We present a clear and general method for constructing hierarchical vector bases of arbitrary polynomial degree for use in the finite element solution of Maxwell's equations. Hierarchical bases enable p-refinement methods, where elements in a mesh can have different degrees of approximation, to be easily implemented. This can prove to be quite useful as sections of a computational domain can be selectively refined in order to achieve a greater error tolerance without the cost of refining the entire domain. While there are hierarchical formulations of vector finite elements in publication (e.g. [1]), they are defined for tetrahedral elements only, and are not generalized for arbitrary polynomial degree. Recently, Hiptmair, motivated by the theory of exterior algebra and differential forms presented a unified mathematical framework for the construction of conforming finite element spaces [2]. In [2], both 1-form (also called H(curl)) and 2-form (also called H(div)) conforming finite element spaces and the definition of their degrees of freedom are presented. These degrees of freedom are weighted integrals where the weighting function determines the character of the bases, i.e. interpolatory, hierarchical, etc.

This report reviews the process and procedures that currently apply to congressional consideration of foreign arms sales proposed by the President. This includes consideration of proposals to sell major defense equipment, defense articles and services, or the re-transfer to third party nations of such military items.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "U.S. air carriers transport billions of tons of cargo each year in both passenger planes and all-cargo planes. Typically, about one-half of the hull of each passenger aircraft is filled with cargo. As a result, any vulnerabilities in the air cargo security system potentially threaten the entire air transport system. GAO agreed to determine the security vulnerabilities that have been identified in the air cargo system, the status of key recommendations that have been made since 1990 to improve air cargo security, and ways in which air cargo security can be improved in the near-and long-term."

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Cyprus has been divided since 1974. Greek Cypriots, nearly 80% of the population, live in the southern two thirds of the island. Turkish Cypriots live in the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (recognized only by Turkey), with about 30,000 Turkish troops providing security. U.N. peacekeeping forces maintain a buffer zone between the two. Members of Congress have urged the Administration to be more active, although they have not proposed an alternative to the U.N.-sponsored talks.

Several major dairy policy issues are addressed in the context of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (P.L. 107- 171, the 2002 farm bill), which was signed into law on May 13, 2002. Included in the enacted 2002 farm bill are a reauthorization of the dairy price support program for an additional 5 ½ years, and new authorization for direct payments to dairy farmers through September 2005, triggered whenever the market price of farm milk falls below a target price level.

The Department of Defense (DOD) administers five environmental programs in response to various requirements under federal environmental laws. These programs include environmental cleanup, environmental compliance, pollution prevention, environmental technology, and conservation. Additionally, the Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for managing defense nuclear waste and cleaning up contaminated nuclear weapons sites. The Administration requested a total of $11.17 billion for these programs in FY2003, about $390 million more than the FY2002 funding level of $10.78 billion. Some of the ongoing issues associated with these programs are the adequacy, cost, and pace of cleanup, whether DOD and DOE adequately comply with environmental laws and regulations, and the extent to which environmental requirements encroach upon military readiness.

In the 108th Congress, debate over energy efficiency programs has focused on budget, oil, natural gas, and electricity issues, and provisions in the omnibus energy policy bill, S. 2095, H.R. 6, and S. 14/S. 1149. The Bush Administration’s FY2005 budget request for the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Efficiency Program sought $875.9 million, including $543.9 for R&D and $332.0 million for grants. In the first session, the omnibus energy bill (H.R. 6) had several significant tax and regulatory measures for energy efficiency. It did not pass the Senate due to concerns about cost and an MTBE “safe harbor” provision.

This issue brief views reorganization and management as involving the alteration of the program administrative structure and operations of the executive branch for reasons of efficiency, economy, and direction. The underlying issue is who reorganizes or sets management policy—Congress or the President— and by what authority and, also, for what purpose?

This project involved images of Titan, Neptune, and Uranus obtained using the 10-meter W.M. Keck II Telescope and its adaptive optics system. An adaptive optics system corrects for turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere by sampling the wavefront and applying a correction based on the distortion measured for a known source within the same isoplanatic patch as the science target (for example, a point source such as a star). Adaptive optics can achieve a 10-fold increase in resolution over that obtained by images without adaptive optics (for example, Saturn's largest moon Titan is unresolved without adaptive optics but at least 10 resolution elements can be obtained across the disk in Keck adaptive optics images). The adaptive optics correction for atmospheric turbulence is not perfect; a point source is converted to a diffraction-limited core surrounded by a ''halo''. This halo is roughly the size and shape of the uncorrected point spread function one would observe without adaptive optics. In order to enhance the sharpness of the Keck images it is necessary to apply a deconvolution algorithm to the data. Many such deconvolution algorithms exist such as maximum likelihood and maximum entropy. These algorithms suffer to various degrees from noise amplification and creation …

This report identifies and analyzes provisions in public laws and committee reports from the 106th Congress relating to GPRA and its implementation, including comparisons to similar provisions in the 104th and 105th Congresses.

High pT hadrons produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC probe nuclear matter at extreme conditions of high energy density. Experimental measurements in Au+Au collisions at sqrt sNN=130, 200 GeV establish the existence of strong medium effects on hadron production well into the perturbative regime.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To understand the federal government's response since the September 11 terrorist attacks, GAO was asked to review governmentwide changes and challenges prevalent in the missions and activities of agencies involved in homeland security, including the coordination and collaboration required to meet overall goals and needs, and government's efforts in planning and implementing strategic, transitional, and human capital activities designed to reorganize and strengthen homeland security."

This document is the First Annual Report for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No., a three-year contract entitled: ''Improving CO{sub 2} Efficiency for Recovering Oil in Heterogeneous Reservoirs.'' The research improved our knowledge and understanding of CO{sub 2} flooding and includes work in the areas of injectivity and mobility control. The bulk of this work has been performed by the New Mexico Petroleum Recovery Research Center, a research division of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. This report covers the reporting period of September 28, 2001 and September 27, 2002. Injectivity continues to be a concern to the industry. During this period we have contacted most of the CO{sub 2} operators in the Permian Basin and talked again about their problems in this area. This report has a summary of what we found. It is a given that carbonate mineral dissolution and deposition occur in a formation in geologic time and are expected to some degree in carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) floods. Water-alternating-gas (WAG) core flood experiments conducted on limestone and dolomite core plugs confirm that these processes can occur over relatively short time periods (hours to days) and in close proximity to each other. Results from …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The tax filing season is when millions of taxpayers file their returns and seek assistance by calling or visiting IRS's offices or Web site. Because of the large number of returns and critical nature of IRS's filing season activities, GAO was asked to assess IRS's 2002 filing season performance in processing tax returns and refunds and providing timely and accurate assistance to taxpayers."

A briefing report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Labor market information is used to help make and assess social and monetary policies, tax and budget projections, and private investment decisions. Produced under cooperative agreements between states and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), labor market information helps provide an up-to-date picture of the U.S. economy and generate closely watched economic indicators, such as unemployment rates and the Gross Domestic Product. In addition, decisions about the distribution of billions of federal dollars to states and local governments depends, in part, on labor market information. In summary, GAO found that (1) funding for the Covered Employment and Wages (ES-202) and Current Employment Statistics (CES) programs declined in real terms over the past 7 years; (2) BLS estimates the funding needs of states by adjusting prior year funding and uses formulas to allocate funds to states; and (3) workload and cost increases outpaced funding increases in the ES-202 program, which could result in data quality problems, according to state Labor Market Information (LMI) officials. BLS estimates LMI budget needs for states by making adjustments to the past year's funding and allocates appropriated funds to states by using …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal year 2000, U. S. Postal Service employees accounted for about one-third of both the federal civilian workforce and the $2.1 billion cost of the Federal Workers' Compensation Program (WCP). During that same year, Postal Service employees submitted 85,000 claims, or one-half of all claims for new work-related injuries, to the Department of Labor's (DOL) Office of Workers' Compensation Program (OWCP), which is charged with administering the program. Because of complaints the subcommittee received from injured federal employees about the untimely receipt of WCP benefits and because Postal Service employees account for such a large portion of the WCP, the Chairman, House Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management, and Intergovernmental Relations, Committee on Government Reform, asked us to determine specifically whether Postal Service employees were receiving WCP benefits in a timely manner. For our current review, we agreed to (1) determine the extent to which Postal Service employees provided all of the evidence required by OWCP regulations for determining the claimants' eligibility for WCP benefits and (2) determine whether claims for WCP eligibility and WCP compensation payments for lost wages or schedule awards were submitted and processed …

The purpose of this discussion is to indicate the threshold values for low-order detonator response by using first principles applied to pin-to-pin configurations and associated limits in pin-to-case scenarios. In addition an attempt to define the electrical environment by first principles is shown to be inadequate and indicates the need to define the electrical insult by reasonable standards. A comparison of two accepted electrical models and a combination of the extreme reported levels from both standards are used to establish an extreme set of parameters for a safety assessment. A simplification of the critical electrical insult parameters is then shown and demonstrated to provide the initial screening protocol with easily defined electrical dimensions of action integral. Action integral and the conductive material properties are the basic parameters needed to define the solid, liquid, and gas phases of the material used for detonator bridge wires. The resulting material phases are directly related to detonator response thresholds. The discussion concludes by showing the ability of ESD insults to arc from pin-to-case, the limited knowledge of the associated arc initiation process, and the modeling need for a reasonable arc resistance in pin-to-case scenarios.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In July 2001 and March 2002, GAO testified on significant breakdowns in internal controls over purchase card transactions at two Navy sites that resulted in fraud, waste, and abuse. As a result, the Congress asked GAO to audit purchase card controls at DOD. This report focuses on Air Force purchase card controls and addresses whether the overall management control environment and key internal controls were effective in preventing potentially fraudulent, improper, and abusive purchase card transactions."

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's work has repeatedly shown that mission fragmentation and program overlap are widespread in the federal government. Implementation of federal crosscutting programs is often characterized by numerous individual agency efforts that are implemented with little apparent regard for the presence and efforts of related activities. GAO has in the past offered possible approaches for managing crosscutting programs, and has stated that the Government Performance and Results Act could provide a framework for addressing crosscutting efforts. GAO was asked to examine the actions and plans agencies reported in addressing the crosscutting issues of border control, flood mitigation and insurance, wetlands, and wildland fire management. GAO reviewed the fiscal year 2001 performance reports and fiscal year 2003 performance plans for the major agencies involved in these issues."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's work has repeatedly shown that mission fragmentation and program overlap are widespread in the federal government. Implementation of federal crosscutting programs is often characterized by numerous individual agency efforts that are implemented with little apparent regard for the presence and efforts of related activities. GAO has in the past offered possible approaches for managing crosscutting programs, and has stated that the Government Performance and Results Act could provide a framework for addressing crosscutting efforts. GAO was asked to examine the actions and plans agencies reported in addressing the crosscutting issues of drug control, family poverty, financial institution regulation, and public health systems. GAO reviewed the fiscal year 2003 performance plans for the major agencies involved in these issues."

Image segmentation transforms pixel-level information from raw images to a higher level of abstraction in which related pixels are grouped into disjoint spatial regions. Such regions typically correspond to natural or man-made objects or structures, natural variations in land cover, etc. For many image interpretation tasks (such as land use assessment, automatic target cueing, defining relationships between objects, etc.), segmentation can be an important early step. Remotely sensed images (e.g., multi-spectral and hyperspectral images) often contain many spectral bands (i.e., multiple layers of 2D images). Multi-band images are important because they contain more information than single-band images. Objects or natural variations that are readily apparent in certain spectral bands may be invisible in 2D broadband images. In this paper, the classical region growing approach to image segmentation is generalized from single to multi-band images. While it is widely recognized that the quality of image segmentation is affected by which segmentation algorithm is used, this paper shows that algorithm parameter values can have an even more profound effect. A novel self-calibration framework is developed for automatically selecting parameter values that produce segmentations that most closely resemble a calibration edge map (derived separately using a simple edge detector). Although the framework is …

The structure of the low-density lipoprotein receptor extracellular portion has been determined. The document proposes a mechanism for the release of lipoprotein in the endosome. Without this release, the mechanism of receptor recycling cannot function.