A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The State Department has determined that about 80 percent of overseas U.S. diplomatic facilities lack adequate security and may be vulnerable to terrorist attack. In September 1998, State expanded its capital construction program to accelerate replacing its most vulnerable embassies and consulates by acquiring sites and preparing plans at 10 priority locations. This report summarizes (1) the status of the 10 priority embassy and consulate construction projects and (2) State's plans for the overall construction program. As of November 2000, seven projects are in the construction phase. The remaining three projects are on hold pending agreement between State and Congress about the Department's construction proposals. Although State envisions a long-term, multi-billion dollar program and has ranked more than 180 facilities it may need to replace, it has not prepared a long-term capital construction plan that identifies (1) proposed construction project's cost estimates and schedules and (2) estimated annual funding requirements for the overall program."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 1998, the Navy consolidated the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and the Naval Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Hawaii. Because of concerns about some aspects of the consolidation, the Navy began a test project, commonly called the Pearl Harbor pilot, to determine if integrating the management, operations, and funding of the shipyard and the intermediate maintenance facility can result in greater efficiency and lower overall ship maintenance costs. In September 1999, GAO reported that the preliminary results of the ongoing Pearl Harbor pilot were mixed and recommended that the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Navy address unresolved issues related to the financial management of the consolidation as the Navy proceeds with similar consolidations in other locations. This report updates GAO's earlier report and discusses whether (1) the Navy has provided adequate cost visibility and accountability over the consolidation, (2) DOD and the Navy have resolved other issues related to the financial structure for consolidations at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere, and (3) the consolidation has generated greater efficiency and lower costs for ship maintenance at Pearl Harbor. GAO found that the Navy still has not provided adequate …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) third expenditure plan for its systems modernization project. GAO found that the plan satisfied the conditions specified in Treasury's 1998 and 1999 appropriations acts and that IRS was making progress towards satisfying Congress' direction on the Custodial Accounting Project (CAP) and Security and Technology Infrastructure Release (STIR) Project. Although IRS has made significant progress in establishing effective modernization management capability, important and challenging work remains to ensure that the systems work as intended. GAO also found that five modernization initiatives experienced schedule delays or cost increases, each of which IRS disclosed in the third plan. However, the third plan did not address whether projects' prior commitments for delivery of promised systems capabilities and benefit/business value were being met. IRS used contractor-provided "rough order-of-magnitude" estimates in preparing its third expenditure plan. However, consistent with its established practice, IRS planned to validate the third plan's estimates as part of its negotiating and definitizing contract task orders. For IRS' second expenditure plan, this process resulted in finalized contract costs that were $9 million under the "rough order-of-magnitude" estimates in the plan."

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a school district may operate a school outside the district;s geographic boundaries (RQ-0273-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether section 32.019 of the Government Code authorizes the Texas Education Agency to release the Texas Legislative Council student information that is confidential under federal law (RQ-0312-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Procedures governing disciplinary action against an employee of a sheriff's department covered by a county civil service system (RQ-0267-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Applicability of various state statutes to local government corporations created under chapter 431 of the Transportation Code (RQ-0629-JC)

This report discusses the efforts of the federal and state initiatives to integrate acute and long-term care, with a n eye toward providing Congress with the necessary information with which to consider future action in the area.

This report summarizes current housing issues, cites legislative proposals, and in some cases, presents brief pro/con discussions.

We present angle-resolved photoemission measurements forultrathin In films on Si(111). Depending on the coverage, this systemself-organizes into a metallic monolayer with either 4x1 or sqrt7 x sqrt3symmetry relative to the substrate. Electronically, they behave likeideal one- and two-dimensional electron gases (1DEG and 2DEG),respectively. The 4x1 system has atomic chains of In whose energy bandsdisperse only parallel to the chains, while for the sqrt7 x sqrt3 system,the dominant reciprocal space features (in both diffraction andbandstructure) resemble a pseudo-square lattice with only weakersecondary features relating to the sqrt7 x sqrt3 periodicity. In bothmaterials the electrons show coupling to the structure. The 1DEG couplesstrongly to phonons of momentum 2kF, leading to an 8x"2" Peierls-likeinsulating ground state. The 2DEG appears to be partially stabilized byelectron gap formation at the sqrt 7 x sqrt3 zone boundary.

During 8 GeV antiproton transfers between the Accumulator to the Main Injector, the antiprotons must travel through four separate beam lines, AP3, AP1, P2, and P1. This note describes the optimization of a single lattice that describes these beam lines for 8 GeV antiproton transfers from the Accumulator to the Main Injector and 8 GeV proton transfers from the Main Injector to the Accumulator.

The purpose of this fire hazards analysis (FHA) is to assess the risk from fire within individual fire areas at the Busted Butte Test Facility and to ascertain whether the DOE fire safety objectives are met. The objective, identified in DOE Order 420.1, Section 4.2, is to establish requirements for a comprehensive fire and related hazards protection program for facilities sufficient to minimize the potential for: (1) The occurrence of a fire related event. (2) A fire that causes an unacceptable on-site or off-site release of hazardous or radiological material that will threaten the health and safety of employees. (3) Vital DOE programs suffering unacceptable interruptions as a result of fire and related hazards. (4) Property losses from a fire and related events exceeding limits established by DOE. Critical process controls and safety class systems being damaged as a result of a fire and related events.

Data obtained through scientific observations are often contaminated by noise and artifacts from various sources. As a result, a first step in mining these data is to isolate the signal of interest by minimizing the effects of the contaminations. Once the data has been cleaned or de-noised, data mining can proceed as usual. In this paper, we describe our work in denoising astronomical images from the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters (FIRST) survey. We are mining this survey to detect radio-emitting galaxies with a bent-double morphology. This task is made difficult by the noise in the images caused by the processing of the sensor data. We compare three different approaches to de-noising: thresholding of wavelet coefficients advocated in the statistical community, traditional Altering methods used in the image processing community, and a simple thresholding scheme proposed by FIRST astronomers. While each approach has its merits and pitfalls, we found that for our purpose, the simple thresholding scheme worked relatively well for the FIRST dataset.

This report provides information about A Brief History and Summary of Recent Supreme Court Decisions and Proposed Constitutional Amendment on Flag Protection.This report is divided into two reports.The first report gives a brief history of the flag protection issue and the other summarizes the two decisions of the United States supreme court.

This document defines the detailed NIF full system shot procedure to obtain 8% power balance as specified by the SDR002 3.2.1.04. Because the 48 quads of the NIF will be set up over a period of five years, obtaining power balance will naturally be accomplished in two steps. First, as each quad is brought online, the four laser beams within each quad will be tuned by setting the PABTS splitter ratios so that each beam will give the same laser power on target during low energy square pulse shots. During the quad activation period all of the technical tools and procedures will be developed that are needed for attaining full laser power balance. After the initial settings of the 48 PABTS, if no other tuning is done the overall NIF power balance is expected to be about <15%. In the second step, an iteration procedure with approximately 18 full laser system shots will be needed to obtain 8% power balance by tuning out the remaining systematic differences among the quads to an acceptable small difference of 2% rms (at 3{omega}). This rms difference is smaller than the expected variation of the injection energy or the amplifier gain, and is also …

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This is the second of two papers describing the application of simulation-optimization methods to a gas storage field development planning problem. The first paper began by giving a detailed description of the field and earlier efforts to model the effects of selected field development options on the field's productivity. It then outlined the basic steps required to apply a combination of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the genetic algorithm (GA) to explore a much larger universe of field development planning options. Familiarity with the contents of the first paper is a prerequisite for understanding the material presented in this second paper. The optimized solutions to the planning problem presented in the first paper were based on a deterministic, ''best guess'' view of the field's reservoir properties. However, practical field development planning dictates that at least some of the uncertainties associated with these properties be taken into account. This second paper describes procedures and presents results showing how the ANN-GA approach to optimization can be extended to accommodate three sources of uncertainty pertinent to the field being studied: (1) Alternative hypotheses regarding the permeabilities in a key region of the field; (2) Uncertainty regarding the likely success of remediating existing wells; …

This report discusses the process for U.S. involvement in each of the seven multilateral development institutions which the U.S. is a part of. The U.S. Treasury Department manages U.S. participation, in consultation with other agencies. Congress has a major role in the formulation of U.S. policy, though this differs in several important respects from the role it exercises over U.S. agencies.

Newsletter of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service discussing topics related to economic aspects of raising dairy cows, dairy production, and managing dairy operations.

The Climate Change Technology Initiative (CCTI) was the Clinton Administration's package of R&D (to develop renewable energy sources and more energy efficient technologies), targeted tax credits (to encourage purchase and deployment of more efficient technologies), and voluntary information programs (to help businesses and schools be better informed when making purchasing and operating decisions that involve energy use and emissions). This report describes the R&D, voluntary information programs, and funding aspects of the CCTI.

This report focuses solely on the accumulation of uranium and plutonium during In-Tank Precipitation process (ITP) processing and precipitate storage. The concentration of uranium and plutonium from solution into the smaller volume of precipitate represents a possible concern for criticality.

The emergence of scalable computer architectures using clusters of PCs or PC-SMPs with commodity networking has made them attractive platforms for high-end scientific computing. Currently, message passing (MP) and shared address space (SAS) are the two leading programming paradigms for these systems. MP has been standardized with MPI, and is the most common and mature parallel programming approach. However, MP code development can be extremely difficult, especially for irregularly structured computations. SAS offers substantial ease of programming, but may suffer from performance limitations due to poor spatial locality and high protocol overhead. In this paper, they compare the performance of and programming effort required for six applications under both programming models on a 32-CPU PC-SMP cluster. Our application suite consists of codes that typically do not exhibit scalable performance under shared-memory programming due to their high communication-to-computation ratios and complex communication patterns. Results indicate that SAS can achieve about half the parallel efficiency of MPI for most of the applications; however, on certain classes of problems, SAS performance is competitive with MPI.

Modeling, in conjunction with testing, is a rich source of insight. Model parameters are easily controlled and monitoring can be done unobtrusively. The ability to inject faults without otherwise affecting performance is particularly critical. Many iterations can be done quickly with a model while varying parameters and conditions based on a small number of validation tests. The objective of Model-Based Reliability Analysis (MBRA) is to identify ways to capitalize on the insights gained from modeling to make both qualitative and quantitative statements about product reliability. MBRA will be developed and exercised in the realm of weapon system development and maintenance, where the challenges of severe environmental requirements, limited production quantities, and use of one-shot devices can make testing prohibitively expensive. However, the general principles will also be applicable to other product types.

It is well known that magnetic exchange coupling across the ferromagnet--antiferromagnet interface results in a unidirectional magnetic anisotropy of the ferromagnetic layer, called exchange bias. Despite large experimental and theoretical efforts, the origin of exchange bias is still controversial, mainly because detection of the interfacial magnetic structure is difficult. We have applied photoelectron emission microscopy (PEEM) on several ferromagnet - antiferromagnet thin-film structures and microscopically imaged the ferromagnetic and the antiferromagnetic structure with high spatial resolution. Taking advantage of the surface sensitivity and elemental specificity of PEEM, the magnetic configuration and critical properties such as the Neel temperature were determined on LaFeO{sub 3} and NiO thin films and single crystals. On samples coated with a ferromagnetic layer, we microscopically observe exchange coupling across the interface, causing a clear correspondence of the domain structures in the adjacent ferromagnet and antiferromagnet. Field dependent measurements reveal a strong uniaxial anisotropy in individual ferromagnetic domains. A local exchange bias was observed even in not explicitly field-annealed samples, caused by interfacial uncompensated magnetic spins. These experiments provide highly desired information on the relative orientation of electron spins at the interface between ferromagnets and antiferromagnets.