A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, millions of visitors, foreign students, and immigrants come to the United States. Foreign visitors may enter on a legal temporary basis--that is, with an authorized period of admission that expires on a specific date--either (1) with temporary visas (generally for tourism, business, or work) or, in some cases, (2) as tourists or business visitors who are allowed to enter without visas. (The latter include Canadians and qualified visitors from 27 countries who enter under the visa waiver program.) The majority of visitors who are tracked depart on time, but others overstay--and since September 11, 2001, the question has arisen as to whether overstay issues might have an impact on domestic security. In this report, we (1) describe available data on the extent of overstaying, (2) report on weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security's long-standing overstay tracking system, and (3) provide some observations on the impact that tracking system weaknesses and significant levels of overstaying may have on domestic security."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During a May 2003 congressional hearing, questions were raised about the accuracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) reported costs for collecting payments from veterans and private health insurers for its Medical Care Collections Fund (MCCF). Congress also had questions about VA's practice of using third-party collections to satisfy veterans' first-party debt. GAO's objectives were to determine: (1) the accuracy of VA's reported cost for collecting first- and third-party payments from veterans and private health insurers, and (2) how VA's practice of satisfying first-party debt with third-party payments affects the collections process."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Discrimination in housing on the basis of race, sex, family status, and other grounds is illegal in the United States. Each year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) and related agencies carry out enforcement activities for several thousand complaints of housing discrimination. The timeliness and effectiveness of the enforcement process have been continuing concerns. GAO describes the stages and practices of the fair housing enforcement process, looks at recent trends, and identifies factors that may influence the length and thoroughness of the process."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To support the Global War on Terrorism in fiscal year 2004, the Congress appropriated $65 billion to the Department of Defense (DOD) in an emergency supplemental appropriations act. To assist the Congress in its oversight role, GAO reviewed (1) the adequacy of current funding for fiscal year 2004 war-related activities and (2) actions DOD is undertaking to cover anticipated shortfalls, if any. Based on the body of work GAO has done on the cost of contingency operations, GAO is also making observations on efforts to require greater accountability to the Congress on the use of funds appropriated to DOD for contingency operations."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Although the federal government has invested substantially in information technology (IT), its success in managing information resources has varied. Agencies have taken steps to implement modern strategies, systems, and management policies and practices, but they still face significant information and technology management challenges. Recognizing the key role of the chief information officer (CIO) in helping an agency to achieve better results through IT, congressional requesters asked GAO to study the current status of CIOs at major departments and agencies. Among the topics this report describes are (1) CIOs' responsibilities and reporting relationships, and (2) current CIOs' professional backgrounds and the tenures of all of the CIOs since enactment of the Clinger-Cohen Act."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "About 7 million undocumented aliens lived in the United States in 2000, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates. Hospitals in states where many of them live report that treating them can be a financial burden. GAO was asked to examine the relationship between treating undocumented aliens and hospitals' costs not paid by patients or insurance. GAO was also asked to examine federal funding available to help hospitals offset costs of treating undocumented aliens and the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security (Homeland Security) for covering medical expenses of sick or injured aliens encountered by Border Patrol and U.S. port-of-entry officials. To conduct this work, GAO surveyed 503 hospitals and interviewed Medicaid and hospital officials in 10 states. GAO also interviewed and obtained data from Homeland Security officials."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) faces the daunting task of bringing together 22 diverse agencies to lead efforts to protect the homeland. Among the challenges posed by this transformation is integrating these agencies' diverse information technology (IT) systems: mission support, administration, and infrastructure (e.g., networks). GAO was asked to determine (1) whether DHS has defined its IT systems integration strategy and (2) how DHS is ensuring that IT investments made by component agencies (specifically focusing on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard) are aligned with the department's strategic direction."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Fiscal Year 2003 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Department of Defense (DOD) to assess whether general and flag officer authorizations were sufficient to meet all requirements. GAO's objectives were to determine whether DOD (1) fully disclosed the results of its study in its March 2003 report to Congress and explained the rationale for any recommendations, (2) used an established methodology to meet the objectives of its study, and (3) incorporated lessons learned from a GAO review of DOD's 1997 general and flag officer study. The 2003 act also directed DOD to review legislation affecting general and flag officer management. DOD included the results of its review in the March 2003 report, making several recommendations. GAO plans a separate review of these issues and recommendations."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Transatlantic airline operations between the United States and European Union (EU) nations are currently governed by bilateral agreements that are specific to the United States and each EU country. Since 1992, the United States has signed so-called "Open Skies" agreements with 15 of the 25 EU countries. A "nationality clause" in each agreement allows only those airlines designated by the signatory countries to participate in their transatlantic markets. In November 2002, the European Court of Justice ruled that existing Open Skies agreements were illegal under EU law, in part because their nationality clauses discriminated against airlines of other EU nations. The United States and the EU have been negotiating revisions to these agreements. Experts agree that removing the nationality clause is central to any new agreement. GAO was asked to report on (1) how prevalent Open Skies agreements are and what their effects on airlines and consumers are, (2) what the key ways that commercial aviation between the United States and the EU could be changed by the Court of Justice decision are, and (3) how the elimination of nationality clause restrictions might affect airlines and …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since fiscal year 1997, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has relied primarily on its 21 health care networks to allocate resources to its medical centers. VA headquarters also directly allocates some resources to the medical centers. In addition, medical centers collect resources from third-party insurance payments and other sources. VA provides general guidance to\ networks for resource allocation to medical centers, but permits variation in networks' allocation methodologies. Representatives from veterans groups and others have expressed concerns regarding resource allocations to medical centers in Network 9 (Nashville) known as the Mid South Healthcare Network. GAO was asked to report for fiscal year 2002 (1) the amount of resources medical centers in the network received and the source of those resources and (2) the basis on which medical centers in the network received these resources. GAO was also asked to supplement findings for fiscal year 2002 with information for fiscal years 1997 through 2003."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that states and school districts cannot deny education to illegal alien children residing here. Issues in estimating the costs of providing education to them are of interest because (1) policy discussions concerning illegal immigration often focus on cost impacts; (2) potential costs are borne mostly at the state and local levels; and (3) the Congress could authorize federal reimbursement for benefits provided to illegal aliens, based on estimated state costs or numbers of illegal aliens. The foreign-born population is growing and is concentrated in certain states; the illegal immigrant component is thought to be substantial. Concerns about education costs may reflect "squeezed" state and local budgets, rising school enrollments, and overcrowded schools. To address the potential for estimating the costs of educating illegal alien schoolchildren, this report (1) identifies major government sources of relevant data, (2) describes a Census Bureau plan for developing new information, and (3) outlines costestimation approaches. GAO provided a draft of this report to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Census Bureau. The agencies informed GAO they had no …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress has expanded the number of low-income and minority serving institutions eligible for grants under Titles III and V of the Higher Education Act and nearly doubled funding for these grants in the last 5 years to about $432 million in fiscal year 2004. Institutions eligible for funding under Titles III and V include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Alaska Native Serving Institutions, Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, and other postsecondary institutions that serve low-income students. Given the recent expansion, we examined these programs to determine (1) how institutions used their Title III and Title V grants and the benefits they received from using these grant funds, (2) what objectives and strategies the Department of Education (Education) has developed for Title III and Title V programs, and (3) to what extent Education monitors and provides assistance to Title III and Title V institutions."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In the 1990 and 2000 Censuses, U.S. military and federal civilian employees overseas were included in the numbers used for apportioning Congress. Currently, the U.S. Census Bureau (Bureau) is assessing the practicality of counting all Americans abroad by holding a test census in France, Kuwait, and Mexico. GAO was asked to (1) assess the soundness of the test design, and (2) examine what past court decisions have held about Americans' rights and obligations abroad."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Allegations of violations of employment discrimination and whistleblower protection laws against federal agencies can end up in federal court, at which point Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys generally take over representation of the agency. Attorneys within Justice's Civil Division and U.S. Attorneys Offices generally handle this type of litigation. The Notifications and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act) requires agencies to repay the Department of the Treasury's Judgment Fund for discrimination and whistleblower protection settlements and judgments paid on their behalf. While the No FEAR Act does not require agencies to reimburse DOJ for costs incurred in defending them in cases covered under the Act, it does require GAO to review how DOJ could ascertain the cost of representing agencies in each case and what the burden of performing this accounting would be. Based on this requirement, our report provides information on (1) the methods DOJ says it could use to account for the personnel and non-personnel costs that it incurs in handling cases covered under No FEAR on a per-case basis and how soon the Department expects it would be …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides health care to veterans through the $27 billion Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical programs. VHA administers and operates VA's medical system, providing care to nearly 5 million patients in 2003. As of September 2003, VHA operated 160 hospitals, 847 outpatient clinics, 134 nursing homes, 42 domiciliaries, and 73 comprehensive home care programs, including facilities in every state, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. VHA is responsible for effective stewardship of the resources provided to it by Congress, which asked GAO to review internal controls in three areas of operation at selected VHA medical centers. GAO conducted a review to assess the effectiveness of control activities over (1) personal property, (2) drugs returned for credit, and (3) part-time physician time and attendance."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress has long encouraged the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) to share health resources to promote cost-effective use of health resources and efficient delivery of care. In February 2002, the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs described VA and DOD health care resource sharing activities at nine locations. GAO was asked to describe the health resource sharing activities that are occurring at these sites. GAO also examined seven other sites that actively participate in sharing activities. Specifically, GAO is reporting on (1) the types of benefits that have been realized from health resource sharing activities and (2) VA- and DOD-identified obstacles that impede health resource sharing. GAO analyzed agency documents and interviewed officials at DOD and VA to obtain information on the benefits achieved through sharing activities. The nine sites reviewed by the Committee and reexamined by GAO are: 1) Los Angeles, CA; 2) San Diego, CA; 3) North Chicago, IL; 4) Albuquerque, NM; 5) Las Vegas, NV; 6) Fayetteville, NC; 7) Charleston, SC; 8) El Paso, TX; and 9) San Antonio, TX. The seven additional sites GAO examined are: 1) …

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) inaugurated a program addressing research and development for an Exoskeleton for Human Performance Augmentation in FY!2001. A team consisting of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the prime contractor, AeroVironment, Inc., the Army Research Laboratory, the University of Minnesota, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute has recently completed an 18-month Phase I effort in support of this DARPA program. The Phase I effort focused on the development and proof-of-concept demonstrations for key enabling technologies, laying the foundation for subsequently building and demonstrating a prototype exoskeleton. The overall approach was driven by the need to optimize energy efficiency while providing a system that augmented the operator in as transparent manner as possible (non-impeding). These needs led to the evolution of two key distinguishing features of this team's approach. The first is the ''no knee contact'' concept. This concept is dependent on a unique Cartesian-based control scheme that uses force sensing at the foot and backpack attachments to allow the exoskeleton to closely follow the operator while avoiding the difficulty of connecting and sensing position at the knee. The second is an emphasis on energy efficiency manifested by an energetic, power, actuation and controls approach designed to enhance …

We consider the transmission of a message from a source node to a terminal node in a network with n nodes and m links where the message is divided into parts and each part is transmitted over a different path in a set of paths from the source node to the terminal node. Here each link is characterized by a bandwidth and delay. The set of paths together with their transmission rates used for the message is referred to as a multipath. We present two algorithms that produce a minimum-end-to-end message delay multipath path table that, for every message length, specifies a multipath that will achieve the minimum end-to-end delay. The algorithms also generate a function that maps the minimum end-to-end message delay to the message length. The time complexities of the algorithms are O(n{sup 2}((n{sup 2}/logn) + m)min(D{sub max}, C{sub max})) and O(nm(C{sub max} + nmin(D{sub max}, C{sub max}))) when the link delays and bandwidths are non-negative integers. Here D{sub max} and C{sub max} are respectively the maximum link delay and maximum link bandwidth and C{sub max} and D{sub max} are greater than zero.

This document describes the guidelines adopted for software development of the Community Land Model (CLM) and serves as a reference to the entire code base of the released version of the model. The version of the code described here is Version 3.0 which was released in the summer of 2004. This document, the Community Land Model Version 3.0 (CLM3.0) User's Guide (Vertenstein et al., 2004), the Technical Description of the Community Land Model (CLM) (Oleson et al., 2004), and the Community Land Model's Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLM-DGVM): Technical Description and User's Guide (Levis et al., 2004) provide the developer, user, or researcher with details of implementation, instructions for using the model, a scientific description of the model, and a scientific description of the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model integrated with CLM respectively. The CLM is a single column (snow-soil-vegetation) biogeophysical model of the land surface which can be run serially (on a laptop or personal computer) or in parallel (using distributed or shared memory processors or both) on both vector and scalar computer architectures. Written in Fortran 90, CLM can be run offline (i.e., run in isolation using stored atmospheric forcing data), coupled to an atmospheric model (e.g., the Community …

Sections 2 through 7 of this report define the result of the 2004 leveling survey through the subsidence monuments at the WIPP site. Approximately 15 miles of leveling was completed through nine vertical control loops. The 2004 survey includes the determination of elevation on each of the 48 existing subsidence monuments and the WIPP baseline survey, and 14 of the National Geodetic Survey's (NGS) vertical control points. The field observations were completed during August through November of 2004 by personnel from the WashingtonTRU Solutions (WTS) Surveying Group, Mine Engineering Department. Additional rod personnel were provided by the Geotechnical Engineering department. Digital leveling techniques were utilized to achieve better than Second Order Class II loop closures as outlined by the Federal Geodetic Control Subcommittee (FGCS). Because it is important to perform the subsidence survey in exactly the same manner each year, WIPP procedure (WP 09-ES4001) details each step of the survey. Starting with the 2002 survey this procedure has been used to perform the subsidence survey. Starting with the survey of the year 2001, Loop 1 and redundant survey connections among the various loops were removed from the survey and report. This resulted in a reduction of fieldwork with no loss …

This report "reviews the management and performance of the Marble Falls Independent School District's (MFISD's) educational,financial, and operations. functions" (Legislative Budget Board Letter).

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of the intake of stable isotopes of carbon and iodine on the committed doses due to the ingestion of {sup 14}C and {sup 129}I. This was accomplished through the application of two different computational approaches. The first was based on the assumption that ground (drinking) water was the only source of intake of both {sup 14}C and {sup 129}I and stable carbon and stable iodine. For purposes of the second approach, the intake of {sup 14}C and {sup 129}I was still assumed to be only that in the ground (drinking) water, but the intake of stable carbon and stable iodine was assumed to be that in the drinking water plus other components of the diet. The doses were estimated using either a conversion formula or the applicable dose coefficients in Federal Guidance Reports No. 11 and No. 13. Serving as input for the analyses was the estimated maximum concentration of {sup 14}C or {sup 129}I that would be present in the ground water due to potential releases from the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repository during the first 10,000 years after closure. The estimated concentrations of stable carbon and …

The work reported here shows the proof of principle (using a small data set) for a suite of algorithms designed to estimate the probability density function of hyperspectral background data and compute the appropriate Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) matched filter decision threshold for a chemical plume detector. Future work will provide a thorough demonstration of the algorithms and their performance with a large data set. The LASI (Large Aperture Search Initiative) Project involves instrumentation and image processing for hyperspectral images of chemical plumes in the atmosphere. The work reported here involves research and development on algorithms for reducing the false alarm rate in chemical plume detection and identification algorithms operating on hyperspectral image cubes. The chemical plume detection algorithms to date have used matched filters designed using generalized maximum likelihood ratio hypothesis testing algorithms [1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 10, 11, 13]. One of the key challenges in hyperspectral imaging research is the high false alarm rate that often results from the plume detector [1, 2]. The overall goal of this work is to extend the classical matched filter detector to apply Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) methods to reduce the false alarm rate, or Probability of False …

This report provides background information on the location of nuclear weapons at the time of the demise of the Soviet Union and their subsequent relocation to storage and deployment areas in Russia. It also provides a description of the safety, security, and control issues raised in 1991 and in more recent years. It includes a brief listing of the cooperative programs and assistance the United States has provided to Russia and the other former Soviet states in an effort to address concerns about the safety and security of nuclear weapons and materials.