Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Medicare is highly vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. The enforcement of program payment rules, however, has raised concerns that these safeguards may have imposed too great a burden on health care providers. The proposed Medicare Education and Regulatory Fairness Act would seek to address some of these concerns by providing expedited procedures for provider appeals, new options for providers to use in repaying Medicare overpayments, protections for providers who voluntarily return overpayments or ask for a review of their claims, and new requirements for provider education. This report reviews how this proposed legislation would affect Medicare policies and procedures in (1) provider education and participation, (2) medical reviews, audits, and appeals, (3) recovery of overpayments, and (4) related legal issues."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Core Financial System Requirements document is intended to assist agencies when reviewing new core financial systems and when improving or evaluating existing core financial systems. It provides the baseline functionality in order to support agency missions and comply with laws and regulations. The final issuance of this document will augment existing federal financial management system functional requirements used in assessing compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act."

A novel approach called Forward-Inverse Adaptive Techniques (FIAT) for reservoir characterization is developed and applied to three representative exploration cases. Inverse modeling refers to the determination of the entire reservoir permeability under steady state single-phase flow regime, given only field permeability, pressure and production well measurements. FIAT solves the forward and inverse partial differential equations (PDEs) simultaneously by adding a regularization term and filtering pressure gradients. An implicit adaptive-grid, Galerkin, numerical scheme is used to numerically solve the set of PDEs subject to pressure and permeability boundary conditions. Three examples are presented. Results from all three cases demonstrate attainable and reasonably accurate solutions and, more importantly, provide insights into the consequences of data undersampling.

In order to set up a powerful proton source for a future Neutrino Factory, increasing at the same time the flux of protons available for new and existing facilities, CERN is studying a 2.2 GeV superconducting H- linac for 4 MW beam power, called SPL. The superconducting part of this linac covers the energy range from 120 MeV to 2.2 GeV. Three sections made of 352 MHz cavities with nominal beta of 0.52, 0.7 and 0.8 bring the beam energy up to 1 GeV. From this energy, superconducting cavities from LEP or beta 0.8 cavities can be used up to the final energy of 2.2 GeV. This paper covers the optimization for the superconducting part, the beam dynamics design principles, the matching between sections, and the results of multiparticle simulations with up to 50 million particles. To demonstrate the stability of the design, matched and mismatched input beams are used.

The mixture of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, halogenated solvents and radionuclides in many DOE waste materials presents a challenging problem for separating the different species and disposing of individual contaminants. One approach for dealing with mixed wastes is to genetically engineer the radiation-resistant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans to survive in and detoxify DOE's mixed waste streams, and to develop process parameters for treating mixed wastes with such constructed strains. The goal for this project is to develop a suite of genetic tools for Deinococcus radiodurans and to use these tools to construct and test stable strains for detoxification of haloorganics in mixed wastes.

This report briefly reviews issues regarding the implementation of the zero-valent iron permeable reactive barrier (PRB) technology at sites managed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Initially, the PRB technology, using zero-valent iron for the reactive media, was received with great enthusiasm, and DOE invested millions of dollars testing and implementing PRBs. Recently, a negative perception of the technology has been building. This perception is based on the failure of some deployments to satisfy goals for treatment and operating expenses. The purpose of this report, therefore, is to suggest reasons for the problems that have been encountered and to recommend whether DOE should invest in additional research and deployments. The principal conclusion of this review is that the most significant problems have been the result of insufficient characterization, which resulted in poor engineering implementation. Although there are legitimate concerns regarding the longevity of the reactive media, the ability of zero-valent iron to reduce certain chlorinated hydrocarbons and to immobilize certain metals and radionuclides is well documented. The primary problem encountered at some DOE full-scale deployments has been an inadequate assessment of site hydrology, which resulted in misapplication of the technology. The result is PRBs with higher than expected flow …

According to the Technical Work Plan titled Technical Work Plan for Waste Form Degradation Process Model Report for SR (CRWMS M&O 2000a), the purpose of this study is to perform abstractions on solubility limits of radioactive elements based on the process-level information and thermodynamic databases provided by Natural Environment Program Operations (NEPO) and Waste Package Operations (WPO). The scope of this analysis is to produce solubility limits as functions, distributions, or constants for all transported radioactive elements identified by the Performance Assessment Operations (PAO) radioisotope screening. Results from an expert elicitation for solubility limits of most radioactive elements were used in the previous Total System Performance Assessments (TSPAs). However, the elicitation conducted in 1993 does not meet the criteria set forth by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) due to lack of documentation and traceability (Kotra et al. 1996, Section 3). Therefore, at the Waste Form Abstraction Workshop held on February 2-4, 1999, at Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project (YMP) decided to develop geochemical models to study solubility for the proposed Monitored Geologic Repository. WPO/NEPO is to develop process-level solubility models, including review and compilation of relevant thermodynamic data. PAO's responsibility is to perform abstractions based …

Analytical Laboratory Quality Audits are designed to improve laboratory performance. The success of the audit, as for many activities, is based on adequate preparation, precise performance, well documented and insightful reporting, and productive follow-up. Adequate preparation starts with definition of the purpose, scope, and authority for the audit and the primary standards against which the laboratory quality program will be tested. The scope and technical processes involved lead to determining the needed audit team resources. Contact is made with the auditee and a formal audit plan is developed, approved and sent to the auditee laboratory management. Review of the auditee's quality manual, key procedures and historical information during preparation leads to better checklist development and more efficient and effective use of the limited time for data gathering during the audit itself. The audit begins with the opening meeting that sets the stage for the interactions between the audit team and the laboratory staff. Arrangements are worked out for the necessary interviews and examination of processes and records. The information developed during the audit is recorded on the checklists. Laboratory management is kept informed of issues during the audit so there are no surprises at the closing meeting. The audit report …

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

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, Congress has provided the military with additional funding to address the shortage of spare parts. This report provides information on how the funding was used and how the Department of Defense (DOD) plans to improve its financial information on spare parts funding. GAO found that the $1.1 billion earmarked for spare parts in the 1999 appropriations act was placed in military services' operation and maintenance accounts. However, DOD did not separately track the use of these funds, which could have been used for other purposes. As a result, DOD plans to annually develop detailed financial management information on spare parts funding uses. Implementation of DOD's plan should increase visibility and accountability for the use of spare parts funds. The plan should also help to determine the extent to which progress is being made in addressing spare parts shortages. Such information, when developed through a reliable and consistent methodology, would also be useful for congressional decision making and oversight. However, DOD does not plan to provide this information to Congress."

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

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The DARHT-II beam line utilizes a fast stripline kicker to temporally chop a high current electron beam from a single induction LINAC and deliver multiple temporal electron beam pulses to an x-ray converter target. High beam quality needs to be maintained throughout the transport line from the end of the accelerator through the final focus lens to the x-ray converter target to produce a high quality radiographic image. Issues that will affect beam quality such as spot size and emittance at the converter target include dynamic effects associated with the stripline kicker as well as emittance growth due to the nonlinear forces associated with the kicker and various focusing elements in the transport line. In addition, dynamic effects associated with transverse resistive wall instability as well as gas focusing will affect the beam transport. A particle-in-cell code is utilized to evaluate beam transport in the downstream transport line in DARHT-II. External focusing forces are included utilizing either analytic expressions or field maps. Models for wakefields from the beam kicker, transverse resistive wall instability, and gas focusing are included in the simulation to provide a more complete picture of beam transport in DARHT-II. From these simulations, for various initial beam loads …

In the recent development of high voltage solid state pulsed power systems, the ability to monitor low voltage signals in a high voltage environment has been a problem. The amplitude of any ground bounce from the high voltage pulse can make the interpretation of low voltage diagnostic signals difficult with industry standard probes. The paper explains the development of a fiber optic voltage probe for the oscilloscope. Included are explanations of the probe's design, fabrication, limitations, and performance when compared with standard probes in a high voltage pulsed power environment.

An all solid-state modulator with multi-pulse burst capability, very fast rise and fall times, pulse width agility, and amplitude modulation capability for use with high-speed beam kickers has been designed and tested at LLNL. The modulator uses multiple solid-state modules stacked in an inductive-adder configuration. It provides a nominal 18kV pulse with {+-} 10% amplitude modulation on the order of several MHz, rise times on the order of 10nS, and can be configured for either positive or negative polarity. The presentation will include measured performance data.

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

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

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

What is the overall state of the Arctic environment? The aim of this report is to answer the many aspects of this seemingly straightforward question. Although several national and international efforts have looked at parts of the Arctic, this is the first attempt to assess the state of Arctic flora and fauna as a whole.

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

Provides a summary of plans for integrating research, development, and deployment for future commercial buildings in the U.S.

The measurements of the mass of the W boson (M{sub W}) and of the top quark (M{sub t}) are important for three reasons: (i) these masses represent fundamental parameters of the Standard Model; (ii) they determine the coupling between the top quark and the Higgs boson, the coupling being proportional to M{sub t}{sup 2}/M{sub W}{sup 2}; and (iii) radiative corrections relate the masses of the W, top quark and the Higgs boson: an accurate measurement of M{sub W} and M{sub t} would provide a constraint on the Higgs mass (M{sub H}). We present here the measurements obtained by the CDF and D0 collaborations corresponding to the so-called Run I of data-taking (1992-95, {approx} 100 pb{sup -1} each) at the Tevatron (p{bar p} collisions, {radical}s = 1.8 TeV). In addition we report on the improvements expected for these measurements in the current run (so-called Run IIa) which, having just started (March 2001), is expected to collect about 2 fb{sup -1} by the year 2004.

The year 2000 was a year of evolutionary change for the Fermilab computer farms. Additional compute capacity was acquired by the addition of PCs for the CDF, D0 and CMS farms. This was done in preparation for Run 2 production and for CMS Monte Carlo production. Additional I/O capacity was added for all the farms. This continues the trend to standardize the I/O systems on the SGI O2x00 architecture. Strong authentication was installed on the CDF and D0 farms. The farms continue to provide large CPU resources for experiments and those users whose calculations benefit from large CPU/low IO resources. The user community will change in 2001 now that the 1999 fixed-target experiments have almost finished processing and Run 2, SDSS, miniBooNE, MINOS, BTeV, and other future experiments and projects will be the major users in the future.