Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report provides information on the income ranges of taxpayers who may have overpaid federal taxes by not itemizing. GAO found that of the returns filed for tax year 1998, 53 percent of taxpayers who may have overpaid federal taxes by not itemizing, had adjusted gross incomes of $50,000 or less. Eleven percent showed adjusted gross incomes of more than $75,000. The median adjusted gross income for these returns was about $47,000. The median adjusted gross income for all returns filed in tax year 1998 was about $27,000."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Because of Amtrak's worsening financial condition, there is growing agreement that the current mission, funding, and structure for providing intercity passenger rail needs to be changed. Intercity passenger rail has the potential to complement other more heavily used modes of transportation in markets where rail transport can be competitive. The potential benefits include reduced air and highway congestion, reduced pollution caused by automobiles, reduced fuel consumption and energy dependency, and greater safety. Intercity passenger rail systems, like other intercity transportation systems, are expensive. Amtrak has called for $30 billion in federal capital support over 20 years to upgrade its operations and to invest in high-speed rail corridors. Amtrak also estimates that the cost to fully develop the 10 federally designated high-speed rail corridors and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor could exceed $50 billion over 20 years. Congress must determine if and how intercity passenger rail fits into the nation's transportation system. and what level of federal investment should be made in light of other competing national priorities. Key initial steps in this framework could include (1) establishing clear, non-conflicting goals for federal support of intercity passenger rail systems; (2) establishing …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Federal, state, and local governments share responsibility for terrorist attacks. However, local government, including police and fire departments, emergency medical personnel, and public health agencies, is typically the first responder to an incident. The federal government historically has provided leadership, training, and funding assistance. In the aftermath of September 11, for instance, one-quarter of the $40 billion Emergency Response Fund was earmarked for homeland security, including enhancing state and local government preparedness. Because the national security threat is diffuse and the challenge is highly intergovernmental, national policymakers must formulate strategies with a firm understanding of the interests, capacity, and challenges facing those governments. The development of a national strategy will improve national preparedness and enhance partnerships between federal, state, and local governments. The creation of the Office of Homeland Security is an important and potentially significant first step. The Office of Homeland Security's strategic plan should (1) define and clarify the appropriate roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local entities; (2) establish goals and performance measures to guide the nation's preparedness efforts; and (3) carefully choose the most appropriate tools of government to implement the national strategy …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Chemical testing kits from World War II containing diluted mustard gas and other chemicals have been discovered on Guam. The Department of Defense (DOD) is responsible for identifying and cleaning up contaminated military sites throughout the United States and its territories. In the mid-1990s, DOD scaled back its identification efforts nationally and focused its attention on Guam. It now relies on referrals from the Guam Environmental Protection Agency and on incidental discovery during construction and other operational activities. Stakeholders had three concerns about the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to identify and address contamination on former defense sites. First, they were uncertain about the Corps' process for adding potentially contaminated locations to its Guam inventory. Second, some locations containing debris, such as metal and tires, were excluded even though the waste was caused by DOD and could place a financial burden on the owner to remove it. Third, stakeholders were concerned about the slow pace of funding for the program. Between fiscal years 1984 and 2000, only four percent of the total expected cost of cleaning up these locations had been funded in Guam, compared with …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Administration took several steps to strengthen homeland security, including the creation of an Office of Homeland Security (OHS). The success of a homeland security strategy requires all levels of government and the private sector to communicate and cooperate with one another. The federal government must formulate realistic budget and resource plans to support the implementation of an efficient and effective homeland security program. A fundamental review of existing programs and operations can create the necessary fiscal flexibility by weeding out out-dated, poorly targeted, or inefficient programs. Although Congress called upon GAO to evaluate the effectiveness of OHS programs, GAO has experienced difficulty in gaining access to this information."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The General Services Administration's (GSA) Federal Supply Service (FSS) and Federal Technology Service (FTS) help agencies to purchase telephone and computer systems, motor vehicles, travel, and everyday supplies valued at more than $30 billion annually. FSS and FTS take different approaches to filling agency customers' requirements but, in the information technology area, they provide similar goods and services and deal with many of the same vendors. Although overlapping programs with similar services would appear to create the potential for inefficiencies, GSA has little hard data with which to assess the situation. GSA has begun to provide more useful information on the performance of FSS and FTS and to identify more efficient operations. If successful, these initiatives also may provide a road map for assessing the performance of other interagency purchasing programs."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since the advent of the all-volunteer Army in 1973, the number of servicemembers with spouses and children has grown significantly. Although the Department of Defense (DOD) has responded positively to this change, GAO believes that some current family benefits could be strengthened. For example, despite improvements to the quality of military child care centers, DOD needs to further expand child care capacity. Moreover, DOD faces challenges in increasing awareness and use of these benefits. GAO compared the military's benefits with those of the private sector, including retirement pay, health care, life insurance, and paid time-off, and found no significant gaps in the benefits offered to active duty servicemen and women. In fact, some military benefits exceed those offered by the private sector."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducts an infrastructure needs assessment every four years to estimate the future capital investment needs of local drinking water systems. In its most recent survey, EPA estimated that nearly $151 billion will be needed during the next 20 years to repair, replace, and upgrade the nation's 55,000 community water systems. The needs assessment survey serves as the basis for EPA's grants to the states under the drinking water revolving fund program. To ensure that it collected valid data to estimate drinking water infrastructure needs EPA conducted site visits to selected systems and had states review supporting documentation. However, EPA cannot tell how closely the estimates reflect actual state-by-state needs because it did not calculate the precision of estimates. GAO found that 31 out of 50 states surveyed established revolving loan funds programs to assist disadvantaged communities. In fiscal years 1991 through 2000, nine federal agencies made available about $44 billion in grants, loans, and loan guarantees for drinking water and wastewater capital improvements."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the implementation of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 and information collection authorizations from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that either expired or were otherwise inconsistent with the act. GAO found that federal paperwork rose by 290 million burden hours during fiscal year 2001--the largest one-year increase since the act was amended and recodified in 1995. This occurred largely because the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) increased its paperwork estimate by about 250 million burden hours during the year. Most of the paperwork increase at IRS resulted from changes made by the agency--not because of new statutes. Federal agencies providing information to OMB identified more than 400 violations of the act during fiscal year 2001. Some of these violations have been going on for years, and they collectively represent substantial opportunity costs."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Estimating the extent of abusive tax schemes used by individual taxpayers is difficult because they are often hidden. Nevertheless, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) believes that the number and dollar consequences of these schemes has grown recently. IRS estimates that 740,000 taxpayers used abusive schemes in tax year 2000. IRS caught $5 billion in improper tax avoidance or tax credit and refund claims, but estimates that another $20 to $40 billion went undetected. Recent developments suggest that the number of individuals using an abusive tax scheme involving offshore accounts may be greater than estimated and potential lost revenues may be higher than estimated. Because no one individual or office could provide an agencywide perspective on IRS's strategy, goals, objectives, performance measures, or program results, it is difficult to provide a clear picture of IRS's efforts to address abusive tax schemes. IRS has created new offices, reemphasized and reorganized earlier efforts, and plans to assign at least 200 additional staff to its efforts. Limited data suggest that IRS's enhanced efforts have helped to successfully convict those promoting and taking advantage of abusive schemes, publicize these results, and uncover previously …

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Wonderful opportunities await particle physics over the next decade, with the coming of the Large Hadron Collider to explore the 1-TeV scale (extending efforts at LEP and the Tevatron to unravel the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking) and many initiatives to develop the understanding of the problem of identity and the dimensionality of spacetime.

The Probe project has established a facility for storage- and network-related research, development and testing. With sites at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Probe is investigating local-area or wide-area distributed storage issues ranging from data mining to optimizing retrieval operations from tape devices. Probe has completed its second full year of operation. In this document we will describe the status of the project as of December 31, 2001. This year we will structure this document by category of work, rather than by project status. We will present sections describing Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computation (SciDAC) projects, network research and research on data mining and distributed cluster analysis. Another section will describe data-transfer application development and testing and other types of hardware- and software-related testing and development activities. We will then describe the work undertaken for presentation at the SC2001 conference. The final section will summarize this year's publications. Individual projects described in this document have used some Probe resource--equipment, software, staff or funding. By describing these projects we do not imply that the work should be entirely credited to Probe, although we do assert that Probe's existence and assistance provided …

Lighting has been one of the fastest growing electric end-uses in China over the last twenty years, with an average annual growth rate of 14%. Fluorescent lighting provides a significant portion of China's lighting need. In 1998, China produced 680 million fluorescent lamps, of which 420 million were linear fluorescent lamps of various diameters (T8 to T12). There are substantial variations both in energy efficiency and lighting performance among locally produced fluorescent lamps. Such variations present a perfect opportunity for policy intervention through efficiency standards to promote the adoption of more efficient fluorescent lamps in China. This paper analyzes China's proposed minimum efficiency standard for fluorescent lamps and presents an assessment of its likely impacts on China's lighting energy consumption and GHG emissions.

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We present a new construction approach for symmetric lifted B-spline wavelets on irregular polygonal control meshes defining two-manifold topologies. Polygonal control meshes are recursively refined by stationary subdivision rules and converge to piecewise polynomial limit surfaces. At every subdivision level, our wavelet transforms provide an efficient way to add geometric details that are expanded from wavelet coefficients. Both wavelet decomposition and reconstruction operations are based on local lifting steps and have linear-time complexity.

The test data obtained from the Baseline Assessment that compares the performance of the density traces to that of different sizes of coal particles is now complete. The experimental results show that the tracer data can indeed be used to accurately predict HMC performance. The following conclusions were drawn: (i) the tracer curve is slightly sharper than curve for coarsest size fraction of coal (probably due to the greater resolution of the tracer technique), (ii) the Ep increases with decreasing coal particle size, and (iii) the Ep values are not excessively large for the well-maintained HMC circuits. The major problems discovered were associated with improper apex-to-vortex finder ratios and particle hang-up due to media segregation. Only one plant yielded test data that were typical of a fully optimized level of performance.

We propose the development of a novel detector that can locate and identify materials of interest to Nuclear Arms Non Proliferation. The device will combine nuclear acoustic resonance (NAR) with superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) widely used in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), geophysics, nondestructive evaluations, and biomagnetism, to name only few. NAR works like NMR. Thus resonant absorption (of applied ultrasonic energy) by a nuclear spin system occurs when the ultrasonic frequency is equal to the appropriate frequency separations between the magnetic nuclear energy levels. Ultrasonic energy couples to the nuclear spin system via spin-phonon interaction. The resulting nuclear acoustic resonance can be detected via the changes in (a) ultrasonic attenuation, (b) ultrasonic velocity, (c) material magnetization, (d) or nuclear magnetic susceptibility, all of which carries ''intrinsic and unique signatures'' of the material under investigation. The device's sensitivity and penetration depth (into metals) will be enhanced by incorporating SQUID technology into the design. We will present the details of interaction physics and outline a plan of action needed to successfully transform the concepts into a practical detector.

Recent measurements of the K-shell and L-shell x-ray spectra of highly charged helium-like and neon-like ions are presented that were performed on the Livermore electron beam ion traps and the Princeton tokamaks. These measurements provide new insights into collisional and indirect line formation processes, identifications of forbidden lines, and a new plasma line diagnostic of magnetic field strength.

The goal of this project was to prototype a Web based computational and collaboratory environment that would act as a commodity technologies based front-end or Gateway to larger HPC systems such as ANL LabSpace. The original name - WebSpace - proposed for such a system was taken during the course of this project by Silicon Graphics and used for their Web authoring environment. To avoid confusion, we changed the name of this project's system to WebFlow.

A computer model was developed using COREsim to perform a time motion study for the Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Loading Station operations. The project is to blend Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) with Natural Uranium (NU) to produce LEU to be shipped to Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for further processing. To cope with a project cost reduction, the LEU Loading Station concept has changed from an enclosed building with air-conditioning to a partially enclosed building without air conditioning. The LEU Loading Station is within a radiological contaminated area; two pairs of coveralls and negative pressure respirator are required. As a result, inclement weather conditions, especially heat stress, will affect and impact the LEU loading operations. The purposes of the study are to determine the climatological impacts on LEU Loading operations, resources required for committed throughputs, and to find out the optimum process pathways for multi crews working simultaneously in the space-lim ited LEU Loading Station.

Work completed in this reporting period focused primarily on continuing measurements of the rate of ammonia loss from concrete, and the measurement of ammonia gas in the air above concrete and flowable fill immediately after placement. Concrete slabs were prepared to monitor the loss of ammonia during mixing, the concentration in the airspace above the slabs soon after placement, and the total quantity of ammonia evolved over a longer time period. Variables tested include temperature, ventilation rate, water:cementitious (W:C) ratio, and fly ash source. Short-term data indicate that for concrete placed in areas with poor air ventilation the fly ash NH{sub 3} concentration should not exceed about 90 to 145 mg/kg ash, depending on the water:cement ratio and the fly ash replacement rate, if a concentration of 10 ppm NH{sub 3} in the air is assumed to be the maximum acceptable level. Longer-term experiments showed that the ammonia loss rate is dependent on ammonia source (that is ammoniated ash vs. non-ammoniated ash with ammonia added to the water), and is also dependent on W:C ratio and temperature. Experiments were also conducted to study the loss of ammonia from fresh concrete during mixing. It was found that a high water:cementitious mix …

This is one report in the series of reports that discuss the campaign finance practices and related issues. Concerns over financing federal elections have become a seemingly perennial aspect of our political system, centered on the enduring issues of high campaign costs and reliance on interest groups for needed campaign funds. The report talks about the today’s paramount issues such as perceived loopholes in current law and the longstanding issues: overall costs, funding sources, and competition.

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