This report provides the results of a random survey of adult Texas residents aged 18 and older to measure the citizen participation rates, the distribution and frequency of play, and the demographic profiles of the past-year players and the non-players.

This report is about Amendments between the houses.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program to collect, maintain, and share data on selected foreign nationals entering and exiting the United States at air, sea and land ports of entry (POEs). These data, including biometric identifiers like digital fingerprints, are to be used to screen persons against watch lists, verify visitors' identities, and record arrival and departure. GAO was asked to review implementation at land POE facilities and in doing so GAO analyzed: (1) efforts to implement US-VISIT entry capability; (2) efforts to implement US-VISIT exit capability; and (3) DHS's efforts to define how US-VISIT fits with other emerging border security initiatives. GAO reviewed DHS and US-VISIT program documents, interviewed program officials, and visited 21 land POEs with varied traffic levels on both borders."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The latest data show continued increases in rates of childhood obesity. For example, obesity rates for children 6 to 11 years old are estimated to have increased from 15.1 to 18.8 percent between 1999 and 2004. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 20 percent of children and youth in the United States will be obese by 2010. There are numerous negative health outcomes and financial consequences related to childhood obesity. Researchers have found that childhood obesity is associated with a number of disorders including hypertension, insulin resistance, sleep apnea, menstrual abnormalities, and orthopedic problems. According to one estimate, insured children treated for obesity are approximately three times more expensive for the health system than the average insured child. Some researchers have suggested that childhood obesity is largely the result of a decline in regular physical activity. In our October 2005 report, we surveyed experts on the key strategies to include in the design or implementation of a program to prevent or reduce childhood obesity. The program strategy identified by experts as most important was "increasing physical activity." Congress asked us to provide information on the …

This report discusses on how an economic policy can indirectly have a positive influence on the economy's terms of trade. It also points out economic growth and the gains from trade.

On December 5, 2006, the reference case projections from 'Annual Energy Outlook 2007' (AEO 2007) were posted on the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) web site. We at LBNL have, in the past, compared the EIA's reference case long-term natural gas price forecasts from the AEO series to contemporaneous natural gas prices that can be locked in through the forward market, with the goal of better understanding fuel price risk and the role that renewables play in mitigating such risk (see, for example, http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/EMS/reports/53587.pdf or http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/54751.pdf). As such, we were curious to see how the latest AEO gas price forecast compares to the NYMEX natural gas futures strip. This brief memo presents our findings. As a refresher, our past work in this area has found that over the past six years, forward natural gas contracts (with prices that can be locked in--e.g., gas futures, swaps, and physical supply) have traded at a premium relative to contemporaneous long-term reference case gas price forecasts from the EIA. As such, we have concluded that, over the past six years at least, levelized cost comparisons of fixed-price renewable generation with variable-price gas-fired generation that have been based on AEO natural gas price forecasts (rather than …

This report provides an overview of the congressional budget process with an accompanying flow chart, that are intended to describe in brief each of the parts of the budget process that involve the Congress, clarify the role played by each, and explain how they operate together.

The well-known hierarchy between the Planck scale (>> 1019GeV) and the TeV scale, namely a ratio of {approx} 10{sup 16} between the two, is coincidentally repeated in a inverted order between the TeV scale and the dark energy scale at {approx} 10{sup -3} eV implied by the observations. We argue that this is not a numerical coincidence. The same brane-world setups to address the first hierarchy problem may also in principle address this second hierarchy issue. Specifically, we consider supersymmetry in the bulk and its breaking on the brane and resort to the Casimir energy induced by the bulk graviton-gravitino mass-shift on the brane as the dark energy. For the ADD model we found that our notion is sensible only if the number of extra dimension n = 2. We extend our study to the Randall-Sundrum model. Invoking the chirality-flip on the boundaries for SUSY-breaking, the zero-mode gravitino contribution to the Casimir energy does give rise to the double hierarchy. Unfortunately since the higher Kaluza-Klein modes acquire relative mass-shifts at the TeV level, the zero-mode contribution to Casimir energy is overshadowed.

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Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses highlights from GAO's report entitled "End-Stage Renal Disease: Bundling Medicare's Payment for Drugs with Payment for All ESRD Services Would Promote Efficiency and Clinical Flexibility." The report examines Medicare payments for certain drugs provided to patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), a condition of permanent kidney failure."

This report discusses major policy approaches, provides a conceptual framework for categorizing energy policy proposals, and briefly describes energy issues that remain current in the debate after the enactment of EPACT.

This report summarizes the European Union's new initiative, casts the initiative from a historical perspective, and assesses the implications of this shift for the global trading system and for U.S. interests.

Shake table tests were performed on a full-scale 7-story slice of a reinforced concrete building at UC San Diego between October 2005 and January 2006. The tests were performed on the NEES Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST) at the Engelkirk Structural Engineering Center of UCSD. The structure was subjected to four uniaxial earthquake ground motions of increasing amplitude. The accelerations measured at the base of the structure and the measured roof displacements have been provided by UCSD. Details of the building construction have also been provided by UCSD. The measured response of this structure was used to assess the capability of the homogenized rebar model in DYNA3D/ParaDyn [1,2] to simulate the seismic response of reinforced concrete structures. The homogenized rebar model is a composite version of the Karagozian & Case concrete model [3]. Work has been done to validate this material model for use in blast simulations, but seismic simulations require longer durations. The UCSD experiment provides full-scale data that can be used to validate seismic modeling capabilities.

This report presents the final hazard categorization (FHC) for the remediation of the 118-D-1, 118-D-2, and 118-D-3 Burial Grounds located within the 100-D/DR Area of the Hanford Site and the 118-H-1, 118-H-2, and 118-H-3 Burial Grounds located within the 100-H Area of the Hanford Site.

Fluidized Bed Steam Reforming (FBSR) is being considered as a potential technology for the immobilization of a wide variety of high sodium low activity wastes (LAW) such as those existing at the Hanford site, at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and the Savannah River Site (SRS). The addition of clay, charcoal, and a catalyst as co-reactants with the waste denitrates the aqueous wastes and forms a granular mineral waste form that can subsequently be made into a monolith for disposal if necessary. The waste form produced is a multiphase mineral assemblage of Na-Al-Si (NAS) feldspathoid minerals with cage and ring structures and iron bearing spinel minerals. The mineralization occurs at moderate temperatures between 650-750 C in the presence of superheated steam. The cage and ring structured feldspathoid minerals atomically bond radionuclides like Tc-99 and Cs-137 and anions such as SO{sub 4}, I, F, and Cl. The spinel minerals stabilize Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous species such as Cr and Ni. Granular mineral waste forms were made from (1) a basic Hanford Envelope A low activity waste (LAW) simulant and (2) an acidic INL simulant commonly referred to as sodium bearing waste (SBW) in pilot scale facilities at the …

This report provides a guide to individuals seated on the Senate Dais.

We are proceeding with the development of a high-energy (10 MeV) neutron imaging system for use as an inspection tool in nuclear stockpile stewardship applications. Our goal is to develop and deploy an imaging system capable of detecting cubic-mm-scale voids, cracks or other significant structural defects in heavily-shielded low-Z materials within nuclear device components. The final production-line system will be relatively compact (suitable for use in existing or proposed facilities within the DOE complex) and capable of acquiring both radiographic and tomographic (CT) images. In this report, we will review our programmatic accomplishments to date, highlighting recent (FY06) progress on engineering and technology development issues related to the proposed imaging system. We will also discuss our preliminary project plan for FY07, including engineering initiatives, proposed radiation damage experiments (neutrons and x rays) and potential options for conducting classified neutron imaging experiments at LLNL.

This report provides information about the House Rules Committee Hearings on Special Rules where the committee has two purposes on mind: to make it in order for the house to remember a measure that was reported by another committee and to establish the terms under while the white house will debate, amend and vote for the measure.

This report presents a brief description f the five methods used to bring proposed legislation to the House floor for consideration.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed homes and displaced millions of individuals. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) continues to respond to this disaster, GAO's previous work identified significant control weaknesses--specifically in FEMA's Individuals and Households Program (IHP) and in the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) purchase card program--resulting in significant fraud, waste, and abuse. Today's testimony will address whether FEMA provided improper and potentially fraudulent (1) rental assistance payments to registrants at the same time it was providing free housing via trailers and apartments; (2) duplicate assistance payments to individuals who claimed damages to the same property for both hurricanes Katrina and Rita; and (3) IHP payments to non-U.S. residents who did not qualify for IHP. This testimony will also discuss (1) the importance of fraud identification and prevention, and (2) the results of our investigation into property FEMA bought using DHS purchase cards. To address these objectives, GAO data mined and analyzed FEMA records and interviewed city officials, university officials, and foreign students. GAO also traveled to Louisiana and Texas to inspect selected property items and to investigate improper housing payments to individuals living in FEMA-provided …

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We study production of Kaluza-Klein gluons (KKG) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the framework of a warped extra dimension with the Standard Model (SM) fields propagating in the bulk. We show that the detection of KK gluon is challenging since its production is suppressed by small couplings to the proton's constituents. Moreover, the KK gluon decaysmostly to top pairs due to an enhanced coupling and hence is broad. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that for MKKG<~;; 4 TeV, 100 fb-1 of data at the LHC can provide discovery of the KK gluon. We utilize a sizeable left-right polarization asymmetry from the KK gluon resonance to maximize the signal significance, and we explore the novel feature of extremely highly energetic"top-jets." We briefly discuss how the detection of electroweak gauge KK states (Z/W) faces a similar challenge since their leptonic decays ("golden" modes) are suppressed. Our analysis suggests that other frameworks, for example little Higgs, which rely on UV completion via strong dynamics might face similar challenges, namely (1) Suppressed production rates for the new particles (such as Z'), due to their"lightfermion-phobic" nature, and (2) Difficulties in detection since the new particles are broad and decay predominantly to third generation quarks and …

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The authors measure the absolute branching fraction for D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -} {pi}{sup +} using partial reconstruction of {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +} X {ell}{sup -} {bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} decays. Only the charged lepton and the soft pion from the decay D*{sup +} {yields} D{sup 0} {pi}{sup +} are used. Based on a data sample of 230 million B{bar B} pairs collected at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory at SLAC, they obtain {Beta}(D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -} {pi}{sup +}) = (4.025 {+-} 0.038 {+-} 0.098)%, where the first error is statistical and the second error is systematic.