Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a member of the legislature is precluded by article XVI, section 40 of the Texas Constitution from working as an independent contractor on a part-time basis for a county government (ID# 31810)

Under this contract members of the MSU high energy physics group constructed a full-scale Pressurized Drift Tube Chamber intended for the GEM muon system at the SSC. They achieved a position resolution of <90 {mu} over the full 5 m{sup 2} area of the detector. This resolution satisfied the GEM resolution requirements of <100 {mu} by a comfortable margin. Based on their SSC work they developed a new technique for creating wire supports in drift tubes with an overall placement accuracy of <20 {mu}. This technique requires only simple jigging and can be duplicated and operated at low cost. Also, they participated in the design and testing of a hadron calorimeter prototype for GEM. This work lead the authors to develop a semi-automatic welding machine to fuse together two plastic optical fibers. Copies of this machine are currently in use in the CDF endplug upgrade at Fermilab and additional copies are used widely in calorimeter and fiber-tracker construction.

Three-dimensional transient finite element analysis is performed on unstructured grids. A trend toward running larger analysis problems, combined with a desire for interactive animation of analysis results, demands efficient visualization techniques. This paper discusses a set of data structures and algorithms for visualizing transient analysis results on unstructured grids and introduces some modifications in order to better support large grids. In particular, an element grouping approach is used to reduce the amount of memory needed for external surface determination and to speed up ``point in element`` tests. The techniques described lend themselves to visualization of analyses carried out in parallel on a massively parallel computer (MPC).

Previous papers have described a general method for visualizing vector fields that involves drawing many small ``glyphs`` to represent the field. This paper shows how to improve the speed of the algorithm by utilizing hardware support for line drawing and extends the technique from regular to unstructured grids. The new approach can be used to visualize vector fields at arbitrary surfaces within regular and unstructured grids. Applications of the algorithm include interactive visualization of transient electromagnetic fields and visualization of velocity fields in fluid flow problems.

We present a comprehensive performance evaluation of our molecular dynamics code SPaSM on the CM-5 in order to devise optimization strategies for the CM-5, T3D, and RISC workstations. In this analysis, we focus on the effective use of the SPARC microprocessor by performing measurements of instruction set utilization, cache effects, memory access patterns, and pipeline stall cycles. We then show that we can account for more than 99% of observed execution time of our program. Optimization strategies are devised and we show that our highly optimized ANSI C program running only on the SPARC microprocessor of the CM-5 is only twice as slow as our Gordon-Bell prize winning code that utilized the CM-5 vector units. On the CM-5E, we show that this optimized code run faster than the vector unit version. We then apply these techniques to the Cray T3D and measure resulting speedups. Finally, we show that simple optimization strategies are effective on a wide variety of high performance RISC workstations.

This report summarizes the spectral analysis and design of an acousto optic tunable filter (AOTF) imaging spectroradiometer for the project SR003. This system will use passive open-path infrared absorption to detect the presence of various source gases.

The ultimate goal of this project is to develop novel processes for making the conversion of coal into distillable liquids competitive to that of petroleum products in the range of $25/bbl. The objectives of Phase 1 were to determine the utility of new precursors to highly dispersed catalysts for use of syngas atmospheres in coal liquefaction, and to estimate the effect of such implementation on the cost of the final product. The project is divided into three technical tasks. Tasks 1 and 2 are the analyses and liquefaction experiments, respectively, and Task 3 deals with the economic effects of using these methods during coal liquefaction. Results are presented on the following: Analytical Support--screening tests and second-stage conversions; Laboratory-Scale Operations--catalysts, coal conversion in synthetic solvents, Black Thunder screening studies, and two-stage liquefaction experiments; and Technical and economic Assessment--commercial liquefaction plant description, liquefaction plant cost; and economic analysis.