Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittees.

This report presents an overview of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. This is a clash between the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination that is occurring in the Caucasus, creating the longest inter-ethnic dispute in the former Soviet Union. The report includes the background and analysis of history, warfare and peace process in the region. The report discusses the Armenian and Azerbaijani perspective, the role and views of others (Iran, Turkey, Russia), as well as the U.S. policy regarding the conflict.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Twenty-one percent of grant-eligible applicants who did not use the District of Columbia's tuition assistance grant (TAG) funding to attend a participating college or university may have encountered such barriers as college entrance requirements and the absence of minority outreach programs. Whether enrollment caps at colleges posed a barrier for applicants is unclear. In the program's first year, 516 of the nearly 2,500 eligible applicants did not use the grants. About 21 percent of the institutions in which applicants expressed interest restrict the number of out-of-state students that they will accept, although the extent to which this played a role in limiting access to these institutions is unclear. Enrollment at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) changed little during the TAG program's first year. The TAG program and UDC appeared to serve different freshmen populations, which may account for the TAG program's minimal impact on UDC enrollment. Although concerns about TAG program administration were largely resolved with the revision of program regulations in December 2000, other administrative issues may hinder program operations, including the determination of applicant eligibility and the distribution of information on …

The authors' long term goal is to develop accurate prediction methods for describing the adsorption behavior of gas mixtures on solid adsorbents over complete ranges of temperature, pressure and adsorbent types. The major objectives of the project are to (1) measure the adsorption behavior of pure CO{sub 2}, methane, nitrogen and their binary and ternary mixtures on several selected coals having different properties at temperatures and pressures applicable to the particular coals being studied, (2) generalize the adsorption results in terms of appropriate properties of the coals to facilitate estimation of adsorption behavior for coals other than those studied experimentally, (3) delineate the sensitivity of the competitive adsorption of CO{sub 2}, methane and nitrogen to the specific characteristics of the coal on which they are adsorbed; establish the major differences (if any) in the nature of this competitive adsorption on different coals, and (4) test and/or develop theoretically-based mathematical models to represent accurately the adsorption behavior of mixtures of the type for which measurements are made. The specific accomplishments of this project during this reporting period are summarized in three broad categories outlining experimentation, model development, and coal characterization.

The overall objective of the present project is to identify and assess strategies and solutions for the management of industry problems related to carbon in ash. Specific research issues to be addressed include: the effect of parent fuel selection on ash properties and adsorptivity, including a first ever examination of the air entrainment behavior of ashes from alternative (non-coal) fuels; the effect of various low-NOx firing modes on ash properties and adsorptivity; and the kinetics and mechanism of ash ozonation. This data will provide scientific and engineering support of the ongoing process development activities. This first project period, experiments were carried out to better understand the fundamental nature of the ozonation effect on ash. Carbon surfaces were characterized by surfactant adsorption, and by X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy before and after oxidation, both by air at 440 C and by ozone at room temperature. The results strongly suggest that the beneficial effect of ozonation is in large part due to chemical modification of the carbon surfaces.

This manuscript is meant to give a short summary of the advantages of high order schemes and suitable test problems which can properly illustrate these advantages.

When the field of modern publishing was on a collision course with telecommunications, publishing organizations had to come up to speed in fields that were, heretofore, completely foreign and technologically forbidding to them. For generations, the technology of publishing centered on offset lithography, typesetting, and photography--fields that saw evolutionary and incremental change from the time of Guttenberg. But publishing now includes making information available over the World Wide Web--Internet publishing--with its ever-accelerating rate of technological change and dependence on computers and networks. Clearly, we need a methodology to help anyone in the field of Internet publishing plan for the future, and there is a well-known, well-tested technique for just this purpose--Scenario Planning. Scenario Planning is an excellent tool to help organizations make better decisions in the present based on what they identify as possible and plausible scenarios of the future. Never was decision making more difficult or more crucial than during the years of this study, 1996-1999. This thesis takes the position that, by applying Scenario Planning, the Technical Information Department at LLNL, a large government laboratory (and organizations similar to it), could be confident that moving into the telecommunications business of Internet publishing stood a very good chance of …

We summarize our lattice QCD study of the form factor at zero recoil in the decay {bar B} {yields} D*{ell}{bar {nu}}. After careful consideration of all sources of systematic uncertainty, we find, h{sub A{sub 1}}(1) = 0.913{sub -17-30}{sup +24+17}, where the first uncertainty is from statistics and fitting while the second combined uncertainty is from all other systematic effects.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Financial relationships between individual investigators or their research institutions and private industry have yielded significant results, including treatments for such diseases as AIDS and strokes. However, some collaborations have raised concerns that the focus on financial reward might compromise the integrity of the research and the safety of human research subjects. GAO reviewed five universities with broad policies and procedures on financial conflicts of interest. All five had difficulty providing basic data on individual investigators' financial conflicts of interest in clinical research involving human subjects. The universities acknowledged a need for better coordination of information on investigators' financial relationships, and several universities were developing ways to do so. Policies and procedures at the five universities addressed financial conflicts of interest affecting institutions, including technology transfer activities and financial relationships with small start-up companies that market products developed by the universities. The Department of Health and Human Services has had limited success in promoting the integrity of biomedical research and protecting human subjects. HHS has taken steps to improve its oversight and monitoring and has drafted guidance on financial conflicts of interest, but this guidance does not …

The 2-D radial vs. poloidal structure of edge turbulence in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak [I.H. Hutchinson, R. Boivin, P.T. Bonoli et al., Nuclear Fusion 41(2001) 1391] was measured using fast cameras and compared with 3-D numerical simulations of edge plasma turbulence. The main diagnostic is Gas Puff Imaging (GPI), in which the visible D(subscript alpha) emission from a localized D(subscript 2) gas puff is viewed along a local magnetic field line. The observed D(subscript alpha) fluctuations have a typical radial and poloidal scale of approximately 1 cm, and often have strong local maxima (''blobs'') in the scrape-off layer. The motion of this 2-D structure motion has also been measured using an ultra-fast framing camera with 12 frames taken at 250,000 frames/sec. Numerical simulations produce turbulent structures with roughly similar spatial and temporal scales and transport levels as that observed in the experiment; however, some differences are also noted, perhaps requiring diagnostic improvement and/or additional physics in the numerical model.

The Control Room Logbook (CRL) is designed to improve and replace the paper logbooks traditionally used in the HEP accelerator control room. Its features benefit the on-line coordinator, the shift operators, and the remote observers. This paper explains some of the most attractive features for each of these roles. The features include the ability to configure the logbook for the specific needs of a collaboration, a large variety of entry types an operator can add by simply clicking and dragging, and a flexible web interface for the remote observer to keep up with control room activities. The entries are saved as UTF-8 based XML files, which allowed us to give the data structure and meaning such that it can easily be parsed in the present and far into the future. The XML tag data is also indexed in a relational database, making queries on dates, keywords, entry type and other criteria feasible and fast. The CRL is used in the D0 control room. This presentation also discusses our experience with deployment, platform independence and other interesting issues that arose with the installation and use of the logbook.

The corrosion resistance of Alloy 22 (UNS No.: N06022) was studied in simulated ground water of different pH values and ionic contents at various temperatures. Potentiodynamic polarization techniques were used to study the electrochemical behavior and measure the critical potentials in the various systems. Alloy 22 was found to be resistant to localized corrosion in the simulated ground waters tested.

Key natural gas reserves in Rocky Mountain and other U.S. basins are in reservoirs with economic producibility due to natural fractures. In this project, we evaluate a unique technology for predicting fractured reservoir location and characteristics ahead of drilling based on a 3-D basin/field simulator, Basin RTM. Recommendations are made for making Basin RTM a key element of a practical E&P strategy. A myriad of reaction, transport, and mechanical (RTM) processes underlie the creation, cementation and preservation of fractured reservoirs. These processes are often so strongly coupled that they cannot be understood individually. Furthermore, sedimentary nonuniformity, overall tectonics and basement heat flux histories make a basin a fundamentally 3-D object. Basin RTM is the only 3-D, comprehensive, fully coupled RTM basin simulator available for the exploration of fractured reservoirs. Results of Basin RTM simulations are presented, that demonstrate its capabilities and limitations. Furthermore, it is shown how Basin RTM is a basis for a revolutionary automated methodology for simultaneously using a range of remote and other basin datasets to locate reservoirs and to assess risk. Characteristics predicted by our model include reserves and composition, matrix and fracture permeability, reservoir rock strength, porosity, in situ stress and the statistics of fracture …

This project focused on the production of hazardous gases in the radiolysis of solid organic matrices, such as polymers and resins, that may be associated with transuranic waste material. Self-radiolysis of radioactive waste is a serious environmental problem because it can lead to a change in the composition of the materials in storage containers and possibly jeopardize their integrity. Experimental determination of gaseous yields is of immediate practical importance in the engineering and maintenance of containers for waste materials. Fundamental knowledge on the radiation chemical processes occurring in these systems allows one to predict outcomes in materials or mixtures not specifically examined, which is a great aid in the management of the variety of waste materials currently overseen by Environmental Management.

The project's primary objective was to enhance domestic petroleum production by demonstration and transfer of horizontal drilling technology in the Paradox Basin, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. If this project can demonstrate technical and economic feasibility, then the technique can be applied to approximately 100 additional small fields in the Paradox Basin alone, and result in increased recovery of 25 to 50 million barrels (4-8 million m3) of oil. This project was designed to characterize several shallow-shelf carbonate reservoirs in the Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian) Paradox Formation, choose the best candidate(s) for a pilot demonstration project to drill horizontally from existing vertical wells, monitor well performance(s), and report associated validation activities.

For flows that contain significant structure, high order schemes offer large advantages over low order schemes. Fundamentally, the reason comes from the truncation error of the differencing operators. If one examines carefully the expression for the truncation error, one will see that for a fixed computational cost that the error can be made much smaller by increasing the numerical order than by increasing the number of grid points. One can readily derive the following expression which holds for systems dominated by hyperbolic effects and advanced explicitly in time: flops = const * p{sup 2} * k{sup (d+1)(p+1)/p}/E{sup (d+1)/p} where flops denotes floating point operations, p denotes numerical order, d denotes spatial dimension, where E denotes the truncation error of the difference operator, and where k denotes the Fourier wavenumber. For flows that contain structure, such as turbulent flows or any calculation where, say, vortices are present, there will be significant energy in the high values of k. Thus, one can see that the rate of growth of the flops is very different for different values of p. Further, the constant in front of the expression is also very different. With a low order scheme, one quickly reaches the limit of …

Large samples of hyperon and kaon decays were collected with the Hyper CP spectrometer during two fixed-target runs at Fermilab. Based on an analysis of 110 million K pm decays from the 1997 data sample we present a branching ratio for K pm right arrow pi pm mu+ mu-. This is the first observation of K- right arrow pi- mu+ mu- decay.

European, Japanese, and US Neutrino Factory designs are presented. The main R&D issues and associated R&D programs, future prospects, and the additional issues that must be addressed to produce a viable Muon Collider design, are discussed.

Optical parametric amplification is an established broadband amplification technology based on a second-order nonlinear process of difference-frequency generation (DFG). When used in chirped pulse amplification (CPA), the technology has been termed optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA). OPCPA holds a potential for producing unprecedented levels of peak and average power in optical pulses through its scalable ultrashort pulse amplification capability and the absence of quantum defect, respectively. The theory of three-wave parametric interactions is presented, followed by a description of the numerical model developed for nanosecond pulses. Spectral, temperature and angular characteristics of OPCPA are calculated, with an estimate of pulse contrast. An OPCPA system centered at 1054 nm, based on a commercial tabletop Q-switched pump laser, was developed as the front end for a large Nd-glass petawatt-class short-pulse laser. The system does not utilize electro-optic modulators or multi-pass amplification. The obtained overall 6% efficiency is the highest to date in OPCPA that uses a tabletop commercial pump laser. The first compression of pulses amplified in highly nondegenerate OPCPA is reported, with the obtained pulse width of 60 fs. This represents the shortest pulse to date produced in OPCPA. Optical parametric amplification in {beta}-barium borate was combined with laser amplification …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress authorized the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program to help federal land management agencies provide high-quality recreational opportunities to visitors and protect resources. The program focuses on recreational activities at the following four land management agencies: the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service. Under the fee demonstration program, participating agencies can collect fees at several sites and use them to (1) enhance visitor services, (2) address a backlog of needs for repair and maintenance, and (3) manage and protect resources. The agencies applied "entrance fees" for basic admission to an area and "user fees" for specific activities such as camping or launching a boat. Under the law, 80 percent of program revenue must be used at the site where it was collected. The rest may be distributed to other sites that may or may not be participating in the demonstration program. Some of the sites GAO surveyed experimented with innovative fee designs and collection methods, such as reducing fees during off-peak seasons and allowing visitors to use credit cards, but room for additional innovation exists, particularly …

The Leon Water Flood site has undergone one season of soil amendments and growth of specialized plants meant to colonize and accelerate the remediation of the salt-impacted site. The researchers characterized the impacted soil as to chemistry, added soil amendments, and planted several species of seedlings, and seeded the scarred areas. After the first growing season, the surface soil was again characterized and groundcover was also characterized. While plant growth was quite meager across the area, soil chemistry did improve over most of the two scars.

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Correct modeling of nucleon elastic scattering is of special importance in many applications at high energy accelerators, such as deep penetration, beam loss and collimation studies. In present paper, the work performed to update the MARS elastic scattering model at E < 5 GeV is described. Modern evaluated nuclear data as well as fitting formulae are used in the new model. For protons as projectiles, Coulomb scattering and Coulomb-nuclear interference are taken into account in addition to nuclear elastic scattering. Comparisons with experimental angular distributions and calculations by means of other codes are presented.

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; The ad valorem taxation of mineral interests that extend across boundary between two counties (RQ-0389-JC)