A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Business Systems Modernization (BSM) program is a multibillion-dollar, high-risk, highly complex effort that involves the development and delivery of a number of modernized information systems that are intended to replace the agency's aging business and tax processing systems. BSM funds are not available until IRS submits an expenditure plan that meets various conditions to congressional appropriations committees for approval. In January and July 2004, the Department of the Treasury submitted IRS's initial and revised fiscal year 2004 plans, respectively. As required by law, GAO reviewed the plans to (1) determine whether the plans satisfied the conditions specified in the law, (2) determine what progress IRS had made in implementing our prior recommendations, and (3) provide any other observations about the plans and IRS's BSM program."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Data from the decennial census are used to apportion and redistrict seats in the House of Representatives, distribute billions of dollars of federal funds, and guide the planning and investment decisions of the public and private sectors. Given the importance of these data, it is essential that they meet high quality standards before they are distributed to the public. After questions arose about the quality of certain data from the 2000 Census, the requesters asked GAO to review U.S. Census Bureau (Bureau) standards on the quality of data disseminated to the public."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Medicare spending for power wheelchairs--one of the program's most expensive items of durable medical equipment (DME)--rose more than fourfold from 1999 through 2003, while overall Medicare spending rose by about 11 percent for the same period, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This spending growth has raised concerns that some of the payments may have been improper. In May 2003, the Department of Justice indicted several power wheelchair suppliers in Texas alleged to have fraudulently billed Medicare. GAO was asked to examine the early and more recent steps taken by CMS and its contractors to respond to improper payments for power wheelchairs."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) process for ensuring that air traffic control (ATC) systems will operate safely in the national airspace system is an integral part of the agency's multibillion-dollar ATC modernization and safety effort. GAO was asked to review (1) FAA's process for approving ATC systems for safe use in the national airspace system; (2) challenges FAA has faced approving ATC systems and how these challenges affected the cost, schedule, and performance estimates of the systems; and (3) actions FAA has taken to improve its process for approving ATC systems."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Environmental indicator sets assemble quantitative measures of conditions and trends (known as indicators) to assess the state of the environment and natural resources and to gauge progress toward specific goals. Such sets are now being developed to bridge the gap between needed and available information and to prioritize further data collection. The widespread development and use of environmental indicator sets has led federal and nonfederal entities to consider the benefits such sets provide when measuring performance and improving oversight of environmental programs. In this context, GAO was asked to identify (1) the purposes for which federal and nonfederal organizations are developing and using environmental indicator sets, and how they are being used; and (2) the major challenges facing the development and use of environmental indicator sets."

BRAC 2005 Intelligence Joint Cross-Service Group Meeting Minutes of November 17, 2004. The document is redacted.

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

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether health care providers administering vaccinations in hospitals under the federal Medicare program are immune from liability for injuries caused by the vaccine (RQ-0227-GA)

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

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Initiatives are underway at the Savannah River Site (SRS) to accelerate the disposition of the supernate and salt portions of the waste in the SRS High Level Waste (HLW) tank farm system. Significant savings in processing time and overall cost could be achieved by in situ treatment of waste supernate or dissolved salt inside a tank farm waste tank. For treatment of actinides and strontium in waste, the baseline method is sorption onto monosodium titanate (MST), an engineered powder with mean particle size of approximately 10 microns. In a separate study at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), engineered forms of MST were developed and compared on a small (250-mL) scale in batch tests. In the current study, a promising form of engineered MST was tested under two conditions: a traditional ion exchange (or adsorption) column and a porous, flow through device called a tea bag, immersed in solution. Both tests used the same amount of engineered MST to treat 10 L of simulated waste solution containing plutonium and strontium.

The scope of this photoelectrochemical hydrogen research project is defined by multijunction photoelectrode concepts for solar-powered water splitting, with the goal of efficient, stable, and economic operation. From an initial selection of several planar photoelectrode designs, the Hybrid Photoelectrode (HPE) has been identified as the most promising candidate technology. This photoelectrode consists of a photoelectrochemical (PEC) junction and a solid-state photovoltaic (PV) junction. Immersed in aqueous electrolyte and exposed to sunlight, these two junctions provide the necessary voltage to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The efficiency of the conversion process is determined by the performance of the PEC- and the PV-junctions and on their spectral match. Based on their stability and cost effectiveness, iron oxide (Fe2O3) and tungsten oxide (WO3) films have been studied and developed as candidate semiconductor materials for the PEC junction (photoanode). High-temperature synthesis methods, as reported for some high-performance metal oxides, have been found incompatible with multijunction device fabrication. A low-temperature reactive sputtering process has been developed instead. In the parameter space investigated so far, the optoelectronic properties of WO3 films were superior to those of Fe2O3 films, which showed high recombination of photo-generated carriers. For the PV-junction, amorphous-silicon-based multijunction devices have been studied. …

Demonstration of association between common genetic variants and chronic human diseases such as obesity could have profound implications for the prediction, prevention and treatment of these conditions. Unequivocal proof of such an association, however, requires adherence to established methodological guidelines, which include independent replication of initial positive findings. Recently, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within GAD2 were found to be associated with class III obesity (BMI > 40 kg/m2) in 188 families (612 individuals) segregating the condition and a case-control study of 575 cases and 646 lean controls. Functional data supporting a pathophysiological role for one of the SNPs (-243A>G) were also presented. In the present study, we attempted to replicate this association in larger groups of subjects, and to extend the functional studies of the -243A>G SNP. In 2,327 subjects comprising 692 German nuclear families with severe, early-onset obesity, we found no evidence for a relationship between the three GAD2 SNPs and obesity, whether SNPs were studied individually or as haplotypes. In two independent case-control studies (a total of 680 class III obesity cases and 1,186 lean controls), there was no significant relationship between the -243A>G SNP and obesity (odds ratio (OR) = 0.99, 95% CI 0.83 - 1.18,in the …

Monosodium titanate (MST) is an inorganic adsorbent powder that effectively removes strontium, plutonium, neptunium, and other trace elements from alkaline high-level waste (HLW) supernate. This work tested one commercial titanate and four general methods to engineer MST into particles large enough to use in adsorption columns. The most successful of the engineered products selected from batch contact and chemical stability testing succeeded in treating 2900 bed volumes (BV) of simulated salt waste containing dissolved plutonium and strontium. There was no detectable strontium breakthrough and only 6 per cent plutonium breakthrough--well within the processing goal--at the end of the demonstration which operated at 5.3 BV/hour. Additional column tests at nominally 15 BV/hr demonstrated similar removal performance. Batch testing of adsorbents used both actual Savannah River Site (SRS) tank supernate as well as simulated salt solutions spiked with strontium, neptunium, and plutonium. In tank waste tests, internal gelation beads produced by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 35,000 +/- 4,000 mL/g for plutonium at a phase ratio of 1970 mL/g. In the same batch the sorbent demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 99,000 +/- 7,500 mL/g for strontium. These results indicate that this material should be …

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate a process for selecting bounding depletion parameters, show that they are conservative for pressurized water reactor (PWR) and boiling water reactor (BWR) spent nuclear fuel (SNF), and establish the range of burnup for which the parameters are conservative. The general range of applicability is for commercial light water reactor (LWR) SNF with initial enrichments between 2.0 and 5.0 weight percent {sup 235}U and burnups between 10 and 50 gigawatt-day per metric ton of uranium (GWd/MTU).

This work contributes to the design of safe and economical Generation-IV Super-Critical Water Reactors (SCWRs) by providing a basis for selecting structural materials to ensure the functionality of in-vessel components during the entire service life. During the second year of the project, we completed electrochemical characterization of the oxide film properties and investigation of crack initiation and propagation for candidate structural materials steels under supercritical conditions. We ranked candidate alloys against their susceptibility to environmentally assisted degradation based on the in situ data measure with an SRI-designed controlled distance electrochemistry (CDE) arrangement. A correlation between measurable oxide film properties and susceptibility of austenitic steels to environmentally assisted degradation was observed experimentally. One of the major practical results of the present work is the experimentally proven ability of the economical CDE technique to supply in situ data for ranking candidate structural materials for Generation-IV SCRs. A potential use of the CDE arrangement developed ar SRI for building in situ sensors monitoring water chemistry in the heat transport circuit of Generation-IV SCWRs was evaluated and proved to be feasible.

Bitmap indexing is a common technique for indexing high-dimensional data in data warehouses and scientific applications. Though efficient for low-cardinality attributes, query processing can be rather costly for high-cardinality attributes due to the large storage requirements for the bitmap indices. Binning is a common technique for reducing storage costs of bitmap indices. This technique partitions the attribute values into a number of ranges, called bins, and uses bitmap vectors to represent bins (attribute ranges) rather than distinct values. Although binning may reduce storage costs, it may increase the access costs of queries that do not fall on exact bin boundaries (edge bins). For this kind of queries the original data values associated with edge bins must be accessed, in order to check them against the query constraints.In this paper we study the problem of finding optimal locations for the bin boundaries in order to minimize these access costs subject to storage constraints. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm for optimal partitioning of attribute values into bins that takes into account query access patterns as well as data distribution statistics. Mathematical analysis and experiments on real life data sets show that the optimal partitioning achieved by this algorithm can lead to …

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

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

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

Funeral program for Sister Hazel Phillips Wilson, born April 23, 1917 and died November 17, 2004. The funeral was held November 17, 2004 at St. Luke Baptist Church, officiated by Rev. Darrell Thomas. Funeral arrangements were made through the Lewis Funeral Home, and she was buried in the Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.