A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General (OIG) has identified significant vulnerabilities in Veterans Affairs' (VA) use of government purchase cards. In its April 26, 2004 report, the OIG reported instances of fraudulent activity totaling $435,900, and numerous improper and questionable uses of the purchase cards totaling $1.1 million. Given that VHA comprised at least 90 percent of VA's dollar and transaction volume for fiscal year 2002, GAO was asked to determine whether existing controls at VHA were designed to provide reasonable assurance that in the future, improper purchases would be prevented or detected in the normal course of business, purchase card and convenience check expenditures were made in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and purchases were made for a reasonable cost and a valid government need."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Improving the federal hiring process is critical given the increasing number of new hires expected in the next few years. Congress asked GAO to report on the (1) status of recent efforts to help improve the federal hiring process and (2) extent to which federal agencies are using two new hiring flexibilities--category rating and direct-hire authority. Category rating permits an agency to select any job candidate placed in a best-qualified category. Direct-hire authority allows an agency to appoint individuals to positions without adherence to certain competitive examination requirements when there is a severe shortage of qualified candidates or a critical hiring need."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A critical element of the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) information technology program is its continuing work with the Department of Defense (DOD) to achieve the ability to exchange patient health care information and create electronic medical records for use by veterans, active-duty military personnel, and their health care providers."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Reliable and complete data are needed to assess watersheds--areas that drain into a common body of water--and allocate limited cleanup resources. Historically, water officials have expressed concern about a lack of water data. At the same time, numerous organizations collect a variety of water data. To address a number of issues concerning the water data that various organization collect, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, asked GAO to determine (1) the key entities that collect water data, the types of data they collect, how they store the data, and how entities can access the data; and (2) the extent that water quality and water quantity data collection efforts are coordinated."

Some genes produce transcripts that function directly in regulatory, catalytic, or structural roles in the cell. These non-coding RNAs are prevalent in all living organisms, and methods that aid the understanding of their functional roles are essential. RNA secondary structure, the pattern of base-pairing, contains the critical information for determining the three dimensional structure and function of the molecule. In this work we examine whether the basic geometric and topological properties of secondary structure are sufficient to distinguish between RNA families in a learning framework. First, we develop a labeled dual graph representation of RNA secondary structure by adding biologically meaningful labels to the dual graphs proposed by Gan et al [1]. Next, we define a similarity measure directly on the labeled dual graphs using the recently developed marginalized kernels [2]. Using this similarity measure, we were able to train Support Vector Machine classifiers to distinguish RNAs of known families from random RNAs with similar statistics. For 22 of the 25 families tested, the classifier achieved better than 70% accuracy, with much higher accuracy rates for some families. Training a set of classifiers to automatically assign family labels to RNAs using a one vs. all multi-class scheme also yielded encouraging …

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating the Coyle Middle School Band of Garland on receiving the John Philip Sousa Foundation Sudler Silver Cup award for 2003.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating Dr. Claude Thomas and the First Baptist Church Euless on the occasion of the church's 100th anniversary.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating the Shallowater High School girls' basketball team on winning the 2003-2004 UIL Class 2A State Championship.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating the Shallowater High School boys' basketball team on winning the 2004 UIL Class 2A State Championship.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating Larry Forehand of Pasadena on the 30th anniversary of Casa Ole restaurants.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating Coach Doug Davalos and the Sul Ross State University Lobos men's basketball team on repeating as American Southwest Conference West Division champs, winning the American Southwest Conference title, and advancing to the Sweet 16 in the 2004 NCAA Division III tournament.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to congratulating Weldon Willig on being named Southwest Region National Coach of the Year by Schutt Sports.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to honoring John McDivitt of Houston on the occasion of his retirement from the American Red Cross after 38 years of service.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to honoring James Ellis "Jim" Hall for his motor sports achievements and congratulating him on the opening of the Chaparral Gallery at the Petroleum Museum in Midland.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to designating September 2004 as Luekemia and Lymphoma Awareness Month in Texas.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to paying tribute to the life of US Army Sgt. William Cody Eckhart of Rocksprings, who died on April 10, 2004, at the age of 25 while serving in Iraq.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to commending the Big Spring Veterans Administration Medical Center for providing quality medical treatment and care to our nation's veterans.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to extending best wishes to the Saint Cecilia Catholic Church in Los Fresnos on the occasion of its 47th anniversary.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to honoring Dr. Richard R. Moore on the occasion of his retirement from Del Mar College in Corpus Christi in August, 2004, after 40 years of service.

General frameworks for distributed computing are slowly evolving out of Grid, Peer Architecture, and Web Services. The following results from a summer long survey into distributing computing practices have revealed three things. One, that Legion and Cactus-G have achieved the most in terms of providing an all-purpose application environment. Two, that extending a local programming environment to operate in a highly distributed fashion can be facilitated with toolkits like Globus. Three, that building a new system from the ground up could be realized, in part, by using some of the following components; an Object Oriented Database, Tapestry, JXTA, BOINC, Globus, component architecture technology, XML and related libraries, Condor-G, Proteus, and ParMETIS.

Improved thermal management is needed to increase the power density of electronic and more effectively cool electronic enclosures that are envisioned in future aircraft, spacecraft and surface ships. Typically, heat exchanger cores must increase in size to more effectively dissipate increased heat loads, this would be impossible in many cases, thus improved heat exchanger cores will be required. In this Phase I investigation, MRi aimed to demonstrate improved thermal management using graphite foam (Gr-foam) core heat exchangers. The proposed design was to combine Gr-foams from POCO with MRi's innovative low temperature, active metal joining process (S-Bond{trademark}) to bond Gr-foam to aluminum, copper and aluminum/SiC composite faceplates. The results were very favorable, so a Phase II SBIR with the MDA was initiated. This had primarily 5 tasks: (1) bonding, (2) thermal modeling, (3) cooling chip scale packages, (4) evaporative cooling techniques and (5) IGBT cold plate development. The bonding tests showed that the ''reflow'' technique with S-Bond{reg_sign}-220 resulted in the best and most consistent bond. Then, thermal modeling was used to design different chip scale packages and IGBT cold plates. These designs were used to fabricate many finned graphite foam heat sinks specifically for two standard type IC packages, the 423 …

In the process of Savannah River Site (SRS) operations limited amounts of waste are generated containing petroleum, and radiological contaminated soils. Currently, this combination of radiological and petroleum contaminated waste does not have an immediate disposal route and is being stored in low activity vaults. SRS developed and implemented a successful plan for clean up of the petroleum portion of the soils in situ using simple, inexpensive, bioreactor technology. Treatment in a bioreactor removes the petroleum contamination from the soil without spreading radiological contamination to the environment. This bioreactor uses the bioventing process and bioaugmentation or the addition of the select hydrocarbon degrading bacteria. Oxygen is usually the initial rate-limiting factor in the biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbons. Using the bioventing process allowed control of the supply of nutrients and moisture based on petroleum contamination concentrations and soil type. The results of this work have proven to be a safe and cost-effective means of cleaning up low level radiological and petroleum-contaminated soil. Many of the other elements of the bioreactor design were developed or enhanced during the demonstration of a ''biopile'' to treat the soils beneath a Polish oil refinery's waste disposal lagoons. Aerobic microorganisms were isolated from the aged refinery's …

The acceleration of the expansion of the universe, ascribed to a dark energy, is one of the most intriguing discoveries in science. In addition to precise, systematics controlled data, clear, robust interpretation of the observations is required to reveal the nature of dark energy. Even for the simplest question: is the data consistent with the cosmological constant? there are important subtleties in the reconstruction of the dark energy properties. We discuss the roles of analysis both in terms of the Hubble expansion rate or dark energy density {rho}DE(z) and in terms of the dark energy equation of state w(z), arguing that each has its carefully defined place. Fitting the density is best for learning about the density, but using it to probe the equation of state can lead to instability and bias.

Achievement of atomic-resolution electron-beam tomography will allow determination of the three-dimensional structure of nanoparticles (and other suitable specimens) at atomic resolution. Three-dimensional reconstructions will yield ''section'' images that resolve atoms overlapped in normal electron microscope images (projections), resolving lighter atoms such as oxygen in the presence of heavier atoms, and atoms that lie on non-lattice sites such as those in non-periodic defect structures. Our first demonstrations of 3-D reconstruction to atomic resolution used five zone-axis images from test specimens of staurolite consisting of a mix of light and heavy atoms. We propose combining ultra-high (sub-Angstrom) resolution zone-axis images with off-zone images by first using linear reconstruction of the off-zone images while excluding images obtained within a small range of tilts (of the order of 60 milliradian) of any zone-axis orientation, since it has been shown that dynamical effects can be mitigated by slight off-axis tilt of the specimen. The (partial) reconstruction would then be used as a model for forward calculation by image simulation in zone-axis directions and the structure refined iteratively to achieve satisfactory fits with the experimental zone-axis data. Another path to atomic-resolution tomography would combine ''zone-axis tomography'' with high-resolution dark-field hollow-cone (DFHC) imaging. Electron diffraction theory indicates …