Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to saluting volunteers in the State of Texas.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to designating April 23, 2003, as Long-Term Care Ombudsman Day in Texas.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to the enrollment of certain children and recipients of medical assistance in group health benefit plans.

Joint resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to exempt certain travel trailers from ad valorem taxation.

Since fall 2001, Livermore Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has deployed 11 Intel IA-32-based Linux clusters ranging in size up to 1154 nodes. All provide a common programming model and implement a similar cluster architecture. Hardware components are carefully selected for performance, usability, manageability, and reliability and are then integrated and supported using a strategy that evolved from practical experience. Livermore Computing Linux clusters run a common software environment that is developed and maintained in-house while drawing components and additional support from the open source community and industrial partnerships. The environment is based on Red Hat Linux and adds kernel modifications, cluster system management, monitoring and failure detection, resource management, authentication and access control, development environment, and parallel file system. The overall strategy has been successful and demonstrates that world-class high-performance computing resources can be built and maintained using commodity off-the-shelf hardware and open source software.

The United States and its allies are helping Afghanistan emerging from more than 22 years of warfare, although substantial risk to Afghan stability remains. Before the U.S. military campaign against the orthodox Islamist Taliban movement began on October 7, 2001, Afghanistan had been mired in conflict since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The defeat of the Taliban has enabled the United States and its coalition partners to send forces throughout Afghanistan to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and leaders that remain at large, including Osama bin Laden. As the war against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban elements winds down, the United States is shifting its military focus toward stabilizing the interim government, including training a new Afghan national army, and supporting the international security force (ISAF) that is helping the new government provide security.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by AIDS than any other part of the world. The United Nations reports that 29.4 million adults and children are infected with the HIV virus in the region, which has about 10% of the world's population but more than 70% of the worldwide total of infected people. This report discusses this issue in detail, including the cause of the African AIDS epidemic, the social and economic consequences, response and treatment, and U.S. policy.

The authors compare CALE simulations with recent experimental results of a laser-induced shock traversing a spherical under-dense region (''void''). In this report the experimental results are described, as well as several numerical attempts at explaining the observed radiographs. The conclusion is that the numerical simulations at this time cannot satisfactorily explain the experiment. The simulations also indicate that the introduction of air gaps between the under-dense sphere and the surrounding foam can greatly change the behavior of the shocked sphere. Thus fabrication details may play an important role in the detailed evolution of this experiment. Regardless of the simulations, analysis of the observed time sequence indicates that reproducibility of this experiment may be a factor. To settle this issue, further experiments of this kind will be required.

This report presents an overview of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. This is a clash between the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination that is occurring in the Caucasus, creating the longest inter-ethnic dispute in the former Soviet Union. The report includes the background and analysis of history, warfare and peace process in the region. The report discusses the Armenian and Azerbaijani perspective, the role and views of others (Iran, Turkey, Russia), as well as the U.S. policy regarding the conflict.

This report provides information about Constitutional Principles and Federal Statutes on Child Pornography.

The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, P.L. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009- 26, added a definition of “child pornography” that include visual depictions of what appears to be a minor engaging in explicit sexual conduct, even if no actual minor was used in producing the depiction. On April 16, 2002, in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court held this provision unconstitutional to the extent that it prohibited pictures that were not produced with actual minors. (This case is discussed under “Section 2256,” below.) In response to Ashcroft, bills were introduced in the House and Senate that would continue to ban some child pornography that was produced without an actual minor; on June 25, 2002, the House passed one such bill: H.R. 4623, 107th Congress.

This report provides a brief overview of the organization and operations of House and Senate committees.

Multi-modality imaging studies are becoming more widely utilized in the analysis of medical data. Anatomical data from CT and MRI are useful for analyzing or further processing functional data from techniques such as PET and SPECT. When data are not acquired simultaneously, even when these data are acquired on a dual-imaging device using the same bed, motion can occur that requires registration between the reconstructed image volumes. As the human torso can allow non-rigid motion, this type of motion should be estimated and corrected. We report a deformation registration technique that utilizes rigid registration for bony structures, while allowing elastic transformation of soft tissue to more accurately register the entire image volume. The technique is applied to the registration of CT and MR images of the lumbar spine. First a global rigid registration is performed to approximately align features. Bony structures are then segmented from the CT data using semi-automated process, and bounding boxes for each vertebra are established. Each CT subvolume is then individually registered to the MRI data using a piece-wise rigid registration algorithm and a mutual information image similarity measure. The resulting set of rigid transformations allows for accurate registration of the parts of the CT and …

Various options for sequential, shared memory and distributed memory implementations for the CLJP algorithm, a parallel coarsening scheme within algebraic multigrid, are discussed. The use of different data structures as well as different approaches of implementing the actual algorithm are investigated, and experimental results illustrating the results are presented.

The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA) and the Federal Power Act (FPA) were enacted to eliminate unfair practices and other abuses by electricity and gas holding companies by requiring federal control and regulation of interstate public utility holding companies. Comprehensive energy legislation has passed the House and Senate. The House passed H.R. 6 on April 11, 2003. On July 31, 2003, the Senate suspended debate on S. 14, inserted the text of H.R. 4 (107th Congress) as a substitute, and passed H.R. 6. A conference agreement was reached November 17, 2003, and passed by the House the next day. H.R. 6 includes an electricity title that would, in part, repeal PUHCA, would prospectively repeal the mandatory purchase requirement under PURPA, and would create an electric reliability organization. On June 15, 2004, H.R. 4503, a comprehensive energy policy bill, passed the House.

This report provides information about the Constitutionality and Summaries of Selected Statutes on Federal Tort Reform Legislation. This report also considers the functionality of federal reform legislation such as product liability.

This report considers the constitutionality of federal tort reform legislation, such as the products liability and medical malpractice reform proposals that have been introduced for the last several Congresses.

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This report documents results from tests conducted to evaluate the impacts of elevated levels of oxalate on operations within the SRS High-Level Waste System. These operations include sludge washing, evaporation, mixing of supernates and wash waters and pretreatment of supernates to remove strontium and actinides by monosodium titanate.

CRS Report for Congress entailing information about changes being made to the law because of the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). Topics include, eligibility by jurisdiction, safeguarding, evaluation and Individualized Education Programs (IEPS), etc..

On March 1, 2003, the Turkish parliament, in a close vote, failed to pass a resolution authorizing the United States to deploy troops to Turkish territory to open a northern front in a war against Iraq. The vote surprised the U.S. government and its Turkish counterpart. Both governments may have greatly overestimated their understanding of the Turkish political situation that contributed to the defeat of the resolution. This report focuses on that political scene, Turkish concerns about an Iraq conflict, the tentative, but unfulfilled, bargain struck between the U.S. and Turkish governments to authorize the U.S. deployment - to the extent that it is known, the final arrangements for U.S. access to Turkish airspace, and attendant issues. This report also reviews the implications of parliament’s actions for the bilateral U.S.- Turkish relationship, regional relations, Turkey’s domestic politics, its economy, and broader issues.

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Recent operations in Afghanistan demonstrated the dangers of providing air support close to troops on the ground. Such close air support requires timely, well-practiced procedures and communication between ground and air elements. While most close air support operations in Afghanistan were successful, "friendly fire" incidents have resulted from mistakes made while conducting the mission. At the request of the Ranking Minority Members of the Subcommittees on Total Force and Readiness, House Committee on Armed Services, GAO reviewed Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to provide adequate close air support training, as well as efforts to enhance the equipment used to support this mission."