The United States and its allies are helping Afghanistan emerge from more than 22 years of warfare, although substantial risk to Afghan stability remains. Before the U.S. military campaign against the orthodox Islamist Taliban movement began on October 7, 2001, Afghanistan had been mired in conflict since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The defeat of the Taliban has enabled the United States and its coalition partners to send forces throughout Afghanistan to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and leaders that remain at large, including Osama bin Laden. As the war against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban elements winds down, the United States is shifting its military focus toward stabilizing the interim government, including training a new Afghan national army, and supporting the international security force (ISAF) that is helping the new government provide security.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The United States Capitol Preservation Commission receives commemorative coin surcharge funds authorized by the United States Capitol Visitor Center Commemorative Coin Act of 1999. Under the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997 and the U.S. Mint's Compliance Procedures for Surcharge Eligibility, the commission must meet certain requirements before receiving available coin surcharge funds. The commission must provide the U.S. Mint with eligibility-related assertions associated with the commission's receipt and use of private matching funds, and an independent auditor must examine the assertions. GAO found that the assertion about the commission's receipt and use of private matching funds pursuant to the law and the U.S. Mint's Compliance Procedures for Surcharge Eligibility are fairly stated in all respects."

The Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) is the new trigger processor which reconstructs 2-D tracks with high speed and accuracy at the level 2 trigger of the CDFII experiment. SVT allows tagging events with secondary vertices and therefore enhances the CDFII B-physics capability. SVT has been fully assembled and operational since the beginning of Tevatron RunII in April 2001. In this paper we briefly review the SVT design and physics motivation and then describe its performance during the early phase of CDF RunII.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report discusses the management of the air transportation network used to move checks from one Federal Reserve office to another. GAO studied the propriety of practices for bidding, awarding, and monitoring contracts and the adequacy of controls to monitor fuel and other payments to vendors. The network was moved to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (FRB Atlanta) in September 1998 and renamed Check Relay. Check Relay's internal controls are designed to ensure that each step of the contract evaluation and approval process conforms to FRB Atlanta and Federal Reserve System policies and that appropriate senior officials review and approve contract terms. Check Relay also ensures that all payments to vendors conform to contract terms. Another set of controls verifies that the amount of fuel used by Check Relay's vendors is consistent with expected levels and that fuel is provided only to the appropriate recipients. Check Relay is managed as a unit of the Retail Payments Office, which is managed out of FRB Atlanta. The Board's Division of Reserve Bank Operations and Payment Systems also has oversight responsibility over Check Relay. GAO found no evidence …

Over the past decade, worldwide production of illicit drugs has risen dramatically: opium and marijuana production has roughly doubled and coca production tripled. Street prices of cocaine and heroin have fallen significantly in the past 20 years, reflecting increased availability. Despite apparent national political resolve to deal with the drug problem, inherent contradictions regularly appear between U.S. anti-drug policy and other national policy goals and concerns. The mix of competing domestic and international pressures and priorities has produced an ongoing series of disputes within and between the legislative and executive branches concerning U.S. international drug policy. One contentious issue has been the Congressionally-mandated certification process, an instrument designed to induce specified drug-exporting countries to prioritize or pay more attention to the fight against narcotics businesses.

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In California, idling is largely done for climate control. This suggests that climate control devices alone could be used to reduce idling. Line-haul truck drivers surveyed require an average of 4-6 kW of power for a stereo, CB radio, light, refrigerator, and climate control found in the average truck. More power may likely be necessary for peak power demands. The amount of time line-haul trucks reported to have stopped is between 25 and 30 hours per week. It was not possible to accurately determine from the pilot survey the location, purpose, and duration of idling. Consulting driver logs or electronically monitoring trucks could yield more accurate data, including seasonal and geographic differences. Truck drivers were receptive to idling alternatives. Two-thirds of truck drivers surveyed support a program to reduce idling. Two-thirds of drivers reported they would purchase idling reduction technologies if the technology yielded a payback period of two years or less. Willingness to purchase auxiliary power units appears to be higher for owner-operators than for company drivers. With a 2-year payback period, 82% of owner- operators would be willing to buy an idle- reducing device, while 63% of company drivers thought their company would do the same. Contact with …

Essential power is a crosscutting technology area that addresses the efficient and practical management of electrical and thermal requirements on trucks. Essential Power Systems: any function on the truck, that is not currently involved in moving the truck, and requires electrical or mechanical energy; Truck Lights; Hotel Loads (HVAC, computers, appliances, lighting, entertainment systems); Pumps, starter, compressor, fans, trailer refrigeration; Engine and fuel heating; and Operation of power lifts and pumps for bulk fluid transfer. Transition from ''belt and gear driven'' to auxiliary power generation of electricity - ''Truck Electrification'' 42 volts, DC and/ or AC; All electrically driven auxiliaries; Power on demand - manage electrical loads; Benefits include: increased fuel efficiency, reduced emission both when truck is idling and moving down the road.

The summaries of this report are: Economics Ultimately Dictates Direction; Electric Auxiliaries Provide Solid Benefits. The Impact on Vehicle Architecture Will be Important; Integrated Generators With Combined With Turbo Generators Can Meet the Electrical Demands of Electric Auxiliaries; Implementation Will Follow Automotive 42V Transition; Availability of Low Cost Hardware Will Slow Implementation; Industry Leadership and Cooperation Needed; Standards and Safety Protocols Will be Important. Government Can Play an Important Role in Expediting: Funding Technical Development; Incentives for Improving Fuel Economy; Developing Standards, Allowing Economy of Scale; and Providing Safety Guidelines.

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a dominant mode of tropical variability (Madden and Julian 1971, 1972). It is manifested on a timescale of {approx}30-70 days through large-scale circulation anomalies which occur in conjunction with eastward propagating convective anomalies over the eastern hemisphere. Recent evidence has suggested that an interactive ocean may be important for the simulation of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (Flatau et al. 1997, Sperber et al. 1997, Waliser et al. 1999, Inness et al. 2002). As part of an initiative to the CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modeling, we examine ocean-atmosphere GCMs to ascertain the degree to which they can represent the 4-dimensional space-time structure of the MJO. The eastward propagation of convection is also examined with respect to the surface fluxes and SST, and we compare and contrast the behavior over the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific. Importantly, the results are interpreted with respect to systematic error of the mean state.

The interaction between energetic electrons and a circularly polarized laser pulse inside an ion channel is studied. Laser radiation can be resonantly absorbed by electrons executing betatron oscillations in the ion channel and absorbing angular momentum from the laser. The absorbed angular momentum manifests itself as a strong axial magnetic field (inverse Faraday effect). The magnitude of this magnetic field is calculated and related to the amount of the absorbed energy. Absorbed energy and generated magnetic field are estimated for the small and large energy gain regimes. Qualitative comparisons with recent experiments are also made.

We report a summary of the surface damage, growth mitigation effort at 351nm for polished fused silica optics. The objective was to experimentally validate selected methods that could be applied to pre-initiated or retrieved-from-service optics, to stop further damage growth. A specific goal was to obtain sufficient data and information on successful methods for fused silica optics to select a single approach for processing large aperture, fused-silica optics used in high-peak-power laser applications. This paper includes the test results and the evaluation thereof, for several mitigation methods for fused silica surfaces. The mitigation methods tested in this study are wet chemical etching, cold plasma etching, CW-CO{sub 2} laser processing, and micro-flame torch processing. We found that CW-CO{sub 2} laser processing produces the most significant and consistent results to halt laser-induced surface damage growth on fused silica. We recorded successful mitigation of the growth of laser-induced surface damage sites as large as 0.5mm diameter, for 1000 shots at 351nm and fluences in the range of 8 to 13J/cm{sup 2}, {approx}11ns pulse length. We obtained sufficient data for elimination of damage growth using CO{sub 2} laser processing on sub-aperture representative optics, to proceed with application to large aperture ({approx}40 x 40cm{sup 2}) …

Solar flares are intense, abrupt releases of energy in the solar corona. In the impulsive phase of a flare, the intensity of hard X-ray emission reaches a sharp peak indicating the highest reconnection rate. It is often observed that an X-ray emitting plasma ejecta (plasmoid) is launched before the impulsive phase and accelerated throughout the phase. Thus, the plasmoid ejection may not be an effect of fast magnetic reconnection as conventionally assumed, but a cause of fast reconnection. Based on resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations, a solar flare model is presented, which can explain these observational characteristics of flares. In the model, merging of a newly generated magnetic island and a pre-existing island results in stretching and thinning of a current sheet, in which fast magnetic reconnection is induced. Recurrence of homologous flares naturally arises in this model. Mechanisms of magnetic island formation are also discussed.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary computational resource for scientific research funded by the DOE Office of Science. The Annual Report for FY2001 includes a summary of recent computational science conducted on NERSC systems (with abstracts of significant and representative projects); information about NERSC's current systems and services; descriptions of Berkeley Lab's current research and development projects in applied mathematics, computer science, and computational science; and a brief summary of NERSC's Strategic Plan for 2002-2005.

The high brightness of the bend magnets at the Advanced Light Source has been exploited to illuminate a Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope (STXM). This is the first diffraction-limited scanning x-ray microscope to operate with useful count rate on a synchrotron bend magnet source. A simple, dedicated beam line has been built covering the range of photon energy from 250 eV to 600 eV. Ease of use and operational availability are radically improved compared to previous installations using undulator beams. This facility provides radiation for C 1s, N 1s and O 1s near edge x-ray absorption spectro-microscopy with a spectral resolution up to about 1:5000 and with STXM count rates in excess of 1 MHz.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) progress in implementing key components of Title 32 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 including NNSA's reorganization efforts; integrated planning, programming, and budgeting improvements; use of its excepted service personnel authority; and efforts to improve its procurement practices. GAO found that although NNSA announced a new headquarters organization in May 2001, the reorganization did not clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the headquarters organizational units and did not address NNSA's field organization at all. More importantly, NNSA still lacks an overall organizational structure that clearly addresses long-standing issues such as the division of roles and responsibilities among headquarters offices and between headquarters and field staff. NNSA lost some momentum during the summer of 2001 as it reevaluated its efforts to develop a new planning, programming, budgeting, and evaluation process. NNSA now has established a conceptual process and begun to develop the necessary implementation plans and procedures. However, because of the broad scope of the work needed to develop these plans and procedures, it will be difficult to fully implement NNSA's process in time for the …

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Russian Federation (RF) and United States (US) collaborations from July 1998 through July 2001 conducted investigations of the Pu-bearing sludges in storage at the Mining Chemical Combine (MCC) K-26 site in order to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium and decommission the radiochemical plant. This RF work resulted in the recovery of approximately 20 kg of weapons-grade plutonium (and {approx}19 MT of uranium) from the sludges which was stored as oxide. Another method investigated and partially developed as joint collaborative efforts during this time period was direct immobilization of plutonium with no recovery of plutonium. This method melts the untreated recovered sludges by microwave ultrahigh frequency (UHF) heating with glass formers. After cooling, melter-crucibles of vitrified sludge are stored on site in underground cavities for eventual disposal in a geologic repository. Cost and technical feasibility studies of the two methods show that direct immobilization (i.e., vitrification) of the plutonium-containing sludge is the preferred alternative. It is also preferred from the ecological point of view. However, RF funding alone is insufficient to continue this work, and US funding has been suspended. It appears unlikely that development of full scale vitrification technologies for the plutonium-bearing sludges can be undertaken without continuing support from the …

The purpose of computer program NetMoment (Appendix I) is to utilize fundamental knowledge of earthquake sources, propagation attenuation, and site response in a simultaneous inversion of network data to determine the moment and source corner frequency of earthquakes, and site specific t*. The source parameters are especially difficult to determine for small earthquakes. A fundamental problem in determining the source corner frequencies of small earthquakes is that site response can result in spectral corner frequencies in the range that may be expected from the earthquakes themselves. Several authors have identified this as fmax (Hanks, 1982), a constant corner frequency for small events so that below threshold moment (about 1.0 x 10{sup 21} dyne-cm) the corner frequency remains constant the size of events diminishes. Hutchings and Wu (1990) found that for the southern California region, events with moment less than about 1.5 x 10{sup 21} dyne-cm (about magnitude 3.4) show no source effect in their spectra. Hanks (1982) found the threshold to be about 1.0 x l0{sup 21} dyne-cm for other southern California sites. Baise et al. (2002) found borehole recordings on Yerba Buena Island, in San Francisco Bay, to have corner frequencies limited to about 3-5 Hz for M < …

We propose to develop a true user facility for ultrafast x-ray science at the Advanced Light Source. This facility will be unique in the world, and will fill a critical need for the growing ultrafast x-ray research community. The development of this facility builds upon the expertise from long-standing research efforts in ultrafast x-ray spectroscopy and the development of femtosecond x-ray sources and techniques at both the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at U.C. Berkeley. In particular, the technical feasibility of a femtosecond x-ray beamline at the ALS has already been demonstrated, and existing ultrafast laser technology will enable such a beamline to operate near the practical limit for femtosecond x-ray flux and brightness from a 3rd generation synchrotron.

The problem that this paper deals with is that Heavy trucks leave their engines on while they are stopped and the driver is sleeping, eating, etc.

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