Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses how states are using the March 2002 Reed Act distribution, which was part of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002. This broad stimulus package included an additional 13 weeks of federally-funded extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits for all states and a distribution to states of $8 billion of the unemployment tax revenue it holds in reserve, referred to as a Reed Act distribution. Under the act, these funds may be used to pay UI benefits, and/or to enhance UI benefits, such as increasing weekly benefit payments, extending the period of time benefits are paid, or otherwise expanding eligibility to groups that currently do not qualify for benefits. States may also appropriate these funds for the administrative costs of UI, including activities related to program integrity, and employment services (ES) programs, including one-stop service centers. This testimony focuses on: (1) the proportion of Reed Act dollars that states have spent; (2) the proportion of total Reed Act dollars that remains in state UI trust funds and the effect this has had on employer UI taxes; and (3) the proportion of Reed Act dollars …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 220 people and injured 4,000, highlighted the compelling need for safe and secure overseas facilities. In November 1999, an independent advisory group, the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel, said that thousands of Americans representing our nation abroad faced an unacceptable level of risk from terrorist attacks and other threats. The panel called for accelerating the process of addressing security risks to provide overseas staff with the safest working environment, consistent with the nation's resources and the demands of their missions. Moreover, the panel concluded that many U.S. overseas facilities were insecure, decrepit, deteriorating, overcrowded, and "shockingly shabby," and it recommended major capital improvements to redress these problems. GAO was asked to (1) assess the current conditions of overseas diplomatic facilities, including security, maintenance, office space, and information technology; and (2) provide some preliminary observations regarding State's efforts to improve facility conditions by replacing existing buildings with new, secure embassy compounds."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "DOE spends more money on contracts than any other civilian federal agency because it relies primarily on contractors to operate its sites and carry out its diverse missions. These missions include maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile, cleaning up radioactive and hazardous waste, and supporting basic energy and science research activities. For fiscal year 2001, DOE spent about 90 percent of its total annual budget, or about $18.2 billion, on contracts. Of that amount, DOE spent about $16.2 billion on contracts to manage or operate 28 major DOE sites. For over a decade, GAO, DOE's Office of Inspector General, and others have identified problems with DOE's contracting practices and the performance of its contractors. Projects were late or never finished; project costs escalated by millions and sometimes billions of dollars; and environmental conditions at the sites did not significantly improve. At the same time, contractors were earning a substantial portion of the profit (fee) available under the contract. Because of these problems, since 1990 we have designated DOE contract management as a high-risk area vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. To address these and other problems, DOE began …

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

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

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

During the grant period we have been involved in synthesizing and experimentally determining solution enthalpy values associated with partially fluorinated ligands. This has lead to the publication of manuscripts dealing with synthetic, calorimetric and catalytic behavior of partially fluorinated ligands. The collaboration with Los Alamos researchers has lead to the publication of catalytic results in sc CO{sub 2} which have proven very interesting. Furthermore, we have also examined ligands that behave as phosphine mimics. The N-heterocyclic carbenes have been explored as alternatives for tertiary phosphines and have resulted in the design and construction of efficient palladium and nickel system capable of performing C-C and C-N cross coupling reactions. The initial studies in this areas were made possible by exploratory work conducted under the DOE/EPSCoR grant.

Advances in Electron Microscopy and single-particle reconstruction have led to results at increasingly high resolutions. This has opened up the possibility of complete automation of single particle reconstruction. Main bottleneck in automation of single particle reconstruction is manual selection of particles in the micrograph. This paper describes a simple but efficient approach for segmentation of particle projections in the micrographs obtained using cryo-electron microscope. Changing the shape of objects to facilitate segmentation from the cluster and reconstructing its actual shape after isolation is successfully attempted. Both low-level and high-level processing techniques are used and the whole process is made automatic. Over 90 percent success in automatic particle picking is achieved. Several areas for improvement and future research directions are discussed.

The ''Seismic Evaluation of Hydrocarbon Saturation in Deep-Water Reservoirs'' (Grant/Cooperative Agreement DE-FC26-02NT15342) began September 1, 2002. During this second quarter: A Direct Hydrocarbon Indicator (DHI) symposium was held at UH; Current DHI methods were presented and forecasts made on future techniques; Dr. Han moved his laboratory from HARC to the University of Houston; Subcontracts were re-initiated with UH and TAMU; Theoretical and numerical modeling work began at TAMU; Geophysical Development Corp. agreed to provide petrophysical data; Negotiations were begun with Veritas GDC to obtain limited seismic data; Software licensing and training schedules were arranged with Paradigm; and Data selection and acquisition continues. The broad industry symposium on Direct Hydrocarbon Indicators was held at the University of Houston as part of this project. This meeting was well attended and well received. A large amount of information was presented, not only on application of the current state of the art, but also on expected future trends. Although acquisition of appropriate seismic data was expected to be a significant problem, progress has been made. A 3-D seismic data set from the shelf has been installed at Texas A&M University and analysis begun. Veritas GDC has expressed a willingness to provide data in the …

This report describes results obtained in evaluation of three different production processes for recovery of scrap by induction melting in air.

A recent thermodynamic model of mixing in spinel binaries, based on changes in cation disordering (x) between tetrahedral and octahedral sites, is investigated for applicability to the Fe{sub 3}O{sub 4}-FeCr{sub 2}O{sub 4} system under conditions where incomplete mixing occurs. Poor agreement with measured consolute solution temperature and solvus is attributed to neglect of: (1) ordering of magnetic moments of cations in the tetrahedral sublattice antiparallel to the moments of those in the octahedral sublattice and (2) pair-wise electron hopping between octahedral site Fe{sup 3+} and Fe{sup 2+} ions. Disordering free energies ({Delta}G{sub D}), from which free energies of mixing are calculated, are modeled by {Delta}G{sub D} = {alpha}{chi} + {beta}{chi}{sup 2} - T(S{sub c} + {chi}{sigma}{sub el} + {gamma}{chi}{sigma}{sup mag}) where the previously-neglected effects are accommodated by: (1) adding a non-configurational entropy term to provide coupling between cation disordering and magnetic ordering and (2) revising the configurational entropy (S{sub c}) analysis. Applying the constraint {alpha} = -(2/3){beta} and regressing the existing database for Fe{sup 2+} ion disorder in Fe{sub 3}O{sub 4} gives: {beta} = -31,020 {+-} 1050 J mol{sup -1}, {sigma}{sub el}/R = -0.730 {+-} 0.081 and {gamma}, the coupling parameter between cation disordering and magnetic ordering, = -0.664 {+-} …

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This paper presents a gesture recognition system for visualization navigation. Scientists are interested in developing interactive settings for exploring large data sets in an intuitive environment. The input consists of registered 3-D data. A geometric method using Bezier curves is used for the trajectory analysis and classification of gestures. The hand gesture speed is incorporated into the algorithm to enable correct recognition from trajectories with variations in hand speed. The method is robust and reliable: correct hand identification rate is 99.9% (from 1641 frames), modes of hand movements are correct 95.6% of the time, recognition rate (given the right mode) is 97.9%. An application to gesture-controlled visualization of 3D bioinformatics data is also presented.

With the number of small, inexpensive Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) increasing, it is feasible to build multi-UAV sensing networks. In particular, by using UAVs in conjunction with unattended ground sensors, a degree of persistent sensing can be achieved. With proper UAV cooperation algorithms, sensing is maintained even though exceptional events, e.g., the loss of a UAV, have occurred. In this paper a cooperation technique that allows multiple UAVs to perform coordinated, persistent sensing with unattended ground sensors over a wide area is described. The technique automatically adapts the UAV paths so that on the average, the amount of time that any sensor has to wait for a UAV revisit is minimized. We also describe the Simulation, Tactical Operations and Mission Planning (STOMP) software architecture. This architecture is designed to help simulate and operate distributed sensor networks where multiple UAVs are used to collect data.

This report contains a guide describing selected printed and electronic reference sources that provide directory information about current Members of Congress and congressional committees. An appendix indexes each category and lists which sources include that type of directory information.

This report provides Head Start issues on the 108th congress, a federal program that has provided comprehensive early childhood development services to low-income children since 1965.

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The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with James McClelland. McClelland joined the Navy in 1939 and after training was assigned to the USS Helena (CL-50). He cruised with the ship to South America before heading for Pearl Harbor. He was aboard during the Japanese attack and was burned badly enough to be evacuated to the hospital on shore. He was returned to the US and after recovering, began training people in fire control. McClelland was discharged in September, 1945.

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