Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since September 2001, about 360,000 reservists have been called to active duty to support the war on terrorism, conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other operations. Some reservists have been on active duty for a year or more, and the pace of reserve operations is expected to remain high for the foreseeable future. When mobilized for active duty under federal authorities, reservists are eligible to receive health care benefits through DOD's military health care system, TRICARE. When reservists are ordered to active duty for more than 30 days, their families are also eligible for health benefits. DOD supplements its military health care facilities with civilian health care providers through its triple-option TRICARE program. DOD's beneficiaries may enroll in TRICARE's Prime option and go to a network provider to receive care; without enrolling, they can see a network provider through the preferred provider option, Extra; or they may elect to use Standard, the fee-for-service option. Some beneficiaries have raised concerns about difficulties in finding civilian providers--particularly Standard, non-network providers--who will accept TRICARE beneficiaries as patients. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2004, enacted on November 24, …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress created the Russian Leadership Program in 1999 as a pilot project to promote mutual understanding by exposing emerging Russian leaders to the American economic system and democratic institutions. In 2003, Congress renamed the program the Open World Leadership Center, expanded its scope, and extended eligibility to a number of other countries. Because Open World had not been independently evaluated, GAO was asked to review (1) the program's progress toward achieving its overall purpose and (2) whether it has appropriate financial management and accountability mechanisms in place."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The current generation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been under development for defense applications since the 1980s. UAVs were used in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003 to observe, track, target, and strike enemy forces. These successes have heightened interest in UAVs within the Department of Defense (DOD) and the services. GAO was asked to (1) determine how much funding DOD requested, was appropriated, and was obligated for major UAV development efforts during fiscal years 1999-2003 and (2) assess whether DOD's approach to planning for UAVs provides reasonable assurance that its investment in UAVs will facilitate their integration into the force structure."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The security of U.S. commercial aviation is a long-standing concern, and substantial efforts have been undertaken to strengthen it. One such effort is the development of a new Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) to identify passengers requiring additional security attention. The development of CAPPS II has raised a number of issues, including whether individuals may be inappropriately targeted for additional screening and whether data accessed by the system may compromise passengers' privacy. GAO was asked to summarize the results of its previous report that looked at (1) the development status and plans for CAPPS II; (2) the status of CAPPS II in addressing key developmental, operational, and public acceptance issues; and (3) additional challenges that could impede the successful implementation of the system."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Consolidation loans, available under the Department of Education's (Education) two major student loan programs--the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) and the William D. Ford Direct Loan Program (FDLP)--help borrowers manage their student loan debt. By combining multiple loans into one loan and extending the repayment period, a consolidation loan reduces monthly repayments, which may lower default risk and, thereby, reduce federal costs of loan defaults. Consolidation loans also allow borrowers to lock in a fixed interest rate, an option not available for other student loans. Consolidation loans under FFELP and FDLP accounted for about 48 percent of the $87.4 billion in total new student loan dollars that originated during fiscal year 2003. Two main types of federal cost pertain to consolidation loans. One is "subsidy"--the net present value of cash flows to and from the government that result from providing these loans to borrowers. For FFELP consolidation loans, cash flows include, for example, fees paid by lenders to the government and a special allowance payment by the government to lenders to provide them a guaranteed rate of return on the student loans they make. For FDLP consolidation …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A critical component of the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) information technology program is its ongoing work with the Department of Defense (DOD) to achieve the ability to exchange patient health care data and create electronic records for use by veterans, active military personnel, and their health care providers. GAO testified before Congress last November that one-way sharing of data, from DOD to VA medical facilities, had been realized. At the Congress's request, GAO assessed, among other matters, VA's and DOD's progress since that time toward defining a detailed strategy for and developing the capability of a twoway exchange of patient health information."

Weekly newspaper from Mannford, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

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There is much interest in the combustion mechanism of organophosphorus compounds (OPCs) due to their role as potential halon replacements in fire suppression. A continuing investigation of the inhibition activity of organophosphorus compounds under a range of equivalence ratios was performed experimentally and computationally, as measured by the burning velocity. Updates to a previous mechanism were made by the addition and modification of reactions in the mechanism for a more complete description of the recombination reactions. In this work, the laminar flame speed is measured experimentally and calculated numerically for a premixed propane/air flame, under a range of equivalence ratios, undoped and doped with dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP). A detailed investigation of the catalytic cycles involved in the recombination of key flame radicals is made for two equivalence ratios, lean and rich. From this, the importance of different catalytic cycles involved in the lean versus rich case is discussed. Although the importance of certain cycles is different under different stoichiometries, the OPCs are similarly effective across the range, demonstrating the robustness of OPCs as flame suppressants. In addition, it is shown that the phosphorus compounds are most active in the high temperature region of the flame. This may, in part, explain …

OpenMP is a widely adopted standard for threading directives across compiler implementations. The standard is very successful since it provides application writers with a simple, portable programming model for introducing shared memory parallelism into their codes. However, the standards do not address key issues for supporting that programming model in development tools such as debuggers. In this paper, we present DMPL, an OpenMP debugger interface that can be implemented as a dynamically loaded library. DMPL is currently being considered by the OpenMP Tools Committee as a mechanism to bridge the development tool gap in the OpenMP standard.

Streak camera breakout and Fabry-Perot interferometer data have been taken on the outer surface of 1.80 g/cm{sup 3} TATB hemispherical boosters initiated by slapper detonators at three temperatures. The slapper causes breakout to occur at 54{sup o} at ambient temperatures and 42{sup o} at -54 C, where the axis of rotation is 0{sup o}. The Fabry velocities may be associated with pressures, and these decrease for large timing delays in breakout seen at the colder temperatures. At room temperature, the Fabry pressures appear constant at all angles. Both fresh and decade-old explosive are tested and no difference is seen. The problem has been modeled with reactive flow. Adjustment of the JWL for temperature makes little difference, but cooling to -54 C decreases the rate constant by 1/6th. The problem was run both at constant density and with density differences using two different codes. The ambient code results show that a density difference is probably there but it cannot be quantified.

The summary of this report is: (1) biogenic flux increases as hydrologic residence time decreases; (2) reaction-based reactive transport modeling can capture this effect; (3) solid-phase Fe(III) bioreduction can be sustained at long residence times in natural sediments; and (4) long-term coupled Fe(III)/U(VI) bioreduction can be sustained in natural sediments.

Analysis of the Genetic Potential and Gene Expression of Microbial Communities Involved in the In Situ Bioremediation of Uranium and Harvesting Electrical Energy from Organic Matter The primary goal of this research is to develop conceptual and computational models that can describe the functioning of complex microbial communities involved in microbial processes of interest to the Department of Energy. Microbial Communities to be Investigated: (1) Microbial community associated with the in situ bioremediation of uranium-contaminated groundwater; and (2) Microbial community that is capable of harvesting energy from waste organic matter in the form of electricity.

The objective of this report is to understand fundamental biogeochemical processes that would allow for the use of bioremediation approaches for cleaning up, managing, or understanding fate and transport at DOE's contaminated legacy waste sites.

The hypothesis of this report is Mobile radionuclides in low-permeability porous matrix regions of fractured saprolite can be effectively isolated and immobilized by stimulating localized in-situ biological activity in highly-permeable fractured and microfractured zones within the saprolite.

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

Semi-weekly newspaper from Seminole, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

We present our preliminary results for semileptonic form factors of D mesons in unquenched lattice QCD. Simulations are carried out with n{sub f} = 2 + 1 dynamical quarks using gauge configurations generated by the MILC collaboration. For the valence quarks, we adopt an improved staggered light quark action and the clover heavy quark action. Our results for D {yields} K and D {yields} {pi} form factors at q{sup 2} = 0 are in agreement with the experimental values.

Generation of a DC electron beam in the future Fermilab electron cooler [1] employs an electrostatic acceleration and a beam energy recovery, so that electrons are decelerated from the nominal energy of 4.3 MeV they have in the cooling section to few keV in the collector. Stable performance of this scheme requires a current loss {delta}I below 10 {micro}A at the beam current up to the nominal value of I = 0.5 A. One of sources of the loss is a back flow of secondary electrons from the beam collector. The paper discusses principles and performance of a collector with the low current loss. Electric and magnetic fields in the collectors used in existing electron coolers are axially symmetrical. For practically interesting parameters, such collectors can not provide {delta}I/I<10{sup -4} because of the reversibility of trajectories in the collectors: a secondary electron with the kinetic energy equal to the energy of the primary one can come out of the collector following the trajectory of the ''parent'' electron. The back flow can be dramatically decreased if the reversibility is broken by a transverse magnetic field in the collector cavity. In our case, the field was formed by a system of permanent …

We extend the Fermilab formalism for heavy quarks to develop a more improved action. We give results of matching calculations of the improvement couplings at tree level. Finally, we estimate the discretization errors associated with the new action.

OAK-B135 This paper investigates the formation and breakup of the ''slinky mode'' in an RFP using analytic techniques previously employed to examine mode locking phenomena in tokamaks. The slinky mode is a toroidally localized, coherent interference pattern in the magnetic field which co-rotates with the plasma at the reversal surface. This mode forms, as a result of the nonlinear coupling of multiple m = 1 core tearing modes, via a bifurcation which is similar to that by which toroidally coupled tearing modes lock together in a tokamak. The slinky mode breaks up via a second bifurcation which is similar to that by which toroidally coupled tearing modes in a tokamak unlock. However, the typical m = 1 mode amplitude below which slinky breakup is triggered is much smaller than that above which slinky formation occurs. Analytic expressions for the slinky formation and breakup thresholds are obtained in all regimes of physical interest. The locking of the slinky mode to a static error-field is also investigated analytically. Either the error-field arrests the rotation of the plasma at the reversal surface before the formation of the slinky mode, so that the mode subsequently forms as a non-rotating mode, or the slinky mode …

After the successful Run I of the Tevatron (1992-1996),with the top quark discovery, both CDF and D0 experiments were extensively upgraded to meet the challenges of the Tevatron Run II collider. The energy of p{bar p} collisions at the Tevatron was increased from {radical}s = 1.8 TeV to {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. t{bar t} production cross section is expected to increase by a factor of {approx} 30%. Major upgrades in the Tevatron accelerator chain will increase the Run II instantaneous luminosity: the goal is to achieve L = 5 - 20 x 10{sup 31} cm{sup 2}s{sup -1} while the highest luminosity reached up to now (September 2003) is 5.2 x 10{sup 31} cm{sup 2} s{sup -1}. In this paper we will present the top quark properties measured by both CDF and D0 with the first physics-quality data collected during the Run II (March 2002-January 2003). First we will review t{bar t} cross section measurements in the various decay channels; then top quark mass measurements will be presented.

The DZERO experiment located at Fermilab has recently started RunII with an upgraded detector. The RunII physics program requires the Data Acquisition to readout the detector at a rate of 1 KHz. Events fragments, totaling 250 KB, are readout from approximately 60 front end crates and sent to a particular farm node for Level 3 Trigger processing. A scalable system, capable of complex event routing, has been designed and implemented based on commodity components: VMIC 7750 Single Board Computers for readout, a Cisco 6509 switch for data flow, and close to 100 Linux-based PCs for high-level event filtering.