Waste containers may contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs), methane, hydrogen and possibly propane. These constituents may occur individually or in mixtures. Determining if a waste container contains a flammable concentration of flammable gases and vapors (from VOCs) is important to the safety of the handling, repackaging and shipping activities. This report provides the basis for determining the flammability of mixtures of flammable gases and vapors. The concentration of a mixture that is at the lowest flammability limit for that mixture is called the action concentration. The action concentration can be determined using total VOC concentrations or actual concentration of each individual VOC. The concentrations of hydrogen and methane are included with the total VOC or individual VOC concentration to determine the action concentration. Concentrations below this point are not flammable. Waste containers with gas/vapor concentrations at or above the action concentration are considered flammable.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Commuter rail is an important part of the transportation system in many cities and regions in our country, providing more than 420 million passenger trips in 2005. Although several of the largest commuter rail agencies hire their own employees, many agencies contract with other companies, including Amtrak, freight railroads, and private rail operators, to provide services that are critical to running the agencies' trains. These contracted services include providing crews to operate trains (train operations); maintenance of equipment (MOE), including maintenance of train cars and locomotives; dispatching train traffic; and maintenance of way (MOW), which involves maintaining the track, signals, and other track infrastructure. Commuter rail agencies can obtain these services by opening contracts to competition or through noncompetitive negotiations with a service provider. Congress asked us to provide information on the service arrangements between commuter rail agencies and other companies. Accordingly, we addressed the following questions: (1) How many currently active commuter rail service contracts were obtained through competitive and noncompetitive processes? (2) What differences, if any, are there between competitively and noncompetitively negotiated contracts?"

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

This final report summarizes work carried out under agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, related to geothermal energy policy issues. This project has involved a combination of outreach and publications on geothermal energy—Contract Number DE-FG03-01SF22367—with a specific focus on educating state-level policymakers. Education of state policymakers is vitally important because state policy (in the form of incentives or regulation) is a crucial part of the success of geothermal energy. State policymakers wield a significant influence over all of these policies. They are also in need of high quality, non-biased educational resources which this project provided. This project provided outreach to legislatures, in the form of responses to information requests on geothermal energy and publications. The publications addressed: geothermal leasing, geothermal policy, constitutional and statutory authority for the development of geothermal district energy systems, and state regulation of geothermal district energy systems. These publications were distributed to legislative energy committee members, and chairs, legislative staff, legislative libraries, and other related state officials. The effect of this effort has been to provide an extensive resource of information about geothermal energy for state policymakers in a form that is useful to them. This non-partisan information has been used as state policymakers attempt …

Cytogenetic analysis of blood lymphocytes is a well established method to assess the absorbed dose in persons exposed to ionizing radiation. Because mature lymphocytes circulate throughout the body, the dose to these cells is believed to represent the average whole body exposure. Cytogenetic methods measure the incidence of structural aberrations in chromosomes as a means to quantify DNA damage which occurs when ionizing radiation interacts with human tissue. Methods to quantify DNA damage at the chromosomal level vary in complexity and tend to be laborious and time consuming. In a mass casualty scenario involving radiological/nuclear materials, the ability to rapidly triage individuals according to radiation dose is critically important. For high-throughput screening for dicentric chromosomes, many of the data collection steps can be optimized with motorized microscopes coupled to automated slide scanning platforms.

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

The synthesis, characterization and luminescent behavior of trivalent Sm, Eu, Dy and Tb complexes of two enantiomeric, octadentate, chiral, 2-hydroxyisophthalamide ligands are reported. These complexes are highly luminescent in solution. Functionalization of the achiral parent ligand with a chiral 1-phenylethylamine substituent on the open face of the complex in close proximity to the metal center yields complexes with strong circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) activity. This appears to be the first example of a system utilizing the same ligand architecture to sensitize four different lanthanide cations and display CPL activity. The luminescence dissymmetry factor, g{sub lum}, recorded for the Eu(III) complex is one of the highest values reported, and this is the first time the CPL effect has been demonstrated for a Sm(III) complex with a chiral ligand. The combination of high luminescence intensity with CPL activity should enable new bioanalytical applications of macromolecules in chiral environments.

This report discusses problems in estimating the natural rate of unemployment. The contents include the natural rate concept, potential causes of a falling natural rate in the 1990s, alternative theories, and measuring the natural rate in practice.

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Deposit summary of $105.00 made on July 10, 2006. Included is an envelope from Kenneth D. Stewart to Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus, postmarked on July 5, 2006.

Six new samples of tritium-aged bulk titanium have been examined by thermal desorption and isotope exchange chemistry. The discovery of a lower temperature hydrogen desorption state in these materials, previously reported, has been confirmed in one of the new samples. The helium release of the samples shows the more severe effects obtained from longer aging periods, i.e. higher initial He/M ratios. Several of the more aged samples were spontaneously releasing helium. Part I will discuss the new results on the new lower temperature hydrogen desorption state found in one more extensively studied sample. Part II will discuss the hydrogen/helium release behavior of the remaining samples.

We report on recent progress toward development of secondary emission ''amplifiers'' for photocathodes. Secondary emission gain of over 300 has been achieved in transmission mode and emission mode for a variety of diamond samples. Techniques of sample preparation, including hydrogenation to achieve negative electron affinity (NEA), have been adapted to this application.

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

The Department of Energy Environmental Management Program is faced with two major issues involving two-phase flow in fractured rock; specifically, transport of dissolved contaminants in the Vadose Zone, and the fate of Dense Nonaqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPLs) below the water table. Conceptual models currently used to address these problems do not correctly include the influence of the fractures, thus leading to erroneous predictions. Recent work has shown that it is crucial to understand the topology, or ''structure'' of the fluid phases (air/water or water/DNAPL) within the subsurface. It has also been shown that even under steady boundary conditions, the influence of fractures can lead to complex and dynamic phase structure that controls system behavior, with or without the presence of a porous rock matrix. Complicated phase structures within the fracture network can facilitate rapid transport, and lead to a sparsely populated and widespread distribution of concentrated contaminants; these qualities are highly difficult to describe with current conceptual models. The focus of our work is to improve predictive modeling through the development of advanced conceptual models for two-phase flow in fractured rock.

Recent in situ observations in stratiform clouds suggest that mixed phase regimes, here defined as limited cloud volumes containing both liquid and solid water, are constrained to narrow layers (order 100 m) separating all-liquid and fully glaciated volumes (Hallett and Viddaurre, 2005). The Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program's (DOE-ARM, Ackerman and Stokes, 2003) North Slope of Alaska (NSA) ARM Climate Research Facility (ACRF) recently started collecting routine measurement of radar Doppler velocity power spectra from the Millimeter Cloud Radar (MMCR). Shupe et al. (2004) showed that Doppler spectra has potential to separate the contributions to the total reflectivity of the liquid and solid water in the radar volume, and thus to investigate further Hallett and Viddaurre's findings. The Mixed-Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (MPACE) was conducted along the NSA to investigate the properties of Arctic mixed phase clouds (Verlinde et al., 2006). We present surface based remote sensing data from MPACE to discuss the fine-scale structure of the mixed-phase clouds observed during this experiment.

Funeral program for Miss Tommye Adelle Dillard. The funeral was held July 10, 2006 at Second Baptist Church, officiated by Rev. Dr. Robert L. Jemerson. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and she was buried in Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

In this project, we are exploiting unique and open source seismic data sets to improve seismic monitoring across the Middle East (including the Iranian Plateau, Zagros Mountains, Arabian Peninsula, Turkish Plateau, Gulf of Aqaba, Dead Sea Rift) and the Horn of Africa (including the northern part of the East African Rift, Afar Depression, southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden). The data sets are being used to perform three related tasks. (1) We are determining moment tensors, moment magnitudes and source depths for regional events in the magnitude 3.0 to 6.0 range. (2) These events are being used to characterize high-frequency (0.5-16 Hz) regional phase attenuation and detection thresholds, especially from events in Iran recorded at stations across the Arabian Peninsula. (3) We are collecting location ground truth at GT5 (local) and GT20 (regional) levels for seismic events with M > 2.5, including source geometry information and source depths. In the first phase of this project, seismograms from earthquakes in the Zagros Mountains recorded at regional distances have been inverted for moment tensors, and source depths for the earthquakes have been determined via waveform matching. Early studies of the distribution of seismicity in the Zagros region found evidence for earthquakes …

The recently discovered gamma-ray burst (GRB) 060218/SN 2006aj is classified as an X-ray Flash with very long duration driven possibly by a neutron star. Since GRB 060218 is very near {approx} 140 Mpc and very dim, one-year observation by Swift suggests that the true rate of GRB 060218-like events might be very high so that such low luminosity GRBs (LL-GRBs) might form a different population of GRBs from the cosmological high luminosity GRBs (HL-GRBs). We found that the high energy neutrino background from such LL-GRBs could be comparable with or larger than that from HL-GRBs. If each neutrino event is detected by IceCube, later optical-infrared follow-up observations such as by Subaru could identify a Type Ibc supernova associated with LL-GRBs, even if gamma- and X-rays are not observed by Swift. This is in a sense a new window from neutrino astronomy, which might enable us to confirm the existence of LL-GRBs and to obtain information about their rate and origin. We also argue LL-GRBs as high energy gamma-ray and cosmic-ray sources.

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This Congressional Research Service Report for Congress details the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) Act of 1965 with emphasis on the fund's history, purpose, and current issues. - Updated July 10, 2006

Laura Miller served as mayor of Dallas, Texas from 2002-2007.

Laura Miller served as mayor of Dallas, Texas from 2002-2007.

A letter from Norval F. Pohl, the then president of UNT, to the UNT Trailblazers about the 50th anniversary of desegregation in the undergrad class when the university was named North Texas State College.