Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO provided information on the Department of Defense's (DOD) internal recovery auditing program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal community and migrant health centers (C/MHC), focusing on: (1) the current status of C/MHCs, the populations they serve, the types of services they provide, and their primary sources of revenue; (2) changes in Medicaid that have had an effect on C/MHCs; (3) how C/MHCs have responded to these and other changes in the health care environment; and (4) assessing the Department of Health and Human Services' actions to monitor C/MHC performance and help them improve operations."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the proposals to change the entire budget process from an annual to a biennial cycle."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the appraisal for the Baca Ranch, focusing on the: (1) extent to which the value established by the owner's appraisal was consistent with the comparable property sales data presented in the appraisal and in the Forest Service's market study; and (2) other key factors that influenced the appraisal's final outcome."

This document summarizes the Tanks Focus Area (TFA's) process of collecting, analyzing, and responding to high-level radioactive tank waste science and technology needs developed from across the DOE complex in FY 2000. The document also summarizes each science and technology need, and provides an initial prioritization of TFA's projected work scope for FY 2001 and FY 2002.

This is the final report for the Project to Enhance Student Science and Engineering Preparation at the Pre-College Level (Project ESEPP) for the period from January 1, 1996 through August 1, 1998. This report summarizes the accomplishments of the program and its ability to meet the objectives described in the original proposal (1990).

This document contains the results of the hazard analysis that has been performed to address Waste Feed Delivery operations and activities.

Sea quark distributions in the nucleon have naively been expected to be generated perturbatively by gluon splitting. In this case, there is no reason for the light quark and anti-quark sea distributions to be different. No asymmetries in the strange or heavy quark sea distributions are predicted in the improved parton model. However,recent experiments have called these naive expectations into question. A violation of the Gottfried sum rule has been measured in several experiments, suggesting that (bar u) < (bar d) in the proton. Additionally, other measurements, while not definitive, show that there may be an asymmetry in the strange and anti-strange quark sea distributions. These effects may require nonperturbative explanations. In this review we first discuss the perturbative aspects of the sea quark distributions. We then describe the experiments that could point to nonperturbative contributions to the nucleon sea. Current phenomenological models that could explain some of these effects are reviewed.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Nonlinear magneto-optical rotation (NMOR) is investigated at highlight powers where the rotation is significantly modified by AC Stark shifts. These shifts are shown to change the overall sign of rotation for closed F-->F+1 transitions as light power is increased. The effect is demonstrated by measurements in rubidium and density matrix calculations. The results are important for applications of nonlinear optical rotation such as sensitive magnetometry.

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On March 9, 2000, the House Committee on the Judiciary reported favorably H.R. 2372. The bill, titled "Private Property Rights Implementation Act of 2000," is aimed principally at lowering the threshold barriers of ripeness and abstention encountered when land owners file in federal court challenging local government actions as "takings." (1) Under the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause (which applies to state and local, not only federal, actions), private property may not be "taken" for public use without just compensation.

With the close of the second Summit of the Americas on April 19, 1998, 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere had formally agreed to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It is a long way from completion, but the prospect of achieving closer regional economic ties is now officially embraced. Except for Mexico, merchandise trade between the United States and Latin America is relatively small, but has been growing steadily this decade, a result of expanding U.S. global trade and reforms in Latin America. Still, some countries in Latin America are more closed to U. S. trade than others, raising the possibility of additional benefits accruing from an FTAA, This report tracks U.S. Latin American trade data in support of congressional interest in the regional trade negotiation process and will be updated as warranted.

In a recent report entitled The Regional Impacts of Climate Change it was concluded that the technological capacity to adapt to climate change is likely to be readily available in North America, but its application will be realized only if the necessary information is available (sufficiently far in advance in relation to the planning horizons and lifetimes of investments) and the institutional and financial capacity to manage change exists. The report also acknowledged that one of the key factors that limit the ability to understand the vulnerability of subregions of North America to climate change, and to develop and implement adaptive strategies to reduce that vulnerability, is the lack of accurate regional projections of climate change, including extreme events. In particular, scientists need to account for the physical-geographic characteristics (e.g., the Great Lakes, coastlines, and mountain ranges) that play a significant role in the North America climate and also need to consider the feedback between the biosphere and atmosphere.

A drift-diffusion transport model has been used to examine the performance capabilities of AlGaN/GaN Npn heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). The Gummel plot from the first GaN-based HBT structure recently demonstrated is adjusted with simulation by using experimental mobility and lifetime reported in the literature. Numerical results have been explored to study the effect of the p-type Mg doping and its incomplete ionization in the base. The high base resistance induced by the deep acceptor level is found to be the cause of limiting current gain values. Increasing the operating temperature of the device activates more carriers in the base. An improvement of the simulated current gain by a factor of 2 to 4 between 25 and 300 C agrees well with the reported experimental results. A preliminary analysis of high frequency characteristics indicates substantial progress of predicted rf performances by operating the device at higher temperature due to a reduced extrinsic base resistivity.

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The resolution of ground-based telescopes is typically limited to {approx}1 second of arc because of the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence. Adaptive optics (AO) technology senses and corrects for the optical distortions due to turbulence hundreds of times per second using high-speed sensors, computers, deformable mirror, and laser technology. The goal of this project is to make AO systems widely useful astronomical tools providing resolutions up to an order of magnitude better than current, ground-based telescopes. Astronomers at the University of California Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton now routinely use the LLNL developed AO system for high resolution imaging of astrophysical objects. We report here on the instrument development progress and on the science observations made with this system during this 3-year ERI project.

Metal-reinforced Al{sub 2}0{sub 3}-matrix composites were prepared using reactive hot pressing. The volume fraction of the reinforcing phase was controlled by the stoichiometry of the particular displacement reaction used. Dense Al{sub 2}0{sub 3}-Ni and Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}-Nb composites were fabricated using this technique. The best combination of strength, 610 MPa, and toughness, 12 MPam{sup 1/2}, was found for the Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}-Ni composites. Indentation cracks and fracture surfaces showed evidence of ductile deformation of the Ni phase. The Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}-Nb composites had high strength, but the toughness was lower than expected due to the poor bonding between the Nb and A1{sub 2}0{sub 3}phases.

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