A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "More small businesses are turning to subcontracting as a way to participate in the federal government's $250 billion procurement program. DOD, accounting for about two-thirds of federal procurements, has a critical role in providing opportunities to small businesses through subcontracting programs such as the Test Program for Negotiation of Comprehensive Small Business Subcontracting Plans (Test Program). In addition, Congress raised concerns about the potential for small businesses to lose opportunities to firms performing work outside of the United States. GAO was asked to review (1) DOD's assessment of the Test Program's effectiveness, (2) the performance of contractors participating in the Test Program, (3) the Defense Contract Management Agency's (DCMA) oversight of contractors' small business subcontracting efforts, and (4) the extent and reasons contractors are subcontracting with businesses performing outside the U.S."

This project consists of two activities. Task A, Simulations and Measurements, combines all the material model development and associated numerical work with the materials-oriented experimental activities. The goal of this effort is to provide an improved understanding of dynamic material properties and to provide accurate numerical representations of those properties for use in analysis codes. Task B, ALE3D Development, involves general development activities in the ALE3D code with the focus of improving simulation capabilities for problems of mutual interest to DoD and DOE. Emphasis is on problems involving multi-phase flow, blast loading of structures and system safety/vulnerability studies.

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This report introduces the adverse effect wage rate (AEWR) and the concerns out of which it grew, from the perspective of labor policy (not of immigration policy). American agricultural employers have long utilized foreign workers on a temporary basis, regarding them as an important manpower resource. Often employed at low wages and under adverse conditions, such alien workers, some argue, may compete unfairly with U.S. workers. To mitigate any "adverse effect" for the domestic workforce, a system of wage floors was developed that applies, variously, both to alien and citizen workers.

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On October 30-31, 2003 over 60 scientists gathered at ANL to discuss potential science that could be done with a fully operational user facility dedicated to delivering widely tunable, short pulse, high peak power vacuum ultraviolet light. The charge given to the workshop by J. Murray Gibson, ANL Associate Lab Director for the Advanced Photon Source, included the following two points: (1) What are the scientifically important experiments that can only be done with the proposed ALFF facility? (2) Are the combined ALFF characteristics of pulse energy, tunability, pulse length, and coherence sufficiently unique to justify establishing a user facility at this time? To fulfill this two-point charge, special emphasis was placed by the workshop committee on two goals. First, scientists were invited who work in areas where the lack of powerful, tunable VUV is a limitation to speak about their current research and to speculate on the science that would be uniquely possible with the ALFF. Second, while many of the same scientists have expertise in using lasers and other VUV sources, it was considered crucial to invite scientists explicitly working on the development of tabletop VUV systems. In addition to addressing the second charge question, the purpose of …

In the next decades, oil exploration by majors and independents will increasingly be in remote, inaccessible areas, or in areas where there has been extensive shallow exploration but deeper exploration potential may remain; areas where the collection of data is expensive, difficult, or even impossible, and where the most efficient use of existing data can drive the economics of the target. The ability to read hydrocarbon chemistry in terms of subsurface migration processes by relating it to the evolution of the basin and fluid migration is perhaps the single technological capability that could most improve our ability to explore effectively because it would allow us to use a vast store of existing or easily collected chemical data to determine the major migration pathways in a basin and to determine if there is deep exploration potential. To this end a the DOE funded a joint effort between California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and GeoGroup Inc. to assemble a representative set of maturity and maturation kinetic models and develop an advanced basin model able to predict the chemistry of hydrocarbons in a basin from this input data. The four year project is now completed and has produced set of public domain …

Argonne National Laboratory's efforts toward researching, proposing and then building a high-energy proton accelerator have been discussed in a handful of studies. In the main, these have concentrated on the intense maneuvering amongst politicians, universities, government agencies, outside corporations, and laboratory officials to obtain (or block) approval and/or funds or to establish who would have control over budgets and research programs. These ''top-down'' studies are very important but they can also serve to divorce such proceedings from the individuals actually involved in the ground-level research which physically served to create theories, designs, machines, and experiments. This can lead to a skewed picture, on the one hand, of a lack of effect that so-called scientific and technological factors exert and, on the other hand, of the apparent separation of the so-called social or political from the concrete practice of doing physics. An exception to this approach can be found in the proceedings of a conference on ''History of the ZGS'' held at Argonne at the time of the Zero Gradient Synchrotron's decommissioning in 1979. These accounts insert the individuals quite literally as they are, for the most part, personal reminiscences of those who took part in these efforts on the ground …

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From Summary: "This report discusses significant legislative provisions in the two principal bills that are likely to be the subject of congressional discussion in the coming weeks and months to reauthorize federal highway, highway safety, and transit programs."

This report presents information on the history of federal regulation of the cable television industry and background information on cable rates and other cable industry issues.

This report discusses the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which seeks to spur economic development and help integrate Africa into the world trading system by granting trade preferences and other benefits to Sub-Saharan African countries that meet certain criteria relating to market reform and human rights.

A magnetocaloric pump provides a simple means of pumping fluid using only external thermal and magnetic fields. The principle, which can be traced back to the early work of Rosensweig, is straightforward. Magnetic materials tend to lose their magnetization as the temperature approaches the material's Curie point. Exposing a column of magnetic fluid to a uniform magnetic field coincident with a temperature gradient produces a pressure gradient in the magnetic fluid. As the fluid heats up, it loses its attraction to the magnetic field and is displaced by cooler fluid. The impact of such a phenomenon is obvious: fluid propulsion with no moving mechanical parts. Until recently, limitations in the magnetic and thermal properties of conventional materials severely limited practical operating pressure gradients. However, recent advancements in the design of metal substituted magnetite enable fine control over both the magnetic and thermal properties of magnetic nanoparticles, a key element in colloidal based magnetic fluids (ferrofluids). This manuscript begins with a basic description of the process and previous limitations due to material properties. This is followed by a review of existing methods of synthesizing magnetic nanoparticles as well as an introduction to a new approach based on thermophilic metal-reducing bacteria. We …

The purpose of this Model Report (REV02) is to document the unsaturated zone (UZ) models used to evaluate the potential effects of coupled thermal-hydrological-chemical (THC) processes on UZ flow and transport. This Model Report has been developed in accordance with the ''Technical Work Plan for: Performance Assessment Unsaturated Zone'' (Bechtel SAIC Company, LLC (BSC) 2002 [160819]). The technical work plan (TWP) describes planning information pertaining to the technical scope, content, and management of this Model Report in Section 1.12, Work Package AUZM08, ''Coupled Effects on Flow and Seepage''. The plan for validation of the models documented in this Model Report is given in Attachment I, Model Validation Plans, Section I-3-4, of the TWP. Except for variations in acceptance criteria (Section 4.2), there were no deviations from this TWP. This report was developed in accordance with AP-SIII.10Q, ''Models''. This Model Report documents the THC Seepage Model and the Drift Scale Test (DST) THC Model. The THC Seepage Model is a drift-scale process model for predicting the composition of gas and water that could enter waste emplacement drifts and the effects of mineral alteration on flow in rocks surrounding drifts. The DST THC model is a drift-scale process model relying on the …