Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is a retirement savings and investment plan for federal employees, governed by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (Board). The TSP is a defined contribution retirement plan available to eligible federal employees. The TSP had about 2.6 million participants and held about $100.6 billion in Net Assets Available for Benefits as of December 31, 2001, and about 3 million participants and $102.3 billion in Net Assets Available for Benefits as of December 31, 2002. In 1997, the Board awarded a contract to American Management Systems, Inc. (AMS) to develop and implement a new record-keeping system for the TSP. In 2001, after several implementation delays, the Board terminated the contract, and the Board's former Executive Director filed a lawsuit against the contractor on behalf of the TSP. On June 20, 2003, 2 days after we provided a draft of this report to the Board for its review, a settlement between the parties was reached. Then, on June 23, 2003, the net unrecovered cost from the system development failure was allocated to participant account balances as recommended in our draft report. While the loss has …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "It is important to ensure that longterm spending on transportation programs meets the goals of increasing mobility and improving transportation safety. In this testimony, GAO discusses what recently completed work on four transportation programs suggests about challenges and strategies for improving the oversight and use of taxpayer funds. These four programs are (1) the federal-aid highway program, administered by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA); (2) highway safety programs, administered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA); (3) the New Starts program, administered by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA); and (4) the Essential Air Service (EAS) program, administered out of the Office of the Secretary of Transportation. Differences in the structure of these programs have contributed to the challenges they illustrate. The federal-aid highway program uses formulas to apportion funds to the states, the highway safety programs use formulas and grants, the New Starts program uses competitive grants, and the EAS program provides subsidies. For each program, GAO describes in general how the program illustrates a particular challenge in managing or overseeing long-term spending and in particular what challenges and strategies for addressing the challenges GAO and others …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government invests over $11 billion in early childhood education and care programs. These programs exist to ensure that children from low-income families are better prepared to enter school and that their parents have access to early childhood education and care that allow them to obtain and maintain employment. The federal government invests more in Head Start, which was funded at $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2002, than any other early childhood education and care program. Head Start has served over 21 million children at a total cost of $66 billion since it began. The Chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions asked GAO to discuss Head Start--how it fits within the array of early childhood education and care programs available to low-income children and their families and what is known about its effectiveness."

The report is about the FY2002 supplemental and FY2003 Assistance for Colombia and neighbors.

This report discusses the national security problem of China's role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response, including legislation, since the mid-1990's.

This paper focuses on a numerical procedure that addresses the difficulties of dealing with large, finite arrays while preserving the generality and robustness of full-wave methods. We present a fast method based on approximating interactions between sufficiently separated array elements via a relatively coarse interpolation of the Green's function on a uniform grid commensurate with the array's periodicity. The interaction between the basis and testing functions is reduced to a three-stage process. The first stage is a projection of standard (e.g., RWG) subdomain bases onto a set of interpolation functions that interpolate the Green's function on the array face. This projection, which is used in a matrix/vector product for each array cell in an iterative solution process, need only be carried out once for a single cell and results in a low-rank matrix. An intermediate stage matrix/vector product computation involving the uniformly sampled Green's function is of convolutional form in the lateral (transverse) directions so that a 2D FFT may be used. The final stage is a third matrix/vector product computation involving a matrix resulting from projecting testing functions onto the Green's function interpolation functions; the low-rank matrix is either identical to (using Galerkin's method) or similar to that for …

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Evaporation is employed in several places in the Waste Treatment Plant pretreatment process to minimize the volume of waste that must be treated in down-stream vitrification processes. Evaporation is the first unit process in pretreatment (Waste Feed Evaporators), applied before LAW vitrification (Treated Feed Evaporator), and concentrates ion exchange eluate (Cs Eluate Evaporator) prior to HLW vitrification. The goal of the Treated Feed Evaporation process is removal of the maximum water content without producing additional insoluble solids. Prior testing of evaporation systems for process feed was completed to support compliance with regulatory permits and to prepare a model of the evaporation system. These tests also indicated a marked tendency for foaming in the WTP evaporators. To date, evaporation testing and modeling have focused on the Treated feed and Cs eluate evaporation systems. This has been the first work performed that investigates evaporation of secondary-waste recycle streams in the Treated LAW Feed Evaporator. Secondary-waste recycles from the LAW off- gas scrubbing system have been the major contributors to the overall Treated Feed Evaporator recycle volume. Experience from Savannah River Site operations suggests that the introduction of silica- laden recycles to an evaporator along with high-sodium treated LAW can significantly increase the …

President George W. Bush established the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002 as part of his commitment to eliminate inequality for Americans with disabilities. The President directed the Commission to identify policies that could be implemented by Federal, State and local governments to maximize the utility of existing resources, improve coordination of treatments and services, and promote successful community integration for adults with a serious mental illness and children with a serious emotional disturbance.

The overall objective of this project is the three phase development of an Early Entrance Coproduction Plant (EECP) which uses petroleum coke to produce at least one product from at least two of the following three categories: (1) electric power (or heat), (2) fuels, and (3) chemicals using ChevronTexaco's proprietary gasification technology. The object of phase 1 is to determine the feasibility and define the concept for the EECP located at a specific site; develop a Research, Development, and Testing (RD and T) Plan to mitigate technical risks and barriers; and prepare a Preliminary Project Financing Plan. The objective of Phase 2 is to implement the work as outlined in the Phase 1 RD and T Plan to enhance the development and commercial acceptance of coproduction technology. The objective of Phase 3 is to develop an engineering design package and a financing and testing plan for an EECP located at a specific site.

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The goal of this effort was to develop dynamic simulation tools to study and characterize particulate transport in Microfluidic devices. This includes the effects of external fields and near-field particle-particle, particle-surface interactions. The unique aspect of this effort is that we focused on the particles in suspension and rigorously accounted for all of the interactions that they experienced in solution. In contrast, other numerical methods within the program, finite element and finite volume approaches, typically treat the suspended species as non-interacting point particles. Later in the program, some of these approaches incorporated approximations to begin to account for particle-particle interactions. Through the programs (BioFlips and SIMBIOSYS), we developed collaborative relationships with device-oriented efforts. More specifically and at the request of the SIMBIOSYS program manager, we allowed our efforts/milestones to be more guided by the needs of our BioFlips colleagues; therefore, our efforts were focused on the needs of the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Peter Gascoyne), UCDavis (Rosemary Smith), and UC Berkeley (Dorian Liepmann). The first two collaborations involved the development of Dielectrophoresis analysis tools and the later involved the development of suspension and fluid modeling tools for microneedles.

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The first part of this report briefly reviews the judicial evolution of race-based affirmative action, particularly in relation to public education. Recent rulings challenging the use of racial admissions and hiring practices by public educational institutions are then considered for their implications on the future development of affirmative action law.

Quantum-shell corrections are made directly to the finite-temperature Thomas-Fermi-Dirac statistical model of the atom by a partition of the electronic density into bound and free components. The bound component is calculated using analytic basis functions whose parameters are chosen to minimize the energy. Poisson's equation is solved for the modified density, thereby avoiding the need to solve Schroedinger's equation for a self-consistent field. The shock Hugoniot is calculated for aluminum: shell effects characteristic of quantum self-consistent field models are fully captures by the present model.

This quarterly report documents significant achievements in the Enhanced Practical Photosynthetic CO{sub 2} Mitigation project during the period from 4/2/2003 through 7/01/2003. As indicated in the list of accomplishments below we have completed some long-term model scale bioreactor tests and are prepared to begin pilot scale bioreactor testing. Specific results and accomplishments for the second quarter of 2003 include: (1) Bioreactor support systems and test facilities: (a) Qualitative long-term survivability tests for S.C.1.2(2) on Omnisil have been successfully completed and results demonstrate a growth rate that appears to be acceptable. (b) Quantitative tests of long-term growth productivity for S.C.1.2(2) on Omnisil have been completed and initial results are promising. Initial results show that the mass of organisms doubled (from 54.9 grams to 109.8 grams) in about 5 weeks. Full results will be available as soon as all membranes and filters are completely dried. The growth rate should increase significantly with the initiation of weekly harvesting during the long term tests. (c) The phase 1 construction of the pilot scale bioreactor has been completed, including the solar collector and light distribution system. We are now in the phase of system improvement as we wait for CRF-2 results in order to be …

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This report presents the cost of the center, the most extensive addition to the Capitol since the Civil War, and the largest in the structure’s more than 200-year history, is now estimated to be at least $555 million. The project is being financed with appropriated funds, and a total of $65 million from private donations and revenue generated by the sale of commemorative coins.

Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This Report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Commerce, Justice, State Appropriations Subcommittees.

This report discusses the issue of U.S. economic assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the importance of continued assistance in light of U.S. national security and also various U.S.-led efforts to promote reform amongst African citizens themselves. U.S. assistance finds its way to Africa through a variety of channels, including the USAID-administered DA program, food aid programs, and indirect aid provided through international financial institutions and the United Nations.

This report provides information on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Circular A-76, “Performance of Commercial Activities,” and the impact of a related reform initiative, the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR) of 1998, within the Department of Defense. The Circular defines federal policy for determining whether recurring commercial activities should be outsourced to commercial sources, Governmental facilities, or through inter-service support agreements. The FAIR Act creates statutory reporting requirements for federal executive agencies, by requiring Federal executive agencies to identify activities “not inherently governmental” and consider outsourcing through managed competitions. However, FAIR does not require that agencies contract out these activities.

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