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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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, Jim Mattox, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Acceptance of bail bonds by peace officers under articles 17.01 and 17.02 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure (RQ-2016)

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; Applicability of the Texas Open Meetings Act, Gov't Code ch. 551 and the Texas Open Records Act, Gov't Cod ch. 552, to the State Employee Charitable Campaign Policy Committee and related questions (ID# 25674)

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 county clerk may collect a records management and preservation fee on a document filed in an adverse probate action(ID# 20909)

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the scientific and practical aspects of a terrorist carrying out large-scale chemical or biological attacks on U.S. soil, focusing on the: (1) technical ease or difficulty for terrorists to acquire, process, improvise, and disseminate certain chemical and biological agents; and (2) extent to which the U.S. government has assessed the threats and risks posed by chemical and biological terrorism in the United States to serve as a basis for planned investments."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on inpatient and residential treatment facilities' use of restraints or seclusion as a means of treating mental patients, focusing on the: (1) dangers of restraint and seclusion, the extent to which restraint and seclusion are used in inpatient and residential treatment facilities for individuals with mental illness or mental retardation, and the number of related injuries and deaths; (2) federal and state policies that govern the use of restraint and seclusion in inpatient or residential treatment facilities for individuals with mental illness or mental retardation; and (3) experiences of states that have instituted regulations and reporting requirements to address the use of restraint and seclusion."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) management of the maintenance of its real properties, focusing on: (1) how the services determine and prioritize maintenance and repair requirements and how they allocate resources to meet their needs; (2) promising practices in facility management that the services could consider; and (3) barriers to implementing promising practices and ways to address them."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on new leased space acquired for the Secret Service's Uniformed Division (SSUD) at 1111 18th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., by the Public Buildings Service (PBS)."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on background investigations conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), focusing on: (1) the circumstances that led DEA to consider relinquishing its authority to conduct personnel background investigations; and (2) whether the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) acted in an independent and objective manner in choosing to review DEA and its background investigations."

The development of detailed, regional wind-resource distributions and other pertinent wind resource characteristics (e.g., assessment maps and reliable estimates of seasonal, diurnal, and directional) is an important step in planning and accelerating the deployment of wind energy systems. This paper summarizes the approach and methods being used to conduct a wind energy resource assessment of Mongolia. The primary goals of this project are to develop a comprehensive wind energy resource atlas of Mongolia and to establish a wind measurement program in specific regions of Mongolia to identify prospective sites for wind energy projects and to help validate some of the wind resource estimates. The Mongolian wind resource atlas will include detailed, computerized wind power maps and other valuable wind resource characteristic information for the different regions of Mongolia.

The model parameters for the normalized 1054V1 material were compared to parameters previously generated for 1026 steel, and the transformation behavior was relatively consistent. Validation of the model predictions by heating into the austenite plus undissolved ferrite phase field and rapidly quenching resulted in reasonable predictions when compared to the measured volume fractions from optical metallography. The hot rolled 1054V1 material, which had a much coarser grain size and a non-equilibrium volume fraction of pearlite, had significantly different model parameters and the on heating transformation behavior of this material was less predictable with the established model. The differences in behavior is consistent with conventional wisdom that normalized micro-structure produce a more consistent response to processing, and it reinforces the need for additional work in this area.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) helps agencies reduce the cost of doing business through energy efficiency, water conservation, and the use of solar and other renewable energy. As a large energy user, the U.S. military has been one of the government sectors of focus. Several military installations have shown substantial energy savings in past years. Most of these efficiency projects, however, have focused primarily on physical upgrades, technologies, and purchasing habits. Furthermost projects have focused on administrative and operational areas of energy use. Military residential housing, in particular, has received little formal attention for energy efficiency involving behaviors of the residents themselves. Behavior-based change is a challenging, but potentially fruitful area for energy conservation programs. However, behavioral change involves links with values, social networks and organizations, and new ways of thinking about living patterns. This handbook attempts to fill a gap by offering guidance for promoting such efforts.

This report documents trends in R and D and in particular (public) energy R and D in the Netherlands. Besides quantitative information on R and D and energy R and D, the report gives an impression of changes in science and technology policy, energy policy and changes in energy research priorities (both organizational and financial). In the Netherlands, 2.09% of GDP (or $6.7 billion) was invested in R and D activities in 1995. The private sector financed 46% of all R and D in that year. A small but significant fraction (9.3%) of the research performed in the Netherlands is financed by foreign public and private sector entities. Energy R and D has been identified by the national Strategic Foresight Activity as an important area of R and D for government support in the future. This is due in part to the overall decline in public support for energy R and D that occurred from 1985 to 1995. However, recent concern over climate change and energy policy has resulted in increased budgets for energy R and D. Recent policy documents (e.g., the Memorandum on Energy R and D in April 1998) and initiatives (e.g., a recent university energy R and …

We present a microelectronics fabrication compatible process that comprises photolithography and a key room temperature SiON thin film plasma deposition to define and seal a fluidic microduct network. Our single wafer process is independent of thermo-mechanical material properties, particulate cleaning, global flatness, assembly alignment, and glue medium application, which are crucial for wafer fusion bonding or sealing techniques using a glue medium. From our preliminary experiments, we have identified a processing window to fabricate channels on silicon, glass and quartz substrates. Channels with a radius of curvature between 8 and 50 {micro}m, are uniform along channel lengths of several inches and repeatable across the wafer surfaces. To further develop this technology, we have begun characterizing the SiON film properties such as elastic modulus using nanoindentation, and chemical bonding compatibility with other microelectronic materials.

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The Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) provides real-time dose assessments for airborne pollutant releases. ARAC is currently in the process of developing an entirely new suite of models and system infrastructure. Diagnostic and dispersion algorithms are being created in-house and a prognostic model NO-RAPS, imported from the Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, is currently being adapted to ARAC`s needs. Diagnostic models are essential for an emergency response capability since they provide the ability to rapidly assimilate available meteorological data and generate the mass-consistent three-dimensional wind fields required by dispersion models. The resulting wind fields may also serve to initialize and validate prognostic models. In general, the performance of diagnostic models strongly correlates with the density and distribution of measurements in the area of interest and the resolution of the terrain. problem, data can be extracted from user-specified databases within a region defined by a metdata grid. Typically the data collection region will cover a geographic domain significantly larger than the area involved in the dispersion simulation in order to provide the most complete set of meteorological information relevant to the problem. This also permits the user to redefine the problem grid size and location, within limits, without reaccessing the meteorological data …

This paper presents a new technique for automatically detecting interval constraints for swept volumes with holes. The technique finds true volume constraints that are not necessarily imposed by the surfaces of the volume. A graphing algorithm finds independent, parallel paths of edges from source surfaces to target surfaces. The number of intervals on two paths between a given source and target surface must be equal; in general, the collection of paths determine a set of linear constraints. Linear programming techniques solve the interval assignment problem for the surface and volume constraints simultaneously.

Recent success with the Sandia Z machine has renewed interest in utilizing fast z-pinenes for ICF. One promising concept places the ICF capsule internal to the imploding z-pinch. At machine parameters relevant to achieving high yield, the imploding z-pinch mass has sufficient opacity to trap radiation giving rise to a dynamic hohlraum. The concept utilizes a 12 MJ, 54 MA z-pinch driver producing a capsule drive temperature exceeding 300 eV to realize a 550 MJ thermonuclear yield. They present the current high-yield design and its development that supports high-yield ICF with a z-pinch driven dynamic hohlraum.

Interest in 3d transition metal impurities in ionic crystals has increased due to their important role in the laser activity of these materials. Moreover, recent advances in tunable solid-state lasers and high-power semiconductor laser diode arrays have generated a strong interest in investigating new compounds that emit in the visible and near-infrared spectral regions. In particular, many optical studies have been devoted to Cr{sup 3+}-doped fluoride crystals as a consequence of the high quality of some Cr{sup 3+}-based laser materials. In the present investigation, the low temperature emission spectra of Cr{sup 3+} ions in the hexagonal elpasolites Cs{sub 2}NaAlF{sub 6} and Cs{sub 2}NaGaF{sub 6} have been measured. Each compound has two crystallographically inequivalent octahedral sites for the Al{sup 3+} and Ga{sup 3+} ions that can be occupied by Cr{sup 3+} ions. For both materials, the luminescence spectrum presents two zero-phonon lines accompanied by a well-defined vibrational structure. The different peaks of the emission broadband are described in terms of phonons of the lattice and normal modes of the octahedral complex [CrF{sub 6}]{sup 3{minus}}. A detailed analysis of the vibrational structure observed leads to the conclusion that the {sup 2}E and {sup 4}T{sub 2} excited states of the [CrF{sub 6}]{sup 3{minus}} …

Beginning in 1998, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNL), US Postal Inspection Service Forensic Laboratory (USPIS), and the Data Fusion Laboratory, Drexel University (DFL) have been collaborating on a large scale research project ''Handwriting Individuality--Moving From Art to Science''. In April 1998 a survey was distributed to the community of forensic document examiners (FDEs) requesting input on the habit areas used and their utility in distinguishing handwriting. The information obtained from this survey was intended to provide the data necessary to select the criteria and begin the evaluation of the handwriting samples currently in the project. Preliminary results of the survey were made available to the community at the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners (ASQDE) meeting in August 1998 and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) meeting in February 1999. This report provides final documentation of the survey and its results. This survey has two objectives: (1) to compile a list of handwriting features and characteristics used by professional forensic document examiners in the examination and comparison of handwriting and (2) to gather information about the significance of these features and characteristics. These objectives are met by having the FDEs provide an indication of their experience in the …

We have discovered that small polyols are reasonably effective at stabilizing colloidal silica against aggregation, even under the conditions of high pH and salt concentration. Both quasielastic and elastic light scattering were used to show that these polyols dramatically decrease the aggregation rate of the suspension, changing the growth kinetics from diffusion-limited cluster-cluster aggregation to reaction-limited cluster-cluster aggregation. These polyols maybe useful in the treatment of tank wastes at the Hanford site.

For widespread use of fuel cells to power automobiles in the near future, it is necessary to convert gasoline or other transportation fuels to hydrogen on-board the vehicle. Partial oxidation reforming is particularly suited to this application as it eliminates the need for heat exchange at high temperatures. Such reformers offer rapid start and good dynamic performance. Lowering the temperature of the partial oxidation process, which requires the development of a suitable catalyst, can increase the reforming efficiency. Catalytic partial oxidation (or autothermal) reformers and non-catalytic partial oxidation reformers developed by various organizations are presently undergoing testing and demonstration. This paper summarizes the process chemistries as well as recent test data from several different reformers operating on gasoline, methanol, and other fuels.

The GDR in {sup 164}Er at 62 MeV excitation energy has been studied in coincidence with the evaporation residues, selected using the Argonne fragment mass analyzer (FMA). The {sup 164}Er* has a prolate shape with deformation statistical model fit to the data indicate that similar to the ground state.