Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a racetrack admission fee collected by a county to distribute to municipalities pursuant to the Texas Racing Act, see TEX. REV. CIV. STAT. ANN. art. 179e, § 6.17(a) (Vernon Supp. 1999), violates article VIII, section 1(f) of the Texas Constitution (RQ-1016)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Comptroller's adjustment of property tax findings for school district pursuant to section 42.257 of the Education Code (RQ-1194)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Binding effect of government agency rules on other state entities (RQ-1201)

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed recruiting and attrition in the military services, focusing on: (1) recruiter selection and incentive systems and their effects on recruiter performance; (2) the screening of incoming recruits for criminal history information to ensure that only qualified persons are allowed to enlist; (3) reasons for attrition during the first 6 months of an enlistee's term; and (4) reasons for premature attrition after first-term enlistees have completed 6 months of service."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the counternarcotics efforts of the United States and Mexico, focusing on: (1) Mexico's efforts in addressing the drug threat; and (2) the status of U.S. counternarcotics assistance provided to Mexico."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the year 2000 status of states' automated systems that support federal human services programs, such as Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Food Stamps."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the privacy of medical records used for health research, focusing on: (1) to what extent medical information used for research depends on personally identifiable information; (2) research that is and is not subject to current federal oversight requirements; (3) how the institutional review board (IRB) ensures the confidentiality of health information used in research; and (4) what steps organizations have taken to safeguard information."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the: (1) status of the National Weather Service (NWS) systems modernization; and (2) most cost-effective alternatives for acquiring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) marine data."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) year 2000 efforts and the remaining challenges IRS faces in making its information systems year 2000 compliant, focusing on: (1) the extent to which IRS monitors the year 2000 status of its mission-critical systems in their entirety; (2) whether IRS met the January 31, 1999, completion goal for the areas that it monitors--application software, systems software, hardware, and telecommunications networks; (3) the status of two remaining, critical year 2000 tasks--conducting year 2000 testing and completing 36 contingency plans; and (4) the fact that other business initiatives are creating competing demands on staff needed for year 2000 efforts."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the readiness of automated systems that support the nation's delivery of health benefits and services to function reliably without interruption throughout the turn of the century, focusing on: (1) Medicare's ability to provide accurate benefits and services to millions of Americans; and (2) the overall readiness of the health care sector."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the readiness of Social Security Administration's (SSA) computer systems that support key benefits programs to function reliably in the next century, focusing on GAO's previous report and recommendations."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Customs Service's progress in addressing the year 2000 computing problem, focusing on Customs': (1) progress to date; (2) program management; and (3) future challenges."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the significant differences in two Department of Defense training programs, focusing on the: (1) training categories and military services with the most significant funding changes from the 1998 to the 1999 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP); (2) bases for the changes; and (3) potential impact of the changes on the services' future training budgets."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Navy's declining ship maintenance workload, focusing on: (1) the Navy's policies and procedures for allocating ship maintenance work to public and private facilities in the Norfolk area; (2) ship maintenance and modernization funding obligated to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and private ship repair companies during the fiscal years (FY) 1994 through 1998; and (3) the extent to which the Atlantic Fleet's ship maintenance program has been affected by the movement of funds out of the ship depot maintenance program since FY 1994."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) ongoing efforts to develop resource-based practice expense relative value units (RVUs), focusing on: (1) whether the new methodology is an acceptable approach for revising Medicare's fee schedule; (2) questions about the data, assumptions, and adjustments underlying the new methodology that need to be addressed during the 3-year phase-in period; and (3) the need for future updates to the practice expense RVUs to reflect changes in health care delivery and for ongoing assessments of the fee schedule's effect on Medicare beneficiaries' access to physicians' care."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the types of health research conducted outside the Common Rule and Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, focusing on: (1) examining how medical information is used for research and the need for personally identifiable information; (2) identifying research that is and is not subject to current federal oversight requirements; (3) examining how institutional review boards (IRB) ensure the confidentiality of health information used in research; and (4) identifying the safeguards health care organizations have put in place to protect the confidentiality of health information used in research."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the auctions federal agencies currently use to award rights or sell assets and the way in which they differ."

We review and extend to the compressible regime an earlier parallelization of an implicit incompressible unstructured Euler code [9], and solve for flow over an M6 wing in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic regimes. While the parallelization philosophy of the compressible case is identical to the incompressible, we focus here on the nonlinear and linear convergence rates, which vary in different physical regimes, and on comparing the performance of currently important computational platforms. Multiple-scale problems should be marched out at desired accuracy limits, and not held hostage to often more stringent explicit stability limits. In the context of inviscid aerodynamics, this means evolving transient computations on the scale of the convective transit time, rather than the acoustic transit time, or solving steady-state problems with local CFL numbers approaching infinity. Whether time-accurate or steady, we employ Newton's method on each (pseudo-) timestep. The coupling of analysis with design in aerodynamic practice is another motivation for implicitness. Design processes that make use of sensitivity derivatives and the Hessian matrix require operations with the Jacobian matrix of the state constraints (i.e., of the governing PDE system); if the Jacobian is available for design, it may be employed with advantage in a nonlinearly implicit analysis, …

A three-dimensional, numerical mode1 for simulating airflow and pollutant dispersion around buildings is described. The model is based on an innovative finite element approach and fully implicit time integration techniques. Linear and nonlinear eddy viscosity/diffusivity submodels are provided for turbulence parameterization. Mode1 predictions for the flow-field and dispersion patterns around a surface-mounted cube are compared with measured data from laboratory experiments.

The Argonne concept for an accelerator complex for efficiently producing high-quality radioactive beams from ion source energy up to 6-15 MeV/u is described. The Isotope-Separator-On-Line (ISOL) method is used. A high-power driver accelerator produces radionuclides in a target that is closely coupled to an ion source and mass separator. By using a driver accelerator which can deliver a variety of beams and energies the radionuclide production mechanisms can be chosen to optimize yields for the species of interest. To effectively utilize the high beam power of the driver two-step target/ion source geometries are proposed (1) Neutron production with intermediate energy deuterons on a primary target to produce neutron-rich fission products in a secondary {sup 238}U target, and (2) Fragmentation of neutron-rich heavy ion rich fission products in a secondary beams such as {sup 18}O in a target/catcher geometry. Heavy ion beams with total energies in the 1-10 GcV range are also available for radionuclide production via high-energy spallation reactions. At the present time R and D is in progress to develop superconducting resonator structures for a driver linac to cover the energy range up to 100 MeV per nucleon for heavy ions and 200 MeV for protons. The post accelerator …

Higher than environmental levels of {sup 232}Th have been found in autopsy samples of lungs and other organs from four former employees of a thorium refinery. Working periods of the subjects ranged from 3 to 24 years, and times from end of work to death ranged from 6 to 31 years. Examination of the distribution of thorium among the organs revealed poor agreement with the distribution calculated from the dosimetric models in Publication 30 of the International Commission on Radioprotection (ICRP). Concentrations in the lungs relative to pulmonary lymph nodes, bone or liver were much higher than calculated from the model for class Y thorium and the exposure histories of the workers. Much better agreement was found with more recently proposed models in Publications 68 and 69 of the ICRP. Radiation doses estimated from the amounts of thorium in the autopsy samples were compatible with health studies that found no significant difference in mortality from that of the general population of men in the US.

The overmoded rf transmission and pulsed power compression system for SLAC's Next Linear Collider (NLC) program requires a high degree of transmission efficiency and mode purity to be economically feasible. To this end, a number of new, high power components and systems have been developed at X-band, which transmit rf power in the low loss, circular TE01 mode with negligible mode conversion. In addition, a highly efficient SLED-II* pulse compressor has been developed and successfully tested at high power. The system produced a 200 MW, 250 ns wide pulse with a near-perfect flat-top. In this paper we describe the design and test results of the high power pulse compression system using SLED-II.

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The Integrated Dynamic Landscape Analysis and Modeling System (IDLAMS) is a prototype, integrated land management technology developed through a joint effort between Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USACERL). Dr. Ronald C. Sundell, Ms. Pamela J. Sydelko, and Ms. Kimberly A. Majerus were the principal investigators (PIs) for this project. Dr. Zhian Li was the primary software developer. Dr. Jeffrey M. Keisler, Mr. Christopher M. Klaus, and Mr. Michael C. Vogt developed the decision analysis component of this project. It was developed with funding support from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), a land/environmental stewardship research program with participation from the US Department of Defense (DoD), the US Department of Energy (DOE), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). IDLAMS predicts land conditions (e.g., vegetation, wildlife habitats, and erosion status) by simulating changes in military land ecosystems for given training intensities and land management practices. It can be used by military land managers to help predict the future ecological condition for a given land use based on land management scenarios of various levels of training intensity. It also can be used as a tool to help land managers compare …