Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and three subsequent laws that create new federal standards for private health insurance which covers nearly 175 million Americans under the age of 65. These laws include standards guaranteeing access to health insurance for small employers and individuals with existing health conditions as well as requirements for health plans regarding mental health services, hospital care for mothers and newborns following childbirth, and reconstructive surgery following a mastectomy. Since HIPAA's enactment in 1996, federal agencies' enforcement roles have continued to evolve as they have established new or expanded existing enforcement activities to ensure compliance with standards under HIPAA and the related federal laws. Agency officials state that they have enough staff resources and expertise to carry out their current enforcement responsibilities. The Health Care Financing Administration's future role depends on the actions of states in enforcing the federal standards, as well as on congressional decisions about whether to reauthorize the Mental Health Parity Act or to enact additional patient protection legislation. In addition, the scope of the Department of Labor's future enforcement activities may depend on …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The consensus of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization, and other major health agencies is that the research to date does not show radiofrequency energy emitted from mobile phones has harmful health effects, but there is not yet enough information to conclude that they pose no risk. Although most of the epidemiological and laboratory studies done on this issue have found no adverse health effects, the findings of some studies have raised questions about cancer and other health problems that require further study. The Cellular Telecommunication & Internet Association (CTIA) and FDA will jointly conduct research on mobile phone health affects. Although the initiative is funded solely by CTIA, FDA's active role in setting the research agenda and providing scientific oversight should help alleviate concerns about the objectivity of the report. The media has widely reported on the debate over whether mobile phones can cause health problems. Thus, the federal government's role in providing the public with clear information on this issue is particularly important. FDA has a consumer information update on mobile phone health issues but has not revised that data …

The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Problem Solving Environment (PSE) consists of the tools and libraries needed for the development of ASCI simulation codes on ASCI machines. The recently completed ASCI PSE Milepost demonstrated that this software environment is available and functional at the scale used for application mileposts on ASCI White. As part of the PSE Milepost, we performed extensive performance testing of several critical run-time based systems. In this paper, we present microbenchmark results that compare the MPI [5], Pthreads and OpenMP [7, 8] implementations on ASCI White and ASCI Blue Pacific. Our results demonstrate that these run-time systems on White have improved sufficiently to accommodate the machine's approximately four-fold increase in processing capability over Blue Pacific.

This document reports the results of the 25 Can Verification Run. The 25 Can Verification Run was performed as outlined in Section 1.d of SRS Acceptance Criteria (Reference 1). The run was performed over the period of February 16 to the 28, 2001. Each of these cans was welded with a dummy Inner Can containing about 5 kg of surrogate material. The cans were then analyzed using radiography and metallography of samples taken at four locations of the weld. The radiographs were examined for porosity. The micrographs of the metallurgical samples were examined for porosity, cracks, and lack of fusion. The results were reviewed by Derrill Rikard (a level 3 inspector at LLNL) and by Ken Durland (a level 3 inspector from WSRC). These reviews did not find anything of concern. Therefore we are submitting these results to SRS for concurrence.

During calendar year 2000, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory performed its customary radiological protection support services in support of the U.S. Department of Energy Richland Operations Office and the Hanford contractors. These services included: 1) external dosimetry, 2) internal dosimetry, 3) in vivo monitoring, 4) radiological records, 5) instrument calibration and evaluation, and 6) calibration of radiation sources traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Each program summary describes the routine operations, program changes and improvements, program assessments, supporting technical studies, and professional activities.

This report addresses some of the frequently asked historical, constitutional, procedural, and legal questions concerning the federal income tax.

Many data types arising from data mining applications can be modeled as bipartite graphs, examples include terms and documents in a text corpus, customers and purchasing items in market basket analysis and reviewers and movies in a movie recommender system. In this paper, the authors propose a new data clustering method based on partitioning the underlying biopartite graph. The partition is constructed by minimizing a normalized sum of edge weights between unmatched pairs of vertices of the bipartite graph. They show that an approximate solution to the minimization problem can be obtained by computing a partial singular value decomposition (SVD) of the associated edge weight matrix of the bipartite graph. They point out the connection of their clustering algorithm to correspondence analysis used in multivariate analysis. They also briefly discuss the issue of assigning data objects to multiple clusters. In the experimental results, they apply their clustering algorithm to the problem of document clustering to illustrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

The project involves using advanced reservoir characterization and thermal production technologies to improve thermal recovery techniques and lower operating and capital costs in a slope and basin clastic (SBC) reservoir in the Wilmington field, Los Angeles Co., CA. Through September 2000, project work has been completed on the following activities: data preparation; basic reservoir engineering; developing a deterministic three dimensional (3-D) geologic model, a 3-D deterministic reservoir simulation model and a rock-log model; well drilling and completions; and surface facilities on the Fault Block II-A Tar Zone (Tar II-A). Work is continuing on improving core analysis techniques, final reservoir tracer work, operational work and research studies to prevent thermal-related formation compaction in the Tar II-A steamflood area, and operational work on the Tar V steamflood pilot and Tar II-A post steamflood projects. Work was discontinued on the stochastic geologic model and developing a 3-D stochastic thermal reservoir simulation model of the Tar II-A Zone so the project team could use the 3-D deterministic reservoir simulation model to provide alternatives for the Tar II-A post steamflood operations and shale compaction studies. The project team spent the fourth quarter 2000 performing well work and reservoir surveillance on the Tar II-A post-steamflood project …

With the exponential growth of information on the World Wide Web there is great demand for developing efficient and effective methods for organizing and retrieving the information available. Document clustering plays an important role in information retrieval and taxonomy management for the World Wide Web and remains an interesting and challenging problem in the field of web computing. In this paper we consider document clustering methods exploring textual information hyperlink structure and co-citation relations. In particular we apply the normalized cut clustering method developed in computer vision to the task of hyperdocument clustering. We also explore some theoretical connections of the normalized-cut method to K-means method. We then experiment with normalized-cut method in the context of clustering query result sets for web search engines.

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

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC 5 television station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story.

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

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A new, very high magnetic field superconducting ECR ion source, VENUS, is under construction at the LBNL 88-Inch Cyclotron [1,2]. The paper describes the VENUS extraction system and discusses the ion beam formation in the strong axial magnetic field (3 T) of the ECR ion source. Emittance values as expected from theory, which assumes a uniform plasma density across the plasma outlet hole, are compared with actual measurements from the AECR-U ion source. Results indicate that highly charged heavier ions are concentrated on the source axis. They are extracted from an ''effective'' plasma outlet hole, whose smaller radius must be included in ion optics simulations.

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

Newsletter of the Texas Department of Health discussing the news, activities, and events of the organization and other information related to health in Texas.

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

The Enhanced Geothermal System concept is to develop the technology required to extract energy from the reduced permeability zones that underlie all high-temperature geothermal systems. Our concept is that injection wells will be drilled into the high temperature zone. The wells will identify fractures that are only poorly connected to the overlying reservoir. Water injected into these fractures will cause them to propagate through thermal contraction, increase in hydrostatic pressure, and reduction of effective stress. The fractures will connect with the overlying normal temperature reservoir, and steam will be produced from existing production wells. The injection water will generate high thermal quality steam while mitigating problems relating to high gas and chloride.

The Probe project has completed its first full year of operation. In this document we will describe the status of the project as of December 31, 2000. We will describe the equipment configuration, then give brief descriptions of the various projects undertaken to date. We will mention first those projects performed for outside entities and then those performed for the benefit of one of the Probe sites. We will then describe projects that are under consideration, including some for which initial actions have been taken and others which are somewhat longer-term.

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During calendar year 2000, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory performed its customary radiological protection support services in support of the U.S. Department of Energy Richland Operations Office and the Hanford contractors. These services included: (1) external dosimetry, (2) internal dosimetry, (3) in vivo monitoring, (4) radiological records, (5) instrument calibration and evaluation, and (6) calibration of radiation sources traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Each program summary describes the routine operations, program changes and improvements, program assessments, supporting technical studies, and professional activities.

B-roll video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story about an audition for the TV game show "Weakest Link".

The Immigration and NaturalizationService (INS), with a current annual budget of $5.0 billion, is the primary agency charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration law. Regulating immigration can be viewed as having two basic components:stemming illegal immigration (enforcement) and facilitating legal immigration (service). The Bush Administration supports separating service from enforcement. While no legislation to restructure INS has been introduced in the 107th Congress at this date, it is likely that proposals will be introduced in the future, since restructuring may necessitate amending existing statutory authorities. For now, Members of Congress, who support restructuring INS, are waiting to review the Bush Administration’s plan before introducing legislation themselves.

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