A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) military construction program provides funding for construction projects in the United States and overseas, and funds most base realignment and closure costs. Recent Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) estimates indicate that it would cost as much as $164 billion to improve facilities to a level that would meet the department's goals. GAO was asked to report on the (1) steps OSD has taken to enhance program management, (2) process of prioritizing and resourcing military construction projects, and (3) advantages and disadvantages of increasing the current funding thresholds for constructing and repairing facilities."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In June 2003, we reported that over 60 federal programs can fund transportation services for certain "transportation-disadvantaged" populations (such as some elderly persons, persons with disabilities, or low-income persons) that lack the ability to provide their own transportation or have difficulty accessing conventional public transportation, but that several obstacles impede coordination of these programs. Most of the programs are administered by four federal departments--Transportation, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education. Coordinating these disparate federal efforts could result in more efficient use of federal resources and in improved services for these transportation-disadvantaged populations. In fact, some local areas that have overcome existing obstacles and successfully coordinated the services offered by federal programs and others available in their area have realized improved customer service and substantial cost savings. To promote and encourage further coordination of the transportation services provided by these programs, we recommended that (1) the Departments of Labor and Education join the Departments of Transportation and Health and Human Services as members of the Coordinating Council on Access and Mobility (Coordinating Council); (2) the members of the Coordinating Council develop and distribute additional guidance to states and …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To assist in deliberations on individual fishing quota (IFQ) programs, GAO determined (1) the methods available for protecting the economic viability of fishing communities and facilitating new entry into IFQ fisheries, (2) the key issues faced by fishery managers in protecting communities and facilitating new entry, and (3) the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the IFQ system and the fishery cooperative approach."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "While there is no universally accepted definition, the term "predatory lending" is used to characterize a range of practices, including deception, fraud, or manipulation, that a mortgage broker or lender may use to make a loan with terms that are disadvantageous to the borrower. Concerns about predatory lending have increasingly garnered the attention and concern of policymakers, consumer advocates and participants in the mortgage industry. This statement is based on GAO's report, released at today's hearing, and discusses federal and state efforts to combat predatory lending; factors that may make elderly consumers more susceptible to predatory lending; the roles of consumer education, mortgage counseling, and loan disclosures in preventing predatory lending; and how the secondary mortgage market can affect predatory lending."

Dihadron fragmentation functions and their evolution arestudied in the process of e+e- annihilation. Under the collinearfactorization approximation and facilitated by the cut-vertex technique,the two hadron inclusive cross section at leading order (LO) is shown tofactorize into a short distance parton cross section and a long distancedihadron fragmentation function. We provide the definition of such adihadron fragmentation function in terms of parton matrix elements andderive its DGLAP evolution equation at leading log. The evolutionequation for the non-singlet quark fragmentation function is solvednumerically with a simple ansatz for the initial condition and resultsare presented for cases of physical interest.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news 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 a commissioners court may delegate its authority under Local Government Code section 111.070(c) to amend the county budget by transferring amounts between budgeted items (RQ-0100-GA)

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 it is a violation of article III, section 53 of the Texas Constitution for a county to pay court reporters a fee for a transcript in addition to the court reporter's salary (RQ-0101-GA)

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 Terrell County may expend venue-project salesand use taxes collected under chapter 334 of the Local Government Code for certain improvements (RQ-0103-GA)

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 the offense of "racing on the highway" under section 545.420 of the Transportation Code, when committed by a juvenile, is "delinquent conduct," "conduct indicating a need for supervision," or a "traffic offense," as those terms are defined by the Family Code (RQ-0105-GA)

This report consists of campaign finance law with a legal analysis of the supreme court ruling in McConnell v. FEC.

NAFEMS was originally founded at the United Kingdom's National Engineering Laboratory as the National Agency for Finite Element Methods and Standards. It was subsequently privatized as the not-for-profit organization NAFEMS, Ltd., but retains its mission ''To promote the safe and reliable use of finite element and related technology''. That mission has been pursued in part by sponsoring a series of studies that published benchmarked deemed suitable to assess the basic accuracy of engineering simulation tools. The early studies focused on FEA for linear solid and structural mechanics and then extended to nonlinear solid mechanics, eventually including contact. These benchmarks are complemented by educational materials concerning analysis technologies and approaches. More recently NAFEMS is expanding to consider thermal-fluid problems. Further information is available at www.nafems.org. Essentially all major commercial firms selling FEA for solid mechanics are members of NAFEMS and it seemed clear that Methods Development Group should leverage from this information resource, too. In 2002, W Program ASCI funding purchased a three-year membership in NAFEMS. In the summer of 2003 the first author hosted a summer graduate student to begin modeling some of the benchmark problems. We concentrated on NIKE3D, as the benchmarks are most typically problems most naturally run …

This document contains the full text of The Clean Air Act, as amended through P.L. 108-201, February 24, 2004.

Research projects supported by the program include items such as dating geological material and producing high current super conducting magnets. The funding continues to give small colleges and universities the valuable opportunity to use the NSC for teaching courses in nuclear processes; specifically neutron activation analysis and gamma spectroscopy. The Reactor Sharing Program has supported the construction of a Fast Neutron Flux Irradiator for users at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the University of Houston. This device has been characterized and has been found to have near optimum neutron fluxes for A39/Ar 40 dating. Institution final reports and publications resulting from the use of these funds are on file at the Nuclear Science Center.

One of the main areas of research in the last two years in this program has been the properties of grain boundaries in perovskite and fluorite structure materials.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) undulator line will consist of 33 undulator segments separated by breaks of two different lengths. The undulator segments are 3.4-m-long permanent-magnet planar hybrid devices with a period length of 30 mm and a magnetic gap of approximately 6 mm. Focusing quadrupoles, in a FODO lattice, and electron-beam diagnostics will be located in the breaks between undulator segments. Every third break will be longer in order to also accommodate x-ray diagnostics. Thus, taking the alternating focusing and defocusing quadrupoles into account, the ''super-period'' length before the undulator line repeats itself is six undulator segments. For additional details on the LCLS project and the undulator line, please refer to the conceptual design report (CDR). A full-length prototype undulator segment has been designed, manufactured and tested, and this document provides a comprehensive report of our experience with the prototype. It contains sections on the overall design philosophy and presents many important measurements including magnetic measurements of the magnet blocks, as well as of the assembled device, and mechanical and thermal measurements. It also contains a summary section (section 5) and one section that summarizes some remaining issues being investigated (section 6).

The top quark is currently only observed at the Tevatron, where it is mainly produced in t{bar t} pairs. Due to the very high mass of the top quark compared to the other quarks and the gauge bosons, it is expected to play a special role in electroweak symmetry breaking. Therefore it might be especially sensitive to new physics. Measurements of various production and decay quantities of the top quark could lead to discoveries of physics beyond the standard model. Several such measurements were performed by the CDF collaboration during Run1 of the Tevatron. These measurements and first results from CDF in Run2 are presented.

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

Single crystal samples of micron dimensions oriented in the [001] direction were shortened 10 to 40% in uniaxial compression with superposed hydrostatic pressure to begin investigation of how the onset of yielding evolves with pressure. A testing machine based on opposed anvil geometry with precision pneumatic control of the applied force and capability to measure sub micron displacements was developed to produce shape changing deformation at pressure. The experiments extend observations of pressure dependent deformation to {approx}5Gpa at shortening rates of {approx}2*10{sup -4}. Samples have been recovered for post run characterization and analysis to determine if deformation mechanisms are altered by pressure. Experiments under hydrostatic pressure provide insight into the nature of materials under extreme conditions, and also provide a means for altering deformation behavior in a controlled fashion. The approach has a long history demonstrating that pressure enhances ductility in general, and produces enhanced hardening relative to that expected from normal cold work in the BCC metals Mo, Ta and Nb{sup 2}. The pressure hardening is in excess of that predicted from the measured increase in shear modulus at pressure, and therefore is likely due to a dislocation mechanism, such as suppression of kink pair formation or the interaction …

With the operation of the RHIC heavy ion program, the theoretical understanding of QCD at finite temperature and density has become increasingly important. Though QCD at finite temperature has been extensively studied using lattice Monte-Carlo simulations over the past twenty years, most physical questions relevant for RHIC (and future) heavy ion experiments remain open. In lattice QCD at finite temperature and density there have been at least two major advances in recent years. First, for the first time calculations of real time quantities, like meson spectral functions have become available. Second, the lattice study of the QCD phase diagram and equation of state have been extended to finite baryon density by several groups. Both issues were extensively discussed in the course of the workshop. A real highlight was the study of the QCD phase diagram in (T, {mu})-plane by Z. Fodor and S. Katz and the determination of the critical end-point for the physical value of the pion mass. This was the first time such lattice calculations at, the physical pion mass have been performed. Results by Z Fodor and S. Katz were obtained using a multi-parameter re-weighting method. Other determinations of the critical end point were also presented, in …

This months issue has the following articles: (1)''Computing Science: One Arrow in the Quiver for Homeland Security''--Commentary by Wayne Shotts; (2) ''On the Front Lines of Biodefense''--The Laboratory's pathogen bioinformatics group is developing ways to rapidly identify microbes that could pose a threat to the nation's citizens, livestock, and crops. (3) ''Defending against Corrosion''--Livermore researchers are designing a rugged system to prevent nuclear wastes from seeping into the environment at the proposed underground repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. (4) ''Engine Shows Diesel Efficiency without the Emissions''--Computer models are helping Laboratory engineers better understand the homogeneous compression charge ignition engine, a fuel-efficient engine with reduced emissions.

Over half a century ago, von Neumann and Richtmyer [1] introduced the idea of adding artificial viscosity to the Euler equations in order to help stabilize shock calculations. Their ideas regarding artificial viscosity influenced Smagorinsky [2, 3] in his development of a subgrid-scale model designed to match the Kolmogorov spectrum for atmospheric turbulence (C. E. Leith, private communication). Since that time, numerous artificial viscosity formulations have been proposed for simulating both shocks and turbulence [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Over the years however, a rift has developed between shock-capturing (monotonicity-preserving) and turbulence-capturing (large-eddy simulation) methods. Artificial viscosities for shock-capturing typically depend on sound speed, which makes them unsuitable for low Mach number flows. On the other hand, subgrid-scale models, customized for incompressible turbulence, usually fail to capture shocks in a monotonic fashion. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an artificial viscosity suitable for computing shock-turbulence interactions. This is accomplished by extending the model of Cook and Cabot [10] to multi-dimensions.

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In 2002, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) proposed the concept for a state-of-the-science appraisal of climate models to be performed approximately every two years. Motivation for this idea arose from the perceived needs of the international modeling groups and the broader climate research community to document progress more frequently than provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports. A committee of external reviewers, which included senior researchers from four leading international modeling centers, supported the concept by stating in its review: ''The panel enthusiastically endorses the suggestion that PCMDI develop an independent appraisal of coupled model performance every 2-3 years. This would provide a useful 'mid-course' evaluation of modeling progress in the context of larger IPCC and national assessment activities, and should include both coupled and single-component model evaluations.''