Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Section 127a, title 10 of the United States Code provides the Department of Defense (DOD) with two options for funding nontraining deployments and operations when Congress has not provided funds in advance. These options involve waiving reimbursements for support services and transferring amounts from other DOD accounts. Section 127a prescribes specific procedures to be followed by DOD when these funding options are used; requires DOD to notify Congress of and report on certain new contingency operations; and states that the Comptroller General of the United States shall from time to time, and when requested by a Committee of Congress, conduct a review to determine whether DOD is complying with the statutory requirements and limitations. GAO found that DOD has complied with the requirements contained in section 127a. Since the current notification and reporting requirements of section 127a were enacted in 1996, DOD has provided congressional notification for four operations, involving Bosnia, Kosovo, hurricane relief in Central America, and East Timor. DOD has rarely used the funding options provided in section 127a. It used the section 127a funding option allowing waiver of reimbursement for units providing support once, for …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has shown that cross-matching or data sharing can be a valuable management and oversight practice. The Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) already has the right to access Social Security Administration's (SSA) data. However, such access is subject to SSA's approval--the Code of Federal Regulations provides that "OWCP may verify the earnings reported by the employee through a variety of means, including by not limited to computer matches with the Office of Personnel Management and inquiries to SSA." Prior GAO work has demonstrated the importance of, and potential savings from, checking applicants' and beneficiaries' initial and continuing eligibility for federal benefits by verifying the economic information they provide with independent, third-party sources."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insures billions of dollars in multifamily housing mortgage loans to help construct, rehabilitate, purchase, and refinance apartments and health care facilities. However, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) lacks assurances that the lenders approved for the Multifamily Accelerated Processing (MAP) program always meet all of HUD's qualifications. HUD's guidance requires prospective lenders to submit documents showing that they are financially sound, have a satisfactory lending record, and have qualified underwriters. GAO found that HUD did not always comply with, or effectively implement, controls and procedures for reviewing and monitoring MAP lenders' underwriting of loans. Before issuing a loan, field staff are required to conduct and document reviews of lenders' mortgage insurance applications and associated loan exhibits to ensure compliance with HUD underwriting requirements. However, staff did not always properly document their reviews. HUD has held some lenders accountable for specific violations of program requirements but is unable to systematically identify lenders that exhibit patterns of noncompliance. To hold lenders accountable for specific violations or for patterns of noncompliance, HUD's Office of Multifamily Housing can suspend or terminate …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Compliance agreements between the Department of Energy (DOE) and its regulators specify cleanup activities and milestones that DOE has agreed to achieve. The 70 compliance agreements at DOE sites vary, but can be divided into three main types. These are: (1) agreements specifically required by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 to address cleanup of federal sites on EPA's national priorities list or by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 to address the management of mixed radioactive and hazardous waste at DOE facilities; (2) court-ordered agreements resulting from lawsuits initiated primarily by states; and (3) other agreements, including state administrative orders enforcing state hazardous waste management laws. DOE reported completing about 80 percent of its milestones by the time originally scheduled in the agreements. The cost of complying with these agreements is not specifically identified in the DOE budget submitted to Congress. Individual DOE sites develop annual compliance cost estimates as part of their budget requests. However, DOE headquarters officials adjust those individual site estimates to reflect national priorities and to reconcile various competing demands. Compliance agreements are site-specific and are not …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The 6,900 Home Health Agencies (HHAs) that serve Medicare beneficiaries must meet federal requirements, known as conditions of participation (COP), to ensure that they have the appropriate staff, are following the plan of care specified by a physician, maintain medical records to document the care provided, and periodically reassess each patient's condition. Although nationwide surveys done at HHAs since 1998 have identified a small proportion of agencies with serious deficiencies, the extent of the problem may be understated, and dangerous situations affecting home health patients may occur more often than documented. Shortcomings in the survey process and inconsistencies in state surveys make it difficult to assess the quality of care delivered and may mask potential problems. The ability to lodge complaints about an HHA and have them resolved promptly is important to protecting patient health and safety. HHA oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has been too limited to identify the problems GAO found in the survey process. CMS does not review state compliance with requirements for conducting HHA surveys, such as whether HHAs with COP-level deficiencies are surveyed annually rather than …

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Our understanding of the generation of coherent synchrotron radiation in magnetic bending systems and its impact on beam dynamics has grown considerably over the past few years. The search for understanding has brought a number of surprises, all related to the complexity of the fully self-consistent problem. Herein I survey the associated phenomenology, theory, and experiments while emphasizing important subtleties that have recently been uncovered. I conclude by speculating on courses of future investigations that may prove fruitful.

None

One of the objectives of the U.S. Department of Defense is to standardize all classes used in object-oriented deployment simulations by developing a standard class attribute representation and behavior for all deployment simulations that rely on an underlying class representation. The EXtensive Hierarchy and Object Representation for Transportation Simulations (EXHORT) is a class framework composed of two hierarchies that together constitute a standard and consistent class attribute representation and behavior that could be used directly by a large set of deployment simulations. The first hierarchy, the Transportation Class Hierarchy (TCH), was submitted to the Army Modeling and Simulation Office's (AMSO) Army Standards Repository in 1999 and presented at the Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop in the same year. The second hierarchy, the Infrastructure Class Hierarchy (ICH), describes the encapsulation of the rest of the defense transportation system and is the primary focus of this paper. The entire EXHORT framework lets deployment simulations use the same set of underlying class data, ensures transparent exchanges, reduces the effort needed to integrate simulations, and permits a detailed analysis of the defense transportation system.

A Monte Carlo procedure is used to generate N-particle configurations compatible with two-temperature canonical equilibria in two dimensions, with particular attention to nonlinear plasma gyrokinetics. An unusual feature of the problem is the importance of a nontrivial probability density function R0(PHI), the probability of realizing a set {Phi} of Fourier amplitudes associated with an ensemble of uniformly distributed, independent particles. This quantity arises because the equilibrium distribution is specified in terms of {Phi}, whereas the sampling procedure naturally produces particles states gamma; {Phi} and gamma are related via a gyrokinetic Poisson equation, highly nonlinear in its dependence on gamma. Expansion and asymptotic methods are used to calculate R0(PHI) analytically; excellent agreement is found between the large-N asymptotic result and a direct numerical calculation. The algorithm is tested by successfully generating a variety of states of both positive and negative temperature, including ones in which either the longest- or shortest-wavelength modes are excited to relatively very large amplitudes.

Natural gas transmission companies mark the right-of-way areas where pipelines are buried with warning signs to prevent accidental third-party damage. Nevertheless, pipelines are sometimes damaged by third-party construction equipment. A single incident can be devastating, causing death and millions of dollars of property loss. This damage would be prevented if potentially hazardous construction equipment could be detected, identified, and an alert given before the pipeline was damaged. The Gas Technology Institute (GTI) is developing a system to solve this problem by using an optical fiber as a distributed sensor and interrogating the fiber with an custom optical time domain reflectometer. Key issues are the ability to detect encroachment and the ability to discriminate among potentially hazardous and benign encroachments. The work performed in the third quarter of the project (2nd quarter of 2002) includes design of the diode laser driver and high-speed detector electronics and programming of the custom optical time domain reflectometer.

The Interstate Clean Transportation (ICTC) purpose is to develop a public-private partnership dedicated to accelerating the market penetration of clean, alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) in interstate goods movement. In order to foster project development, the ICTC activity sought to increase awareness of heavy-duty AFVs among truck fleet operators.

Polycrystals of the intermetallic compound of the Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system, where x = 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.625, 0.675, 0.725, 0.75, 0.775, 0.825, 0.875, and 1, have been prepared by electric-arc-melting on water-cooled copper hearth in an argon atmosphere. A study of phase relationships and crystallography in the pseudobinary system Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} using X-ray powder diffraction data and optical metallography was completed. It revealed that silicides in the composition range from 0.825 to 1 crystallize in the Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 4}-type crystal structure: germanides in the composition range from 0 to 0.625 crystallize in the Sm{sub 5}Ge{sub 4}-type structure, and alloys with intermediate composition range from 0.675 to 0.775 crystallize in the monoclinic Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 2}Ge{sub 2}-type structure. The -{Delta}S{sub m} values were determined from magnetization measurements for 7 alloys. The alloys with a monoclinic crystal structure which belong to an intermediate phase region have large MCE value, which exceeds those observed in the other two phase regions by 300 to 500%. The nature of the observed magnetic and structural transformations in the Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system seems to be similar with those reported for the Gd{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system. However, the …

Using the ion channeling techniques we find that a substantial fraction (up to 15%) of the Mn atoms reside in interstitial sites in Ga{sub 1-x}Mn{sub x}As alloys (with x ranging from 0.02 to 0.09). Moreover, the T{sub C} of Ga{sub 1-x}Mn{sub x}As is found to be very sensitive to annealing at temperatures close to the growth temperature of 265 C. Ion channeling results demonstrate that the increase of TC after annealing at 282 C can be attributed to a relocation of Mn atoms from interstitial sites to form random clusters. A series of Ga{sub 1-x-y}Mn{sub x}Be{sub y}As layers, in which the magnetic moments and free holes are independently controlled by the Mn and Be contents, respectively, are also investigated. A dramatic increase of the concentration of Mn interstitials and a reduction of T{sub C} are observed as the Be concentration increases, while the free hole concentration stays relatively constant at {approx}5x10{sup 20}cm{sup -3}. These results demonstrate that the concentrations of free holes as well as uncompensated Mn spins are governed by the position of the Fermi level, which controls the formation energy of compensating interstitial Mn acceptors. This Fermi-level-induced hole saturation is responsible for the commonly observed upper limit of …

An x-ray streak camera operating in accumulation mode was developed for studying ultrafast dynamics at synchrotron facilities. A laser-triggered photoconductive switch was used as a sweeping unit to obtain low timing jitter. The fast rise time of the ramp pulse generated by the switch (90 ps) combined with the fast response of the traveling wave deflection plates (150 ps) significantly reduced the jitter caused by the shot-to-shot laser fluctuation. At {approx}1% rms (root mean square) laser energy fluctuation, the resolution of the camera is 1.1 ps when over 5000 laser shots were accumulated. This is two times better than that of the previous design with slower response (300 ps) deflection plates.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This paper introduces two efficient algorithms that compute the Contour Tree of a 3D scalar field F and its augmented version with the Betti numbers of each isosurface. The Contour Tree is a fundamental data structure in scientific visualization that is used to pre-process the domain mesh to allow optimal computation of isosurfaces with minimal storage overhead. The Contour Tree can be also used to build user interfaces reporting the complete topological characterization of a scalar field, as shown in Figure 1. In the first part of the paper we present a new scheme that augments the Contour Tree with the Betti numbers of each isocontour in linear time. We show how to extend the scheme introduced in 3 with the Betti number computation without increasing its complexity. Thus we improve on the time complexity from our previous approach 8 from 0(m log m) to 0(n log n+m), where m is the number of tetrahedra and n is the number of vertices in the domain of F. In the second part of the paper we introduce a new divide and conquer algorithm that computes the Augmented Contour Tree for scalar fields defined on rectilinear grids. The central part of the …

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with John Sloup. Sloup joined the Army in 1943. He served with the 7th Infantry Division and participated in the invasions of Leyte and Okinawa. After the war ended, Sloup was shipped to Korea. In January of 1946, he returned to the US and was discharged.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with James “Jim” White. White was born in Cosby, Tennessee on 6 April 1920. He tells of conditions encountered while growing up during the Depression. Entering the U.S. Army in 1942 he was assigned to the 90th Infantry Division, Company A, 358th Regiment and trained as a rifleman at Camp Barkley, Texas. The division was sent to England in preparation for Operation Overlord. White landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day +1 and comments on the high casualty rate, the procedures in clearing a town of German soldiers and of being wounded by a land mine. Mrs. Betty White tells of receiving the message that her husband was wounded and of her concern. White was awarded a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart while in the Army.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Gerald Peterson. Peterson was born in Indianapolis in 1917. He grew up during the Great Depression and shares memories of how his family managed. He graduated from Arsenal Technical School in 1935. Peterson graduated from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan in 1939 with a degree in industrial engineering and management. He was hired by the Boeing Company, and completed structural designs for the tail section of the B-17. He also assisted in the design and build of the B-29. In 1940, Peterson was required to register for possible draft, though after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, his engineering job was frozen and he remained in his position for the duration of the war. Peterson remained with Boeing until June of 1949.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with John Sloup. Sloup joined the Army in 1943. He served with the 7th Infantry Division and participated in the invasions of Leyte and Okinawa. After the war ended, Sloup was shipped to Korea. In January of 1946, he returned to the US and was discharged.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with James “Jim” White. White was born in Cosby, Tennessee on 6 April 1920. He tells of conditions encountered while growing up during the Depression. Entering the U.S. Army in 1942 he was assigned to the 90th Infantry Division, Company A, 358th Regiment and trained as a rifleman at Camp Barkley, Texas. The division was sent to England in preparation for Operation Overlord. White landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day +1 and comments on the high casualty rate, the procedures in clearing a town of German soldiers and of being wounded by a land mine. Mrs. Betty White tells of receiving the message that her husband was wounded and of her concern. White was awarded a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart while in the Army.