A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Title insurance is a required element of almost all real estate purchases and is not an insignificant cost for consumers. However, consumers generally do not have the knowledge needed to "shop around" for title insurance and usually rely on professionals involved in real estate--such as lenders, real estate agents, and attorneys--for advice in selecting a title insurer. Recent state and federal investigations into title insurance sales have identified practices that may have benefited these professionals and title insurance providers at the expense of consumers. At your request, GAO currently has work under way studying the title insurance industry, including pricing, competition, the size of the market, the roles of the various participants in the market, and how they are regulated. You asked GAO to identify and report on preliminary issues for further study. In so doing, this report focuses on: (1) the reasonableness of cost structures and agent practices common to the title insurance market that are not typical of other insurance markets; (2) the implications of activities identified in recent state and federal investigations that may have benefited real estate professionals rather than consumers; and …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Government Performance and Results Act calls for agencies to address human capital in the context of performance-based management. The act requires that annual performance plans describe how agencies will use their human capital to accomplish their goals and objectives. Designing, implementing, and maintaining a strategic human capital management focus are critical to maximizing performance and ensuring that government is accountable to the American people. GAO found that the human capital challenges described in fiscal year 2001 performance plans reflected the different levels of attention agencies are to pay this critical issue. GAO contends that the breadth, depth, and specificity of many related human capital goals and strategies needs to be increased. The plans' discussions of human capital increasingly need to focus on describing human capital challenges. The plans need to specify the what, why, how, and when of the strategies to address those challenges. The discussions should also better link human capital management and the agencies' strategic and program planning to maximize performance and ensure optimal resource allocation. Overall, the fiscal year 2001 plans showed that substantial opportunities exist for goals and strategies as they …

A briefing report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on Balkans security issues, focusing on: (1) the current security situation in the Balkans, particularly in Kosovo and Bosnia; (2) the projected security in the region over the next 5 years; (3) factors in the decision to withdraw Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo; and (4) how the executive branch has defined U.S. interests in the region in the National Security Strategy and public statements."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) manages and operates about 577,000 structures worldwide, valued at about $712 billion. DOD has worked for several years to develop models that can reliably estimate the installation support funds needed to sustain these facilities, and plans to spend over $55 billion to support these facilities and operate its bases in fiscal year 2008. Because GAO has identified support infrastructure as a high-risk area that affects DOD's ability to devote funds to other more critical needs, GAO initiated this review under the Comptroller General's authority. This report discusses (1) the reliability of the annual funding estimates produced by the facilities sustainment model, (2) DOD's progress in meeting funding goals for facility sustainment and recapitalization, (3) the extent to which DOD has addressed deferred facility sustainment funding needs, and (4) the status of DOD's efforts to develop a new installation services model. To address these objectives, GAO reviewed the accuracy and support for the model's key inputs, analyzed pertinent documents, and visited eight judgmentally selected installations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO confirmed differences among the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in the rates at which illnesses have been reported among their Gulf War veterans; their assessment of nuclear, biological, and chemical threats in the Gulf; and their preparations to meet them. However, because of differences in the experiences of the three sets of veterans, there is no single, unambiguous cause that can be identified for the reported illnesses. If multinational allies are to act in a coordinated fashion, they require a similar level of awareness of and preparation for the threats to be faced; otherwise, force protection and operational success could be jeopardized and the utility of some forces restricted. Gulf War Coalition members prepared for somewhat different threats and used different countermeasures. In addition, the U.S. lacked clear doctrine for timely and systematic warning of allied forces and U.S. ground troops about pending strikes on suspected nuclear, biological, and chemical targets."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "By law, married persons who file joint tax returns are each fully responsible for the accuracy of the tax return and for the full tax liability. This is true even though only one taxpayer may have earned the wages or income shown on the tax return. Under the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Innocent Spousal Program, IRS can relieve taxpayers of tax debts on the basis of equity considerations, such as not knowing that their spouse failed to pay taxes due. Since passage of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, IRS has received thousands of requests from taxpayers for innocent spouse relief. IRS's inability to provide timely responses to such requests has generated concerns among taxpayers, Congress, and other stakeholders. IRS reached decisions on 21 percent more cases than it received in fiscal year 2001, reducing some of its backlog from previous years. The agency accomplished this through a variety of initiatives, including a substantial staffing commitment, centralization and specialization, automated tools, and routine estimating of future workload and staffing needs. IRS's procedures conform to applicable guidance for transferring tax liabilities from joint tax accounts …

This report explores the United States' relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the context of law and civil society programs that promote democratic change in China, discussions of human rights, and public diplomacy programs. This report explores in particular the economics of said relationship, including U.S.-funded programs to promote democratic-leaning policy changes. This report also discusses the opinions of analysts and other experts who both defend and oppose such efforts.

This report discusses recent (2008-2009) pirate attacks on vessels, including United States vessels, in the waters off the Horn of Africa. The Horn of Africa is sometimes called the Somali Peninsula and includes the nations of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia. This report explores reasons behind the increased number of pirate attacks in recent years, as well as what efforts are being taken to combat said attacks, including those by the 111th Congress and President Obama and his Administration.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) commitment to assuring the health and safety of its workers includes the conduct of illness and injury surveillance activities that provide an early warning system to detect health problems among workers. The Illness and Injury Surveillance Program monitors illnesses and health conditions that result in an absence, occupational injuries and illnesses, and disabilities and deaths among current workers.

The selection of the project delivery method (PDM) for any project is critical--it establishes communication, coordination, and contractual issues between the owner, contractor, and designer. With an increase in the number of green design projects, understanding the relationship between the PDM and green design is paramount to project and contract management. It is reasonable to assume that a positive relationship between green design and design-build (DB) exists since both theoretically are intended to foster an integrated, holistic, and collaborative project. This research examines the relationship between the design-bid-build (DBB), construction management (CM), and DB PDMs and green design with the goal of establishing best practices and identifying potential synergies between them. The research collected information by conducting primarily telephone interviews with approximately twenty-five individuals, including owners, contractors, and designers involved in completed green design projects, mainly in the public sector. The interviews developed a general understanding of the current state of knowledge and experience and not a rigorous quantitative analysis. Upon completion of the interviews, the tabulated results were summarized and green project characteristics and project-PDM interactions emerged. Existing published research was evaluated to reveal aspects of PDMs independent of green design. Best practices were ascertained by combining information from …

This document reports the results of a follow-on optical design study of visible-light and infrared optics for the ITER upper ports, performed by LLNL under contract for the US ITER Project Office. The major objectives of this work are to move the viewing aperture closer to the plasma so that the optical path does not cut through any adjacent blanket shield module other than the module designated for the port; move optics forward into the port tube to increase the aperture size and therefore improve the spatial resolution; assess the trade-off between spatial resolution and spatial coverage by reducing the field of view; and create a mechanical model with a neutron labyrinth. Here we show an optical design incorporating all these aspects. The new design fits into a 360 mm ID tube, as did the previous design. The entrance aperture is increased from 10 mm to 21 mm, with a corresponding increase in spatial resolution. The Airy disk diameter for 3.8 {micro}m wavelength IR light is 5.1 mm at the most distant target point in the field of view. The field of view is reduced from 60 toroidal degrees (full toroidal coverage with 6 cameras) to 50 toroidal degrees. The …

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Researchers at the Timken Company conceived a project to develop an on-line instrument for wall thickness measurement of steel seamless mechanical tubing based on laser ultrasonic technology. The instrument, which has been installed and tested at a piercing mill, provides data on tube eccentricity and concentricity. Such measurements permit fine-tuning of manufacturing processes to eliminate excess material in the tube wall and therefore provide a more precisely dimensioned product for their customers. The resulting process energy savings are substantial, as is lowered environmental burden. The expected savings are $85.8 million per year in seamless mechanical tube piercing alone. Applied across the industry, this measurement has a potential of reducing energy consumption by 6 x 10{sup 12} BTU per year, greenhouse gas emissions by 0.3 million metric tons carbon equivalent per year, and toxic waste by 0.255 million pounds per year. The principal technical contributors to the project were the Timken Company, Industrial Materials Institute (IMI, a contractor to Timken), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Timken provided mill access as well as process and metallurgical understanding. Timken researchers had previously developed fundamental ultrasonic analysis methods on which this project is based. IMI developed and fabricated the laser ultrasonic generation and …

The purpose of this proposal is to gain a better understanding of the space-time correlations of atmospheric fluctuations in clouds through application of methods from statistical physics to high resolution, continuous data sets of cloud observations available at the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program archive. In this report we present the accomplishments achieved during the four year period. Starting with the most recent one, we report on two break-throughs in our research that make the fourth year of the project exceptionally successful and markedly outperforming the objectives. The first break-through is on characterization of the structure of cirrus radiative properties at large, intermediate and small, generating cells scales by applying the Fokker-Planck equation method and other methods to ARM millimeter wavelength radar observations collected at the Southern Great Plains site. The second break-through is that we show that different characterizations of the cirrus radiative properties are obtained for different synoptic scale environments. We outline a stochastic approach to investigate the internal structure of radiative properties of cirrus clouds based on empirical modeling and draw conclusions about cirrus dynamical properties in the context of the synoptic environment. Results on the structure of cirrus dynamical properties are consistent with the …

The 118-C-3:3 french drains received condensate from the steam heating system in the 105-C Reactor Building. The 118-C-3:3 french drain meets the remedial action objectives specified in the Remaining Sites ROD. The results demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations do not preclude any future uses and allow for unrestricted use of shallow zone soils. The results also demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations are protective of groundwater and the Columbia River.

The UCLA work on this grant was to design and help implement an object-oriented version of the GTC code, which is written in Fortran90. The GTC code is the main global gyrokinetic code used in this project, and over the years multiple, incompatible versions have evolved. The reason for this effort is to allow multiple authors to work together on GTC and to simplify future enhancements to GTC. The effort was designed to proceed incrementally. Initially, an upper layer of classes (derived types and methods) was implemented which called the original GTC code 'under the hood.' The derived types pointed to data in the original GTC code, and the methods called the original GTC subroutines. The original GTC code was modified only very slightly. This allowed one to define (and refine) a set of classes which described the important features of the GTC code in a new, more abstract way, with a minimum of implementation. Furthermore, classes could be added one at a time, and at the end of the each day, the code continued to work correctly. This work was done in close collaboration with Y. Nishimura from UC Irvine and Stefan Ethier from PPPL. Ten classes were ultimately …

The 100-B-1 waste site was a dumping site that was divided into two areas. One area was used as a laydown area for construction materials, and the other area was used as a chemical dumping area. The 100-B-1 Surface Chemical and Solid Waste Dumping Area site meets the remedial action objectives specified in the Remaining Sites ROD. The results demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations support future unrestricted land uses that can be represented by a rural-residential scenario. The results also demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations are protective of groundwater and the Columbia River.

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This report provides information about the Guide to Individuals Seated on the House Dais. The house of representatives meets in the capitol in the house chamber.

This report describes the relevant BAPCPA provisions and discusses the recent court decisions.

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Since September 11, 2001, several bills introduced in the U.S. Congress have included provisions to assist emergency communications. Key provisions from a number of these bills have become law. This report summarizes progress in developing legislation, especially in the 109th Congress, in three areas of emergency communications: communications among first responders and other emergency personnel; emergency warnings and alerts; and 911 call centers and systems.

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This report discusses the "minority witness rule." When a Senate committee, other than the Appropriations Committee, holds a hearing, the minority party members of the panel have the right to call witnesses of their choosing to testify during at least one day of that hearing.