[en] The U.S. Congress has determined that the safe use of nuclear materials for peaceful purposes is a legitimate and important national goal. It has entrusted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with the primary Federal responsibility for achieving that goal. The NRC's mission, therefore, is to regulate the Nation's civilian use of byproduct, source, and special nuclear materials to ensure adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment. The NRC's FY 1998 budget requests new budget authority of $481,300,000 to be funded by two appropriations - one is the NRC's Salaraies and Expenses appropriation for $476,500,000, and the other is NRC's Office of Inspector General appropriation for $4,800,000. Of the funds appropriated to the NRC's Salaries and Expenses, $17,000,000, shall be derived from the Nuclear Waste Fund and $2,000,000 shall be derived from general funds. The proposed FY 1998 appropriation legislation would also exempt the $2,000,000 for regulatory reviews and other assistance provided to the Department of Energy from the requirement that the NRC collect 100 percent of its budget from fees. The sums appropriated to the NRC's Salaries and Expenses and NRC's Office of Inspector General shall be reduced by the amount of revenues received during FY 1998 from licensing fees, inspection services, and other services and collections, so as to result in a final FY 1998 appropriation for the NRC of an estimated $19,000,000 - the amount appropriated from the Nuclear Waste Fund and from general funds. Revenues derived from enforcement actions shall be deposited to miscellaneous receipts of the Treasury

No abstract available

[en] Risk management is a tool that has been used by project managers for several decades to help manage scope, cost, and schedule baselines and to improve the likelihood of project success. More recently, the risk management process has been applied to the management of companies and corporations under the designation of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) where it is used to help ensure success in meeting strategic objectives. All of this focus on risk (related to events or conditions that may occur) is normally done without considering how issues (related to events or conditions that will or has occurred) may impact the allocation of resources required to address risks, and perhaps more importantly, how resources required to support normal work scope may be impacted. This paper suggests the use of an integrated risk and issue management process, where risks and issues are managed concurrently using similar but separate and distinct processes. The benefit of using an integrated process is the organization and centralization of data related to risks and issues that becomes available for decision makers to use in prioritizing and allocating limited resources between performing normal work, addressing risks, or resolving issues. Applying integrated risk and issue management to any activity will lead to better decisions, whether the activity is personal, project, program, or enterprise. (authors)

[en] We consider a natural model of random knotting—choose a knot diagram at random from the finite set of diagrams with n crossings. We tabulate diagrams with 10 and fewer crossings and classify the diagrams by knot type, allowing us to compute exact probabilities for knots in this model. As expected, most diagrams with 10 and fewer crossings are unknots (about 78% of the roughly 1.6 billion 10 crossing diagrams). For these crossing numbers, the unknot fraction is mostly explained by the prevalence of ‘tree-like’ diagrams which are unknots for any assignment of over/under information at crossings. The data shows a roughly linear relationship between the log of knot type probability and the log of the frequency rank of the knot type, analogous to Zipf’s law for word frequency. The complete tabulation and all knot frequencies are included as supplementary data. (paper)

[en] In today’s highly competitive market, organizations gain competitive advantage by collaborating on innovations. However, in general, before a successful partnership can start, organizations will have to negotiate ownership and access to the intellectual property produced as a result of the joint effort. While some collaborative projects are not created to pursue commercial gains, outputs of collaboration may have commercial application. Experience shows that the framework for the collaboration should be determined at the beginning through an agreement that describes the project itself and the future ownership, management and exploitation of the future intellectual property. The attractiveness of a collaborative project is highly increased if such framework can be negotiated timely. It is important that the partners involved into a collaborative project agree on the allocation of ownership, transfer, and access to intellectual property before the project starts. This is done to reduce uncertainties and to protect the rights and resources of the partners. Partners should agree not only on the owners of the future intellectual property but also on the ways for subsequent commercial exploitation of the results of the collaboration. A timely negotiated and successfully finalized framework for IP ownership and management plays a key role in protecting partner investments and ensuring the successful exploitation of the results of the collaboration. (author)

No abstract available

[en] The major Nova project milestone, Nova Operable/All Project Construction Complete was reached on December 19, 1984, with a 17kJ, 3 omega test shot that delivered 10 beams simultaneously into the Nova target chamber. The construction completion milestone was accomplished on schedule and about $1.5 million under the March 1, 1983, baseline construction budget. During 1984, the Nova project continued to operate under this budget except that three major modifications to the plan, involving release of contingency funds, were authorized by DOE. These modifications were: (1) expenditure of $3 million for additional target diagnostics; (2) expenditure of $2.4 million to extend the construction period from September to December 1984 to allow for an additional three months of x-ray laser experiments utilizing the two arms of Nova installed in the Novette test bed; (3) expenditure of $3 million for Nova activation during the period from October 1984 through February 1985. The baseline financial plan for the total project updated to December 1984 is illustrated. The comparison between project financial status on December 31, 1984, and the baseline budget adopted 22 months earlier is shown. The Nova laser/target system figure of $133,878 includes the additional expense of extending the construction period three months to December 1984

[en] Highlights: • We study risk preferences of both attacker and defender in a sequential game. • We study how risk preferences affect a player’s behavior in equilibrium. • We compare the new model with the one does not consider risk preferences. • We find the model utility is high especially when the attacker is risk seeking. This paper studies a sequential defender-attacker game, where the defender allocates defensive resources to multiple potential targets while considering the risk preferences of both attacker and defender. We model and obtain analytical equilibrium results for this problem and study how risk preferences affect a player’s behavior in equilibrium. We find that in the strategic case, when both the attacker and the defender have some target valuation, the strategic attacker’s risk preferences and target valuation affect the optimal defense allocation. In particular, when the attacker becomes more risk seeking/averse, the high valuable target to the attacker would receive more/less resources. The proposed model leads to a significantly lower expected damage than a model where the attacker is incorrectly considered risk neutral, especially when the attacker is risk seeking.

[en] The Consistent Histories (CH) formalism attempts to construct a quantum framework which can be used without the need to introduce observers external to the studied system. The prime motivation in mind is the application of the formalism to the universe as a whole. In order to achieve this, CH maintains that a formulation of quantum mechanics should allow for the assignment of probabilities to alternative histories of a system. Therefore, it provides an observer-independent criterion to decide which sets of histories can be given probabilities and states rules to determine them. The framework establishes that each realm, that is, each set of histories to which probabilities can be assigned, provides a valid quantum-mechanical account of a system. Furthermore, the version of CH first presented in [1, 2] proposes an 'evolutionary' explanation of our existence in the universe and of our preference for quasiclassical descriptions of nature. The present work critically evaluates claims to the effect that the formalism offered in [1, 2] solves many interpretational problems in quantum mechanics. In particular, it is pointed out that the interpretation of the proposed framework leaves vague two crucial points, namely, whether realms are fixed or chosen and the link between measurements and histories. The claim of this work is that by doing so, CH overlooks the main interpretational problems of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, we challenge the evolutionary explanation offered and we critically examine the proposed notion of a realm-dependent reality.

No abstract available