Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To ensure that people claiming disability insurance program benefits can obtain legal representation at a fair price, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is required to regulate the fees that attorneys charge people to represent their disability claims before the agency. Balancing the needs of the claimants with those of their attorneys, the law limits the amount of fees that attorneys can charge claimants, but also guarantees that those fees will be paid from the claimants' past-due benefits. Inefficiencies in the current process increase both the time it takes to pay the attorney fees and the cost of administration. One segment of attorney fee processing--the fee approval process--was substantially simplified in 1991. Systems support could streamline the second segment of the processing--the fee payment--thus lowering the annual administrative costs and cutting processing time. Automation of this final segment of the fee process could help improve customer service for both claimants and their attorneys."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses lessons learned from the Department of Defense's (DOD) TRICARE contracts and their implications for the future. TRICARE's successes and maturity reflect the ability of the DOD and its contractors to work within the current contract structure. However, it has not been easy, and there are important lessons from current contract shortcomings that need to be addressed in designing future TRICARE contracts. Most, including DOD, believe that the current contracts are too large, complex, and prescriptive in nature, limiting innovation and competition. Also, numerous adjustments to these contracts have created an unstable program, and program costs have been difficult to predict, contributing to annual funding shortfalls. Additionally, financial incentives, accountability, and data quality need to be strengthened to achieve greater efficiencies. To address these weaknesses, DOD redesigned its solicitation for the next round of TRICARE contracts; however, the initial issuance was withdrawn because of internal concerns and reservations about its costs and specifications. DOD is now reassessing how to structure the TRICARE contracts and is considering the views and recommendations of the Defense Medical Oversight Committee, a group formed to oversee TRICARE."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the recruitment and the retention of nursing staff, including both nurses and nurses aides, and concerns about the future supply of these workers. The health and long-term care systems in the United States rely heavily on the services of both nurses and nurses aides, the two largest groups of health care workers. GAO found that the recruitment and the retention of both nurses and nurses aides are major concerns for health care providers. Experts and providers have reported a shortage of nurses, partly as a result of patients' increasingly complex care needs. This shortage is expected to become more serious as the population ages and the demand for nurses increases. Several factors combine to constrain the current and future supply of nurses. Like the population in general, the nurse workforce is aging; the average age of a registered nurse rose from 37 years in 1983 to 42 years in 1998. Enrollments in nursing programs have declined during the last five years, shrinking the pool of new workers available to replace those who are retiring. Many studies also report less job satisfaction among nurses, which could …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has become increasingly aware that the use of more commercial and military electronic systems aboard ships, aircraft, and vehicles can cause unintended electromagnetic interactions among systems and harm operations. Such unintended interactions, called electromagnetic environmental effects, have already undermined mission effectiveness on many occasions. The new procurement procedures established by DOD are reasonable and could help prevent problems arising from radio frequency interference. The impact of these new procedures cannot be evaluated, however, until DOD has had a chance to apply its revised guidance to systems as they go through each acquisition decision milestone. DOD would then be able to demonstrate that the new procedures have (1) resulted in the review of relevant documents at each decision milestone to identify potential frequency problems, (2) prevented interference problems, and (3) improved the acquisition process. No DOD system had undergone the new procedures for all decision milestones at the time of GAO's review. The first of three pilot programs using the new acquisition guidance should be completed by January 2002 according to DOD officials. Consequently, GAO could not assess the programs' effectiveness."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) does not have a financial management enterprise architecture, and it does not have the management structures in place to effectively develop, implement, and maintain one. DOD has not applied recognized best practices--particularly support and sponsorship by the head of the enterprise and assignment of accountability and commensurate authority--to develop, implement, and maintain a DOD-wide financial management enterprise architecture. Nevertheless, DOD's various components are either spending or planning to spend billions of dollars to acquire new or modify existing financial management systems. In the absence of a complete, enforceable enterprise architecture, such investments are unwise. DOD runs the risk that its components will spend billions of dollars to modify and modernize financial management systems independently from one another, forcing DOD to maintain a system that suffers from duplication, limited interoperability, and unnecessarily costly operations and maintenance. As part of its plan to invest in financial management systems modernization, DOD has tried to use lessons learned from its Year 2000 program. DOD can build upon these actions to ensure that it uses recognized best practices for enterprise architecture management. This approach will allow …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the U.S. government's rule of law assistance efforts in the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. GAO found that these efforts have had limited impact so far, and results may not be sustainable in many cases. U.S. agencies have had some success in introducing innovative legal concepts and practices in these countries. However, the U.S. assistance has not often had a major, long-term impact on the evolution of the rule of law in these countries. In some cases, countries have not widely adopted the new concepts and practices that the United States has advocated. In other cases, continuation or expansion of the innovations depends on further funding from the U.S. or other donors. In fact, the rule of law appears to have actually deteriorated in recent years in several countries, including Russia and Ukraine, according to the data used to measure the results of U.S. development assistance in the region and a host of U.S. government and foreign officials. This testimony summarizes an April 2001 report (GAO-01-354)."

Weekly newspaper published in Duncanville, Texas that includes local Cedar Hill, state, and national news along with advertising.

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Wet-etch figuring (WEF), a computer-controlled method for generating arbitrarily shaped optical surfaces using wet chemical etching, has been developed. This method uses applicator geometry and surface tension gradients (the Marangoni Effect) to define and confine the footprint of a wetted etchant zone on the surface. Capillary forces attach the flowing etchant solution to the underside of the optic being figured. No mechanical or thermal stresses or residues are applied to the optic by this process. This enables interferometric measurement of the glass thickness while surfacing, which then controls the placement and dwell time of the wetted zone. The result is a truly deterministic, closed-loop figuring process with a high degree of optical precision. This process can figure sub-millimeter thickness, large-aperture plates or sheets that are very difficult to finish by conventional methods. Automated linear and circular spot etching tools were used to demonstrate surfacing on 380 micron-thick glass sheets, to Strehl better than 0.8, as specified by data array or Zernike polynomials.

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The objective of this calculation was to determine the structural response of a 12-Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Long, a 24-Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and a 5-Defense High Level Waste/Department of Energy (DHLW/DOE)--Long spent nuclear fuel waste packages lifted in a horizontal position. The scope of this calculation was limited to reporting the calculation results in terms of maximum stress intensities in the trunnion collar sleeves. In addition, the maximum stress intensities in the inner and outer shells of the waste packages were presented for illustrative purposes. The information provided by the sketches (Attachments I, II and III) is that of the potential design of the types of waste packages considered in this calculation, and all obtained results are valid for these designs only. This calculation is associated with the waste package design and was performed by the Waste Package Design Section in accordance with the ''Technical work plan for: Waste Package Design Description for LA'' (Ref. 7). AP-3.12Q, Calculations (Ref. 13), was used to perform the calculation and develop the document.

Three peaks and two dips have been detected in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from the BOOMERANG experiment, at {ell} {approx} 210, 540, 840 and {ell} {approx} 420, 750, respectively. Using model-independent analyses, we find that all five features are statistically significant and we measure their location and amplitude. These are consistent with the adiabatic inflationary model. We also calculate the mean and variance of the peak and dip locations and amplitudes in a large 7-dimensional parameter space of such models, which gives good agreement with the model-independent estimates, and forecast where the next few peaks and dips should be found if the basic paradigm is correct. We test the robustness of our results by comparing Bayesian marginalization techniques on this space with likelihood maximization techniques applied to a second 7-dimensional cosmological parameter space, using an independent computational pipeline, and find excellent agreement: {Omega}{sub tot} = 1.02{sub -0.05}{sup +0.06} vs. 1.04 {+-} 0.05, {Omega}{sub b}h{sup 2} = 0.022{sub -0.003}{sup +0.004} vs. 0.019{sub -0.004}{sup +0.005}, and n{sub s} = 0.96{sub -0.09}{sup +0.10} vs. 0.90 {+-} 0.08. The deviation in primordial spectral index n{sub s} is a consequence of the strong correlation with the optical depth.

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Tasks of nuclear safety assurance for storage and transport of fresh mixed uranium-plutonium fuel of the VVER-1000 reactor are considered in the view of 3 MOX LTAs introduction into the core. The precise code MCU that realizes the Monte Carlo method is used for calculations.

The primary research effort supported by Grant No. DOE DEFG02-97ER62366 titled ''Retrieval of Cloud Fraction and Type Using Broadband Diffuse and Total Shortwave Irradiance Measurements'' was application of clear-sky identification and cloud fraction estimation algorithms developed by Charles N. Long and Thomas P. Ackerman to the downwelling total, direct and diffuse shortwave irradiance measurements made at all of the central, boundary, and extended facilities of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Southern Great Plains (SOP) site. Goals of the research were finalization and publication of the two algorithms in the peer-reviewed literature and operational application of them to all of aforementioned data streams from the ARM SGP site. The clear-sky identification algorithm was published as Long and Ackerman (2000) in the Journal of Geophysical Research, while a description of the cloud fraction estimation algorithm made it to the scientific literature as Long et al. (1999) in the Proceedings of the 10th American Meteorological Association Conference on Atmospheric Radiation held in Madison, Wisconsin. The cloud fraction estimation algorithm relies on empirical relationships between the outputs of the clear-sky identification algorithm and cloud fraction; as such, the cloud fraction estimation algorithm requires significant amounts of data both to properly develop the …

This report provides the critical experimenter's interpretations and descriptions of informal critical experiment logbook notes and associated information (e.g., experimental equipment designs/sketches, chemical and isotopic analyses, etc.) for the purpose of formally documenting the results of critical experiments performed in the late 1960s at the Oak Ridge Critical Experiments Facility. The experiments were conducted with aqueous solutions of 97.6 wt % {sup 233}U uranyl nitrate having uranium densities varying between about 346 g U/l and 45 g U/l. Criticality was achieved with single simple units (e.g., cylinders and spheres) and with spaced subcritical simple cylindrical units arranged in unreflected, water-reflected, and polyethylene reflected critical arrays.

Interview with building contractor and Marine Corps veteran Donald Boots. The interview includes Boots' personal experiences about the Pacific Theater during World War II, childhood, boot camp, camouflage school, training in beachhead organization with the 4th Pioneer Battalion, mopping-up operations on Kwajalein, rest and retraining on Maui, being assigned as a BAR man, invading Saipan, and assaulting enemy caves on Saipan. Boots also talks about the stress of battle, returning to Maui for rest and retraining, the invasion of Iwo Jima, Japanese resistance on the Iwo Jima beaches, the rescue of his friend, his role in organizing the beach operation at Iwo Jima, establishing beach defenses on Iwo Jima, evacuating and returning to Maui, retraining and refitting for the invasion of the Japanese home islands, and the dropping of the atomic bombs.

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Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC 5 television station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story.

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Parameterization of cumulus convection in general circulation model (GCM) has been recognized as one of the most important and complex issues in the model physical parameterizations. In earlier studies, most cumulus parameterizations were developed and evaluated using data observed over tropical oceans, such as the GATE (the Global Atmospheric Research Program's Atlantic Tropical Experiment) data. This is partly due to inadequate field measurements in the midlatitudes. In this study, we compare and evaluate a total of eight types of the state-of-the-art cumulus parameterizations used in fifteen Single-Column Models (SCM) under the summertime midlatitude continental conditions using the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) summer 1997 Intensive Operational Period (IOP) data, which covers several continental convection events. The purpose is to systematically compare and evaluate the performance of these cumulus parameterizations under summertime midlatitude continental conditions. Through the study we hope to identify strengths and weaknesses of these cumulus parameterizations that will lead to further improvements. Here, we briefly present our most interesting results. A full description of this study can be seen in Xie et al. (2001). The authors conclude that: (1) The SCM simulation errors are closely related to problems with model cumulus parameterizations. The schemes with …

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