The first part of this report briefly reviews the judicial evolution of race-based affirmative action, particularly in relation to public education. Recent rulings challenging the use of racial admissions and hiring practices by public educational institutions are then considered for their implications on the future development of affirmative action law.

This report discusses the issue of U.S. economic assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the importance of continued assistance in light of U.S. national security and also various U.S.-led efforts to promote reform amongst African citizens themselves. U.S. assistance finds its way to Africa through a variety of channels, including the USAID-administered DA program, food aid programs, and indirect aid provided through international financial institutions and the United Nations.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The report is about the FY2002 supplemental and FY2003 Assistance for Colombia and neighbors.

Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This Report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Commerce, Justice, State Appropriations Subcommittees.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

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

This report presents the cost of the center, the most extensive addition to the Capitol since the Civil War, and the largest in the structure’s more than 200-year history, is now estimated to be at least $555 million. The project is being financed with appropriated funds, and a total of $65 million from private donations and revenue generated by the sale of commemorative coins.

This report discusses the national security problem of China's role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response, including legislation, since the mid-1990's.

This report provides information on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Circular A-76, “Performance of Commercial Activities,” and the impact of a related reform initiative, the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR) of 1998, within the Department of Defense. The Circular defines federal policy for determining whether recurring commercial activities should be outsourced to commercial sources, Governmental facilities, or through inter-service support agreements. The FAIR Act creates statutory reporting requirements for federal executive agencies, by requiring Federal executive agencies to identify activities “not inherently governmental” and consider outsourcing through managed competitions. However, FAIR does not require that agencies contract out these activities.

The overall objective of this project is the three phase development of an Early Entrance Coproduction Plant (EECP) which uses petroleum coke to produce at least one product from at least two of the following three categories: (1) electric power (or heat), (2) fuels, and (3) chemicals using ChevronTexaco's proprietary gasification technology. The object of phase 1 is to determine the feasibility and define the concept for the EECP located at a specific site; develop a Research, Development, and Testing (RD and T) Plan to mitigate technical risks and barriers; and prepare a Preliminary Project Financing Plan. The objective of Phase 2 is to implement the work as outlined in the Phase 1 RD and T Plan to enhance the development and commercial acceptance of coproduction technology. The objective of Phase 3 is to develop an engineering design package and a financing and testing plan for an EECP located at a specific site.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government invests over $11 billion in early childhood education and care programs. These programs exist to ensure that children from low-income families are better prepared to enter school and that their parents have access to early childhood education and care that allow them to obtain and maintain employment. The federal government invests more in Head Start, which was funded at $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2002, than any other early childhood education and care program. Head Start has served over 21 million children at a total cost of $66 billion since it began. The Chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions asked GAO to discuss Head Start--how it fits within the array of early childhood education and care programs available to low-income children and their families and what is known about its effectiveness."

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This quarterly report documents significant achievements in the Enhanced Practical Photosynthetic CO{sub 2} Mitigation project during the period from 4/2/2003 through 7/01/2003. As indicated in the list of accomplishments below we have completed some long-term model scale bioreactor tests and are prepared to begin pilot scale bioreactor testing. Specific results and accomplishments for the second quarter of 2003 include: (1) Bioreactor support systems and test facilities: (a) Qualitative long-term survivability tests for S.C.1.2(2) on Omnisil have been successfully completed and results demonstrate a growth rate that appears to be acceptable. (b) Quantitative tests of long-term growth productivity for S.C.1.2(2) on Omnisil have been completed and initial results are promising. Initial results show that the mass of organisms doubled (from 54.9 grams to 109.8 grams) in about 5 weeks. Full results will be available as soon as all membranes and filters are completely dried. The growth rate should increase significantly with the initiation of weekly harvesting during the long term tests. (c) The phase 1 construction of the pilot scale bioreactor has been completed, including the solar collector and light distribution system. We are now in the phase of system improvement as we wait for CRF-2 results in order to be …

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A spatial-domain solution to the problem of electromagnetic scattering from a dielectric half-space is outlined. The resulting half-space operators are referred to as Fresnel surface integral operators. When used as preconditioners for nonplanar geometries, the Fresnel operators yield surface Fresnel integral equations (FIEs) which are stable with respect to dielectric constant, discretization, and frequency. Numerical properties of the formulations are discussed.

This paper focuses on a numerical procedure that addresses the difficulties of dealing with large, finite arrays while preserving the generality and robustness of full-wave methods. We present a fast method based on approximating interactions between sufficiently separated array elements via a relatively coarse interpolation of the Green's function on a uniform grid commensurate with the array's periodicity. The interaction between the basis and testing functions is reduced to a three-stage process. The first stage is a projection of standard (e.g., RWG) subdomain bases onto a set of interpolation functions that interpolate the Green's function on the array face. This projection, which is used in a matrix/vector product for each array cell in an iterative solution process, need only be carried out once for a single cell and results in a low-rank matrix. An intermediate stage matrix/vector product computation involving the uniformly sampled Green's function is of convolutional form in the lateral (transverse) directions so that a 2D FFT may be used. The final stage is a third matrix/vector product computation involving a matrix resulting from projecting testing functions onto the Green's function interpolation functions; the low-rank matrix is either identical to (using Galerkin's method) or similar to that for …

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The goal of this effort was to develop dynamic simulation tools to study and characterize particulate transport in Microfluidic devices. This includes the effects of external fields and near-field particle-particle, particle-surface interactions. The unique aspect of this effort is that we focused on the particles in suspension and rigorously accounted for all of the interactions that they experienced in solution. In contrast, other numerical methods within the program, finite element and finite volume approaches, typically treat the suspended species as non-interacting point particles. Later in the program, some of these approaches incorporated approximations to begin to account for particle-particle interactions. Through the programs (BioFlips and SIMBIOSYS), we developed collaborative relationships with device-oriented efforts. More specifically and at the request of the SIMBIOSYS program manager, we allowed our efforts/milestones to be more guided by the needs of our BioFlips colleagues; therefore, our efforts were focused on the needs of the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Peter Gascoyne), UCDavis (Rosemary Smith), and UC Berkeley (Dorian Liepmann). The first two collaborations involved the development of Dielectrophoresis analysis tools and the later involved the development of suspension and fluid modeling tools for microneedles.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.