A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Millions of U.S. workers participate in "contingent" employment, such as temporary or part-time work, and not in permanent or full-time jobs. The Department of Labor (DOL) enforces several labor laws to protect these and other workers, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which provides minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor protections. In June 2000, GAO reported that contingent workers lagged behind standard full-time workers in terms of income, benefits, and workforce protections, and that some employees do not receive worker protections because employers misclassified them as independent contractors. GAO was asked to update this report by describing (1) the size and nature of the contingent workforce, (2) the benefits and workforce protections provided to contingent workers, and (3) the actions that DOL takes to detect and address employee misclassification. We analyzed DOL survey data on contingent workers and interviewed DOL officials."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In March 2006, we issued our opinions on the calendar year 2005 financial statements of the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF), the Savings Association Insurance Fund (SAIF), and the FSLIC Resolution Fund (FRF). We also issued our opinion on the effectiveness of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance as of December 31, 2005, and our evaluation of FDIC's compliance with significant provisions of selected laws and regulations for the three funds for the year ended December 31, 2005. The purpose of this report is to discuss issues identified during our audits of the 2005 financial statements regarding internal controls and accounting procedures that could be improved, and to recommend actions to address these weaknesses. Although these issues were not material in relation to the financial statements, we believe they warrant management's attention."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To lawfully work in the United States, individuals must provide identification and evidence of work authorization to their employers. Individuals who are not U.S. citizens must have authorization to work from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet individuals without these required authorizations can gain employment using fraudulent documents containing fictitious information or information that belongs to someone else or by being hired by an employer who does not follow the law. In prior GAO work on these issues, we have reported that Social Security Administration (SSA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data can be useful for identity and employment eligibility verification as well as to facilitate more effective worksite enforcement. However, the use of these data has drawbacks since they contain some erroneous information and information about hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. citizens and work-authorized aliens. Because the confidentiality of tax data is considered crucial to voluntary taxpayer compliance, IRS is restricted under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code from sharing taxpayer information with third parties except in very limited circumstances. Currently, IRS is not authorized to share taxpayers' information for worksite enforcement …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (NSVI) issued by the National Security Council (NSC), prevailing in Iraq is a vital U.S. interest because it will help win the war on terror and make America safer, stronger, and more certain of its future. This report (1) assesses the evolving U.S. national strategy for Iraq and (2) evaluates whether the NSVI and its supporting documents address the desirable characteristics of an effective national strategy developed by GAO in previous work. In this report, the NSVI and supporting documents are collectively referred to as the U.S. strategy for Iraq."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Act) contains provisions that address challenges to developing geothermal resources, including the high risk and uncertainty of developing geothermal power plants, lack of sufficient transmission capacity, and delays in federal leasing. Among the provisions are means to simplify federal royalties on geothermal resources while overall collecting the same level of royalty revenues. This testimony summarizes the results of a recent GAO report, GAO-06-629. In this testimony, GAO describes: (1) the current extent of and potential for geothermal development, (2) challenges faced by developers of geothermal resources, (3) federal, state, and local government actions to address these challenges, and (4) how provisions of the Act are likely to affect federal geothermal royalty disbursement and collections."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In November 2005, the National Security Council (NSC) issued the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (NSVI) to clarify the President's strategy for achieving U.S. political, security, and economic goals in Iraq. The U.S. goal is to establish a peaceful, stable, and secure Iraq. In addition, in June 2006, the administration issued a fact sheet at Camp David discussing current progress and goals in Iraq. This testimony (1) discusses the extent to which the NSVI and its supporting documents address the six characteristics of an effective national strategy, and (2) assesses how security, political, and economic factors will affect achieving the U.S. strategy for Iraq. In this testimony, the NSVI and supporting documents are collectively referred to as the U.S. strategy for Iraq."

It has been proposed that during growth under anaerobic oroxygen-limited conditions Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 uses theserine-isocitrate lyase pathway common to many methylotrophic anaerobes,in which formaldehyde produced from pyruvate is condensed with glycine toform serine. The serine is then transformed through hydroxypyruvate andglycerate to enter central metabolism at phosphoglycerate. To examine itsuse of the serine-isocitrate lyase pathway under anaerobic conditions, wegrew S. oneidensis MR-1 on [1-13C]lactate as the sole carbon source witheither trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) or fumarate as an electron acceptor.Analysis of cellular metabolites indicates that a large percentage(>75 percent) of lactate was partially oxidized to either acetate orpyruvate. The 13C isotope distributions in amino acids and other keymetabolites indicate that, under anaerobic conditions, a complete serinepathway is not present, and lactate is oxidized via a highly reversibleserine degradation pathway. The labeling data also suggest significantactivity in the anaplerotic (malic enzyme and phosphoenolpyruvatecarboxylase) and glyoxylate shunt (isocitrate lyase and malate synthase)reactions. Although the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle is often observedto be incomplete in many other anaerobes (absence of 2-oxoglutaratedehydrogenase activity), isotopic labeling supports the existence of acomplete TCA cycle in S. oneidensis MR-1 under TMAO reductioncondition.

Instabilities of the bunch form in storage rings may be induced through the wake field arising from corrugations in the vacuum chamber, or from the wake and precursor fields due to coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR). For over forty years the linearized Vlasov equation has been applied to calculate the threshold in current for an instability, and the initial growth rate. Increasing interest in nonlinear aspects of the motion has led to numerical solutions of the nonlinear Vlasov equation, augmented with Fokker-Planck terms to describe incoherent synchrotron radiation in the case of electron storage rings. This opens the door to much deeper studies of coherent instabilities, revealing a rich variety of nonlinear phenomena. Recent work on this topic by the author and collaborators is reviewed.

The STAR collaboration at RHIC reports measurements of theinclusive yield of non-photonic electrons, which arise dominantly fromsemi-leptonic decays of heavy flavor mesons, over a broad range oftransverse momenta (1.2<pt<10 gevc) in pp, dAu, and AuAucollisions at sqrt sNN = 200 GeV. The non-photonic electron yieldexhibits unexpectedly large suppression in central AuAu collisions athigh pt, suggesting substantial heavy quark energy loss at RHIC. Thecentrality and \pt dependences of the suppression provide constraints ontheoretical models of suppression.

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An e-mail from the Texas Ethics Commission to Al Daniels acknowledging receipt of filing for Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus. There is an electronic filing version of General-Purpose Committee Campaign Finance Report submitted to the Texas Ethics Commission. A report of Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus, Sales by Item Detail made on January through June 2006. The report lists type of services, contribution, dues, and sales, with an account balance ending of $10,884.00. A report of Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus, Expenses by Vendor Detail made on January through June 2006, with an account ending of $9,554.95. Also, a General Ledger for the Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus about payment and invoice history as of June 2006.

Self attenuation has historically caused both conceptual as well as measurement problems. The purpose of this paper is to eliminate some of the historical confusion by reviewing the mathematical basis and by comparing several methods of correcting for self attenuation focusing on transmission as a central concept.

Broadband subspace detectors are introduced for seismological applications that require the detection of repetitive sources that produce similar, yet significantly variable seismic signals. Like correlation detectors, of which they are a generalization, subspace detectors often permit remarkably sensitive detection of small events. The subspace detector derives its name from the fact that it projects a sliding window of data drawn from a continuous stream onto a vector signal subspace spanning the collection of signals expected to be generated by a particular source. Empirical procedures are presented for designing subspaces from clusters of events characterizing a source. Furthermore, a solution is presented for the problem of selecting the dimension of the subspace to maximize the probability of detecting repetitive events at a fixed false alarm rate. An example illustrates subspace design and detection using events in the 2002 San Ramon, California earthquake swarm.

A Retarding Field Analyzer (RFA) was inserted in a drift region of a magnetic transport section of the high-current experiment (HCX) that is at high-vacuum to measure ions and electrons resulting from beam interaction with background gas and walls. The ions are expelled during the beam by the space-charge potential and the electrons are expelled mainly at the end of the beam, when the beam potential decays. The ion energy distribution shows the beam potential of {approx} 2100 V and the beam-background gas total cross-section of 1.6x10{sup -20} m{sup 2}. The electron energy distribution reveals that the expelled electrons are mainly desorbed from the walls and gain {approx} 22 eV from the beam potential decaying with time before entering the RFA. Details of the RFA design and of the measured energy distributions are presented and discussed.

The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) engaged in numerous projects outlined under the scope of work discussed in the United States Department of Energy (DOE) grant number DE-FC26-04NT15456 awarded to the IOGCC. Numerous projects were completed that were extremely valuable to state oil and gas agencies as a result of work performed utilizing resources provided by the grant. There are numerous areas in which state agencies still need assistance. This additional assistance will need to be addressed under future scopes of work submitted annually to DOE's Project Officer for this grant. This report discusses the progress of the projects outlined under the grant scope of work for the 2005-2006 areas of interest, which are as follows: Area of Interest No. 1--Regulatory Streamlining and Improvement: This area of interest continues to support IOGCC's regulatory streamlining efforts that include the identification and elimination of unnecessary duplications of efforts between and among state and federal programs dealing with exploration and production on public lands. Area of Interest No. 2--Technology: This area of interest seeks to improve efficiency in states through the identification of technologies that can reduce costs. Area of Interest No. 3--Training and Education: This area of interest is vital …

Tree-based overlay networks (TB{bar O}Ns) have become important for scalable data multicast and aggregation. This infrastructure's generality has lead to widespread usage in large scale and widely distributed environments--environments in which reliability must be addressed. This paper presents state compensation, a novel reliability concept for TB{bar O}N environments that avoids explicit state replication (such as checkpoints) for failure recovery by leveraging general properties of TB{bar O}N computations that allow computational state from non-failed processes to compensate for state lost from failed ones. In this paper, we present our state compensation mechanisms, prove sufficient properties of distributed computations that make these mechanisms feasible and show how to derive computation-specific recovery primitives from these properties. We also present a case study of the recovery process. The result is a general TB{bar O}N recovery model that requires no additional storage, network, or computational resources during normal operation.

This ''Work Plan'' outlines the scope of work for a targeted groundwater sampling investigation and monitoring well installation at Barnes, Kansas. This activity is being conducted at the request of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), in accordance with the intergovernmental agreement between the KDHE and the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Data resulting from the proposed work will be used to determine the hydraulic gradient near the former CCC/USDA facility, delineate the downgradient carbon tetrachloride plume, and determine additional monitoring requirements at Barnes. The overall goal is to establish criteria for monitoring leading to potential site reclassification. The proposed work will be performed on behalf of the CCC/USDA by the Environmental Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne is a nonprofit, multidisciplinary research center operated by the University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The Farm Service Agency of the USDA has entered into an interagency agreement with DOE, under which Argonne provides technical assistance with environmental site characterization and remediation at former CCC/USDA grain storage facilities. Argonne issued a ''Master Work Plan'' (Argonne 2002) to provide general guidance for all investigations at former CCC/USDA facilities …

Funeral program for Brother Walter Charles Williams, born June 1, 1933. The funeral was held July 11, 2006 at the Westridge Park First Baptist Church, officiated by Rev. Ray Weathers. Funeral arrangements were made through the Lewis Funeral Home, and he was buried in the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

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We present dimensional and density changes in an aging plutonium alloy enriched with 7.3 at.% of {sup 238}Pu and reference alloys of various ages. After 45 equivalent years of aging, the enriched alloys at 35 C have swelled in volume by 0.14 to 0.16% and now exhibit a near linear volume increase, without void swelling. Based on X-ray diffraction measurements, the lattice expansion by self-irradiation appears to be the primary cause for dimensional changes during the initial 2-3 years of aging. Following the initial transient, the density change is primarily cause by a constant helium in-growth rate as a result of {alpha}-particle decay.