Large hydrogen-oxygen ablative chamber test program Final report

Large hydrogen-oxygen albative chambe

Personal and Political Bias in the Debate Over Federal Income Taxation Rates and Progressivity

Unlike the commentaries of flat tax proponents, this article will not attempt to dispel the notion of progressive taxation. Rather, this article will first question whether professors who write about tax policy can as a group reach unbiased conclusions about progressivity policy. Next, this article will address a few progressivity concepts that fuel taxation debates. Finally, this commentary will outline some ideas for structuring the federal income taxation system in ways that reduce political rancor and potentially create reasonable acceptance by tax producers, tax beneficiaries, and their respective advocates

Application of Computer-Assisted Analysis Techniques to Taxation

Thus, it may be useful at this early point in the development of computer-assisted legal analysis to speculate on the full potential for computer applications to taxation in light of the analytic complexities commonly encountered in tax work

Coverage Flexibility for Qualified Retirement Plans After the Tax Reform Act of 1986

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 substantially changed the participation coverage criteria for qualified retirement plans. The purpose of this article is to set forth selected observations about the problems and opportunities that now exist respecting planning for coverage exclusions under the Internal Revenue Code Accordingly, this article will consider both surviving concepts from prior law and new rules that emerge from the 1986 Tax Act

A Perspective on Participant Loan Provisions in Qualified Retirement Plans After the 1986 Tax Act

The Tax Reform Act of 1986\u27 is the fourth major tax enactment in four years to have a significant impact on qualified deferred compensation plans. Like the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,2 this most recent tax legislation substantially affects the use of participant loan provisions in qualified plans. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cumulative technical difficulties that retirement plan designers and administrators should now consider in reviewing the feasibility and operation of participant loan provisions

The Simplified Employee Pension: An Increasingly Attractive Alternative Among Qualified Retirement Plans

Even if the SEP rules remain unaltered for the next several years, employers will want to continue questioning whether their retirement contribution objectives are best served by conventional plans that are increasingly more difficult to administer and keep tax-qualified.9 In effect, the SEP may become more attractive by default, as I.R.C. § 401(a) plans continue to become less attractive as a result of the overly complex legislative and regulatory tinkering to which they are subject. Practitioners should reconsider this point when reviewing each new change or interpretation of law affecting standard qualified retirement plans. The discussion that follows is organized under headings reflecting the major plan design differences that distinguish the SEP from its more complicated alternatives

Prediction of impending mechanical seal failure in centrifugal pumps

Mechanical seals on centrifugal pumps provide the junction between the rotating shaft and stationary housing on a pump assembly which prevents unnecessary fluid leakage. When these seals fail, the pumps no longer run at peak performance, and sometimes will not run at all. Since mechanical seals fail approximately 85% of the time as opposed to wear out, the early detection of their failure could assist in preventing system down time and possibly preventing the seal failure. The seals in question were instrumented to determine various operating conditions during different phases of the seal\u27s performance spectrum. By training artificial intelligence computer codes to classify the relative performance of specific seals based on the information obtained by instrumentation, a prediction technique was modeled. These artificial intelligence codes were programmed using the general judgment criteria found from a literature survey as well as discussions with plant engineers directly associated with the failing seals. These codes are dependent on a variety of pump performance characteristics. These models for predictive analysis along with defined goals for increased data collection practices not only prove the feasibility of using artificial intelligence codes to help predict mechanical seal failure, but also lay the foundation for an expanded and robust failure analysis study

Analysis and testing of numerical formulas for the initial value problem

Three computer programs for evaluating and testing numerical integration formulas used with fixed stepsize programs to solve initial value systems of ordinary differential equations are described. A program written in PASCAL SERIES, takes as input the differential equations and produces a FORTRAN subroutine for the derivatives of the system and for computing the actual solution through recursive power series techniques. Both of these are used by STAN, a FORTRAN program that interactively displays a discrete analog of the Liapunov stability region of any two dimensional subspace of the system. The derivatives may be used by CLMP, a FORTRAN program, to test the fixed stepsize formula against a good numerical result and interactively display the solutions