Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Department of State's efforts to improve the foreign affairs community's information technology infrastructure, focusing on: (1) State's efforts to implement the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel's recommendations; and (2) the challenges and risks it will face as it proceeds."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed opportunities to reduce claims processing and other costs of the Department of Defense's (DOD) managed health care program--TRICARE, focusing on: (1) the cost of processing TRICARE claims; (2) opportunities that potentially can reduce costs and improve service to beneficiaries, namely increased anti-fraud efforts and more joint procurement of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); and (3) the process beneficiaries use to make medical appointments."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) and the Forest Service's land exchange programs, focusing on the: (1) agencies' use of land exchanges since 1989; (2) extent to which the agencies ensure that their land exchanges meet exchange requirements; (3) effect of the agencies' recent efforts to improve the management of their exchange programs; and (4) extent to which problems in specific exchanges are reflective of inherent difficulties in the land exchange program as a whole."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the U.S. air mobility forces' readiness to execute the National Military Strategy, focusing on: (1) whether the Air Force's strategic airlift and aerial refueling fleets are capable of meeting the requirements for winning two nearly simultaneous major theater wars; (2) the reasons for any shortfalls in strategic airlift and aerial refueling capability; and (3) what Department of Defense's (DOD) efforts are underway to resolve these capability shortfalls and what are the issues it faces in doing so."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the proposed Cyber Security Information Act of 2000 (H.R. 4246), focusing on how it can enhance critical infrastructure protection and the formidable challenges involved with achieving the goals of the bill."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Department of Energy's (DOE) privatization initiative as it has been applied to DOE's nuclear waste cleanup program, focusing on: (1) what DOE has accomplished by privatizing such projects; and (2) the lessons that can be learned from these efforts."

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a governmental body may meet in executive session to discuss a proposed contract (RQ-0168-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether an excavator, who has given proper notice of a planned excavation under section 251.151 of the Utilities Code, must be given a new notice to a notification center when excavation does not start within fourteen days of the date the excavator provides the notice (RQ-0173-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a property owner of land dedicated as a cemetary may convey the land and related questions (RQ-0175-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Time when municipal tax abatement ends for a propert owner elected to the city council that granted the abatement: Clarification of Attorney General Opinion JC-0155 (1999) (RQ-0177-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether an oyster-bed lease authorized by chapter 76 of the Parks and Wildlife Code is a perpetual lease or an annual lease, and related question (RQ-0163-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a county may permit the installation of temporary water lines along its right-of-way (RQ-0164-JC)

The Waste Treatment Building System provides the space, layout, structures, and embedded subsystems that support the processing of low-level liquid and solid radioactive waste generated within the Monitored Geologic Repository (MGR). The activities conducted in the Waste Treatment Building include sorting, volume reduction, and packaging of dry waste, and collecting, processing, solidification, and packaging of liquid waste. The Waste Treatment Building System is located on the surface within the protected area of the MGR. The Waste Treatment Building System helps maintain a suitable environment for the waste processing and protects the systems within the Waste Treatment Building (WTB) from most of the natural and induced environments. The WTB also confines contaminants and provides radiological protection to personnel. In addition to the waste processing operations, the Waste Treatment Building System provides space and layout for staging of packaged waste for shipment, industrial and radiological safety systems, control and monitoring of operations, safeguards and security systems, and fire protection, ventilation and utilities systems. The Waste Treatment Building System also provides the required space and layout for maintenance activities, tool storage, and administrative facilities. The Waste Treatment Building System integrates waste processing systems within its protective structure to support the throughput rates established …

The Waste Package Remediation System remediates waste packages (WPs) and disposal containers (DCs) in one of two ways: preparation of rejected DC closure welds for repair or opening of the DC/WP. DCs are brought to the Waste Package Remediation System for preparation of rejected closure welds if testing of the closure weld by the Disposal Container Handling System indicates an unacceptable, but repairable, welding flaw. DC preparation of rejected closure welds will require removal of the weld in such a way that the Disposal Container Handling System may resume and complete the closure welding process. DCs/WPs are brought to the Waste Package Remediation System for opening if the Disposal Container Handling System testing of the DC closure weld indicates an unrepairable welding flaw, or if a WP is recovered from the subsurface repository because suspected damage to the WP or failure of the WP has occurred. DC/WP opening will require cutting of the DC/WP such that a temporary seal may be installed and the waste inside the DC/WP removed by another system. The system operates in a Waste Package Remediation System hot cell located in the Waste Handling Building that has direct access to the Disposal Container Handling System. One …

Vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are becoming increasingly important for short-haul optical fiber transmission systems. Given the commercial success of GaAs-based 850nm VCSELs, dramatic enhancements in transmission bandwidth and distance can be achieved in conventional single- and multi-mode fiber by extending the emission wavelength to the 1300nm-1550nm range. GaInNAs is a promising active layer material grown on GaAs that can achieve 1300nm emission [l], and electrically pulsed broad-area GaInNAs VCSELs [2,3] have been realized. Here we take advantage of the properties of GaAs-based materials-thermally-conductive high contrast mirrors and AlAs-oxide current apertures-to demonstrate for the first time low-threshold ({approx}1 mA) GaInNAs VCSELs emitting at a wavelength of 1200 nm under continuous-wave room temperature operation. The device structure is shown schematically in figure 1. The bottom mirror consists of a 22.5-period n-doped GaAs/AlAs distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) designed for a center wavelength {lambda} near 1200nm, the top mirror is a 22-period p-doped DBR whose reflectance is enhanced by a Ti/Au contact electrode, and the GaAs {lambda} cavity contains three 70{angstrom}, Ga{sub 0.3}In{sub 0.7}N{sub 0.02}As{sub 0.98} quantum wells (QWs) separated by 200{angstrom} GaAs barriers. The epilayers were grown by molecular beam epitaxy using solid-source arsenic and a rf nitrogen plasma source. After growth, …

Decision trees have long been popular in classification as they use simple and easy-to-understand tests at each node. Most variants of decision trees test a single attribute at a node, leading to axis-parallel trees, where the test results in a hyperplane which is parallel to one of the dimensions in the attribute space. These trees can be rather large and inaccurate in cases where the concept to be learnt is best approximated by oblique hyperplanes. In such cases, it may be more appropriate to use an oblique decision tree, where the decision at each node is a linear combination of the attributes. Oblique decision trees have not gained wide popularity in part due to the complexity of constructing good oblique splits and the tendency of existing splitting algorithms to get stuck in local minima. Several alternatives have been proposed to handle these problems including randomization in conjunction with deterministic hill climbing and the use of simulated annealing. In this paper, they use evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to determine the split. EAs are well suited for this problem because of their global search properties, their tolerance to noisy fitness evaluations, and their scalability to large dimensional search spaces. They demonstrate the technique …

Advanced in technology have enabled us to collect data from observations, experiments, and simulations at an ever increasing pace. As these data sets approach the terabyte and petabyte range, scientists are increasingly using semi-automated techniques from data mining and pattern recognition to find useful information in the data. In order for data mining to be successful, the raw data must first be processed into a form suitable for the detection of patterns. When the data is in the form of images, this can involve a substantial amount of processing on very large data sets. To help make this task more efficient, they are designing and implementing an object-oriented image processing toolkit that specifically targets massively-parallel, distributed-memory architectures. They first show that it is possible to use object-oriented technology to effectively address the diverse needs of image applications. Next, they describe how we abstract out the similarities in image processing algorithms to enable re-use in the software. They will also discuss the difficulties encountered in parallelizing image algorithms on massively parallel machines as well as the bottlenecks to high performance. They will demonstrate the work using images from an astronomical data set, and illustrate how techniques such as filters and denoising …

The National Ignition Facility will require hundreds of very large single crystals (boules) of KDP and KD*P for the amplifier and frequency conversion optics. Rapid growth now routinely produces 250-300 kg boules of KDP. Technical hurdles overcome during the past year include inclusion formation and spurious nucleation. Areas of continued interest are control of asymmetry and aspect ratio. Variations in KDP concentration on the pm scale at the growing crystal steps can cause inclusions of growth solution. Microscopic investigations, hydrodynamic modeling, and theoretical modeling have been combined to provide a good mechanistic understanding of the formation of inclusions. Modifications to rotation regimes to improve hydrodynamics can eliminate or minimize the effects of these instability mechanisms, and can increase the inclusion-free growth rate by 20-40% over previously observed growth rates. Aspect ratio and boule asymmetry remains of great interest. Small changes in asymmetry can result in significant increases in maximum yields for boules of the same mass. Reasons for the observed changes in aspect ratio during growth will be presented, along with methods to control or influence aspect ratio and boule asymmetry.

The Waste Treatment Building Ventilation System provides heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) for the contaminated, potentially contaminated, and uncontaminated areas of the Monitored Geologic Repository's (MGR) Waste Treatment Building (WTB). In the uncontaminated areas, the non-confinement area ventilation system maintains the proper environmental conditions for equipment operation and personnel comfort. In the contaminated and potentially contaminated areas, in addition to maintaining the proper environmental conditions for personnel comfort and equipment operation, the contamination confinement area ventilation system directs potentially contaminated air away from personnel in the WTB and confines the contamination within high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration units. The contamination confinement area ventilation system creates airflow paths and pressure zones to minimize the potential for spreading contamination with the building. The contamination confinement ventilation system also protects the environment and the public by limiting airborne releases of radioactive or other hazardous contaminants from the WTB. The Waste Treatment Building Ventilation System confines the radioactive and hazardous material within the building such that the release rates comply with regulatory limits, The system design, operations, and maintenance activities incorporate ALARA (as low as is reasonably achievable) principles to maintain personnel radiation doses to all occupational workers below regulatory limits and as …

Some recent advances in dielectric continuum models for static and dynamic aspects of molecular solvation are discussed, and connections with molecular-level solvent models are noted. The traditional Born-Onsager-Kirkwood (BKO) model is compared to a more flexible model (the so-called frequency-resolved cavity model (FRCM)) which assigns distinct inner and outer solute cavities in accommodating, respectively, the inertialess (optical) and inertial solvent response. Sample calculations of solvent reorganization energy ({lambda}{sub s}) are presented for various thermal and optical electron transfer (ET) processes, based on self-consistent reaction field models using molecular orbital (MO) or configuration interaction (CI) solvent wave functions.

The Fermilab Tevatron collider experiments CDF and D0 collected more than 100 pb{sup -1} of data at {radical}(s) = 1.8 TeV during Run I (1992-1995). Results of searches for new phenomena (exotics) are presented, covering supersymmetry, leptoquarks, technicolor, and quark compositeness. In each case, no discrepancy with the Standard Model is observed, and stringent limits on new physics predicted by these models are extracted. Parameters for Run II of the Tevatron are given along with projections of search reaches for this upcoming run.

The 25-year-old command-and-control environmental regulatory structure in the US has resulted in significant environmental improvements. Recently, however, its limitations (e.g., rigid application regardless of site-specific conditions, disregard of cross-media and multimedia impacts, limited incentives for new technology development and use) have become increasingly apparent. New regulatory approaches that recognize current and anticipated economic constraints, new knowledge of environmental processes and impacts, and the benefits of new technologies are needed. Such approaches could be especially important for the US petroleum refining industry. This industry operates under thin profit margins, releases chemicals that can produce adverse health and environmental impacts, and must meet the technological challenges of producing more highly refined fuels from poorer quality feedstocks. Under a grant from the Environmental Technology Initiative (ETI), Argonne National Laboratory and its subcontractor, Analytical Services, Inc. developed two alternative environmental regulatory programs for next-generation petroleum refineries. (In this report, next-generation refineries refers to the refineries of today as they operate in the next 20 or more years rather than to fully reengineered future refineries.) The objective of the ETI refinery project was to develop future-oriented regulatory programs for next-generation refineries that will expand the use of innovative technologies, encourage pollution prevention, demonstrate environmental responsibility, …

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