Farm commodity programs were a product of the Great Depression. This report discusses the history of farm commodity legislation. Since 1933, Congress has required the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) to administer a variety of programs providing price support and income protection for the nations farmers.

This report provides a brief overview of federal law with respect to five selected advertising issues: alcohol advertising, tobacco advertising, the Federal Trade Commission Act, advertising by mail, and advertising by telephone. There are numerous federal statutes regulating advertising that do not fit within any of these categories; as random examples, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires disclosures in advertisements for prescription drugs ; the Truth in Lending Act governs the advertising of consumer credit ; and a federal criminal statute makes it illegal falsely to convey in an advertisement that a business is connected with a federal agency.

The blender's tax credits were specifically enacted to complement the excise tax exemptions, so as to help support farm incomes by finding another market for corn, sugar, and other agricultural products that are the basic raw materials for alcohol production. More recently, proponents of expanding the alcohol fuels tax incentives argue that they reduce smog and improve air quality.

Currently, in most parts of the United States, timepieces are moved forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the fall to provide an extended daylight period during the summer months. This is known as Daylight Saving Time (DST). Much debate and many changes led to this present practice. This report provides a brief history of the issues surrounding DST, an outline of the legislation that created and modified it, and a list of references to more discussions.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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;Whether the term "corporation " in section 22(a) of the veterinary Licensing Act,V.T.C.S art 8890,refers to a non-profit or municipal corporation.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the wildfire hazards faced by communities located adjacent to national forests in the dry, inland portion of the Western United States, focusing on: (1) the extent and seriousness of threats posed by national forest wildfires to nearby communities in the interior West; (2) agency efforts to address them; and (3) barriers to successfully implementing these efforts."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the President's proposal for addressing Social Security and use of the budget surplus."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS), focusing on: (1) whether NAIS is an effective mechanism for disseminating procurement information to industry, including small businesses; and (2) the status of efforts to develop a governmentwide electronic procurement information system similar to NAIS."

The design status and R and D plan of a 1.5 Angstrom SASE-FEL at SLAC, called the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), are described. The LCLS utilizes one third of the SLAC linac for the acceleration of electrons to about 15 GeV. The FEL radiation is produced in a long undulator and is directed to an experimental area for its utilization. The LCLS is designed to produce 300 fsec long radiation pulses at the wavelength of 1.5 Angstrom with 9 GW peak power. This radiation has much higher brightness and coherence, as well as shorter pulses, than present 3rd generation sources. It is shown that such leap in performance is now within reach, and is made possible by the advances in the physics and technology of photo-injectors, linear accelerators, insertion devices and free-electron lasers.

We examine correlation functions within the correspondence between gauged supergravity on anti-de Sitter space and N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory in Minkowski space. The imaginary parts of four-point functions in momentum space are computed, in addition to particular examples of three-point functions. Exchange diagrams for gravitons are included. The results indicate additional structure in N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory at strong 't Hooft coupling and in the large N limit.

IDP++, image and data processing in C++, is a set of a signal processing libraries written in C++. It is a multi-dimension (up to four dimensions), multi-data type (implemented through templates) signal processing extension to C++. IDP++ takes advantage of the object-oriented compiler technology to provide ``information hiding.`` Users need only know C, not C++. Signals or data sets are treated like any other variable with a defined set of operators and functions. We here some examples of the nonlinear filter library within IDP++. Specifically, the results of MIN, MAX median, {alpha}-trimmed mean, and edge-trimmed mean filters as applied to a real aperture radar (RR) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data set.

We describe recent, energetics performance results on the engineering preamplifier module (PAM) prototype located in the front end of the 1.8MJ National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser system. Three vertically mounted subsystem located in the PAM provide laser gain as well as spatial beam shaping. The first subsystem in the PAM prototype is a diode pumped, Nd:glass, linear, TEM{sub 00}, 4.5m long regenerative amplifier cavity. With a single diode pumped head, we amplify a 1nJ, mode matched, temporally shaped ({approx} 20ns) seed pulse by a factor of approximately 10{sup 7} to 20mJ. The second subsystem in the PAM is the beam shaping module, which magnifies the gaussian output beam of the regenerative amplifier to provide a 30mm x 30mm square beam that is spatially shaped in two dimensions to pre-compensate for radial gain profiles in the main amplifiers. The final subsystem in the PAM is the 4-pass amplifier which relay images the 1mJ output of the beam shaper through four gain passes in a {phi}5cm x 48cm flashlamp pumped rod amplifier, amplifying the energy to 175. The system gain of the PAM is 10{sup 10}. Each PAM provides 35 of injected energy to four separate main amplifier chains which in turn …

A common dilemma among builders of large scientific data stores is whether to use a lightweight object persistence manager or a genuine object-oriented database. There are often good reasons to consider each of these strategies; a few are described in this paper. Too often, however, electing to use a lightweight approach has meant programming to an interface that is entirely different than that expected by commercial object-oriented databases. With the emergence of object database standards, it is possible to provide an interface to persistence managers that does not needlessly inhibit coexistence with (and, perhaps, eventual migration to) object-oriented databases. This paper describes an implementation of a substantial subset of the ODMG-93[1]C++ specification that allows clients to use many of today`s lightweight object persistence managers through an interface that conforms to the ODMG standard. We also describe a minimal interface that persistence software should support in order to provide persistence services for ODMG implementations.

This document outlines the groundwater monitoring plan, under RCRA regulations in 40 CFR 265 Subpart F and WAC173-300-400, for the 216-B-63 Trench. This interim status facility is being sampled under detection monitoring criteria and this plan provides current program conditions and requirements.

Thus publication contains information compiled by the Energy information administration (EIA) on the following topics: heating fuel supplies; alternative fuel vehicles; natural gas production; clean air laws and coal transportation; EIA`s world Wide Web Site; EIA`s CD-ROM; Press Releases; Microfiched products; electronic publishing; new reports; machine-readable files; how to order EIA publications; and Energy Data Information Contracts.

Much of the US Department of Energy`s (DOE`s) research on plutonium metallurgy and plutonium processing is performed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in Los Alamos, New Mexico. LANL`s main facility for plutonium research is the Plutonium Facility, also referred to as Technical Area 55 (TA-55). The main laboratory building for plutonium work within the Plutonium Facility (TA-55) is the Plutonium Facility Building 4, or PF-4. This Environmental Assessment (EA) analyzes the potential environmental effects that would be expected to occur if DOE were to stage sealed containers of transuranic (TRU) and TRU mixed waste in a support building at the Plutonium Facility (TA-55) that is adjacent to PF-4. At present, the waste containers are staged in the basement of PF-4. The proposed project is to convert an existing support structure (Building 185), a prefabricated metal building on a concrete foundation, and operate it as a temporary staging facility for sealed containers of solid TRU and TRU mixed waste. The TRU and TRU mixed wastes would be contained in sealed 55-gallon drums and standard waste boxes as they await approval to be transported to TA-54. The containers would then be transported to a longer term TRU waste storage area at …

This is the fourth wellhead productive capacity report. The three previous ones were published in 1991, 1993, and 1994. This report should be of particular interest to those in Congress, Federal and State agencies, industry, and the academic community, who are concerned with the future availability of natural gas. The EIA Dallas Field Office has prepared five earlier reports regarding natural gas productive capacity. These reports, Gas Deliverability and Flow Capacity of Surveillance Fields, reported deliverability and capacity data for selected gas fields in major gas producing areas. The data in the reports were based on gas-well back-pressure tests and estimates of gas-in-place for each field or reservoir. These reports use proven well testing theory, most of which has been employed by industry since 1936 when the Bureau of Mines first published Monograph 7. Demand for natural gas in the United States is met by a combination of natural gas production, underground gas storage, imported gas, and supplemental gaseous fuels. Natural gas production requirements in the lower 48 States have been increasing during the last few years while drilling has remained at low levels. This has raised some concern about the adequacy of future gas supplies, especially in periods of …

The US DOE Office of Fissile Material Disposition is examining options for placing fissile materials that were produced for fabrication of weapons, and now are deemed to be surplus, into a condition that is substantially irreversible and makes its use in weapons inherently more difficult. The principal fissile materials subject to this disposition activity are plutonium and uranium containing substantial fractions of plutonium-239 uranium-235. The data in this report, prepared as technical input to the fissile material disposition Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) deal only with the disposition of plutonium that contains well over 80% plutonium-239. In fact, the data were developed on the basis of weapon-grade plutonium which contains, typically, 93.6% plutonium-239 and 5.9% plutonium-240 as the principal isotopes. One of the options for disposition of weapon-grade plutonium being considered is the power reactor alternative. Plutonium would be fabricated into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel and fissioned (``burned``) in a reactor to produce electric power. The MOX fuel will contain dioxides of uranium and plutonium with less than 7% weapon-grade plutonium and uranium that has about 0.2% uranium-235. The disposition mission could, for example, be carried out in existing power reactors, of which there are over 100 in the United …

At the end of calender year 1992, the Fernald Environmental Management Project (FEMP) had approximately 12,500 drums of mixed low-level waste in storage and the Fernald Environmental Restoration Management Corporation (FERMCO) had just begun to develop an aggressive project based program to treat and dispose of this mixed waste. By 1996 the FERMCO mixed waste management program had reduced the aforementioned 12,500 drums of waste once in inventory to approximately 5800 drums. Projects are currently in progress to completely eliminate the FEMP inventory of mixed waste. As a result of these initiatives and aggressive project management, the FEMP has become a model for mixed waste handling, treatment and disposal for DOE facilities. Mixed waste management has traditionally been viewed as a singular and complex environmental problem. FERMCO has adopted the viewpoint that treatment and disposal of mixed waste is an engineering project, to be executed in a disciplined fashion with timely and economic results. This approach allows the larger mixed waste management problem to be divided into manageable fractions and managed by project. Each project is managed by problem solving experts, project managers, in lieu of environmental experts. In the project approach, environmental regulations become project requirements for individual resolution, …

This project is a package of 11 individual CRADA`s plus hardware. This innovative project established a three-year multi-party collaboration that is significantly accelerating the availability of commercial massively parallel processing computing software technology to U.S. government, academic, and industrial end-users. This report contains individual presentations from nine principal investigators along with overall program information.

A new computer program, the SX Solver, has been developed to analyze solvent-extraction equilibria. The program operates out of Microsoft Excel{reg_sign} and uses the built-in ''Solver'' function to minimize the sum of the square of the residuals between measured and calculated distribution coefficients. The extraction of nitric acid by tributylphosphate has been modeled to illustrate the program's use.