inserts did not perform up to the current state of the art. Due to difficulties in the prototype production of the disc cutters, the disc cutter was manufactured but not tested. Although much promising information was obtained as a result of this project, the objective of developing an effective means for producing rock drill bits and rock disc cutters that last longer, increase energy efficiency and penetration rate, and lower overall production cost was not met.

Interview with David Braden, architect and Army Air Forces veteran. In the interview, Braden speaks about his impressions of General Curtis LeMay in the Pacific Theater during World War II, his assignment to Saipan, Mariana Islands, for bombing operations against the Japanese homeland, LeMay's arrival in the Marianas and changes in bombing techniques, the thirty-five mission limitation and improvement in aircrew morale, his functions as a B-29 navigator, LeMay's decision to conduct incendiary night rights at 5,000 feet, the strategic importance of Iwo Jima for bomber crews, and his assessment of how LeMay's policies made a decided difference in ending the war.

Intellectual property legislation that came close to enactment during the 108th Congress passed the Senate by unanimous consent early in the 109th Congress. Among the issues addressed are unauthorized distribution of pre-release commercial works, the marketing of devices for home use to edit objectionable content from DVDs, the preservation of the nation's film heritage, and use by libraries and archives of "orphan works." This report discusses the provision of S. 167, 109th Congress, first session.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), enacted in 1985, provides payments to farmers to take highly erodible or environmentally sensitive cropland out of production for ten years or more to conserve soil and water resources. It is the federal government’s largest private land retirement program. The program is administered by the Farm Service Agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with technical assistance provided by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

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This paper summarizes an exercise carried out to validate the process of implementing LLNL's ALE3D to predict the permanent deformation and rupture of an air-backed steel plate subjected to underwater shock. Experiments were performed in a shock tank at the Naval Science and Technology Laboratory in Visakhapatnam India, and the results are documented in reference. A consistent set of air-backed plates is subjected to shocks from increasing weights of explosives ranging from 10g-80g. At 40g and above, rupture is recorded in the experiment and, without fracture mechanics implemented in ALE3D, only the cases of 10g, 20g, and 30g are presented here. This methodology applies the Jones-Wilkins-Lee (JWL) Equation of State (EOS) to predict the pressure of the expanding detonation products, the Gruneisein EOS for water under highly dynamic compressible flow - both on 1-point integrated 3-d continuum elements. The steel plates apply a bilinear elastic-plastic response with failure and are simulated with 3-point integrated shell elements. The failure for this exercise is based on effective (or equivalent) plastic strain.

This report documents the pro-democracy "Falun Gong" movement in China. It has been accredited as the largest and most protracted public demonstrations in China since the democracy movement of 1989.

This report consists of broadband over powerlines in regulatory and policy issues.

The potential of terrorist attacks against agricultural targets (agroterrorism) is increasingly recognized as a national security threat, especially after the events of September 11, 2001. In this context, agroterrorism is defined as the deliberate introduction of an animal or plant disease with the goal of generating fear, causing economic losses, and/or undermining stability. This report addresses the use of biological weapons against agriculture, rather than the threat of terrorists using agricultural inputs for other purposes. It also focuses more on agricultural production than food processing and distribution.

Our first goal was to produce laboratory-scale test beds with a four-probe electrical impedance instrument having 32 current sources. The first test bed, filled with saline, resembles a larger lab-sized test bed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. We studied arrays of four rods, each with 8 electrodes in this saline-filled tank. We then placed these rods in a test bed of Ottawa sand, and studied the conductivity of a saturated and unsaturated saline/sand bed. This test bed resembles the field test site in the ground at LLNL. The LLNL lab and the field site have only a single current source. Using our existing 32-source instrument, we studied an array of four 8-electrode probes in both the saline and sand tanks. The results were include in our report to you last year, and are summarized below. Figure 1 is a diagram of the four electrode rods, as seen from above, showing seven positions at which a small conductive target was placed, at the level of the middle of the rods. Figure 2 shows the sensitivity of the system to the target presence, as measured by norm distinguishability, at each of these seven positions. The distinguishability was substantially higher when the optimal, …

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Locating specific 3D objects in overhead images is an important problem in many remote sensing applications. 3D objects may contain either one connected component or multiple disconnected components. Solutions must accommodate images acquired with diverse sensors at various times of the day, in various seasons of the year, or under various weather conditions. Moreover, the physical manifestation of a 3D object with fixed physical dimensions in an overhead image is highly dependent on object physical dimensions, object position/orientation, image spatial resolution, and imaging geometry (e.g., obliqueness). This paper describes a two-stage computer-assisted approach for locating 3D objects in overhead images. In the matching stage, the computer matches models of 3D objects to overhead images. The strongest degree of match over all object orientations is computed at each pixel. Unambiguous local maxima in the degree of match as a function of pixel location are then found. In the cueing stage, the computer sorts image thumbnails in descending order of figure-of-merit and presents them to human analysts for visual inspection and interpretation. The figure-of-merit associated with an image thumbnail is computed from the degrees of match to a 3D object model associated with unambiguous local maxima that lie within the thumbnail. This …

Probabilistic inverse techniques, like the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, have had recent success in combining disparate data types into a consistent model. The Stochastic Engine (SE) initiative was a technique that developed this method and applied it to a number of earth science and national security applications. For instance, while the method was originally developed to solve ground flow problems (Aines et al.), it has also been applied to atmospheric modeling and engineering problems. The investigators of this proposal have applied the SE to regional-scale lithospheric earth models, which have applications to hazard analysis and nuclear explosion monitoring. While this broad applicability is appealing, tailoring the method for each application is inefficient and time-consuming. Stochastic methods invert data by probabilistically sampling the model space and comparing observations predicted by the proposed model to observed data and preferentially accepting models that produce a good fit, generating a posterior distribution. In other words, the method ''inverts'' for a model or, more precisely, a distribution of models, by a series of forward calculations. While powerful, the technique is often challenging to implement, as the mapping from model space to data needs to be ''customized'' for each data type. For example, all …

Faculty Chamber Music recital performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Performance Hall.

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Making solid energetic materials requires the physical mixing of solid fuels and oxidizers or the incorporation of fuel and oxidizing moieties into a single molecule. The former are referred to as composite energetic materials (i.e., thermites, propellants, pyrotechnics) and the latter are deemed monomolecular energetic materials (i.e., explosives). Mass diffusion between the fuel and oxidizer is the rate controlling step for composite reactions while bond breaking and chemical kinetics control monomolecular reactions. Although composites have higher energy densities than monomolecular species, they release that energy over a longer period of time because diffusion controlled reactions are considerably slower than chemistry controlled reactions. Conversely, monomolecular species exhibit greater power due to more rapid kinetics than physically mixed energetics. Reducing the diffusion distance between fuel and oxidizer species within an energetic composite would enhance the reaction rate. Recent advances in nanotechnology have spurred the development of nano-scale fuel and oxidizer particles that can be combined into a composite and effectively reduce diffusion distances to nano-scale dimensions or less. These nanocomposites have the potential to deliver the best of both worlds: high energy density of the physically mixed composite with the high power of the monomolecular species. Toward this end, researchers at Lawrence …

This report discuses the HIPAA privacy rule, which gives patients the right of access to their medical information and prohibits health plans and health care providers from using or disclosing individually identifiable health information without a patient’s written authorization except as expressly permitted or required by the rule.

Weekly student newspaper from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes campus news along with advertising.

The main objective of this project was to evaluate pretargeting systems that use a bispecific antibody (bsMAb) to improve the detection and treatment of cancer. A bsMAb has specificity to a tumor antigen, which is used to bind the tumor, while the other specificity is to a peptide that can be radiolabeled. Pretargeting is the process by which the unlabeled bsMAb is given first, and after a sufficient time (1-2 days) is given for it to localize in the tumor and clear from the blood, a small molecular weight radiolabeled peptide is given. According to a dynamic imaging study using a 99mTc-labeled peptide, the radiolabeled peptide localizes in the tumor in less than 1 hour, with > 80% of it clearing from the blood and body within this same time. Tumor/nontumor targeting ratios that are nearly 50 times better than that with a directly radiolabeled Fab fragment have been observed (Sharkey et al., ''Signal amplification in molecular imaging by a multivalent bispecific nanobody'' submitted). The bsMAbs used in this project have been composed of 3 antibodies that will target antigens found in colorectal and pancreatic cancers (CEA, CSAp, and MUC1). For the ''peptide binding moiety'' of the bsMAb, we initially …

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

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

Biweekly newspaper from Harper, Texas that includes community news along with advertising.

Semiweekly newspaper from Brady, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.