Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Health care spending varies across the country due to differences in the use and price of health care services. Understanding the reasons for utilization and price variation may contribute to developing methods to control health care spending. This report provides preliminary results from our work on geographic variations in health care spending and prices. Congress asked us to examine geographic variations in health care spending and prices in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). FEHBP is the health insurance program administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for federal civilian employees and retirees, which covered 8.5 million people in 2001. FEHBP contracts with private insurers to provide health benefits. It is the largest private insurance program in the United States. This report summarizes preliminary information provided to you at an interim briefing on July 21, 2004. The enclosed briefing slides highlight the results of our work comparing Milwaukee to other areas of the country. The objectives of the briefing were to (1) compare Milwaukee health care spending per enrollee, hospital inpatient prices, and physician prices with other metropolitan areas, and (2) examine factors identified by stakeholders …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress has provided funding for numerous highway demonstration projects in legislation authorizing surface transportation programs as well as in annual appropriations acts for the Department of Transportation (DOT). In some cases, the projects are identified in the legislation itself. In others, they are identified in committee reports accompanying the legislation. These projects are all designated for specific geographic locations within states and for specific purposes, and funds made available for them generally remain available for them until expended. This report includes information we provided to Congress on July 14, 2004, on unobligated funds no longer needed that could be rescinded from highway demonstration projects and also includes a recommendation to the Secretary of Transportation."

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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This report provides historical context and reviews some of the factors inspiring debate related to funding for rail freight.

In this report we investigate order, stability, and phase transformations for a series of actinide-based alloys. The statics and kinetics of precipitation and ordering in this class of alloys are modeled with a scheme that couples fundamental information on the alloy energetics obtained from experimental and assessed thermo-chemical data to the CALPHAD approach commonly used in industry for designing alloys with engineering specificity with the help of the Thermo-Calc software application. The CALPHAD approach is applied to the study of the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of Pu-based alloys, Pu-X, where X=Al, Fe, Ga. The assessment of the equilibrium phase diagrams in the whole range of alloy composition has been performed with the PARROT module of the Thermo-Calc application software. Predictions are made on the low temperature and Pu-rich side of the phase diagrams of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al for which controversy has been noted in the past. The validity of the assessed thermo-chemical database will be discussed by comparing predicted heats of transformation for pure Pu with measured values from differential scanning calorimetry analysis. An overall picture for the stability properties of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al that reconciles the results of past studies carried out on these alloys is proposed. Results on phase …

The monocular passive ranging (MPR) problem in remote sensing consists of identifying the precise range of an airborne target (missile, plane, etc.) from its observed radiance. This inverse problem may be set as a global optimization problem (GOP) whereby the difference between the observed and model predicted radiances is minimized over the possible ranges and atmospheric conditions. Using additional information about the error function between the predicted and observed radiances of the target, we developed GMG, a new algorithm to find the Global Minimum with a Guarantee. The new algorithm transforms the original continuous GOP into a discrete search problem, thereby guaranteeing to find the position of the global minimum in a reasonably short time. The algorithm is first applied to the golf course problem, which serves as a litmus test for its performance in the presence of both complete and degraded additional information. GMG is further assessed on a set of standard benchmark functions and then applied to various realizations of the MPR problem.

The authors report total ionizing dose and single event effects on 2Gb Samsung flash memory devices after exposure to 200 MeV protons to various doses up to 83 krad(Si). They characterize observed failures and single event upsets on 22 devices from two different lots. Devices from both lots are robust to greater than 20 krad(Si) although they see evidence for lot-to-lot variation where only one lot appears robust up to about 50 krad(Si). Single event upsets are observed at a relatively low rate and are consistent with single isolated bit flips within registers that transfer bits to and from the flash memory cells.

Differences caused by BPM reading one bunch and multi-bunch average need to be well understood before the beam parameters, such as the synchrotron tune, betatron tune, and chromaticity, are extracted from those BPM data. It is easy to perform such a study using numerical simulation other than modifying the BPM electronics.

The purpose of this task is to characterize the physical properties of kaolin/sand slurry used to test the performance of a new submersible mixer pump which is undergoing performance testing at the TNT Waste Tank mockup facility. Three different sample locations, the SMP cooling water exit, the SMP fluid flow field, and SMP effective cleaning radius were used for sampling over the seven day test. The physical properties determinations for the kaolin/sand slurry samples include rheology, weight percent total solids (wt TS), density, and particle size distribution were requested, though not all these determinations were performed on all the samples. The physical properties determinations are described in more detail in section 1.0. Measurements were performed at Savannah River National Laboratory in accordance with the Technical Assistance Request (TAR)1. The data, average of two measurements, is shown in the table below. This data clearly shows that the SMP-CWE samples contained more so lids than those at other sample locations for a given sample day. The SMP-FFF and SMP-ECR were similar in solids content. The rheology of the samples is dependent on the wt solids concentration and are all within the bounds stated in the TAR.

Porous solids such as activated alumina, silica and molecular sieves generally contain significant amounts of hydrogen atoms in the form of H2O or OH even at high temperature and low humidity environment. A significant amount of this hydrogen is available for reversible isotopic exchange. This exchange reaction is slow under normal conditions and does not render itself to practical applications. But if the exchange kinetics is improved this reaction has the potential to be used for tritium removal from gas streams or for hydrogen isotopic separation.The use of catalysts to improve the exchange kinetics between hydrogen isotope in the gas phase and that in the solid phase was investigated. Granules of alumina, silica and molecular sieve were coated with platinum or palladium as the catalyst. The granules were packed in a 2-cm diameter column for isotope exchange tests. Gas streams containing different concentrations of deuterium in nitrogen or argon were fed through the protium saturated column. Isotope concentration in column effluent was monitored to generate isotope break-through curves. The curves were analyzed to produce information on the kinetics and capacity of the material. The results showed that all materials tested provided some extent of isotope exchange but some were superior …

This report presents wind speed and direction summaries for a wide area of the Southeastern United States (including EPA Region 4) and portions of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys in a monthly time series format that is further broken down for eight hours of the day (01:00, 04:00, 07:00, 10:00, 13:00, 16:00, 19:00, 22:00 EST). The data used for these summaries were obtained from the International Station MeteorologicalClimate Summary (FCCA, 1996), a publicly available source of tabular data from weather stations around the world distributed through the National Climatic Data Center. The advantage of examining the data in the form presented in this report is that it is far easier to examine and understand regional and diurnal weather patterns than would be possible with the tabular data in its original format. The winds presented here can be viewed online in any of three formats through an Internet link. The first format is the traditional wind rose as used in our earlier reports f or 13 stations in the Southeast, c.f., Weber, Buckley, and Parker 2002 and Weber, Buckley, and Kurzeja 2003. The second format is the mode, or most frequent wind direction sector from the wind rose plots (i.e., …

This work studies the stability of the toroidicity-induced Alfven Eigenmodes (TAE) in the proposed ITER burning plasma experiment, which can be driven unstable by two groups of energetic particles, the 3.5-MeV {alpha}-particle fusion products and the tangentially injected 1-MeV beam ions. Both species are super-Alfvenic but they have different pitch-angle distributions and the drive for the same pressure gradients is typically stronger from co-injected beam ions as compared with the isotropically distributed {alpha}-particles. This study includes the effect of anisotropy of the beam-ion distribution function on TAE growth rate directly via the additional velocity space drive and indirectly in terms of the enhanced effect of the resonant particle phase space density. For near parallel injection, TAEs are marginally unstable if the injection aims at the plasma center where the ion Landau damping is strong, whereas with the off-axis neutral-beam injection the instability is stronger with the growth rate near 0.5% of TAE mode frequency. In contrast, for perpendicular beam injection TAEs are predicted to be stabilized in nominal ITER discharges. In addition, the effect of TAEs on the fast-ion beta profiles is evaluated on the bases of a quasi-linear diffusion model which makes use of analytic expressions for the local …

Weekly newspaper from Holliday, 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.

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

As adaptive optics (AO) matures, it becomes possible to envision AO systems oriented towards specific important scientific goals rather than general-purpose systems. One such goal for the next decade is the direct imaging detection of extrasolar planets. An 'extreme' adaptive optics (ExAO) system optimized for extrasolar planet detection will have very high actuator counts and rapid update rates - designed for observations of bright stars - and will require exquisite internal calibration at the nanometer level. In addition to extrasolar planet detection, such a system will be capable of characterizing dust disks around young or mature stars, outflows from evolved stars, and high Strehl ratio imaging even at visible wavelengths. The NSF Center for Adaptive Optics has carried out a detailed conceptual design study for such an instrument, dubbed the eXtreme Adaptive Optics Planet Imager or XAOPI. XAOPI is a 4096-actuator AO system, notionally for the Keck telescope, capable of achieving contrast ratios >10{sup 7} at angular separations of 0.2-1'. ExAO system performance analysis is quite different than conventional AO systems - the spatial and temporal frequency content of wavefront error sources is as critical as their magnitude. We present here an overview of the XAOPI project, and an error …

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) established an area monitoring dosimeter program in accordance with Article 514 of the Department of Energy (DOE) Radiological Control Manual (RCM) in January 1993. This program is to minimize the number of areas requiring issuance of personnel dosimeters and to demonstrate that doses outside Radiological Buffer Areas are negligible. In accordance with 10 CFR Part 835.402 (a)(1)-(4) and Article 511.1 of the PNNL Radiological Control Program Description, personnel dosimetry shall be provided to (1) radiological workers who are likely to receive at least 100 mrem annually, and (2) declared pregnant workers, minors, and members of the public who are likely to receive at least 50 mrem annually. Program results for calendar years 1993-2003 confirm that personnel dosimetry is not needed for individuals located in areas monitored by the program.

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A micro-mechanistic understanding of bone fracture that encompasses how cracks interact with the underlying microstructure and defines their local failure mode is lacking, despite extensive research on the response of bone to a variety of factors like aging, loading, and/or disease. Micro-mechanical models for fracture incorporating such local failure criteria have been widely developed for metallic and ceramic materials systems; however, few such deliberations have been undertaken for the fracture of bone. In fact, although the fracture event in mineralized tissues such as bone is commonly believed to be locally strain controlled, until recently there has been little experimental evidence to support this widely held belief. In the present study, a series of in vitro experiments involving a double-notch bend test geometry are performed in order to shed further light on the nature of the local cracking events that precede catastrophic fracture in bone and to define their relationship to the microstructure. Specifically, crack-microstructure interactions are examined to determine the salient toughening mechanisms in human cortical bone and to characterize how these may affect the anisotropy in fracture properties. Based on preliminary micro-mechanical models of these processes, in particular crack deflection and uncracked ligament bridging, the relative importance of these …

A technique for creating renewable reflective optics suitable for focusing of pulsed laser beams is proposed. It is based on the heating of the surface of a planar reflecting slab by an auxiliary heating source that causes thermal expansion of the slab material and creates a desired surface relief. The presence of this relief is a transient phenomenon, but, for short-enough main pulse, this does not cause any problems. If the surface is damaged by the main pulse, the shifting of the slab and repeating the whole cycle allows recreating the transient mirror. Favorable features of this approach include controlling the optics ''at a distance'', without any direct mechanical contact. Detailed discussion of the possibilities provided by this technique for the focusing of x-ray beams at the planned LCLS facility at Stanford is presented. It is concluded that 10-fold increase of intensity of 8-keV beam and 100-fold increase of intensity of 0.8 keV beam is possible. A set of design equations and constraint is formulated. The analysis presented can be used as a template for analyses of similar transient optical systems for the UV and optical range.

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