This report provides an overview of how federal lands and resources are managed, the agencies that manage the lands,the authorities under which these lands are managed, and some of the issues associated with federal land management.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The five Great Lakes, which comprise the largest system of freshwater in the world, are threatened on many environmental fronts. To address the extent of progress made in restoring the Great Lakes Basin, which includes the lakes and surrounding area, GAO (1) identified the federal and state environmental programs operating in the basin and funding devoted to them, (2) evaluated the restoration strategies used and how they are coordinated, and (3) assessed overall environmental progress made in the basin restoration effort."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, millions of visitors, foreign students, and immigrants come to the United States. Foreign visitors may enter on a legal temporary basis--that is, with an authorized period of admission that expires on a specific date--either (1) with temporary visas (generally for tourism, business, or work) or, in some cases, (2) as tourists or business visitors who are allowed to enter without visas. (The latter include Canadians and qualified visitors from 27 countries who enter under the visa waiver program.) The majority of visitors who are tracked depart on time, but others overstay--and since September 11, 2001, the question has arisen as to whether overstay issues might have an impact on domestic security. In this report, we (1) describe available data on the extent of overstaying, (2) report on weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security's long-standing overstay tracking system, and (3) provide some observations on the impact that tracking system weaknesses and significant levels of overstaying may have on domestic security."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "About 7 million undocumented aliens lived in the United States in 2000, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates. Hospitals in states where many of them live report that treating them can be a financial burden. GAO was asked to examine the relationship between treating undocumented aliens and hospitals' costs not paid by patients or insurance. GAO was also asked to examine federal funding available to help hospitals offset costs of treating undocumented aliens and the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security (Homeland Security) for covering medical expenses of sick or injured aliens encountered by Border Patrol and U.S. port-of-entry officials. To conduct this work, GAO surveyed 503 hospitals and interviewed Medicaid and hospital officials in 10 states. GAO also interviewed and obtained data from Homeland Security officials."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) faces the daunting task of bringing together 22 diverse agencies to lead efforts to protect the homeland. Among the challenges posed by this transformation is integrating these agencies' diverse information technology (IT) systems: mission support, administration, and infrastructure (e.g., networks). GAO was asked to determine (1) whether DHS has defined its IT systems integration strategy and (2) how DHS is ensuring that IT investments made by component agencies (specifically focusing on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard) are aligned with the department's strategic direction."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In the 1990 and 2000 Censuses, U.S. military and federal civilian employees overseas were included in the numbers used for apportioning Congress. Currently, the U.S. Census Bureau (Bureau) is assessing the practicality of counting all Americans abroad by holding a test census in France, Kuwait, and Mexico. GAO was asked to (1) assess the soundness of the test design, and (2) examine what past court decisions have held about Americans' rights and obligations abroad."

The Department of Energy is developing processes to treat Savannah River Site (SRS) radioactive waste. In the first step, personnel contact the incoming salt solution that contains entrained sludge with monosodium titanate (MST) to adsorb strontium and select actinides. They filter the resulting slurry to remove the sludge and MST. The filtrate receives further treatment to remove cesium. Previously, personnel conducted a review of solid-liquid separation technologies and identified the rotary microfilter as a plausible improvement over the tubular crossflow filter in the current baseline. The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) received funding from the DOE to continue developing the rotary microfilter for SRS high level waste applications. As part of this task, the authors developed a protocol to weld stainless steel and ceramic filter disks. After they welded the disks, they placed them in the pilot-scale rotary microfilter and tested them with simulated SRS waste. The conclusions are: the rotary microfilter has now operated for over 2400 hours with no significant operational problems; filter flux with the welded disks was significantly less than the flux in comparable tests with filter disks fabricated using epoxy; the ceramic filter media produced the highest flux; the Pall filter media produced higher flux …

Theoretical investigations of plasma-based accelerators and other advanced accelerator concepts. The focus of the work was on the development of plasma based and structure based accelerating concepts, including laser-plasma, plasma channel, and microwave driven plasma accelerators.

In the process of screening a soil against a certain contaminant, we define the health-risk based preliminary remediation goal (PRG) as the contaminant concentration above which some remedial action may be required. PRG is thus the first standard (or guidance) for judging a site. An over-estimated PRG (a too-large value) may cause us to miss some contaminated sites that can threaten human health and the environment. An under-estimated PRG (a too-small value), on the other hand, may lead to unnecessary cleanup and waste tremendous resources. The PRGs for soils are often calculated on the assumption that the contaminant concentration in soil does not change with time. However, that concentration usually decreases with time as a result of different chemical and transport mechanisms. The static assumption thus exaggerates the long-term exposure dose and results in a too-small PRG. We present a box model that considers all important transport processes and obeys the law of mass conservation. We can use the model as a tool to estimate the transient contaminant concentrations in air, soil and groundwater. Using these concentrations in conjunction with appropriate health risk parameters, we may estimate the PRGs for different contaminants. As an example, we calculated the tritium PRG …

Although we know that many supernovae are aspherical, the exact nature of their geometry is undetermined. Because all the supernovae we observe are too distant to be resolved, the ejecta structure can't be directly imaged, and asymmetry must be inferred from signatures in the spectral features and polarization of the supernova light. The empirical interpretation of this data, however, is rather limited--to learn more about the detailed supernova geometry, theoretical modeling must been undertaken. One expects the geometry to be closely tied to the explosion mechanism and the progenitor star system, both of which are still under debate. Studying the 3-dimensional structure of supernovae should therefore provide new break throughs in our understanding. The goal of this thesis is to advance new techniques for calculating radiative transfer in 3-dimensional expanding atmospheres, and use them to study the flux and polarization signatures of aspherical supernovae. We develop a 3-D Monte Carlo transfer code and use it to directly fit recent spectropolarimetric observations, as well as calculate the observable properties of detailed multi-dimensional hydrodynamical explosion simulations. While previous theoretical efforts have been restricted to ellipsoidal models, we study several more complicated configurations that are tied to specific physical scenarios. We explore clumpy …

The overall goal of this project was to evaluate either boronated EGF or anti-EGFR monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) as delivery agents for boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT).

This research has led to an understanding of the microscopic processes that are responsible for manipulation of atoms on metal surfaces.

None

This report discusses concerns over financing federal elections, such as political action committees (PACs) and proposed reforms to campaign finance.

None

This report provides a selection of information gateways for businesses, state and local governments, research organizations, and others that wish to pursue homeland security related business opportunities or grants from the federal government.

The MJO has long been an aspect of the global climate that has provided a tough test for the climate modelling community. Since the 1980s there have been numerous studies of the simulation of the MJO in atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs), ranging from Hayashi and Golder (1986, 1988) and Lau and Lau (1986), through to more recent studies such as Wang and Schlesinger (1999) and Wu et al. (2002). Of course, attempts to reproduce the MJO in climate models have proceeded in parallel with developments in our understanding of what the MJO is and what drives it. In fact, many advances in understanding the MJO have come through modeling studies. In particular, failure of climate models to simulate various aspects of the MJO has prompted investigations into the mechanisms that are important to its initiation and maintenance, leading to improvements both in our understanding of, and ability to simulate, the MJO. The initial focus of this chapter will be on modeling the MJO during northern winter, when it is characterized as a predominantly eastward propagating mode and is most readily seen in observations. Aspects of the simulation of the MJO will be discussed in the context of its sensitivity …

None

Although there are five effective shear moduli for any layered VTI medium, one and only one effective shear modulus for the layered system contains all the dependence of pore fluids on the elastic or poroelastic constants that can be observed in vertically polarized shear waves. Pore fluids can increase the magnitude the shear energy stored by this modulus by a term that ranges from the smallest to the largest shear moduli of the VTI system. But, since there are five shear moduli in play, the increase in shear energy overall is reduced by a factor of about 5 in general. We can therefore give definite bounds on the maximum increase of shear modulus, being about 20% of the permitted range, when gas is fully replaced by liquid. An attendant increase of density (depending on porosity and fluid density) by approximately 5 to 10% partially offsets the effect of this shear modulus increase. Thus, an increase of shear wave speed on the order of 5 to 10% is shown to be possible when circumstances are favorable - i.e., when the shear modulus fluctuations are large (resulting in strong anisotropy), and the medium behaves in an undrained fashion due to fluid trapping. …

The evolving plan for most of the KE and KW Basin sludges is disposition to WIPP as remote handled (RH) TRU. Because the hydrogen gas concentration in the sealed transportation cask destined for WIPP is limited by flammability safety, the number of containers and shipments to WIPP likely will be driven by the rate of hydrogen generated by the contained uranium metals reaction with water. Therefore, gas generation testing with uranium metal particles of known surface area and immobilized in candidate (grout) solidification matrices was used to identify the effectiveness of various candidate solidification matrices to inhibit the rate of the uranium metal-water reaction.

Time synchronization is a major challenge and a rich area of study in ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. Transmitted-reference (TR) receivers avoid the stringent synchronization requirements that exist in conventional pulse detection schemes. However, the performance of such receivers is highly sensitive to precise timing acquisition and tracking of integration window that defines the limits of the finite integrator prior to final decision block. In this paper we propose a novel rapid synchronization technique that allows us to extract the timing information very accurately in UWB-TR receivers in the presence of a variety of channel noise and interference. The principles of the method are presented and the BER performance of a synchronized UWB-TR receiver is investigated in the presence of a range of values for timing jitter by computer simulations. Our studies show that the proposed synchronization technique greatly improves the performance of UWB-TR receivers in the presence of jitter and AWGN with modest increase in complexity.