This report provides basic information on the science of food biotechnology. It discusses regulatory policies and issues of concern about the use of biotechnology to modify foods through genetic engineering. It describes the scientific processes used and current products available. It explains how all three major federal agencies - the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency - regulate these foods.

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A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Interpretation of Senate Bill 667, establishing program to assist individuals with hearing or speech impairment to purchase specialized telecommunications device for telephone access (ID# 39619)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Status of work performed by county attorney while he simultaneously held the office of municipal judge (RQ-1053)

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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: What information a law enforcement agency is authorized to give to a public school district or private school under article 15.27 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (RQ-628)

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 article 4582b of the Revised Civil Statutes and Texas Funeral Service Commission rules preclude a funeral establishment designating the embalming facilities of another funeral establishment as its embalming room, from retaining a licensed embalmer as an independent contractor, and related questions (RQ-0054)

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 committee appointed by a commissioners court to recommend the selection of an architect is subject to the Open Meetings Act (RQ-0063)

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO published a functional requirements document for seized property and forfeited assets systems that will provide the capability for financial managers and others to control and account for seized property and forfeited assets."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO described how the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) and its contractors monitor third-party billing companies' involvement in the submission of claims to Medicare."

We provide a practical and effective method for solving constrained optimization problems by successively training a multilayer feedforward neural network in a coupled neural-network/objective-function representation. Nonlinear programming problems are easily mapped into this representation which has a simpler and more transparent method of solution than optimization performed with Hopfield-like networks and poses very mild requirements on the functions appearing in the problem. Simulation results are illustrated and compared with an off-the-shelf optimization tool.

The precision of new HERA data on jet photoproduction opens up the possibility to discriminate between different models of the photon structure. This requires equally precise theoretical predictions from perturbative QCD calculations. In the past years, next-to-leading order calculations for the photoproduction of jets at HERA have become available. Using the kinematic cuts of recent ZEUS analyses, we compare the predictions of three calculations for different dijet and three-jet distributions. We find that in general all three calculations agree within the statistical accuracy of the Monte Carlo integration yielding reliable theoretical predictions. In certain restricted regions of phase space, the calculations differ by up to 5%.

Nuclear fusion is the energy source that powers the sun. For more than four decades man has sought to develop this essentially inexhaustible, clean power source for use on earth. Unfortunately the conditions needed to initiate fusion are daunting; the nuclear fuel, consisting of isotopes of hydrogen, must be heated to temperatures in excess of 100,000,000 C and maintained at that temperature long enough for the nuclear fuel to ignite and burn. Lasers are being used as one of the tools to achieve these conditions. The best lasers for this work are those that derive their energy from a unique set of optical glasses called laser glasses. The work to develop, manufacture and test these glasses has involved a partnership between university and industry that has spanned more than 25 years. During this time lasers used in fusion development have grown from small systems that could fit on the top of a table to systems currently under construction that are approximately the size of a municipal sports stadium. A brief historical and anecdotal account of the development of laser glasses for fusion energy research applications is the subject of the presentation.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was faced with the need to secure its PeopleSoft-Oracle business system in an academic environment that has no firewall. To provide protected access to the database servers for NT-based users all over the site while not hindering the lab's open connectivity with the Internet, we implemented a pseudo three-tier architecture for PeopleSoft with Windows Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame technology. The client application and Oracle database were placed behind a firewall, and access was granted via an encrypted link to a thin client. Authentication in the future will be through two-factor token cards. NT workstations in the business system unit were further secured through switched network ports and an automated installation process that included SMB signing and disabling LM Authentication in favor of NTLMv2. The hardened workstations then accessed the business system through the Citrix Secure ICA client. How these security measures affected our mixed environment (Windows9x, Samba, Transarc AFS clients, Pathworks, developers, researchers) is discussed.

Conscious awareness of our environment is based on a feedback loop comprised of sensory input transmitted to the central nervous system leading to construction of our ''model of the world,'' (Lewis et al, 1982). We then assimilate the neurological model at the unconscious level into information we can later consciously consider useful in identifying belief systems and behaviors for designing diverse systems. Thus, we can avoid potential problems based on our open-to-error perceived reality of the world. By understanding how our model of reality is organized, we allow ourselves to transcend content and develop insight into how effective choices and belief systems are generated through sensory derived processes. These are the processes which provide the designer the ability to meta model (build a model of a model) the user; consequently, matching the mental model of the user with that of the designer's and, coincidentally, forming rapport between the two participants. The information shared between the participants is neither assumed nor generalized, it is closer to equivocal; thus minimizing error through a sharing of each other's model of reality. How to identify individual mental mechanisms or processes, how to organize the individual strategies of these mechanisms into useful patterns, and to …

We discuss two topics in the production of heavy quarks in deep-inelastic scattering: the next-to-leading order Monte-Carlo HVQDIS and the next-to-leading logarithmic resummation of soft gluon effects, including estimates of next-to-next-to-leading order corrections therefrom.

A geotechnical study has been completed in H-Area for the In-Tank Precipitation Facility (ITP) and the balance of the H-Area Tank Farm (HTF) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. The study consisted of subsurface field exploration, field and laboratory testing, and engineering analyses. The purpose of these investigations is to evaluate the overall stability of the H-Area tanks under static and dynamic conditions. The objectives of the study are to define the site-specific geological conditions at ITP and HTF, obtain engineering properties for the assessment of the stability of the native soils and embankment under static and dynamic loads (i.e., slope stability, liquefaction potential, and potential settlements), and derive properties for soil-structure interaction studies. This document contains the records of cone penetrometer and dilatometer soundings for the In-Tank Precipitation Facility (ITP) and H-Tank Farm (HTF) Geotechnical Report, Volume 3.

We have studied the determination of the running b-quark mass, m{sub b}(M{sub Z}), using Z{sup 0} decays into 3 or more hadronic jets. We calculated the ratio of {ge} 3-jet fractions in e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} b{bar b} vs. e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} q{sub l}{bar q}{sub l} (q{sub l} = u or d or s) events at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD using six different infra-red- and collinear-safe jet-finding algorithms. We compared with corresponding measurements from the SLD Collaboration and found a significant algorithm-dependence of the fitted m{sub b}(M{sub Z}) value. Our best estimate, taking correlations into account, is m{sub b}(M{sub Z}) = 2.52 {+-} 0.27(stat.){sub -0.47}{sup +0.33}(syst.){sub -1.46}{sup +0.54}(theor.) GeV/c{sup 2}.

We have utilized ''in situ'' X-ray Absorption Fine Structure Spectroscopy to investigate the structure and composition of thin oxide films of nickel and iron that have been prepared by electrodeposition on a graphite substrate from aqueous solutions. The films are generally disordered. Structural information has been obtained from the analysis of the data. We also present initial findings on the local structure of heavy metal ions, e.g. Sr and Ce, incorporated into the electrodeposited nickel oxide films. Our results are of importance in a number of technological applications, among them, batteries, fuel cells, electrochromic and ferroelectric materials, corrosion protection, as well as environmental speciation and remediation.

The performance of a stand-alone polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) system directly fueled by hydrogen has been evaluated for transportation vehicles. The study was carried out using a systems analysis code and a vehicle analysis code. The systems code includes models for the various PEFC components and is applicable for steady-state and transient situations. At the design point the system efficiency is above 50% for a 50-kW system. The efficiency improves under partial load and approaches 60% at 40% load, as the fuel cell operating point moves to lower current densities on the V-I polarization curve. At much lower loads, the system efficiency drops because of the deterioration in the performance of the compressor, expander, and eventually the fuel cell. The system performance suffers at lower temperatures, as the V-I characteristic curve for the fuel cell shifts downward because of the increased ohmic losses. The results of the transient analysis indicate that the hydrogen-fueled PEFC system can start rather rapidly, within seconds from ambient conditions. However, the warm-up time constant to reach the design operating temperatures is about 180 s. It is important during this period for the coolant to bypass the system radiator until the coolant temperature approaches the …

The protection of nuclear and civil structures from the destructive effects of earthquakes has been the focus of intense research and development throughout the world. Seismic isolation is an effective means for reducing and even eliminating the devastating consequences of earthquakes on people, equipment and structures. Engineers have developed many devices for implementing the seismic isolation strategy and the most effective and economical ones have been identified through the test of time. One of these devices is the laminated elastomeric isolation bearing. The behavior of high damping elastomer bearings during several recent earthquakes has shown that they are a viable device for mitigating the effects of earthquakes. In this paper, results are presented from recent tests on two different elastomers. The first is a highly filled, high modulus, high damping elastomer and the second is a highly-filled, low modulus, high damping elastomer. The stiffness recovery characteristics of the high modulus elastomer subjected to beyond design basis strains and the results of seven years of aging on the low modulus elastomer are presented.