A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) efforts to educate farmers about risk management, focusing on: (1) the extent of farmers' use of risk management tools; and (2) educational programs and projects USDA has directed or initiated to prepare farmers for managing risks and determining the groups or individuals who have participated in or been served by these programs."

A lifting fixture (drawing number 3823.113-MD-372382) that lifts large steel mandrels from one end through the mandrel's end support web is described. The mandrels are used as a mold to form carbon fiber cylinders. The mandrels are held from one end to allow the carbon cylinder to be pulled horizontally off the mandrel. Only mandrels as described in drawing numbers 3823.113-MD-358992 and 3823.1 13-MD-358994 are lifted by the fixture. The largest mandrel is 41 inches in diameter, 120 inches long, and weighs approximately 3,000 lbs. A detailed procedure for removing the carbon cylinder from the steel mandrel is given in the Appendix. The fixture is to be supported only using Fermilab Forklift 10207 or equivalent. The forklift has a nameplate capacity of 12,000 lbs 24 inches from the mast at an elevation of 130 inches from the floor. The forklift forks must be removed from the truck prior to using the fixture. The forklift is to be used to support the mandrels only during the lifting operation and is not to be used to transport the mandrels. Stresses at the lifting fixture are shear stresses on the support brackets due to the overall weight of the mandrel and moment loads …

Fusion chambers and high pulse-rate target systems for inertial fusion energy (IFE) must: regenerate chamber conditions suitable for target injection, laser propagation, and ignition at rates of 5 to 10 Hz; extract fusion energy at temperatures high enough for efficient conversion to electricity; breed tritium and fuel targets with minimum tritium inventory; manufacture targets at low cost; inject those targets with sufficient accuracy for high energy gain; assure adequate lifetime of the chamber and beam interface (final optics); minimize radioactive waste levels and annual volumes; and minimize radiation releases under normal operating and accident conditions. The primary goal of the US IFE program over the next four years (Phase I) is to develop the basis for a Proof-of-Performance-level driver and target chamber called the Integrated Research Experiment (IRE). The IRE will explore beam transport and focusing through prototypical chamber environment and will intercept surrogate targets at high pulse rep-rate. The IRE will not have enough driver energy to ignite targets, and it will be a non-nuclear facility. IRE options are being developed for both heavy ion and laser driven IFE. Fig. 1 shows that Phase I is prerequisite to an IRE, and the IRE plus NIF (Phase II) is prerequisite …

The US health care industry is experiencing a substantial paradigm shift with regard to home care due to the convergence of several technology areas. Increasingly-capable telehealth systems and the internet are not only moving the point of care closer to the patient, but the patient can now assume a more active role in his or her own care. These technologies, coupled with (1) the migration of the health care industry to electronic patient records and (2) the emergence of a growing number of enabling health care technologies (e.g., novel biosensors, wearable devices, and intelligent software agents), demonstrate unprecedented potential for delivering highly automated, intelligent health care in the home. This editorial paper presents a vision for the implementation of intelligent health care technology in the home of the future, focusing on areas of research that have the highest potential payoff given targeted government funding over the next ten years. Here, intelligent health care technology means smart devices and systems that are aware of their context and can therefore assimilate information to support care decisions. A systems perspective is used to describe a framework under which devices can interact with one another in a plug-and-play manner. Within this infrastructure, traditionally passive …

We are developing rugged and reliable hydrogen safety sensors that can be easily manufactured. Potential applications also require an inexpensive sensor that can be easily deployed. Automotive applications demand low cost, while personnel safety applications emphasize light-weight, battery-operated, and wearable sensors. Our current efforts involve developing and optimizing sensor materials for stability and compatibility with typical thick-film manufacturing processes. We are also tailoring the sensor design and size along with various packaging and communication schemes for optimal acceptance by end users.

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new rule on emission standards for new nonroad spark-ignition nonhandheld engines. GAO noted that: (1) the rule would control emissions from new nonroad spark-ignition nonhandheld engines at or below 19 kilowatts, which are principally used in lawn and garden equipment; and (2) EPA complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

Federal land ownership and management are of perennial interest to Congress. This report describes the constitutional authority for federal land ownership. It provides the history of federal land acquisition and disposal, and describes the federal land management agency jurisdictions, based on congressional authorities to reserve or withdraw lands from disposal. The report then describes several efforts to force additional federal land disposal, including recent legislative activity. It concludes with describes the various current land acquisition and disposal authorities of the four major federal land management agencies. The report will be updated to reflect major legislative activity or changes in acquisition or disposal authorities.

This report compares selected House and Senate rules of procedure governing various stages of the legislative process: referral of legislation to committees; scheduling and calling up measures; and floor consideration. The appendices provide sources of additional information about House and Senate rules of procedure.

The Security Specification, Version 1.0 allows security services to be provided by many devices in a network. It correctly presumes that if a virtual circuit needs these security services, then network topology and device policy will act to ensure that the appropriate security services are applied to the virtual circuit. This contribution moves that the Security Service Discovery and Routing function be included in the Security Version 2.0 work scope.

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The 3 km long linac at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is used for fixed target experiments such as E-155, with energies up to 50 GeV. The SLAC Energy Development (SLED) system increase the maximum no-load energy by a factor of 1.6, but it also causes a varying beam energy curve. To provide a long pulse or bunch train for the experiment the energy profile has to be flat. Besides more sophisticated methods such as varying the phase of two klystrons feeding one structure section as proposed in the NLC design, we describe the method used for E-155 in spring of 1997. The desired low charged beam didn't have any significant beam loading, but by inserting a 180{degree} phase notch during the SLED pulse, a beam pulse of up to 500 ns was achieved. The energy range without compensation would have been 15%, while with compensation the energy spread was reduced to about 0.15%. The phase notch was achieved by triggering a pair of two additional 180{degree} phase switches about half a structure fill-time after the SLED pulse was triggered. Simulations are compared with the experimental result.

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) new rules on endangered and threatened species of salmonids. GAO noted that: (1) the rules would impart threatened status on several species of salmonids; and (2) NOAA complied with the applicable requirements in promulgating the rules."

Variable-speed, horizontal axis wind turbines use blade-pitch control to meet specified objectives for three regions of operation. This paper focuses on controller design for the constant power production regime. A simple, rigid, non-linear turbine model was used to systematically perform trade-off studies between two performance metrics. Minimization of both the deviation of the rotor speed from the desired speed and the motion of the actuator is obtained through systematic selection of proportional-integral-derivative controller gain values. The gain design is performed using a non-linear turbine model and two linear models. The linear models differ only in selection of linearization point. The gain combinations resulting from design based upon each of the three models are similar. Performance under each of the three gain combinations is acceptable according to the metrics selected. The importance of operating point selection for linear models is illustrated. Because the simulation runs efficiently, the non-linear model provides the best gain design, but careful selection of the linearization point can produce acceptable gain designs from linear models.

Telemedicine technology is rapidly evolving. Whereas early telemedicine consultations relied primarily on video conferencing, consultations today may utilize video conferencing, medical peripherals, store-and-forward capabilities, electronic patient record management software, and/or a host of other emerging technologies. These remote care systems rely increasingly on distributed, collaborative information technology during the care delivery process, in its many forms. While these leading-edge systems are bellwethers for highly advanced telemedicine, the remote care market today is still immature. Most telemedicine systems are custom-designed and do not interoperate with other commercial offerings. Users are limited to a set of functionality that a single vendor provides and must often pay high prices to obtain this functionality, since vendors in this marketplace must deliver entire systems in order to compete. Besides increasing corporate research and development costs, this inhibits the ability of the user to make intelligent purchasing decisions regarding best-of-breed technologies. We propose a secure, object-oriented information architecture for telemedicine systems that promotes plug-and-play interaction between system components through standardized interfaces, communication protocols, messaging formats, and data definitions. In this architecture, each component functions as a black box, and components plug together in a lego-like fashion to achieve the desired device or system functionality. The architecture …

The linac at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) can provide beams to different experiments during PEP-II operations. It is planned to have a 30-GeV beam to the end of the linac into the FFTB (Final Focus Test Beam) area, where there will be two plasma experiments installed. They will demonstrate plasma focusing and plasma acceleration up to 1 GeV/m. The acceleration goes linear with the current and is inversely proportional to the square of the bunch length. These high charge, short bunches will create strong longitudinal wakefields in the linac. They create a strong double-horned energy profile and have different beam dynamics in the linac. Therefore we made a test run in Fall of 1998 to measure and quantify the beam properties, like stability, distributions, tails, and backgrounds, which will be discussed in this paper. The actual plasma experiments are planned for the spring of 1999.

The 3 km long linac of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) has for many years provided low emittance beams for the SLC collider. With the beginning of the operation of the B-Factory, PEP-II, the linac will now serve primarily as an injector for the low (LER) and high energy rings (HER) of PEP-II. The different beams are stabilized by a new regional linac energy management (LEM) program, which keeps the magnet strengths and therefore the deflections constant at each of the four extraction points. They are at 3.1 GeV (positrons for LER), 9 GeV (electrons for HER), 25 GeV (electrons for the positron production), and 28.5 GeV (electrons for other purposes such as test beams, plasma experiments, and iris destruction tests). Since many components of the accelerator can be configured on each pulse, it is possible to run these beams with different intensities, bunch length, energies, rates, etc. Only the quadrupole magnet strengths are fixed, producing different lattices for different energy beams, which must be matched at extraction from the linac. Since PEP-II injection does not require all of the full 120 Hz rate, it is possible to run other experiments at the same time. That might include an …

The experiment E155 at SLAC measured the spin structure functions g{sub 1} and g{sub 2} of the proton and deuteron. The experiment used deep inelastic scattering of 48.3 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons incident on polarized solid {sup 15}NH{sub 3} and {sup 6}LiD targets. The data taken by three independent spectrometers covered a kinematic range of 0.014 < x < 0.9 and 1 (GeV/c){sup 2} < Q{sup 2} < 40 (GeV/c){sup 2}. Due to the high luminosity and polarization available at SLAC the data on g{sub 1} are to date the most precise in this kinematic range. The x and Q{sup 2} dependence of g{sub 1} has been studied using NLO PQCD fits, allowing extraction of values for the Bjorken sum rule and quark and gluon spin contributions to the nucleon. Results are presented for g{sub 1} and g{sub 2} for the proton and deuteron.

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An important component of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory wind resource assessment methodology is the use of available upper-air data to construct detailed vertical profiles for a study region. Currently, the most useful upper-air data for this type of analysis are archived observations from approximately 1800 rawinsonde and pilot balloon stations worldwide. However, significant uncertainty exists in the accuracy of the constructed profiles for many regions. The United States Reanalysis Data Set, recently created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, has the potential to improve the quality of the vertical profiles. The initial evaluation of the usefulness of the Reanalysis data for wind resource assessment consisted of contrasting reanalysis-derived vertical profiles of the wind characteristics to those generated from upper-air observations for comparable locations. The results indicate that, while reanalysis data can be substituted for upper-air observation data in the assessment methodology for areas of the world where observation data are limited, enough discrepancies with observation data have been noticed to warrant further studies.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed an automated technique for wind resource mapping to aid in the acceleration of wind energy deployment. The new automated mapping system was developed with the following two primary goals: (1) to produce a more consistent and detailed analysis of the wind resource for a variety of physiographic settings, particularly in areas of complex terrain; and (2) to generate high quality map products on a timely basis. Using computer mapping techniques reduces the time it takes to produce a wind map that reflects a consistent analysis of the distribution of the wind resource throughout the region of interest. NREL's mapping system uses commercially available geographic information system software packages. Regional wind resource maps using this new system have been produced for areas of the United States, Mexico, Chile, Indonesia (1), and China. Countrywide wind resource assessments are under way for the Philippines, the Dominican Re public, and Mongolia. Regional assessments in Argentina and Russia are scheduled to begin soon.