A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Women represent an increasingly larger share of the total workforce in the United States--constituting nearly half of the total workforce. In addition, an increasing proportion of women in the workforce are more educated. However, research by GAO and others has shown that women's average pay has been and remains lower than that of men. Questions have been raised about the extent to which less-advantaged women--that is, those who are low wage or less educated--experience lower wages than less-advantaged men. GAO was asked to examine the differences in representation, key characteristics, and pay among women and men (1) with less education and (2) with low wages. GAO defined less-educated workers as those having a high school degree or less and low-wage workers as those earning an hourly wage rate in the bottom quintile--or 20 percent--of wages across the workforce. GAO analyzed data from the Department of Labor's Current Population Survey (CPS); reviewed other work on similar topics; and interviewed agency officials, representatives of women's groups, and other researchers."

This report discusses details of policy changes regarding travel to Cuba, which have been a key and often contentious component in U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba's communist government since the early 1960s. In January 2011, the Obama Administration announced policy changes further easing restrictions on travel and remittances. In the first session of the 112th Congress, there were several attempts aimed at rolling back the Obama Administration's actions easing restrictions on travel and remittances. Several initiatives were also introduced that would further ease or lift such restrictions altogether.

This report discusses the current status of Central Asian states and U.S. policy, which has been aimed at facilitating their cooperation with U.S. and NATO stabilization efforts in Afghanistan and their efforts to combat terrorism, proliferation, and trafficking in arms, drugs, and persons. Congress will be considering an increase in support for the programs in Central Asia.

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The experimental efforts of the Neutrino Physics Group at MIT center primarily around the exploration of neutrino mass and its significance within the context of nuclear physics, particle physics, and cosmology. The group has played a prominent role in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, a neutrino experiment dedicated to measure neutrino oscillations from 8B neutrinos created in the sun. The group is now focusing its efforts in the measurement of the neutrino mass directly via the use of tritium beta decay. The MIT group has primary responsibilities in the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino mass experiment, expected to begin data taking by 2013. Specifically, the MIT group is responsible for the design and development of the global Monte Carlo framework to be used by the KATRIN collaboration, as well as responsibilities directly associated with the construction of the focal plane detector. In addition, the MIT group is sponsoring a new research endeavor for neutrino mass measurements, known as Project 8, to push beyond the limitations of current neutrino mass experiments.

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This project focused on conceptual exploration of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability and sensitivity using a Delay Differential Equation developed in the project. We have (i) established the existence and continuous dependence of solutions of the model (ii) explored multiple models solutions, and the distribution of solutions extrema, and (iii) established and explored the phase locking phenomenon and the existence of multiple solutions for the same values of model parameters. In addition, we have applied to our model the concept of pullback attractor, which greatly facilitated predictive understanding of the nonlinear model's behavior.

This report presents, in analytical question and answer form, the issues surrounding the financial conditions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are stockholder-owned government-sponsored enterprises.

This report discusses background and issues for congressional oversight of ARRA Broadband Awards.

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