This issue brief discusses the Airport Improvement Program and its complement, the Passenger Facility Charge (PFC). After a brief history of federal support for airport construction and improvement, the report describes AIP funding, its source of revenues, funding distribution, the types of projects the program funds, AIP and PFC policy issues, and the allowable use of AIP funds for airport security purposes.

A conference committee is composed of a House and a Senate delegation appointed to reconcile the differences between the versions of a measure passed by the two chambers. Congress usually uses a conference committee to resolve such disagreements on the more important, controversial, or complex measures. The members of each chamber’s delegation are known as its conferees or, more formally, “managers.” This report discusses how House conferees are selected.

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Seven proposals to reform the Electoral College system have been introduced to date in the 107th Congress. H.J.Res. 3 (Representative Green of Texas), and H.J.Res. 5 (Representative Delahunt) would eliminate the electoral college, substituting direct popular election of the President. H.J.Res. 1 (Representative Clyburn), H.J.Res. 18 (Representative Engel), and H.J.Res. 37 (Representative Clement) would incorporate the “district” method of awarding electoral votes, and H.J.Res. 17 (Representative Engel) would provide for proportional award of electoral votes. H.J.Res. 25 (Representative Leach) is a hybrid plan. These measures have been referred to the House Judiciary Committee and await further action.

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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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

The coking test facilities include three reactors (or cokers) and ten utilities. Experiments were conducted using the micro-coker, pilot-coker, and stirred-batch coker. Gas products were analyzed using an on-line gas chromatograph. Liquid properties were analyzed in-house using simulated distillation (HP 5880a), high temperature gas chromatography (6890a), detailed hydrocarbon analysis, and ASTM fractionation. Coke analyses as well as feedstock analyses and some additional liquid analyses (including elemental analyses) were done off-site.

Improved prediction of interwell reservoir heterogeneity is needed to increase productivity and to reduce recovery cost for California's heavy oil sands, which contain approximately 2.3 billion barrels of remaining reserves in the Temblor Formation and in other formations of the San Joaquin Valley. This investigation involved application of advanced analytical property-distribution methods conditioned to continuous outcrop control for improved reservoir characterization and simulation.

This project involved application of advanced analytical property-distribution methods conditioned to continuous outcrop control for improved reservoir characterization and simulation. The investigation was performed in collaboration with Chevron Production Company U.S.A. as an industrial partner, and incorporates data from the Temblor Formation in Chevron's West Coalinga Field, California. Improved prediction of interwell reservoir heterogeneity was needed to increase productivity and to reduce recovery cost for California's heavy oil sands, which contained approximately 2.3 billion barrels of remaining reserves in the Temblor Formation and in other formations of the San Joaquin Valley.

OAK B204 Quarterly Report Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (NERI) Quarterly Progress Report Model Based Transient Control and Component Degradation Monitoring in Generation IV

Improved prediction of interwell reservoir heterogeneity was needed to increase productivity and to reduce recovery cost for California's heavy oil sands, which contain approximately 2.3 billion barrels of remaining reserves in the Temblor Formation and in other formations of the San Joaquin Valley. This investigation involved application of advanced analytical property-distribution methods conditioned to continuous outcrop control for improved reservoir characterization and simulation.

Improved prediction of interwell reservoir heterogeneity was needed to increase productivity and to reduce recovery cost for California's heavy oil sands, which contain approximately 2.3 billion barrels of remaining reserves in the Temblor Formation and in other formations of the San Joaquin Valley. This investigation involved application of advanced analytical property-distribution methods conditioned to continuous outcrop control for improved reservoir characterization and simulation.

Improved prediction of interwell reservoir heterogeneity was needed to increase productivity and to reduce recovery cost for California's heavy oil sands, which contain approximately 2.3 billion barrels of remaining reserves in the Temblor Formation and in other formations of the San Joaquin Valley. This investigation involved application of advanced analytical property-distribution methods conditioned to continuous outcrop control for improved reservoir characterization and simulation.

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

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Under LLNL Exploratory Research LDRD funding, the Rapsodi project developed rapid setup technology for computational physics and engineering problems that require computational representations of complex geometry. Many simulation projects at LLNL involve the solution of partial differential equations in complex 3-D geometries. A significant bottleneck in carrying out these simulations arises in converting some specification of a geometry, such as a computer-aided design (CAD) drawing to a computationally appropriate 3-D mesh that can be used for simulation and analysis. Even using state-of-the-art mesh generation software, this problem setup step typically has required weeks or months, which is often much longer than required to carry out the computational simulation itself. The Rapsodi project built computational tools and designed algorithms that help to significantly reduce this setup time to less than a day for many realistic problems. The project targeted rapid setup technology for computational physics and engineering problems that use mixed-element unstructured meshes, overset meshes or Cartesian-embedded boundary (EB) meshes to represent complex geometry. It also built tools that aid in constructing computational representations of geometry for problems that do not require a mesh. While completely automatic mesh generation is extremely difficult, the amount of manual labor required can be significantly …

The laboratory has invested a significant amount of resources towards the development of high-performance scientific simulation software, including numerical libraries, visualization, steering, software frameworks, and physics packages. Unfortunately, because this software was not designed for interoperability and re-use, it is often difficult to share these sophisticated software packages among applications due to differences in implementation language, programming style, or calling interfaces. This LDRD Strategic Initiative investigated and developed software component technology for high-performance parallel scientific computing to address problems of complexity, re-use, and interoperability for laboratory software. Component technology is an extension of scripting and object-oriented software development techniques that specifically focuses on the needs of software interoperability. Component approaches based on CORBA, COM, and Java technologies are widely used in industry; however, they do not support massively parallel applications in science and engineering. Our research focused on the unique requirements of scientific computing on ASCI-class machines, such as fast in-process connections among components, language interoperability for scientific languages, and data distribution support for massively parallel SPMD components.

The search for extrasolar planets--planets orbiting stars outside out solar system-- is motivated by the desire to discover small planets similar to Earth. Since small planets are difficult to detect, the first step is finding giant planets with large orbits, like Jupiter. Solar systems containing these planets may have smaller, Earth-like planets travelling closer to the parent star. However, current methods detect extrasolar planets indirectly by observing a planet's gravitational influence on its parent star. These methods are primarily sensitive to giant planets with small orbits. A new method is needed to directly observe planets with large orbits. Direct observation can also provide additional information about a planet's composition and/or orbit. Directly observing an extrasolar planet from Earth is challenging because of the relative proximity of the planet to its parent star. Although a large, terrestrial telescope can provide the angular resolution necessary to visually separate the planet from the star, atmospheric turbulence limits the telescope's performance. In addition, the parent star appears much brighter than the planet. Adaptive optics (AO) can increase a planet's brightness, but they have little effect on residual star glare.

An accurate equation of state (EOS) for planetary constituents at extreme conditions is the key to any credible model of planets or low mass stars. However, very few materials have their high pressure (>few Mbar) EOS experimentally validated, and even then, only on the principal Hugoniot. For planetary and stellar interiors, compression occurs from gravitational force so that material states follow a line of isotropic compression (ignoring phase separation) to ultra-high densities. An example of the hydrogen phase space composing Jupiter and one particular Brown Dwarf is shown. At extreme densities, material states are predicted to have quite unearthly properties such as high temperature superconductivity and low temperature fusion. High density experiments on Earth are achieved with either static compression techniques (i.e. diamond anvil cells) or dynamic compression techniques using large laser facilities, gas guns, or explosives. The ultimate goal of this multi-directorate and multi-institutional proposal was to develop techniques that will enable us to understand material states that previously only existed at the core of giant planets, stars, or speculative theories. Our effort was a complete success, meeting all of the objectives set out in our proposals. First we focused on developing accurate Hugoniot techniques to be used for …

We used synthetic aperture radar interferograms to image ground subsidence that occurred over the Dixie Valley geothermal field during different time intervals between 1992 and 1997. Linear elastic inversion of the subsidence that occurred between April, 1996 and March, 1997 revealed that the dominant sources of deformation during this time period were large changes in fluid volumes at shallow depths within the valley fill above the reservoir. The distributions of subsidence and subsurface volume change support a model in which reduction in pressure and volume of hot water discharging into the valley fill from localized upflow along the Stillwater range frontal fault is caused by drawdown within the upflow zone resulting from geothermal production. Our results also suggest that an additional source of fluid volume reduction in the shallow valley fill might be similar drawdown within piedmont fault zones. Shallow groundwater flow in the vicinity of the field appears to be controlled on the NW by a mapped fault and to the SW by a lineament of as yet unknown origin.

The power of a quantum computer (QC) relies on the fundamental concept of the superposition in quantum mechanics and thus allowing an inherent large-scale parallelization of computation. In a QC, binary information embodied in a quantum system, such as spin degrees of freedom of a spin-1/2 particle forms the qubits (quantum mechanical bits), over which appropriate logical gates perform the computation. In classical computers, the basic unit of information is the bit, which can take a value of either 0 or 1. Bits are connected together by logic gates to form logic circuits to implement complex logical operations. The expansion of modern computers has been driven by the developments of faster, smaller and cheaper logic gates. As the size of the logic gates become smaller toward the level of atomic dimensions, the performance of such a system is no longer considered classical but is rather governed by quantum mechanics. Quantum computers offer the potentially superior prospect of solving computational problems that are intractable to classical computers such as efficient database searches and cryptography. A variety of algorithms have been developed recently, most notably Shor's algorithm for factorizing long numbers into prime factors in polynomial time and Grover's quantum search algorithm. …