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This report discusses significant legislative provisions in the two provisional bills that are likely to be the subject of congressional discussion to reauthorize federal highway, highway safety, and transit programs.

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department may convey real property or an interest in real property the State received under a court-approved final judgement “solely for the use and benefit of the … Department, acting in the public Trust … only for the public park purposes, for promoting public beach access, and for off-beach parking” (RQ-0131-GA)

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a licensed crab fisherman must obtain permission from the owner submerged land in order to place crab traps at that location (RQ-0130-GA)

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) activities that are called for in federal policy and law are intended to enhance the security of the cyber and physical public and private infrastructures that are essential to our nation's security, economic security, and public health and safety. As our reliance on these infrastructures increases, so do the potential threats and attacks that could disrupt critical systems and operations. Effective information-sharing partnerships between industry sectors and government can contribute to CIP efforts. Federal policy has encouraged the voluntary creation of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to facilitate the private sector's participation in CIP by serving as mechanisms for gathering and analyzing information and sharing it among the infrastructure sectors and between the private sector and government. This testimony discusses the management and operational structures used by ISACs, federal efforts to interact with and support the ISACs, and challenges to and successful practices for ISACs' establishment, operation, and partnerships with the federal government."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Discrimination in housing on the basis of race, sex, family status, and other grounds is illegal in the United States. Each year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) and related agencies carry out enforcement activities for several thousand complaints of housing discrimination. The timeliness and effectiveness of the enforcement process have been continuing concerns. GAO describes the stages and practices of the fair housing enforcement process, looks at recent trends, and identifies factors that may influence the length and thoroughness of the process."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Fiscal Year 2003 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Department of Defense (DOD) to assess whether general and flag officer authorizations were sufficient to meet all requirements. GAO's objectives were to determine whether DOD (1) fully disclosed the results of its study in its March 2003 report to Congress and explained the rationale for any recommendations, (2) used an established methodology to meet the objectives of its study, and (3) incorporated lessons learned from a GAO review of DOD's 1997 general and flag officer study. The 2003 act also directed DOD to review legislation affecting general and flag officer management. DOD included the results of its review in the March 2003 report, making several recommendations. GAO plans a separate review of these issues and recommendations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since fiscal year 1997, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has relied primarily on its 21 health care networks to allocate resources to its medical centers. VA headquarters also directly allocates some resources to the medical centers. In addition, medical centers collect resources from third-party insurance payments and other sources. VA provides general guidance to\ networks for resource allocation to medical centers, but permits variation in networks' allocation methodologies. Representatives from veterans groups and others have expressed concerns regarding resource allocations to medical centers in Network 9 (Nashville) known as the Mid South Healthcare Network. GAO was asked to report for fiscal year 2002 (1) the amount of resources medical centers in the network received and the source of those resources and (2) the basis on which medical centers in the network received these resources. GAO was also asked to supplement findings for fiscal year 2002 with information for fiscal years 1997 through 2003."

This report "reviews the management and performance of the Marble Falls Independent School District's (MFISD's) educational,financial, and operations. functions" (Legislative Budget Board Letter).

This report contains top-level requirements for the various areas of radiological protection for workers. Detailed quotations of the requirements for applicable regulatory documents can be found in the Radiological Design Summary Report Implementation Guide. For the purposes of demonstrating compliance with these requirements, per Engineering Standard 01064, ''shall consider / shall evaluate'' indicates that the designer must examine the requirement for the design and either incorporate or provide a technical justification as to why the requirement is not incorporated. This report describes how the Building 512-S, Actinide Removal Process meets the required radiological design criteria and requirements based on 10CFR835, DOE Order 420.1A, WSRC Manual 5Q and various other DOE guides and handbooks. The analyses supporting this Radiological Design Summary Report initially used a source term of 10.6 Ci/gallon of Cs-137 as the basis for bulk shielding calculations. As the project evolved, the source term was reduced to 1.1 Ci/gallon of Cs-137. This latter source term forms the basis for later dose rate evaluations.

The dipole mode synchrotron frequency is a basic beam parameter; it and a few similarly basic quantities measured at small time intervals serve to characterize the longitudinal beam dynamics throughout the acceleration cycle. The effective accelerating voltage, in conjunction with the amount of rf voltage required for the acceleration, is important for the estimate of the beam energy loss per turn. The dipole mode frequency can be used to obtain the effective accelerating rf voltage, providing that it can be measured precisely. The synchrotron frequency measured from the synchrotron phase detector signal (SPD) generally agrees well with calculation, and it can be applied for such purposes as inferring the effective rf voltage.

The CTR Vehicle Systems and Fuels team a diesel hybrid powertrain. The goal of this experiment was to investigate and demonstrate the potential of diesel engines for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) in a fuel economy and emissions. The test set-up consisted of a diesel engine coupled to an electric motor driving a Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT). This hybrid drive is connected to a dynamometer and a DC electrical power source creating a vehicle context by combining advanced computer models and emulation techniques. The experiment focuses on the impact of the hybrid control strategy on fuel economy and emissions-in particular, nitrogen oxides (NO{sub x}) and particulate matter (PM). The same hardware and test procedure were used throughout the entire experiment to assess the impact of different control approaches.

Natural gas combustion turbines are rapidly becoming the primary technology of choice for generating electricity. At least half of the new generating capacity added in the US over the next twenty years will be combustion turbine systems. The Department of Energy has cosponsored with Siemens Westinghouse, a program to maintain the technology lead in gas turbine systems. The very ambitious eight year program was designed to demonstrate a highly efficient and commercially acceptable power plant, with the ability to fire a wide range of fuels. The main goal of the Advanced Turbine Systems (ATS) Program was to develop ultra-high efficiency, environmentally superior and cost effective competitive gas turbine systems for base load application in utility, independent power producer and industrial markets. Performance targets were focused on natural gas as a fuel and included: System efficiency that exceeds 60% (lower heating value basis); Less than 10 ppmv NO{sub x} emissions without the use of post combustion controls; Busbar electricity that are less than 10% of state of the art systems; Reliability-Availability-Maintainability (RAM) equivalent to current systems; Water consumption minimized to levels consistent with cost and efficiency goals; and Commercial systems by the year 2000. In a parallel effort, the program was …

Heavy metals such as chromium and arsenic are widespread in the environment due to their usage in many industrial processes. These metals may pose significant health risks to humans, especially children, due to their mutagenic and carcinogenic properties. Typically, the health risks associated with the ingestion of soil-bound metals are estimated by assuming that the metals are completely absorbed through the human intestinal tract (100% bioavailable). This assumption potentially overestimates the risk since soils are known to strongly sequester metals thereby potentially lowering their bioavailability. Beginning in 2000, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with funding from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), studied the effect of soil properties on the bioaccessibility of soil-bound arsenic and chromium. Representative A and upper-B horizons from seven major U.S. soil orders were obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation. The soils were spiked with known concentrations of arsenic (As(III) and As(V)) and chromium (Cr(III) and Cr(VI)), and the bioaccessibility was measured using a physiologically based extraction test that mimics the gastric activity of children. Linear regression models were then developed to relate the bioaccessibility measurements to the soil …

The Mission of the ARA Program was to develop the Corporate Infrastructure to mass-produce new bio-based materials from Soybeans. The resins were integrated with the bio-fuels program. (1) to research, develop, and commercialize low cost adhesives and resins from soy oil and protein, the co-products of the soy bio-diesel process. (2) to study structure-functionality of soy oil and proteins at molecular and genomic levels

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This report outlines how the Department of Defense (DOD) has organized to gather and analyze Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) related data and document the process. It also describes DOD's selection criteria process, and the Secretary of Defense's requirement to certify the need for a BRAC round. The report then explains how the list of recommended BRAC actions will be drawn together for submission by the Secretary of Defense to the President.

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This report provides an overview of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spending on HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) as well as budget numbers for other federal government programs targeting HIV/AIDS.

This report describes current developments and U.S. interests in Uzbekistan, an emerging Central Asian regional power by virtue of its relatively large population, important energy and other resources, and political prominence. Uzbekistan has offered broad-scale support for U.S.-led coalition operations in Afghanistan and lent diplomatic support for operations in Iraq.

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Today's distributed systems require simple and powerful resource discovery queries in a dynamic environment consisting of a large number of resources spanning many autonomous administrative domains. The distributed search problem is hard due to the variety of query types, the number of resources and their autonomous, partitioned and dynamic nature. We propose a generalized resource discovery framework that is built around an application level messaging protocol called Peer-to-Peer I/O (P2PIO). P2PIO addresses a number of scalability problems in a general way. It provides flexible and uniform transport-independent resource discovery mechanisms to reduce both the client and network burden in multi-hop P2P systems.

Evolving challenges and solid accomplishments define the year 2003 for us. Our scientific breakthroughs validate our strategic directions and reaffirm our critical role in fulfilling the Laboratory's missions. Our growth continues in new research projects and significant new programmatic support. Our mission is clear: to enable the Laboratory to accomplish its primary mission through excellence in the chemical and materials sciences. The directorate's common theme and determination has remained constant: Deliver on our commitments, while anticipating and capitalizing on opportunities through innovation in science and technology. In this, the 2003 Annual Report, we describe how our science is built around a strategic plan with four organizing themes, each with key scientific accomplishments by our staff and collaborators. Our strategic plan is synergistic with the Laboratory's Long-Range Science and Technology Plan, which identifies six areas of institutional research and development strategy. This 2003 CMS Annual Report is organized into two major sections: research themes and dynamic teams. The research-theme section addresses challenges, achievements, and new frontiers within each of the four research themes. The dynamic-teams section illustrates the directorate's organizational structure of divisions, centers, and institutes that supports a team environment across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The research presented gives substantive …