This report discusses the issue of U.S. economic assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the importance of continued assistance in light of U.S. national security and also various U.S.-led efforts to promote reform amongst African citizens themselves. U.S. assistance finds its way to Africa through a variety of channels, including the USAID-administered DA program, food aid programs, and indirect aid provided through international financial institutions and the United Nations.

This report presents the issues considered by the 108th Congress related to the civil works program of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps). The Corps plans, constructs, and operates water resources facilities primarily for flood control, navigation, and environmental purposes.

The basic aim of chemistry experiments of transactinide elements (TAN) is to establish their place in the periodic table of the elements, i.e. to determine if their chemical behavior is similar to the one of supposed homologs. In this contribution I will try to give an overview of all chemical experiments on element 108, hassium (Hs) that have been reported to date. Based on the systematics of the periodic table, Hs is expected to be a member of group 8 and therefore homologous to osmium (Os) and ruthenium (Ru). As a member of the transactinide series, its experimental investigation is complicated by low production cross-sections and short half-lives. It has therefore been successfully investigated only recently. Already in the seventies of the last century, several authors mentioned the tetroxides of the two heavier group 8 elements, Ru and Os, to be very outstanding compounds with respect to their unusually high volatility. A possible HsO{sub 4} was considered suitable for isolating Hs from unwanted by-products of the nuclear production reaction. While RuO{sub 4}4 is rather unstable, OsO{sub 4} is well-known to be a stable compound and is widely used in organic chemistry. Recent theoretical calculations on the electronic structure and properties …

In this report several other Clean Water Act issues are likely to receive congressional attention, through oversight hearings and possibly in legislative proposals. Among the topics of interest is whether and how the Administration will revise the current program for restoration of pollution-impaired waters (the Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL program), in view of controversy over regulatory changes made during the Clinton Administration and continuing disagreement among states, cities, industry, and environmental advocates about program effectiveness and efficiency.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "One of the U.S. Census Bureau's (Bureau) long-standing challenges has been counting migrant farm workers. Although the Bureau goes to great lengths to locate these individuals, its efforts are often hampered by the unconventional and hidden housing arrangements, distrust of outsiders, and language and literacy issues often associated with this population group. To help inform the planning for the 2010 Census, we were asked to review the adequacy of the Bureau's procedures for locating migrant farm workers and their dwellings during the 2000 Census, and the steps, if any, that the Bureau can take to improve those procedures."

If all checks were replaced by electronic transactions, the exact cost savings would still be unknown, because estimates of the cost of using a check and the number of checks written each year remain in dispute. Consequently, estimates of cost savings range from $1.4 billion annually for truncation alone to $68 billion for replacing checks with electronic payments. A significant part of the savings comes from eliminating the handling, sorting, and physically transporting of checks to the paying bank. To clear checks electronically, banks must negotiate processing agreements thatmake it unnecessary to physically present the paper check. Since the benefits are not uniformly dispersed among the participants, banks have found it difficult to obtain these agreements, thus constraining the widespread adoption of electronic check clearing.

This report provides a select chronology and resource guide concerning congressional and presidential actions and documents pertaining to budget for FY2004.

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This report describes how the practice of naming post offices through public law originated and how it is commonly done today. House and Senate practices for approving such legislation, and procedures followed by the U.S. Postal Service in organizing a dedication ceremony, are also described.

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Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "On June 4, 2003, GAO testified before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs at a hearing entitled "Transforming the Department of Defense Personnel System: Finding the Right Approach." This letter responds to a request that we provide answers to posthearing questions from Senator George V. Voinovich and Senator Thomas R. Carper concerning the proposed Department of Defense (DOD) Human Capital Reform."

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Numerous types of actinide-bearing waste materials are found throughout the DOE complex. Most of these wastes consist of large volumes of non-hazardous materials contaminated with relatively small quantities of actinide elements. Separation of these wastes into their inert and radioactive components would dramatically reduce the costs of stabilization and disposal. For example, the DOE is responsible for decontaminating concrete within 7000 surplus contaminated buildings. The best technology now available for removing surface contamination from concrete involves removing the surface layer by grit blasting, which produces a large volume of blasting residue containing a small amount of radioactive material. Disposal of this residue is expensive because of its large volume and fine particulate nature. Considerable cost savings would result from separation of the radioactive constituents and stabilization of the concrete dust. Similarly, gas diffusion plants for uranium enrichment contain valuable high-purity nickel in the form of diffusion barriers. Decontamination is complicated by the extremely fine pores in these barriers, which are not readily accessible by most cleaning techniques. A cost-effect method for the removal of radioactive contaminants would release this valuable material for salvage.

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Now in its 10th year, the twice-yearly TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a ''Who's Who'' in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). The TOP500 list was started in 1993 as a project to compile and publish twice a year a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. But it is more than just a ranking system and serves as major source of information to analyze trends in HPC. The list of manufacturers active in this market segment has changed continuously and quite dramatically during the 10 year history of this project. And while the architectures of the systems in the list have also seen a constant change, it turns out that the overall increase in the performance levels recorded is rather smooth and predictable. HPC performance levels grow exponentially. The most important single factor for this growth is - of course the increase of processor performance described by Moore's Law. However, the TOP500 list clearly illustrates that HPC performance has actually outpaced Moore's Law, due to the increasing processor numbers in HPC systems. On the other hand changes in computer architecture make it more and more of a challenge to achieve high performance efficiencies in the …

Iterative image estimation methods have been widely used in emission tomography. Accurate estimate of the uncertainty of the reconstructed images is essential for quantitative applications. While theoretical approach has been developed to analyze the noise propagation from iteration to iteration, the current results are limited to only a few iterative algorithms that have an explicit multiplicative update equation. This paper presents a theoretical noise analysis that is applicable to a wide range of preconditioned gradient type algorithms. One advantage is that proposed method does not require an explicit expression of the preconditioner and hence it is applicable to some algorithms that involve line searches. By deriving fixed point expression from the iteration based results, we show that the iteration based noise analysis is consistent with the xed point based analysis. Examples in emission tomography and transmission tomography are shown.

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