A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last decade, the Congress has made significant changes in numerous federal programs that support low-income families, including changes that have shifted program emphases from providing cash assistance to providing services that promote employment and economic independence. As a result of some of the federal policy changes, the support system is more decentralized than before. This heightens the importance of understanding policy choices and practices at the state and local levels as well as those at the federal level. To provide the Congress with information on this system, GAO agreed to address the following questions: (1) To what extent do states provide supports for lowincome families? (2) How have states structured programs to support low-income families? (3) What changes have states made to supports for low-income families in recent years? Our review focused primarily on supports for which states make many of the key decisions about eligibility, benefit amounts, and service provision. To obtain this information, GAO conducted a mail survey of the social service directors in the 50 states and the District of Columbia; conducted site visits in New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, …

In 1999, the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded a Cooperative Agreement to Texaco Energy Systems Inc. to provide a preliminary engineering design of an Early Entrance Coproduction Plant (EECP). Since the award, continuous and diligent work has been undertaken to achieve the design of an economical facility that makes strides toward attaining the goal of DOE's Vision 21 Program. The objective of the EECP is to convert coal and/or petroleum coke to power while coproducing transportation fuels, chemicals, and useful utilities such as steam. This objective is being pursued in a three-phase effort through the partnership of the DOE with prime contractor Texaco Energy Systems, LLC. (TES), the successor to Texaco Energy Systems, Inc. The key subcontractors to TES include General Electric (GE), Praxair, and Kellogg Brown and Root. ChevronTexaco provided gasification technology and Rentech Inc.'s Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) technology that has been developed for non-natural gas sources. GE provided gas turbine technology for the combustion of low energy content gas. Praxair provided air separation technology and KBR provided engineering to integrate the facility. A conceptual design was completed in Phase I and the report was accepted by the DOE in May 2001. The Phase I work identified risks …

While numerous techniques exist for remediation of contaminant plumes in groundwater or near the soil surface, remediation methods in the deep vadose zone are less established due to complex transport dynamics and sparse microbial populations. There is a lack of knowledge on how physical and hydrologic features of the vadose zone control microbial growth and colonization in response to nutrient delivery during bioremediation. Yet pollution in the vadose zone poses a serious threat to the groundwater resources lying deeper in the sediment. While the contaminants may be slowly degraded by native microbial communities, microbial degradation rates rarely keep pace with the spread of the pollutant. It is crucial to increase indigenous microbial degradation in the vadose zone to combat groundwater contamination.

This note reports results from a simulation of 100k events for one example of a minimal SUGRA supersymmetry case at the LHC using full simulation of the ATLAS detector. It was carried out as part ATLAS Data Challenge 1.

The automated production of maps of human settlement from recent satellite images is essential to detailed studies of urbanization, population movement, and the like. Commercial satellite imagery is becoming available with sufficient spectral and spatial resolution to apply computer vision techniques previously considered only for laboratory (high resolution, low noise) images. In this project, we extracted the boundaries of human settlements from IKONOS 4-band and panchromatic images using spectral segmentation together with a form of generalized second-order statistics and detection of edges and corners.

This report provides basic information on congressional salaries and allowances. First, the report briefly summarizes the current salary of Members of Congress, limits on their outside earned income and honoraria, and applicable health insurance and retirement benefits.

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. The objective is to have these products produced by technologies capable of using synthesis gas derived from coal and/or other carbonaceous feedstocks. The objectives of Phase I were to determine the feasibility and define the concept for the EECP located at a specific site; develop a Research, Development, and Testing (RD&T) Plan for implementation in Phase II; and prepare a Preliminary Project Financing Plan. The objective of Phase II is to implement the work as outlined in the Phase I RD&T Plan to enhance the development and commercial acceptance of coproduction technology that produces high-value products, particularly those that are critical to our domestic fuel and power requirements. The work performed under Phase II will resolve critical knowledge and technology gaps on the integration of gasification and downstream processing to coproduce some combination of power, fuels, and chemicals from coal and/or other carbonaceous feedstocks. The objective of Phase III is to develop an …