Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress, the Department of Defense, and GAO have expressed concerns about the readiness of U.S. forces to carry out combat missions. To ensure that Army units can fulfill their missions, the Army decided to staff all active units at 100 percent with personnel at authorized grades and skills over fiscal years 2000-2003. The initiative has had mixed results. On the positive side, some combat divisions that have been routinely staffed at less than authorized levels are now staffed in the aggregate at 100 percent. On the negative side, because of the effort to staff the combat divisions and armored regiments at 100 percent, the staffing levels of some nondivisional units, including early deploying combat support units, have decreased. According to Army officials, some management decisions are affecting the Army's ability to achieve the goals for the manning initiative. The Army's ability to fully achieve and sustain its manning initiative goals will depend on its future management decisions on funding, recruiting, and retention."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), insures billions of dollars in home mortgage loans made by private lenders. HUD's 2020 Management Reform Plan, issued in 1997, sought to downsize and reform the agency, including its single-family mortgage insurance program. As part of its 2020 plan, HUD consolidated the single-family program's field activities at four new regional homeownership centers and specified resources for the centers. Although HUD has substantially streamlined FHA's single-family mortgage insurance programs, human capital issues remain a concern. This report reviews HUD's implementation of the homeownership center concept under the 2020 plan, focusing on (1) the deployment of center staff, (2) the training provided to the center staff, and (3) the centers' monitoring of contractors. GAO found that nearly half of the centers' staff remain in 71 field offices across the country, even though HUD envisioned that only a third of the staff would stay in the field offices. The deployment of staff across the centers is not consistent with their workload, and, as a result, the centers are having trouble supervising and making effective use …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the Department of Justice's fiscal year 2000 performance report and fiscal year 2002 performance plan required by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 and assesses Justice's progress in achieving selected key outcomes that were identified as important mission areas. Justice's overall progress toward achieving the key outcomes was difficult to ascertain because generally the performance report lacked fiscal year 2000 performance targets to measure success and lacked clear linkage between performance measures and outcomes. Justice did not set fiscal year 2000 performance targets for some measures because the measures were new, and for some measures Justice believes that setting performance targets could cause the public to perceive law enforcement as engaging in "bounty hunting" or pursuing arbitrary targets merely for the sake of meeting particular goals. Justice's strategies varied in the extent to which they included sufficient information to inform decisionmakers about initiatives to achieve these outcomes. GAO notes opportunities for Justice to improve the usefulness of its reports and plans."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal year 2000, Medicare made more than $200 billion in payments to hundreds of thousands of health care providers who served nearly 40 million beneficiaries. Because of the program's vast size and complexity, GAO has included Medicare on its list of government areas at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. GAO first included Medicare on that list in 1990, and it remains there today. GAO has continually reported on the efforts of the Health Care Financing Administration -- recently renamed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) -- to safeguard Medicare payments and streamline operations. CMS relies on its claims administration contractors to run Medicare. As these contractors have become more aggressive in identifying and pursuing inappropriate payments, providers have expressed concern that Medicare has become to complex and difficult to navigate. CMS's oversight of its contractors has historically been weak. In the last two years, however, CMS has made substantial progress. GAO has identified several areas in which CMS still need improvement, especially in ensuring that contractors provide accurate, complete, and timely information to providers on Medicare billing rules and coverage policies."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony reviews the Department of Defense's (DOD) handling of appropriated funds from expired appropriation accounts. In 1990, Congress changed the law governing the use of appropriation accounts because it concluded that controls over them were not working. Without adequate controls, Congress was concerned that agencies could disburse money in amounts and for purposes that it had not approved. GAO found that DOD improperly charged appropriation accounts after they were closed. GAO also found that DOD did not establish the requisite systems, controls, and managerial attention required to properly account for its disbursements consistent with the 1990 account closing law, and as a result, DOD made at least $615 million of illegal or otherwise improper adjustments during fiscal year 2000 alone. DOD was aware of the limitations the account closing law placed on the availability of canceled appropriations and that the law was enacted because of previous abuses by DOD's use of old appropriations. DOD also knew that a major system used to control its use of appropriations allowed for disbursements to be charged in a way that was inconsistent with the law. However, DOD did nothing to …

Recent work in classification indicates that significant improvements in accuracy can be obtained by growing an ensemble of classifiers and having them vote for the most popular class. This paper focuses on ensembles of decision trees that are created with a randomized procedure based on sampling. Randomization can be introduced by using random samples of the training data (as in bagging or boosting) and running a conventional tree-building algorithm, or by randomizing the induction algorithm itself. The objective of this paper is to describe the first experiences with a novel randomized tree induction method that uses a sub-sample of instances at a node to determine the split. The empirical results show that ensembles generated using this approach yield results that are competitive in accuracy and superior in computational cost to boosting and bagging.

The U.S. has generally lacked the capability for an iterative process of detailed structural design, manufacturing, and testing at the full blade level to achieve specific structural performance, cost, and weight targets. This project examined the effects that different composites processing methods had on the performance of representative blade substructures. In addition, the results of the testing of these substructures was used to validate NuMAD, the design tool developed at Sandia National Laboratories.

The Gordon Research Conference on Applied and Environmental Microbiology was held at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, July 22-27, 2001. The conference was attended by 121 participants. The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field, coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, and included US and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate discussion about the key issues in the field today. Session topics included the following: Environmental and applied genomics, Cell-to-cell signaling and multicellular behavior, Emerging technologies and methods, Novel metabolisms and ecosystems, Directed evolution of enzymes and pathways, Symbiotic and trophic relationships, Synthesis and application of novel biopolymers, and Microbes at the oxic-anoxic interface. There was also a special lecture titled ''Under the umbrella of the big tree: microbial biology into the 21st century.''

Development of an ANSI/ANS Standard for the training and qualification of criticality safety engineers has been underway for nearly one year. The working group for this Standard is comprised of criticality safety experts from regulatory, licensee and contractor organizations. Its goal is to develop a standard that can be uniformly adopted, that covers all criticality safety engineer qualification levels, and that includes all required competencies such that most of the qualifications can be easily transferred between sites. This status report is presented to let the general criticality safety community know of progress on the Standard, and to solicit feedback to the working group as it continues work on ANSI/ANS-8.26.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In negotiating profit on contracts, the Department of Defense (DOD) requires contracting officers to set negotiating objectives by relying on guidelines in defense regulations. Congress mandated that DOD review its profit guidelines and consider whether modifying them would provide more incentive for contractors to develop and produce complex and innovative new technologies for weapon systems. After completing its review, DOD issued a final rule in December 2000 that added a technology incentive to its guidelines for setting profit objectives on negotiated defense contracts. This report reviews whether the new policy is (1) likely to achieve its intended objective of stimulating increased innovation and (2) consistent with the revised policies for acquiring weapons systems. GAO found that the new profit policy may have limited effect on incentivizing additional innovation because the policy has limited reach during research and development and it does not provide adequate guidance on when to apply the incentive. The policy may not reinforce DOD's emphasis on technology maturity in its guidance on the system acquisition process."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the Department of Defense's (DOD) handling of appropriated funds from expired appropriation accounts. In 1990, Congress changed the law governing the use of appropriation accounts because it concluded that controls over them were not working. Without adequate controls, Congress was concerned that agencies could disburse money in amounts and for purposes that it had not approved. GAO found that DOD improperly charged appropriation accounts after they were closed. GAO also found that DOD did not establish the requisite systems, controls, and managerial attention required to properly account for its disbursements consistent with the 1990 account closing law. As a result, DOD made at least $615 million of illegal or otherwise improper adjustments during fiscal year 2000 alone. DOD was aware of the limitations the account closing law placed on the availability of canceled appropriations and that the law was enacted because of previous abuses by DOD. DOD also knew that a major system used to control its use of appropriations allowed for disbursements to be charged in a way that was inconsistent with the law. However, DOD did nothing to fix the system, …

A workshop entitled ''Radionuclide Contamination in Water Resources'' was held in Almaty, Kazakhstan from Tuesday 29 May through Friday 1 June. This workshop was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and three organizations from the Republic of Kazakhstan: the Institute of Nonproliferation, the Institute of Hydrogeology and Hydrophysics, and KazAtomProm. Representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, three national laboratories, and 13 different organizations from the Republic of Kazakhstan attended the workshop. A complete list of attendees, the workshop program, and information on the background and motivation for this workshop are provided in this report. The objective of the workshop was to identify critical problems, discover what is known about the problems related to radionuclide contamination of groundwater resources, form collaborative teams, and produce a small number proposals that both address further characterization and assess risk via contaminant fate and transport modeling. We plan to present these proposals to U.S. government agencies and international sponsors for funding.

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Adaptive optics for the 30-100 meter class telescopes now being considered will require an extension in almost every area of AO system component technology. In this paper, we present scaling laws and strawman error budgets for AO systems on extremely large telescopes (ELTs) and discuss the implications for component technology and computational architecture. In the component technology area, we discuss the advanced efforts being pursued at the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) in the development of large number of degrees of freedom deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, and guidestar lasers. It is important to note that the scaling of present wavefront reconstructor algorithms will become computationally intractable for ELTs and will require the development of new algorithms and advanced numerical mathematics techniques. We present the computational issues and discuss the characteristics of new algorithmic approaches that show promise in scaling to ELT AO systems.

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A guide that describes financing program options, key components of financing support in commercial and residential sectors for clean energy programs, and considers factors for states and communities to consider as they make decisions, get started or update financing programs for clean energy.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been charged by the DOE National Transportation Program (NTP) with the responsibility of retrieving reports and information pertaining to packaging and transportation (P&T) incidents from the centralized Occurrence Reporting and Processing System (ORPS) database. These selected reports have been analyzed for trends, impact on P&T operations and safety concerns, and lessons learned (LL) in P&T operations. This task is designed not only to keep the NTP aware of what is occurring at DOE sites on a periodic basis, but also to highlight potential P&T problems that may need management attention and allow dissemination of LL to DOE Operations Offices, with the subsequent flow of information to contractors. The Safety Metrics Indicator Program (SMIP) was established by the NTP in fiscal year (FY) 1998 as an initiative to develop a methodology for reporting occurrences with the appropriate metrics to show rates and trends. One of its chief goals has been to augment historical reporting of occurrence-based information and present more meaningful statistics for comparison of occurrences. To this end, the SMIP established a severity weighting system for the classification of the occurrences, which would allow normalization of the data and provide a basis for …

In 1995 the ASHG/DOE AAAS Congressional Fellow Program was established to initiate a dialogue between the professional genetics community and federal policy makers.

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The total inventory of fourteen radionuclides, three metals, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been calculated for the twenty-two Old Solvent Tanks (OSTs). The inventory calculations are based upon extensive characterization data of the multiple liquid and sludge samples taken from the OSTs. In addition, the total inventory of sixteen actinides (including error) has been calculated. The actinide inventory will be useful for criticality safety considerations.

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The entire history of the discoveries of K{sub L}{sup o} and violations of T and CP began at Brookhaven. It is most appropriate for us to hold today's special seminar on CP Violation in K decay in this laboratory. Forty-five years ago, in the same paper on parity nonconservation, it was also pointed out that there is no proof of T symmetry in the weak interaction, nor of C invariance. That paper was submitted to the Physical Review (then, also located at BNL) on June 22, 1956. A month later, Lederman and his collaborators discovered a long-lived neutral V particle (now called K{sub L}{sup o}) at the Cosmotron using the cloud chamber. This discovery was presented as a rigorous proof of C symmetry. In the same summer at Brookhaven, in collaboration with Oehme and Yang, I did the analysis on the neutral kaon system, assuming T, C and CP violations (but based on CPT symmetry). In that work, the two non-orthogonal eigen-states {psi}{sub +} and {psi}{sub -} (now K{sub S}{sup o} and K{sub L}{sup o}) were characterized by a non-orthogonality parameter {alpha} ({approx_equal} 2 Re{epsilon} in today's notation), which was shown to be small, because of unitarity. We then went …

Phase-space analysis of neutron optics has revealed that neutron imaging by Bragg reflection from thick bent perfect crystals can be non-dispersive (independent of the neutron wavelength), like with an optical mirror. The corresponding devices, called Bragg mirrors (BM), can be used for neutron imaging at pulsed neutron sources. Using a position sensitive detector (PSD) and time-of-flight analysis (TOF), a BM imaging system will make it possible to collect both real space mapping data and scattering space data simultaneously. Each pixel of PSD will correspond to a point in the sample and will contain a segment of the diffraction pattern (useful for strain, texture or phase analysis), or of an inelastic spectrum. In this paper the resolution and efficiency of BM in TOF diffraction experiments are calculated and compared with the usual sequential method of mapping. Experimental tests performed at steady state neutron sources showed sub-millimeter spatial resolution in the one-dimensional case.