Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the Catholic War Veterans of the United States of America, Incorporated for Fiscal Year 2004. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditors' opinions that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the Jewish War Veterans, U.S.A., National Memorial, Incorporated for Fiscal Years 2005 and 2004. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditors' opinions that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the Big Brothers-Big Sisters of America for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2004. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditor's opinion that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, the Department of Defense (DOD) has increasingly relied on goods and services provided by the private sector under contract. Since fiscal year 2000, DOD's contracting for goods and services has nearly doubled, and this trend is expected to continue. In fiscal year 2005 alone, DOD obligated nearly $270 billion on contracts for goods and services. Given the magnitude of the dollar amounts involved, it is essential that DOD acquisitions be handled in an efficient, effective, and accountable manner. In other words, DOD needs to ensure that it buys the right things, the right way. Enacted January 6, 2006, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 required us to review DOD's efforts to identify and assess the vulnerability of its contracts to fraud, waste, and abuse. We reviewed the areas of vulnerability that DOD faces with regard to contracting fraud, waste, and abuse, and the recent initiatives that DOD has taken to address these vulnerabilities, including actions DOD has taken in response to a March 2005 Defense Science Board report on management oversight in acquisition organizations."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of Former Members of Congress for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2004. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditor's opinion that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In December 2000, the Congress passed the Launching Our Communities' Access to Local Television Act of 2000 (LOCAL TV Act). The act created the Local Television Loan Guarantee Program and established the LOCAL Television Loan Guarantee Board to finance projects to provide access to signals of local television stations to households in areas with limited or no access to such signals from a commercial, for-profit satellite service or other multichannel video provider. The program authorizes the board to approve loan guarantees up to 80 percent of loans, totaling no more than $1.25 billion in aggregate; however, since inception of the program, no loan guarantees have been approved and the program has not been utilized. Section 1006 of the act requires that we perform an annual audit of the (1) administration of the provisions of the act and (2) financial position of each applicant who receives a loan guarantee under the act, including the nature, amount, and purpose of investments made by the applicant. In April 2005, we issued our required annual report covering fiscal year 2004. Since there continue to be no loan guarantee recipients for GAO to …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This letter responds to Congress's request for additional information related to the subcommittee's May 25, 2006 hearing on whether charities participating in the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) are meeting their employment tax responsibilities. Our responses are based on work performed during GAO's audit, communication with the Internal Revenue Service, GAO's views of generally accepted accounting principles and generally accepted auditing standards, and on professional judgment."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2004 and 2003. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditor's opinion that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the National Ski Patrol System, Incorporated, for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2005 and 2004. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditor's opinion that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the audit reports covering the financial statements of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society of the United States of America for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2004 and 2003. GAO found no reportable instances of noncompliance. The audit reports included the auditor's opinion that the financial statements of the corporation were presented fairly in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Given today's unprecedented terrorism threat environment and the resulting widespread congressional and public interest in the security of our nation's borders, GAO conducted an investigation testing whether radioactive sources could be smuggled across U.S. borders. Most travelers enter the United States through the nation's 154 land border ports of entry. Department of Homeland Security U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspectors at ports of entry are responsible for the primary inspection of travelers to determine their admissibility into the United States and to enforce laws related to preventing the entry of contraband, such as drugs and weapons of mass destruction. GAO's testimony provides the results of undercover tests made by its investigators to determine whether monitors at U.S. ports of entry detect radioactive sources in vehicles attempting to enter the United States. GAO also provides observations regarding the procedures that CBP inspectors followed during its investigation. GAO has also issued a report on the results of this investigation (GAO-06-545R)."

The coupling of energetic metallic multilayers (a.k.a. flash metal) with energetic sol-gel synthesis and processing is an entirely new approach to forming energetic devices for several DoD and DOE needs. They are also practical and commercially viable manufacturing techniques. Improved occupational safety and health, performance, reliability, reproducibility, and environmentally acceptable processing can be achieved using these methodologies and materials. The development and fielding of this technology will enhance mission readiness and reduce the costs, environmental risks and the necessity of resolving environmental concerns related to maintaining military readiness while simultaneously enhancing safety and health. Without sacrificing current performance, we will formulate new impact initiated device (IID) compositions to replace materials from the current composition that pose significant environmental, health, and safety problems associated with functions such as synthesis, material receipt, storage, handling, processing into the composition, reaction products from testing, and safe disposal. To do this, we will advance the use of nanocomposite preparation via the use of multilayer flash metal and sol-gel technologies and apply it to new small IIDs. This work will also serve to demonstrate that these technologies and resultant materials are relevant and practical to a variety of energetic needs of DoD and DOE. The goal …

The CALPHAD approach is applied to kinetic studies of phase transformations and aging of prototypes of Ni-Cr-Mo-based alloys selected for waste disposal canisters in the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP). Based on a previous study on alloy stability for several candidate alloys, the thermodynamic driving forces together with a newly developed mobility database have been used to analyze diffusion-controlled transformations in these Ni-based alloys. Results on precipitation of the Ni{sub 2}Cr-ordered phase in Ni-Cr and Ni-Cr-Mo alloys, and of the complex P- and {delta}-phases in a surrogate of Alloy 22 are presented, and the output from the modeling are compared with experimental data on aging.

The recent discoveries of nonmolecular phases of simple molecular solids [1,2] demonstrate the proof-of-the-principles for producing exotic phases by application of high pressure. Modern advances in theoretical and computational methodologies now make possible to explain or even predict novel structures and properties in a relatively wide range of length scales on the basis of thermodynamic stability [3]. Equally important in materials research is the recent developments in advanced x-ray and laser diagnostics that enable in-situ observations at the formidable pressure-temperature conditions [4]. Having benefited by all these developments, we discuss the first principle of the pressure-induced chemistry, 'Mbar Chemistry', with a few examples that may have important implications in materials research.

Rare charmless hadronic B decays are a good testing ground for QCD. In this paper we describe a selection of new measurements made by the BABAR and BELLE collaborations.

SABER, the South Arc Beam Experimental Region, is a proposed new beam line facility designed to replace the Final Focus Test Beam at SLAC. In this paper, we outline the optical design features and beam parameters now envisioned for SABER. A magnetic chicane to compress positron bunches for SABER and a bypass line that could transport electrons or positrons from the two-thirds point of the linac to SABER, bypassing the LCLS systems, are also discussed.

CTCP, an innovative TCP congestion control algorithm developed by Microsoft, is evaluated and compared to HSTCP and StandardTCP. Tests were performed on the production Internet from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to various geographically located hosts to give a broad overview of the performances. We find that certain issues were apparent during testing (not directly related to the congestion control algorithms) which may skew results. With this in mind, we find that CTCP performed similarly to HSTCP across a multitude of different network environments. However, to improve the fairness and to reduce the impact of CTCP upon existing StandardTCP traffic, two areas of further research were investigated. Algorithmic additions to CTCP for burst control to reduce the aggressiveness of its cwnd increments demonstrated beneficial improvements in both fairness and throughput over the original CTCP algorithm. Similarly, {gamma} auto-tuning algorithms were investigated to dynamically adapt CTCP flows to their network conditions for optimal performance. While the effects of these auto-tuning algorithms when used in addition to burst control showed little to no benefit to fairness nor throughput for the limited number of network paths tested, one of the auto-tuning algorithms performed such that there was negligible impact upon StandardTCP. With these …

An international collaboration is currently working on the construction and design of an asymmetric B Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center that will be ready to collect data in 1999. The main physics motivation for such a facility is to test the description and mechanism of CP violation in the Standard Model of particle physics and provide insight into the question of why more matter than antimatter is observed in the universe today. In particular, this experiment will measure CP violation in the decay of B mesons. In the early stages of this effort, the Canadian contingent proposed to build the central tracking chamber for the BaBar detector. Presently, a prototype drift chamber is in operation and studies are being performed to test some of the unique features of drift chamber design dictated by the conditions of the experiment. Using cosmic muons, it is possible to study tracking and pattern recognition in the prototype chamber, and therefore calculate the efficiency and spatial resolution of the prototype chamber cells. These performance features will be used to test whether or not the helium-based gas mixtures proposed for the BaBar drift chamber are a viable alternative to the more traditional argon-based gases.

The BaBar high energy physics experiment will be in operation at the PEP-II asymmetric e{sup +}e{sup -} collider in Spring 1999. The primary purpose of the experiment is the investigation of CP violation in the neutral B meson system. The electromagnetic calorimeter forms a central part of the experiment and new techniques are employed in data acquisition and reconstruction software to maximize the capability of this device. The use of a matched digital filter in the feature extraction in the front end electronics is presented. The performance of the filter in the presence of the expected high levels of soft photon background from the machine is evaluated. The high luminosity of the PEP-II machine and the demands on the precision of the calorimeter require reliable software that allows for increased physics capability. BaBar has selected C++ as its primary programming language and object oriented analysis and design as its coding paradigm. The application of this technology to the reconstruction software for the calorimeter is presented. The design of the systems for clustering, cluster division, track matching, particle identification and global calibration is discussed with emphasis on the provisions in the design for increased physics capability as levels of understanding of …

Background: Discovery of precise specificity oftranscription factors is an important step on the way to understandingthe complex mechanisms of gene regulation in eukaryotes. Recently,doublestranded protein-binding microarrays were developed as apotentially scalable approach to tackle transcription factor binding siteidentification. Results: Here we present an algorithmic approach toexperimental design of a microarray that allows for testing fullspecificity of a transcription factor binding to all possible DNA bindingsites of a given length, with optimally efficient use of the array. Thisdesign is universal, works for any factor that binds a sequence motif andis not species-specific. Furthermore, simulation results show that dataproduced with the designed arrays is easier to analyze and would resultin more precise identification of binding sites. Conclusion: In thisstudy, we present a design of a double stranded DNA microarray forprotein-DNA interaction studies and show that our algorithm allowsoptimally efficient use of the arrays for this purpose. We believe such adesign will prove useful for transcription factor binding siteidentification and other biological problems.

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