Blind Adults in America: Their Lives and Challenges

In an effort to learn more about Americans with disabilities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided that the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) would be used to gather information about men, women, and children with disabilities living all across the country. They interviewed thousands of adults and children with disabilities in 1994 and 1995, including 779 legally blind adults representing 993,766 non-institutionalized adults ages 18 and older nationwide, and 52 children representing 65,296 non-institutionalized legally blind children ages 5 to 17 nationwide. The federal government, however, never used the data to provide information to advocates or policy makers about the daily lives of legally blind adults and children. The National Center for Policy Research (CPR) for Women & Families used the NHIS data to conduct the first comprehensive statistical analysis of data on blind adults. With the support of the Aid Association for the Blind of the District of Columbia, we have summarized the information into this report. Some of the findings support assumptions that have been made about blind adults, while other findings highlight previously unrecognized needs of this very important group of Americans

Biosecurity: A 21st Century Challenge

Based on a review of key reports and experts' opinions, summarizes the debate over "dual-use" technologies and the various approaches to controlling biosecurity risk. Outlines proposed preventive measures and steps to build response capacity

Research relative to a model of the Orion nebula

Research basically has been directed along two avenues. First of all, there is a long-standing interest in modeling H II regions in order to understand the physical processes involved and to extract important astrophysical information. This includes knowledge of chemical elemental abundances and properties of the exciting stars, such as their far ultraviolet spectrum. The Orion Nebula is a prime candidate to study because it is nearby, bright, the extinction is not large, and its appearance is reasonably circular. Such a shape is consistent with a geometrical structure that is spherically symmetric (1-D) or one that is axisymmetric (2-D) seen nearly face-on. Previously all detailed modeling of the ionization and thermal structure of H II regions has been confined to 1-D because of computational complexity. There is now the capability to treat the 2-D case with much of the level of physical sophistication as the 1-D case. The interpretation of the spectra of gaseous nebulae in terms of underlying physical processes requires measurements of line intensities at different points in the object and over as wide a set of excitation and ionization conditions as practical.Observations of nebulae have been made for many years in the optical and radio but only recently in the infrared and ultraviolet. These relatively new windows allow observations of lines of ionization states not available in the radio or optical--providing a much more complete set of known quantities to undertake a meaningful modeling effort