National Institute of Standards and Technology March 2012 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction (ACEHR or Committee), will hold a meeting via teleconference on Friday, April 27, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. The primary purpose of this meeting is to review the Committee's draft annual report to the NIST Director. Any draft meeting materials will be posted on the NEHRP Web site at https://nehrp.gov/. Interested members of the public will be able to participate in the meeting from remote locations by calling into a central phone number.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is forming a Work Group (WG) to examine alternative methods for testing the accuracy of commercial measuring devices including, but not limited to retail motor-fuel dispensers. The WG will investigate the current methodology and standards (e.g., neck-type volumetric field standards and associated test procedures) widely used by weights and measures officials and service companies to test commercial measuring devices as well as proposed alternatives to ensure that the methodologies and standards facilitate measurements that are traceable to the International System of Units (SI). WG membership is open to any interested party. This notice also summarizes key issues to be considered by this WG.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's (DOC) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will hold a free public workshop titled ``Conformity AssessmentApproaches and Best Practices'' on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The purpose of the NIST public workshop is (1) to examine current approaches to conformity assessment among Federal agencies and the private sector and (2) to provide a forum for discussion with NIST on conformity assessment practices, challenges and the means by which these challenges are being addressed.

This notice announces the Secretary of Commerce's approval of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 180-4, Secure Hash Standard (SHS). FIPS 180-4 updates FIPS 180-3 by providing a general procedure for creating an initialization value, adding two additional secure hash algorithms to the Standard: SHA-512/224 and SHA- 512/256 and removing a restriction that padding must be done before hash computation begins, which was required in FIPS 180-3.