A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO examined the extent to which agencies' efforts and federal laws ensure the: (1) safety of functional foods and dietary supplements; and (2) accuracy of health-related claims on product labels and in advertising."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's management problems, focusing on: (1) the status of the Board's organization and operations; (2) the Board's efforts to update and develop plans, policies, and procedures for accomplishing the Board's mission, including those aimed at ensuring the objectivity of its investigative activities; and (3) whether the Board would benefit from the independent oversight of an inspector general."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Federal Facilities Council's (FFC) study on the role of federal agencies' facility design reviews in the facility acquisition process."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO: (1) assessed the Navy's progress since 1996 in improving the self-defense capability of surface ships against cruise missiles; and (2) evaluated Navy plans for meeting future anti-cruise missile self-defense requirements."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on real-time disclosure of foreign automated teller machine (ATM) fees levied by the card-issuing bank, focusing on: (1) alterations to the ATM system that would be needed to support real-time foreign fee disclosure; (2) estimated costs and timeframes associated with implementing real-time foreign fee disclosure; (3) potential competitive impact on ATM industry participants, defined to include various sized banks, ATM networks, ATM owners, and third-party processors; (4) potential impact on consumers; and (5) alternatives to real-time foreign fee disclosure."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed security protection for selected officials from all of the civilian executive branches from fiscal years 1997 through 1999, focusing on: (1) how many federal government officials were protected, who protected them, and how many security personnel protected them; (2) the cost to protect these officials; (3) under what legal authorities were agencies providing security protection; (4) under what circumstances were officials protected; (5) how agencies were preparing threat assessments, and what are the implications of standardizing and centralizing threat assessments; (6) what training did protective personnel receive, and what the implications of standardizing and centralizing security protection training are; (7) the implications of centralizing protection services under one agency; and (8) the views of the protected officials regarding the need for and adequacy of their protection."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed ways to distribute Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act funds to states and localities, focusing on the: (1) potential for distributing funds on the basis of counts of persons with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in each geographic area rather than on counts of only persons whose disease has progressed to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS); (2) differences in funding for states with and without an eligible metropolitan area (EMA); and (3) current effect of the hold-harmless provision adopted in the 1996 reauthorization, when the method of counting living AIDS cases replaced the practice of counting cumulative AID cases."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Health Care Infrastructure Investment Act of 2000 (H.R. 4401), which calls for the development of an immediate claim, administration, payment resolution, and data collection system, focusing on the: (1) effects of the system on the claims process of both the Medicare part B program and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP); and (2) the role and composition of a proposed Health Care Infrastructure Commission."

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) requirements for protecting and controlling classified documents."

A brief study was conducted to roughly estimate the availability of a superconducting (SC) linear accelerator (LINAC) as compared to a normal conducting (NC) one. Potentially, SC radio frequency cavities have substantial reserve capability, which allows them to compensate for failed cavities, thus increasing the availability of the overall LINAC. In the initial SC design, there is a klystron and associated equipment (e.g., power supply) for every cavity of an SC LINAC. On the other hand, a single klystron may service eight cavities in the NC LINAC. This study modeled that portion of the Spallation Neutron Source LINAC (between 200 and 1,000 MeV) that is initially proposed for conversion from NC to SC technology. Equipment common to both designs was not evaluated. Tabular fault-tree calculations and computer-event-driven simulation (EDS) computer computations were performed. The estimated gain in availability when using the SC option ranges from 3 to 13% under certain equipment and conditions and spatial separation requirements. The availability of an NC LINAC is estimated to be 83%. Tabular fault-tree calculations and computer EDS modeling gave the same 83% answer to within one-tenth of a percent for the NC case. Tabular fault-tree calculations of the availability of the SC LINAC …

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Calibration of hydroacoustic stations for nuclear explosion monitoring is important for increasing monitoring capability and confidence from newly installed stations and from existing stations. Calibration of hydroacoustic stations is herein defined as the near-field precision location of the hydrophones and determination of the amplitude response; and the regional-scale calibration of acoustic traveltimes, bathymetric shadowing, diffraction, and reflection as recorded at a particular station. An important type of calibration not considered here is ocean-basin-scale calibration of a hydroacoustic monitoring system. To understand how to best conduct hydroacoustic station calibrations, an experiment was conducted in May 1999 at Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. The experiment made use of a British oceanographic research vessel towing an airgun array and collected data over three MILS hydrophones that were in use by the National Data Center and the International Data Center. From the towed airgun data we were able to determine the location for each of the three hydrophones to accuracy better than 100 meters in latitude, longitude, and depth. The agreement with the nominal locations was excellent in depth and to within 1 km in latitude and longitude. The depths determined for the hydrophones and the ocean bottom depths determined from the …

The Department of Energy (DOE) has moved rapidly toward electronic production, management, and dissemination of scientific and technical information. The World-Wide Web (WWW) has become a primary means of information dissemination. Electronic commerce (EC) is becoming the preferred means of procurement. DOE, like other government agencies, depends on and encourages the use of international standards in data communications. Like most government agencies, DOE has expressed a preference for openly developed standards over proprietary designs promoted as ``standards'' by vendors. In particular, there is a preference for standards developed by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) that use open, public processes to develop their standards. Among the most widely adopted international standards is the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, ISO 8879:1986, FIPS 152), to which DOE long ago made a commitment. Besides the official commitment, which has resulted in several specialized projects, DOE makes heavy use of coding derived from SGML: Most documents on the WWW are coded in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which is an application of SGML. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the backing of major software houses like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, and Sun, is promoting …

Measurements that accumulate the rate of real coincidence between multiplets of detection events (groupings of arbitrary order, e.g., one event, two events, three events, etc.) can yield spurious results if background events arise from processes (e.g., spontaneous fission or neutron spallation) that themselves produce correlated multiplets. This is particularly true if this background varies significantly over time or from one location to another, as it often does in operating facilities, i.e., those not specifically designed to support experimental radiation measurements but that instead rely upon the support of precise radiation measurements for, e.g., NMC and A. In particular, both the quantity and location of radioactive material in weapons facilities changes frequently and unpredictably, and so the background due to the presence (or absence) of this material is completely out of the control of the radiation measurement analyst. Furthermore, numerous Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS) measurements have revealed that background often contains mutually correlated events even in the complete absence of material (e.g., {sup 240}Pu) with a significant spontaneous fission rate. The technique subsequently described removes the effects of such self-correlated background from active NMIS measurements. It could be adapted to other active radiation measurements.

The long-standing problem of characterizing failure for fiber composite materials will be reviewed. Emphasis will be given to the lamina level involving nominally aligned fibers in a matrix phase. However, some consideration will also be given to laminate failure using the lamina form as the basic building block along with the concept of progressive damage. The many different lamina level theories will be surveyed along with the commitment necessary to produce critical experimental data. Four particular theories will be reviewed and compared in some detail, these being the Tsai-Wu, Hashin, Puck, and Christensen forms. These four theories are reasonably representative of the great variety of different forms with widely different physical effects that can be encountered; also for comparison, the rudimentary forms of maximum normal stress and maximum normal strain criteria will be given. The controversial problem of how many different individual modes of failure are necessary to describe general failure will receive attention. A specific and detailed methodology for evaluation of all the various theories will be formulated.

This project began on August 1, 1999. As of July 1, 2000, the progress has been in materials production, test planning, testing facility design & instruction, and calibration. One new subcontractor was added to provide a solution to the CFCC material permeability issue (Northwestern University). This is in addition to the three subcontracts that were previously in place (McDermott Technologies Inc. for continuous fiber reinforced ceramic tubing fabrication, Swales Aerospace for LOCA testing of tubes, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology for In Reactor testing of tubes).

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Annual report of the Texas Racing Commission describing goals, activities, and accomplishments during the fiscal year 1999.