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This report discusses a category of congressionally chartered nonprofit organizations that have as their purpose the promotion of patriotic, charitable, educational, and other eleemosynary activities . Title 36 of the United States Code, where such corporate organizations are listed with their charters, was re-codified by law in 1998 (EL 105-225).

This report describes relevant treaties, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, current U.S. law, and proposed legislation, including H.Con.Res. 113, the Iraq Cultural Protection Act (H.R. 2009 and H.R. 3497), and the Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004 (S. 1291 and S. 671, the latter of which has passed the Senate as an engrossed amendment to H.R. 1047, the Miscellaneous Trade and Technical Corrections Act of 2004).

This report lists civil suites filled by federal regulatory agencies charging individuals and corporations with violations related to these scandals. The list is limited to corporations and their offices or employees that fit within the Enron pattern. That is, these are cases that display one or more of the following: irregular accounting and auditing, management self-dealing, conflicts of interests between firms and financial advisors (or Wall Street firms and their costumers), and manipulation or abusive trading in energy markets.

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether article XI, section 7 of the Texas Constitution bars a county from agreeing to indemnify an appraisal district for the costs of litigation arising from the appraisal district's performance of 9-1-1 services for the county (RQ-0122-GA)

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The equity listing standards of the three largest U.S. securities markets--the American Stock Exchange (Amex), the Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. (NASDAQ), and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)--have received heightened attention as part of efforts to restore investor confidence following the 2001 terrorist attacks and the unexpected corporate failures beginning that year. GAO was asked to discuss (1) the status of the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) recommendations to the three largest markets for improving their equity listing programs, (2) SEC's oversight of NASDAQ's moratorium on the enforcement of certain of its listing standards and the status of affected listed companies (issuers), and (3) actions the three largest markets have taken to strengthen corporate governance."

Incomplete or sparse information on types of data such as geologic or formation characteristics introduces a high level of risk for oil exploration and development projects. ''Expert'' systems developed and used in several disciplines and industries have demonstrated beneficial results. A state-of-the-art exploration ''expert'' tool, relying on a computerized database and computer maps generated by neural networks, is being developed through the use of ''fuzzy'' logic, a relatively new mathematical treatment of imprecise or non-explicit parameters and values. Oil prospecting risk can be reduced with the use of a properly developed and validated ''Fuzzy Expert Exploration (FEE) Tool.'' This FEE Tool can be beneficial in many regions of the U.S. by enabling risk reduction in oil and gas prospecting as well as decreased prospecting and development costs. In the 1998-1999 oil industry environment, many smaller exploration companies lacked the resources of a pool of expert exploration personnel. Downsizing, low oil prices, and scarcity of exploration funds have also affected larger companies, and will, with time, affect the end users of oil industry products in the U.S. as reserves are depleted. The FEE Tool will benefit a diverse group in the U.S., leading to a more efficient use of scarce funds, …

Precision cleaning studies done at Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T), the Kansas City Plant (KCP), and at other locations within the Department of Energy (DOE) Weapons complex over the last 30 years have depended upon results from MESERAN Evaporative Rate Analysis for detecting low levels of organic contamination. The characterization of the surface being analyzed is carried out by depositing a Carbon-14 tagged radiochemical onto the test surface and monitoring the rate at which the radiochemical disappears from the surface with a Geiger-Mueller counter. In the past, the total number of counts over a 2-minute span have been used to judge whether a surface is contaminated or not and semi-quantitatively to what extent. This technique is very sensitive but has not enjoyed the broad acceptance of a purely quantitative analysis. The work on this project developed calibrations of various organic contaminants typically encountered in KCP operations. In addition, a new analysis method was developed to enhance the ability of MESERAN Analyzers to detect organic contamination and yield quantitative data in the microgram and nanogram levels.

An Environmental Questionnaire for the demonstration at the Bellefield Boiler Plant (BBP) was submitted to the national Energy Technology Laboratory. An R&D variance for the air permit at the BBP was sought from the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD). R&D variances for the solid waste permits at the J. A. Rutter Company (JARC), and Emery Tree Service (ETS) were sought from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP). Construction wood was acquired from Thompson Properties and Seven D Corporation. Verbal authorizations were received in all cases. Memoranda of understanding were executed by the University of Pittsburgh with BBP, JARC and ETS. Construction wood was collected from Thompson Properties and from Seven D Corporation. Forty tons of pallet and construction wood were ground to produce BioGrind Wood Chips at JARC and delivered to Mon Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Five tons of construction wood were hammer milled at ETS and half of the product delivered to MVTC. Blends of wood and coal, produced at MVTC by staff of JARC and MVTC, were shipped by rail to BBP. The experimental portion of the project was carried out at BBP in late March and early April 2001. Several preliminary tests were successfully conducted using …

This report is on Ballast Water Management to Combat Invasive Species.

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This report focuses on trends in personal health care spending, which includes spending on health care goods and services provided to individuals and excludes expenditures for administrative costs, research, and public health activities. Personal health care expenditures have grown considerably over the past 40 years. It is estimated that personal health spending will exceed $2.9 trillion in 2013.

The high-density infrared (HDI) transient-liquid coating (TLC) process was successfully developed and demonstrated excellent, enhanced (5 times higher than the current material and process) wear performance for the selected functionally graded material (FGM) coatings under laboratory simulated, in-service conditions. The mating steel component exhibited a wear rate improvement of approximately one and a half (1.5) times. After 8000 cycles of wear testing, the full-scale component testing demonstrated that the coating integrity was still excellent. Little or no spalling was observed to occur.

We assess how well next generation neutrinoless double beta decay and normal neutrino beta decay experiments can answer four fundamental questions. 1) If neutrinoless double beta decay searches do not detect a signal, and if the spectrum is known to be inverted hierarchy, can we conclude that neutrinos are Dirac particles? 2) If neutrinoless double beta decay searches are negative and a next generation ordinary beta decay experiment detects the neutrino mass scale, can we conclude that neutrinos are Dirac particles? 3) If neutrinoless double beta decay is observed with a large neutrino mass element, what is the total mass in neutrinos? 4) If neutrinoless double beta decay is observed but next generation beta decay searches for a neutrino mass only set a mass upper limit, can we establish whether the mass hierarchy is normal or inverted? We base our answers on the expected performance of next generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiments and on simulations of the accuracy of calculations of nuclear matrix elements.

Recording of the ninth public hearing held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States on April 8, 2004 at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The Commission heard testimony from Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs on the formulation and conduct of U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Transcript of the ninth public hearing held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States held April 8, 2004 at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The Commission heard testimony from Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs on the formulation and conduct of U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Fluid flow experiments are being conducted on core specimens of quartz monzonite retrieved from depths of about 1 km at the Desert Peak East EGS site in Churchill County, Nevada. Our immediate goal is to observe permeability evolution in fractures at pressure and temperature conditions appropriate to the Desert Peak geothermal site. Longer term, we aim to evaluate mechanisms that control the evolution of fracture permeability. In the experiments saline water is flowed through an artificial fracture at a constant rate of 0.02 ml/min over a period of several weeks. The constant flow tests are interrupted at selected times for shorter tests in which flow is either stopped or varied between 0 and 2.0 ml/min. The experiments to date were conducted at a confining pressure of 5.5 MPa, pore pressures of 1.38 MPa or 2.07 MPa and temperatures of 167- 169 C. Measurements include differential pressure and electrical resistance across the specimen. The short-term variable flow rate experiments allow us to calculate the effective hydraulic aperture of the fracture at various times during the experiment. Changes in electrical resistivity provide indirect evidence of ongoing mineral dissolution and precipitation processes that are expected to change fracture permeability over time. The early …

Livermore Computing is an early and aggressive adopter of parallel file systems including, for example, GPFS from IBM and Lustre for our present Linux systems. As such, we have acquired more than our share of battle scars from encountering bugs in 'bleeding edge' file systems that we have pressed into production to serve our customers' massive I/O requirements. A major role of the Scalable I/O Project is to detect errors before our end users do. In order to do this, we have developed highly parallel test codes to stress and probe potentially weak areas of file system behavior. This paper describes those test programs and how we make use of them.

Effects of W on the creep resistance of two nearly fully lamellar TiAl alloys with 1.0 and 2.0 at.%W have been investigated. In the low stress regime (LS) a nearly quadratic (1.5<n<2) creep behavior was observed. It is found that the addition of W can improve the creep resistance; however, the addition of excess W can result in the formation of {beta} phase, which produces an adverse effect on the creep strength.

Exposure to environmental radiation and the application of new clinical modalities, such as radioimmunotherapy, have heightened the need to understand cellular responses to low dose and low-dose rate ionizing radiation. Many tumor cell lines have been observed to exhibit a hypersensitivity to radiation doses below 50 cGy, which manifests as a significant deviation from the clonogenic survival response predicted by a linear-quadratic fit to higher doses. However, the underlying processes for this phenomenon remain unclear. Using a gel microdrop/flow cytometry assay to monitor single cell proliferation at early times post irradiation, we examined the response of human A549 lung carcinoma, T98G glioma and MCF7 breast carcinoma cell lines exposed to gamma radiation doses from 0 to 200 cGy delivered at 0.18 and 22 cGy/min. The A549 and T98G cells, but not MCF7 cells, showed the marked hypersensitivity at doses <50 cGy. To further characterize the low-dose hypersensitivity, we examined the influence of low-dose radiation on cell cycle status and apoptosis by assays for active caspase-3 and phosphatidylserine translocation (annexin-V binding). We observed that caspase-3 activation and annexin-V binding mirrored the proliferation curves for the cell lines. Furthermore, the low-dose hypersensitivity and annexin-V binding to irradiated A549 and T98G cells were …

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We investigate the impact of water, a polar solvent, on the optical absorption of prototypical silicon clusters with oxygen passivation. We approach this complex problem by assessing the contributions of three factors: chemical reactivity; thermal equilibration and dielectric screening. We find that the silanone (Si=O) functional group is not chemically stable in the presence of water and exclude this as a source of significant red shift in absorption in aqueous environments. We perform first principles molecular dynamics simulations of the solvation of an oxygenated silicon cluster with explicit water molecules at 300 K. We find a systematic 0.7 eV red shift in the absorption gap of this cluster, which we attribute to thermal strain of the molecular structure. Surprisingly, we find no observable screening impact of the solvent, in contrast with consistent blue shifts observed for similarly sized organic molecules in polar solvents. The predicted red shift is expected to be significantly smaller for larger Si quantum dots produced experimentally, guaranteeing that their vacuum optical properties are preserved even in aqueous environments.