A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In early 2001, U.S. stock and option markets began quoting prices in decimal increments rather than fractions of a dollar. At the same time, the minimum price increment, or tick size, was reduced to a penny on the stock markets and to 10 cents and 5 cents on the option markets. Although many believe that decimal pricing has benefited small individual (retail) investors, concerns have been raised that the smaller tick sizes have made trading more challenging and costly for large institutional investors, including mutual funds and pension plans. In addition, there is concern that the financial livelihood of market intermediaries, such as the broker-dealers that trade on floor-based and electronic markets, has been negatively affected by the lower ticks, potentially altering the roles these firms play in the U.S. capital market. GAO assessed the effect of decimal pricing on retail and institutional investors and on market intermediaries."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, were held against the backdrop of growing concerns about international terrorism. Despite widespread fears of a potential terrorist attack on the Olympics, Greece hosted a safe and secure event with no terrorist incidents. To assist Greece in securing the 2004 Games, U.S. government agencies provided training and other support in the four years leading up to the Games. In addition, the U.S. government provided some security and other assistance to American athletes, spectators, and commercial investors, and expects to continue such support for future Olympics, including the upcoming 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. GAO was asked to (1) determine the U.S. approach and coordination efforts for providing security assistance to the 2004 Summer Olympics; (2) examine the roles of U.S. agencies in Athens Olympics security and their financial outlays; and (3) review lessons learned in providing security assistance in support of the Olympics and how they are being incorporated into preparations for future Olympics. The Departments of State, Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice concurred with the report or had no comments."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To help alleviate the psychological distress caused by the September 11, 2001, attacks the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded the state of New York two grants totaling $154.9 million to provide crisis counseling and public education. Because of questions about whether the program, called Project Liberty, had spent all the funds it received from the federal government, GAO was asked to determine (1) the extent to which the program expended the funds awarded from the federal government, (2) whether the federal government had an effective process in place to determine the amount of funds to provide the program, (3) whether the federal government had adequate financial oversight of the program, and (4) steps taken by the federal government and New York State to assess the program's effectiveness."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Pension funding rules are intended to ensure that plans have sufficient assets to pay promised benefits to plan participants. However, recent terminations of large underfunded plans, along with continued widespread underfunding, suggest weaknesses in these rules that may threaten retirement incomes of these plans' participants, as well as the future viability of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) single-employer insurance program. We have prepared this report under the Comptroller General's authority, and it is intended to assist the Congress in improving the financial stability of the defined benefit (DB) system and PBGC. We have addressed this report to each congressional committee of jurisdiction to help in their deliberations. This report examines: (1) the recent funding and contribution experience of the nation's largest private DB plans; (2) the funding and contribution experience of large underfunded plans, and the role of the additional funding charge (AFC); and (3) the implications of large plans' recent funding experiences for PBGC, in terms of risk to the agency's ability to insure benefits."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on April 14, 2005, to discuss the Department of Defense's (DOD) implementation of the National Security Personnel System (NSPS). This letter responds to questions for the record."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The outcome of ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations is vital to the U.S. economy, because trade with WTO members accounts for about one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product. The current round of trade negotiations--called the Doha Round--was supposed to end by January 2005 with agreement on the key issues of agriculture, industrial market access, services, and to strengthen the trading system's contribution to economic development. Failure to reach any agreement at the last WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003, put the talks behind schedule and threatened the outcome; however, talks resumed in 2004, and a new ministerial conference will convene in Hong Kong in December 2005. In light of these events, and with the impending renewal decision on U.S. Trade Promotion Authority, which streamlines the process by which Congress approves trade agreements, GAO was asked to assess (1) the overall status of the Doha Round negotiations, (2) progress on key negotiating issues, and (3) factors affecting progress toward concluding the negotiations."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Advocates for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) believe that the Social Security Administration's (SSA) process for determining eligibility for Disability Insurance (DI) may treat some claimants unfairly. As a result, claimants with IBD believe they are likely to be denied benefits at the initial decision and reconsideration levels, making it necessary for them to appeal to SSA's hearings level to have their claims allowed. This congressionally mandated study focuses on (1) how SSA evaluates claims involving IBD to establish disability under Title II of the Social Security Act and (2) what unique challenges claimants with IBD encounter when applying for DI benefits, and what actions, if any, SSA has taken to address these challenges."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In March 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule that will limit emissions of mercury--a toxic element that causes neurological problems--from coal-fired power plants, the nation's largest industrial source of mercury emissions. Under the rule, mercury emissions are to be reduced from a baseline of 48 tons per year to 38 tons in 2010 and to 15 tons in 2018. In the rule, EPA set the emissions target for 2010 based on the level of reductions achievable with technologies for controlling other pollutants--which also capture some mercury--because it believed emerging mercury controls had not been adequately demonstrated. EPA and the Department of Energy (DOE) coordinate research on mercury controls. In this context, GAO was asked to (1) describe the use, availability, and effectiveness of technologies to reduce mercury emissions at power plants; and (2) identify the factors that influence the cost of these technologies and report on available cost estimates. In completing our review, GAO did not independently test mercury controls. GAO provided the draft report to DOE and EPA for comment. DOE said that it generally agreed with our findings. EPA provided technical …

This letter is part of the Web-at-Risk project. The letter introduces participants to what the Web-at-Risk project is and what the study hopes to accomplish.

This document is part of the Web-at-Risk project. This is the focus group discussion guide used for the project. The purpose of the questions included in this guide are to create a comfortable atmosphere in which people feel valued for their participation, to establish the context for the discussion, and to provide the facilitator with information about the group.

This document is the end user interview questionnaire used for the Web-at-Risk project. It includes instructions for the interviewer, key concepts, and digital archive examples along with the questions to be asked.

This document is a consent form for focus groups and end users for the Web-at-Risk project. This consent form describes the purpose of the study, the description of the study, the procedures used, and the risks and benefits to users.

This document is part of the Web-at-Risk project. This is the focus group participant questionnaire and lists seven questions for participants to answer.

This document is part of the Web-at-Risk project. This is the needs assessment survey for the project. The purpose of this assessment is twofold: (1) to identify curator and end-user needs that impact the collection development process for web archives, and (2) To identify the requirements for the Curator User Interface (CUI) to the web crawler and associated tools in the areas of content crawling, crawl progress monitoring, crawl quality assessment, management and description of crawled content, searching and browsing of crawled content, and preservation of crawled content.

This document is a consent form for telephone interviews that are part of the Web-at-Risk project. This paper describes the purpose of the interview and what the Web-at-Risk project is, with a place for consent to be interviewed and a signature.

This document is an interview, questionnaire for the Web-at-Risk project. The purpose of this interview is to explore the issues information publishers or content producers have regarding web archives. The purpose of this discussion is to elicit the needs and thoughts of the users regarding web archives of materials created by a third party, such as a universal library.

This report is part of the Web-at-Risk project. The Web-at-Risk project is one of eight digital preservation projects funded in 2004 by the Library of Congress. Each of the projects represents a collaborative effort to preserve for future generations born-digital or digitized cultural heritage materials and collections. The Web-at-Risk project is a 3-year collaborative effort of the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas (UNT), and New York University. The project will develop a Web Archiving Service that enables curators to build collections of web-published materials. The content will be collected largely from US federal and state government agencies, but will also include political policy documents, campaign literature, and information surrounding political movements. The project work will be conducted along four paths of overlapping activities. The Web-at-Risk Project work paths include (1) Content identification, selection, and acquisition; (2) Content harvest and analysis; (3) Content ingest, retention, and transfer; and (4) Partnership building.

The goal of this cost share contract is to advance key technologies to reduce size, weight and cost while enhancing performance and reliability of Modular Inverter Product for Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Efforts address technology development to meet technical needs of DER market protection, isolation, reliability, and quality. Program activities build on SatCon Technology Corporation inverter experience (e.g., AIPM, Starsine, PowerGate) for Photovoltaic, Fuel Cell, Energy Storage applications. Efforts focused four technical areas, Capacitors, Cooling, Voltage Sensing and Control of Parallel Inverters. Capacitor efforts developed a hybrid capacitor approach for conditioning SatCon's AIPM unit supply voltages by incorporating several types and sizes to store energy and filter at high, medium and low frequencies while minimizing parasitics (ESR and ESL). Cooling efforts converted the liquid cooled AIPM module to an air-cooled unit using augmented fin, impingement flow cooling. Voltage sensing efforts successfully modified the existing AIPM sensor board to allow several, application dependent configurations and enabling voltage sensor galvanic isolation. Parallel inverter control efforts realized a reliable technique to control individual inverters, connected in a parallel configuration, without a communication link. Individual inverter currents, AC and DC, were balanced in the paralleled modules by introducing a delay to the individual PWM …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Quarterly publication of the Texas Comptroller's Office regarding sales and use tax in the state of Texas, including an analysis by county, analysis by industry, and related notes.

Monthly report written by the Texas Daily Newspaper Association's (TDNA's) office manager, Darla Thompson, to Ken Whalen providing a summary of revenues and account balances, programs, meetings, and other activities in the office during the previous month.

Flat flaps that enclose the trailer base on the sides and top are known to reduce truck drag and reduce fuel consumption. Such flapped-truck geometries have been studied in laboratory wind tunnels and in field tests. A recent review of wind tunnel data for a variety of truck geometries and flow Reynolds numbers show roughly similar values of peak drag reduction, but differ in the determination of the optimum flap angle. Optimum angles lie in the range 12 degrees-20 degrees, and may be sensitive to Reynolds number and truck geometry. The present field test is undertaken to provide additional estimates of the magnitude of the savings to be expected on a typical truck for five flap angles 10, 13, 16, 19, and 22 degrees. The flaps are constructed from a fiberglass-epoxy-matrix material and are one-quarter of the base width in length (about 61 cm, or 2 feet). They are attached along the rear door hinge lines on either side of the trailer, so that no gap appears at the joint between the flap and the side of the trailer The flap angle is adjusted by means of two aluminum supports. The present test is performed on the NASA Crows Landing …

This report details progress on inferring interwell communication from well rate fluctuations. Starting with the procedure of Albertoni and Lake (2003) as a foundation, the goal of the project is to develop further procedures to infer reservoir properties through weights derived from correlations between injection and production rates. A modified method, described in Jensen et al. (2005) and Yousef et al. (2005), and herein referred to as the ''capacitance model'', produces two quantities, {lambda} and {tau}, for each injector-producer well pair. We have focused on the following items: (1) Approaches to integrate {lambda} and {tau} to improve connectivity evaluations. Interpretations have been developed using Lorenz-style and log-log plots to assess heterogeneity. Testing shows the interpretations can identify whether interwell connectivity is controlled by flow through fractures, high-permeability layers, or due to partial completion of wells. Applications to the South Wasson and North Buck Draw Fields show promising results. (2) Optimization of waterflood injection rates using the capacitance model and a power law relationship for watercut to maximize economic return. Initial tests using simulated data and a range of oil prices show the approach is working. (3) Spectral analysis of injection and production data to estimate interwell connectivity and to assess …

The report herein is a summary of the work performed on three projects to demonstrate hydrocarbon drilling and production methods applicable to deep and ultra deepwater field developments in the Gulf of Mexico and other like applications around the world. This work advances technology that could lead to more economic development and exploitation of reserves in ultra-deep water or remote areas. The first project is Subsea Processing. Its scope includes a review of the ''state of the art'' in subsea components to enable primary production process functions such as first stage liquids and gas separation, flow boosting, chemical treatment, flow metering, etc. These components are then combined to allow for the elimination of costly surface production facilities at the well site. A number of studies were then performed on proposed field development projects to validate the economic potential of this technology. The second project involved the design and testing of a light weight production riser made of composite material. The proposed design was to meet an actual Gulf of Mexico deepwater development project. The various engineering and testing work is reviewed, including test results. The third project described in this report encompasses the development and testing of a close tolerance …