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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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

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; Whether a city that terminates a reinvestment sone pursuant to section 311.017(a) of the Tax Code may create a new reinvestment zone with identical geographic boundaries for the purpose of setting a new tax increment base, and related questions (RQ-703)

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 Bexar County Bail Bond Board is authorized to issue multiple licenses to an individual under V.T.C.S. article 2372p-3 (ID# 22504)

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 elevators in a facility that serves as the residence of members of a religious order are required to meet the requirements set forth in Health and Safety Code chapter 754, subchapter B, and related question (ID# 37383)

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: Frequency of county jail inspections required of the Commission of Jail Standards under Government Code section 511.009 (ID# 36043)

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 legislature may impose certain restrictions on expenditures of the Children’s Trust Fund of Texas Council and related questions (ID# 35255)

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 a navigation district may enter into a tax abatement agreement when a board member of the navigation district owns an interest in the property receiving the tax abatement(RQ-324).

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on federal courts and the differences that exist in ordering fines and restitution, focusing on: (1) the percentages of those offenders who were ordered to pay fines and restitution in fiscal year (FY) 1997 and those who were not; (2) differences across judicial circuits and districts in the percentages of those offenders who were ordered to pay fines or restitution and those who were not; and (3) officials' opinions about possible reasons for these differences."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on federal offenders who were ordered to pay criminal fines and victim restitution, focusing on: (1) the percentage of offenders who were ordered to pay fines or restitution in fiscal year (FY) 1997 and those who were not; (2) differences across judicial circuits and districts in the percent of offenders who were ordered to pay fines or restitution and those who were not; and (3) officials' opinions about possible reasons for those differences."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed how well kinship care is serving foster children, focusing on the: (1) quality of care that children in kinship care receive compared with that received by other foster children, as measured by a caseworker's assessment of a caregiver's parenting skills, the extent to which a foster child is able to maintain contact with familiar people and surroundings, and a caregiver's willingness to enforce court-ordered restrictions on parental visits; (2) frequency with which state child welfare agencies pursue various permanent living arrangements and the time children in kinship care have spent in the system compared with other foster children; and (3) recent state initiatives intended to help ensure that children in kinship care receive good quality foster care and are placed in permanent homes in a timely manner."

The value of energy technology R and D as an insurance investment to reduce the cost of climate change stabilization, oil price shocks, urban air pollution, and energy disruptions is estimated to be $5-8 billion/year in sum total. However, the total that is justified is actually less than this sum because some R and D is applicable to more than one risk. nevertheless, the total DOE investment in energy technology R and D (about $1.3 billion/year in FY97) seems easily justified by its insurance value alone; and, in fact, more might be warranted, particularly in the areas related to climate change and urban air pollution. This conclusion appears robust even if the private sector is assumed to be investing a comparable amount. Not counted is the value to the economy and to US competitiveness of better energy technologies that may result from the R and D; only the insurance value for reducing the cost of these four risks to society was estimated.

A glass-bonded sodalite ceramic waste form is being developed for the long-term immobilization of salt wastes that are generated during spent nuclear fuel conditioning activities. A durable waste form is prepared by hot isostatic pressing (HIP) a mixture of salt-loaded zeolite powders and glass frit. A mechanistic description of the corrosion processes is being developed to support qualification of the CWF for disposal. The initial set of characterization tests included two standard tests that have been used extensively to study the corrosion behavior of high level waste (HLW) glasses: the Material Characterization Center-1 (MCC-1) Test and the Product Consistency Test (PCT). Direct comparison of the results of tests with the reference CWF and HLW glasses indicate that the corrosion behaviors of the CWF and HLW glasses are very similar.

This paper presents criticality safety evaluations from an enduser's perspective. Overall issues related to a criticality safety evaluation in an operations support setting are discussed. A work flow process is presented which shows the key steps in conducting an effective criticality evaluation. Finally, a few suggestions are given to assist newcomers to this field.

The purpose of this Operations Procedures Plan is to establish a standard procedure which outlines how NIF Operations procedures will be developed (i.e , written, edited, reviewed, approved, published, revised) and accessed by the NIF Operations staff who must use procedures in order to accomplish their tasks. In addition, this Plan is designed to provide a guide to the NIF Project staff to assist them in planning and writing procedures. Also, resource and scheduling information is provided.

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) examination is presented of the microstructure of a ceramic waste form developed at Argonne National Lab - West for immobilization of actinides and fission products present in an electrorefiner salt. The material is produced by occluding the salt in zeolite granules, followed by hot isostatic pressing of the occluded zeolite in a mixture with a borosilicate glass. The paper presents results from a cold surrogate ceramic waste form, as well as {sup 239}Pu and {sup 238}Pu loaded samples.

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The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thought and discussion in the technical community on standardization of the experimental determination of the pertinent electrochemical properties of solid electrolytes in lithium batteries. This standardization is needed for comparison and modeling of solid electrolytes in a practical lithium battery. The appropriate electrochemical properties include transport, thermodynamic, and physical parameters that generally depend on concentration and temperature. While it is beyond the scope of this work to put forward definitive measurement techniques for all types of solid electrolytes, it is hoped that comparisons between various techniques to examine a dissolved binary lithium salt in a dry polymer solvent will lead to improved understanding and methodology for examining solid electrolytes.

A new approach in utilizing a computer data acquisition system is proposed to address many issues associated with criticality safety control. This Criticality Safety Support System (CSSS) utilizes many features of computer and information process technology such as digital pictures, barcodes, voice data entry, etc. to enhance criticality safety in an R and D environment. Due to on-line data retrieving, data recording, and data management offered by new technology, the CSSS would provide a framework to design new solutions to old problems. This pilot program is the first step in developing this application for the years to come.

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An MPI library's implementation of broadcast communication can significantly affect the performance of applications built with that library. In order to choose between similar implementations or to evaluate available libraries, accurate measurements of broadcast performance are required. As we demonstrate, existing methods for measuring broadcast performance are either inaccurate or inadequate. Fortunately, we have designed an accurate method for measuring broadcast performance, even in a challenging grid environment. Measuring broadcast performance is not easy. Simply sending one broadcast after another allows them to proceed through the network concurrently, thus resulting in inaccurate per broadcast timings. Existing methods either fail to eliminate this pipelining effect or eliminate it by introducing overheads that are as difficult to measure as the performance of the broadcast itself. This problem becomes even more challenging in grid environments. Latencies a long different links can vary significantly. Thus, an algorithm's performance is difficult to predict from it's communication pattern. Even when accurate pre-diction is possible, the pattern is often unknown. Our method introduces a measurable overhead to eliminate the pipelining effect, regardless of variations in link latencies. choose between different available implementations. Also, accurate and complete measurements could guide use of a given implementation to improve application …

False positive detections account for a great part of the expense associated with unexploded ordnance (UXO) remediation. Presently fielded systems like pulsed electromagnetic induction systems and cesium-vapor magnetometers are able to distinguish between UXO and other metallic ground clutter only with difficulty. The discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) has led to the development of a new generation of integrated-circuit magnetic sensors that are far more sensitive than previously available room-temperature-operation electronic devices. The small size of GMR sensors makes possible the construction of array detectors that can be used to image the flux emanating from a ferrous object or from a non-ferrous object with eddy currents imposed by an external coil. The purpose of a GMR-based imaging detector would be to allow the operator to easily distinguish between UXO and benign objects (like shrapnel or spent bullets) that litter formerly used defense sites (FUDS). In order to demonstrate the potential of a GMR-based imaging technology, a crude magnetic imaging system has been constructed using commercially available sensors. The ability to roughly determine the outline and disposition of magnetic objects has been demonstrated. Improvements to the system which are necessary to make it into a high-performance UXO detector are outlined.

In this paper we introduce and study a least-squares finite element approximation for singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equations of second order. By introducing the flux (diffusive plus convective) as a new unknown, the problem is written in a mixed form as a first order system. Further, the flux is augmented by adding the lower order terms with a small parameter. The new first order system is approximated by the least-squares finite element method using the minus one norm approach of Bramble, Lazarov, and Pasciak [2]. Further, we estimate the error of the method and discuss its implementation and the numerical solution of some test problems.