This report discusses the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group, which is a regional development bank (RDB) "dedicated to combating poverty and improving the lives of people of the continent." It comprises three lending facilities: the market rate facility, the AfDB; a concessional lending facility, the African Development Fund; and a trust fund established by Nigeria to lend to low-income African countries. The Bank has 53 African members, as well as 24 non-regional members, including the United States.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is modernizing the paper-intensive processes and antiquated information systems it uses to support the retirement of civilian federal employees through the Retirement Systems Modernization (RSM) program. In January 2008, we reported on the agency's management of this program, in which we noted concerns and made recommendations for improvement in four key areas: (1) system testing, (2) system defect resolution, (3) program cost estimation, and (4) program earned value management. The explanatory statement of the House Appropriations Committee regarding the fiscal year 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act directed OPM to submit to Cpngressional Committees and to GAO not later than February 20, 2008, a report of its actions on the four areas of concern that we identified. Further, the explanatory statement directed that GAO provide to Congressional Committees and to OPM our comments on the agency's report."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is subject to most U.S. laws but, under the terms of its 1976 covenant with the United States, administers its own immigration system. It has applied this flexibility to admit substantial numbers of foreign workers, in addition to admitting tourists and foreign investors. The covenant grants Congress the right to apply federal immigration law to the CNMI. On December 11, 2007, the House of Representatives passed legislation applying U.S. immigration law to the CNMI; as of report issuance, this legislation was pending in the Senate. If passed, it will amend the covenant and will apply federal immigration law to the CNMI 1 year after the legislation's enactment, subject to a transition period that begins 1 year after enactment but may be delayed 180 days. GAO was asked to review key provisions of the pending legislation, current U.S. immigration law, and current CNMI immigration law, particularly regarding (1) foreign workers, (2) tourists, and (3) foreign investors. The Departments of Homeland Security and the Interior generally agreed with the findings in this report, and the Department of Labor provided no …

This report is the final report for the General Electric Distributed Wireless Multi-Sensor Technologies project. The report covers the research activities and benefits surrounding wireless technology used for industrial sensing applications. The main goal of this project was to develop wireless sensor technology that would be commercialized and adopted by industry for a various set of applications. Many of these applications will yield significant energy savings. One application where there was significant information to estimate a potential energy savings was focused on equipment condition monitoring and in particular electric motor monitoring. The results of the testing of the technology developed are described in this report along with the commercialization activities and various new applications and benefits realized.

California has been using DOE-2 as the main building energy analysis tool in the development of building energy efficiency standards (Title 24) and the code compliance calculations. However, DOE-2.1E is a mature program that is no longer supported by LBNL on contract to the USDOE, or by any other public or private entity. With no more significant updates in the modeling capabilities of DOE-2.1E during recent years, DOE-2.1E lacks the ability to model, with the necessary accuracy, a number of building technologies that have the potential to reduce significantly the energy consumption of buildings in California. DOE-2's legacy software code makes it difficult and time consuming to add new or enhance existing modeling features in DOE-2. Therefore the USDOE proposed to develop a new tool, EnergyPlus, which is intended to replace DOE-2 as the next generation building simulation tool. EnergyPlus inherited most of the useful features from DOE-2 and BLAST, and more significantly added new modeling capabilities far beyond DOE-2, BLAST, and other simulations tools currently available. With California's net zero energy goals for new residential buildings in 2020 and for new commercial buildings in 2030, California needs to evaluate and promote currently available best practice and emerging technologies to …

This report provides information about the Federal Reserve Policy Responses on Financial Turmoil. The federal reserve has been central in the response to the current financial turmoil.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "College students face challenges obtaining health insurance--they may not have access to insurance through an employer, and as they get older, they may lose dependent coverage obtained through a parent's plan. Federal law ensures continued access to health insurance for some, but not all, such students. Without health insurance, college students may be unable to pay for their health care, and the cost of this care may be passed on to federal and state payers, such as Medicaid. College students may have access to student insurance plans offered by their colleges. GAO was asked to report on uninsured college students, student insurance plans, and efforts to increase the number of insured students. GAO reviewed (1) college students' insurance status, (2) uninsured college students' characteristics, (3) the extent to which colleges offered student insurance plans and the characteristics of available plans, and (4) efforts to increase the number of insured students. GAO analyzed data from a national survey on college students' insurance status and uninsured college students' characteristics. GAO collected data from 340 colleges on the availability of student insurance plans and the characteristics of available plans, …

The effect of hydrogen on the fracture toughness properties of Types 304L, 316L and 21-6-9 forged stainless steels was investigated. Fracture toughness samples were fabricated from forward-extruded forgings. Samples were uniformly saturated with hydrogen after exposure to hydrogen gas at 34 MPa or 69 and 623 K prior to testing. The fracture toughness properties were characterized by measuring the J-R behavior at ambient temperature in air. The results show that the hydrogen-charged steels have fracture toughness values that were about 50-60% of the values measured for the unexposed steels. The reduction in fracture toughness was accompanied by a change in fracture appearance. Both uncharged and hydrogen-charged samples failed by microvoid nucleation and coalescence, but the fracture surfaces of the hydrogen-charged steels had smaller microvoids. Type 316L stainless steel had the highest fracture toughness properties and the greatest resistance to hydrogen degradation.

In aerobic aquifers typical of many Department of Energy (DOE) legacy waste sites, uranium is present in the oxidized U(VI) form which is more soluble and thus more mobile. Field experiments at the Old Rifle UMTRA site have demonstrated that biostimulation by electron donor addition (acetate) promotes biological U(VI) reduction (2). However, U(VI) reduction is reversible and oxidative dissolution of precipitated U(IV) after the cessation of electron donor addition remains a critical issue for the application of biostimulation as a treatment technology. Despite the potential for oxidative dissolution, field experiments at the Old Rifle site have shown that rapid reoxidation of bio-reduced uranium does not occur and U(VI) concentrations can remain at approximately 20% of background levels for more than one year. The extent of post-amendment U(VI) removal and the maintenance of bioreduced uranium may result from many factors including U(VI) sorption to iron-containing mineral phases, generation of H2S or FeS0.9, or the preferential sorption of U(VI) by microbial cells or biopolymers, but the processes controlling the reduction and in situ reoxidation rates are not known. To investigate the role of microbial community composition in the maintenance of bioreduced uranium, in-well sediment incubators (ISIs) were developed allowing field deployment of …

The examination of which protective measures are the most appropriate to be implemented in order to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from attacks on critical infrastructures and key resources typically involves a comparison of the consequences that could occur when the protective measure is implemented to those that could occur when it is not. This report describes a framework for evaluation that provides some additional capabilities for comparing optional protective measures. It illustrates some potentially important time-dependent factors, such as the implementation rate, that affect the relative pros and cons associated with widespread implementation of protective measures. It presents example results from the use of protective measures, such as detectors and pretrained responders, for an illustrative biological incident. Results show that the choice of an alternative measure can depend on whether or not policy and financial support can be maintained for extended periods of time. Choice of a time horizon greatly influences the comparison of alternatives.

Montana’s state program began its sixth year in 2006. The project’s research cluster focused on physical, chemical, and biological materials that exhibit unique electron-transfer properties. Our investigators have filed several patents and have also have established five spin-off businesses (3 MSU, 2 UM) and a research center (MT Tech). In addition, this project involved faculty and students at three campuses (MSU, UM, MT Tech) and has a number of under-represented students, including 10 women and 5 Native Americans. In 2006, there was an added emphasis on exporting seminars and speakers via the Internet from UM to Chief Dull Knife Community College, as well as work with the MT Department of Commerce to better educate our faculty regarding establishing small businesses, licensing and patent issues, and SBIR program opportunities.

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This report provides background information on Medicaid financing and a discussion of current issues. Last year, Congress placed temporary moratoriums on the implementation of four controversial regulations that anticipate large reductions in federal spending for Medicaid.

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This Congressional Research Service Report for Congress contains part A of Medicare (HI or Hospital Insurance) and insolvency projections pertaining to this portion of the Medicare trust fund.

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This Quality Assurance Project Plan provides the quality assurance requirements and processes that will be followed by staff working on the 100-NR-2 Apatite Project. The U.S. Department of Energy, Fluor Hanford, Inc., Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Washington Department of Ecology agreed that the long-term strategy for groundwater remediation at 100-N would include apatite sequestration as the primary treatment, followed by a secondary treatment. The scope of this project covers the technical support needed before, during, and after treatment of the targeted subsurface environment using a new high-concentration formulation.

A 1-year plant-wide assessment at the ATK Promontory manufacturing facility utilizing innovative assessment technologies to identify energy savings opportunities in: steam, water, compressed air, HVAC, utility, production, and building systems.

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Relatively large values of objective-lens defocus must normally be used to produce detectable levels of image contrast for unstained biological specimens, which are generally weak phase objects. As a result, a subsequent restoration operation must be used to correct for oscillations in the contrast transfer function (CTF) at higher resolution. Currently used methods of CTF-correction assume the ideal case in which Friedel mates in the scattered wave have contributed pairs of Fourier components that overlap with one another in the image plane. This"ideal" situation may be only poorly satisfied, or not satisfied at all, as the particle size gets smaller, the defocus value gets larger, and the resolution gets higher. We have therefore investigated whether currently used methods of CTF correction are also effective in restoring the single-sideband image information that becomes displaced (delocalized) by half (or more) the diameter of a particle of finite size. Computer simulations are used to show that restoration either by"phase flipping" or by multiplying by the CTF recovers only about half of the delocalized information. The other half of the delocalized information goes into a doubly defocused"twin" image of the type produced during optical reconstruction of an in-line hologram. Restoration with a Wiener filter …

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