A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since the early 1990s, growth in the use of the Internet has revolutionized the way that our nation communicates and conducts business. While the Internet was originally developed by the Department of Defense, the vast majority of its infrastructure is currently owned and operated by the private sector. Federal policy recognizes the need to prepare for debilitating Internet disruptions and tasks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with developing an integrated public/private plan for Internet recovery. GAO was asked to (1) identify examples of major disruptions to the Internet, (2) identify the primary laws and regulations governing recovery of the Internet in the event of a major disruption, (3) evaluate DHS plans for facilitating recovery from Internet disruptions, and (4) assess challenges to such efforts."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "American workers are increasingly relying on 401(k) plans, which allow pre-tax contributions to individual accounts, for their retirement income. As workers accrue earnings on their investments, they also pay a number of fees that may significantly decrease their retirement savings. Because of concerns about the effects of fees on participants' retirement savings, GAO examined (1) the types of fees associated with 401(k) plans and who pays these fees, (2) how information on fees is disclosed to plan participants, and (3) how the Department of Labor (Labor) oversees plan fees and certain business arrangements. GAO reviewed industry surveys on fees and interviewed Labor officials and pension professionals about disclosure and reporting practices."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The United Nations (UN) estimated in 2005 that renovating its headquarters will cost up to $1.75 billion. As the UN's host country and largest contributor, the United States has a substantial interest in the project's success. In this report, we (1) determine whether the development of the Capital Master Plan (CMP) has been consistent with leading industry practices, (2) examine factors that led to changes in the cost estimate and determine whether the 2005 estimate was updated using industry practices, (3) review the status of financing of the renovation, (4) identify decisions needed for the renovation to proceed, and (5) review UN oversight and State monitoring efforts. To address these objectives, we reviewed UN design and planning documents, including the latest cost estimate, to compare them with industry standards. To assess oversight, we reviewed Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) and UN Board of Auditors reports and met with UN officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently began a 6-year, $425 million program called Sentinel to replace and expand on both its failed Virtual Case File (VCF) project and its antiquated, paper-based, legacy system for supporting mission-critical intelligence analysis and investigative case management activities. Because of the FBI's experience with VCF and the importance of Sentinel, GAO was requested to address a number of program management issues associated with acquiring Sentinel via a prime development contractor. This report focuses on one of these issues: whether the FBI is adequately providing for the program's human capital needs. The findings are based on GAO's review of relevant program documentation, interviews with program officials, and human capital management guidance."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As Hurricane Katrina so forcefully demonstrated, the nation's critical infrastructures and key resources have been vulnerable to a wide variety of threats. Because about 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, it is vital that the public and private sectors work together to protect these assets. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for coordinating a national protection strategy including formation of government and private sector councils as a collaborating tool. The councils, among other things, are to identify their most critical assets, assess the risks they face, and identify protective measures, in sector-specific plans that comply with DHS's National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). GAO examined (1) the extent to which these councils have been established; (2) the key facilitating factors and challenges affecting the formation of the councils; and (3) the overall status of the plans and key facilitating factors and challenges encountered in developing them. GAO obtained information by reviewing key documents and conducting interviews with federal and private sector representatives. GAO is not making any recommendations at this time since prior recommendations are still being implemented. …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for overseeing direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. If FDA identifies a violation of laws or regulations in a DTC advertising material, the agency may issue a regulatory letter asking the drug company to take specific actions. GAO was asked to discuss (1) trends in drug company spending on DTC advertising and other activities; (2) what is known about the relationship between DTC advertising and drug spending and utilization; (3) the DTC advertising materials FDA reviews; (4) the number of regulatory letters that cited DTC materials and FDA's process for issuing those letters; and (5) the effectiveness of these letters at limiting the dissemination of violative DTC advertising. GAO reviewed research literature, analyzed FDA's processes, and examined FDA documentation."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Using performance measures, the Coast Guard explains how well its programs are performing. To do so, it reports one "primary" measure for each program (such as percent of mariners rescued) and maintains data on other, "secondary" measures (such as percent of property saved). Concerns have been raised about whether measures for non-homeland security programs accurately reflect performance, that is, they did not rise or fall as resources were added or reduced. For the six non-homeland security programs, GAO used established criteria to assess the soundness of the primary measures--that is, whether measures cover key activities; are clearly stated; and are objective, measurable, and quantifiable--and the reliability of data used to calculate them. GAO also used these criteria to assess the soundness of 23 selected secondary measures. Finally, through interviews and report review, GAO assessed challenges in using measures to link resources to results."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In April 2005 GAO reported on the EEO policy framework in the federal workplace and the roles of EEOC and OPM. This report, in response to a congressional request, provides information on (1) federal agency EEO and human capital managers' views of the EEO framework requirements; (2) their views on the usefulness of guidance and feedback from EEOC and OPM concerning these requirements; and (3) how and to what extent EEOC and OPM coordinate in developing policy, providing guidance, and exercising oversight."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) strengthened and extended quality requirements for labs that perform tests to diagnose or treat disease. About 36,000 labs that perform certain complex tests must be surveyed biennially by either a state or one of six private accrediting organizations. CMS oversees implementation of CLIA requirements and the activities of survey organizations. GAO was asked to examine (1) the quality of lab testing; (2) the effectiveness of surveys, complaint investigations, and enforcement actions in detecting and addressing lab problems; and (3) the adequacy of CMS's CLIA oversight."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The President's Management Agenda (PMA) focuses attention on ensuring resources entrusted to the federal government are well managed and used wisely. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) developed standards to measure success and a PMA scorecard that gives a "green", "yellow" or "red score" by agency. Green indicates success, yellow indicates mixed results, and red indicates unsatisfactory results. For the Improved Financial Performance Initiative, GAO was asked to (1) study and evaluate OMB's process and criteria for awarding a green score for current status and progress and (2) provide examples of how agency managers use financial data to better manage on a day-to-day basis. To fulfill these objectives, GAO interviewed OMB and agency officials and examined OMB and agency documentation relevant to OMB's scoring process."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Prior to the 1998 privatization of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC), the Department of Energy (DOE) transferred about 45,000 metric tons of natural uranium to USEC to, among other things, be enriched to fulfill USEC's nuclear fuel contracts. About 9,550 metric tons were subsequently discovered to be contaminated with technetium, a radioactive metal, at levels exceeding the specification for nuclear fuel. Although DOE has not admitted liability, DOE and USEC have entered into agreements under which USEC is decontaminating the uranium. DOE has compensated USEC for its decontamination costs in several ways, including using proceeds from sales of government-owned clean uranium. GAO was asked to examine (1) USEC's progress in decontaminating uranium and (2) DOE's oversight of USEC's decontamination activities. A forthcoming GAO legal opinion will address DOE's legal authority to transfer clean uranium to USEC for sale and use the proceeds to compensate USEC for its decontamination services."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) faced the challenge of providing assistance quickly while having sufficient controls to provide assurance that benefits were paid only to those eligible under the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). On February 13, 2006, GAO testified on the initial results of its ongoing work related to whether (1) controls are in place and operating effectively to limit assistance to qualified applicants, (2) indications exist of fraud and abuse in the application for and receipt of assistance payments, and (3) controls are in place and operating effectively over debit cards to prevent duplicate payments and improper usage."

This dissertation develops the subject of beam evolution in storage rings with nearly uncoupled symplectic linear dynamics. Linear coupling and dissipative/diffusive processes are treated perturbatively. The beam distribution is assumed Gaussian and a function of the invariants. The development requires two pieces: the global invariants and the local stochastic processes which change the emittances, or averages of the invariants. A map based perturbation theory is described, providing explicit expressions for the invariants near each linear resonance, where small perturbations can have a large effect. Emittance evolution is determined by the damping and diffusion coefficients. The discussion is divided into the cases of uniform and non-uniform stochasticity, synchrotron radiation an example of the former and intrabeam scattering the latter. For the uniform case, the beam dynamics is captured by a global diffusion coefficient and damping decrement for each eigen-invariant. Explicit expressions for these quantities near coupling resonances are given. In many cases, they are simply related to the uncoupled values. Near a sum resonance, it is found that one of the damping decrements becomes negative, indicating an anti-damping instability. The formalism is applied to a number of examples, including synchrobetatron coupling caused by a crab cavity, a case of current interest …

Finite-difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) simulations of the reshocked two-dimensional single-mode Richtmyer-Meshkov instability using third-, fifth- and ninth-order spatial flux reconstruction and uniform spatial grid resolutions corresponding to 128, 256 and 512 points per initial perturbation wavelength are presented. The dependence of the density, vorticity, simulated density Schlieren and baroclinic production fields, mixing layer width, circulation deposition, mixing profiles, chemical products and mixing fractions, energy spectra, statistics, probability distribution functions, effective turbulent kinetic energy and enstrophy production/dissipation rates, numerical Reynolds numbers, and effective numerical viscosity on the order and resolution is comprehensively investigated to long evolution times. The results are interpreted using the computed implicit numerical diffusion arising from the truncation errors in the characteristic projection-based WENO method. It is quantitatively shown that simulations with higher order and higher resolution have lower numerical dissipation. The sensitivity of the quantities considered to the order and resolution is further amplified following reshock, when the energy deposition on the evolving interface by the second shock-interface interaction induces the formation of small-scale structures. Simulations using lower orders of reconstruction and on coarser grids preserve large-scale structures and flow symmetry to late times, while simulations using higher orders of reconstruction and on finer grids exhibit …

We present a linear scaling 3 dimensional fragment (LS3DF)method that uses a novel decomposition and patching scheme to do abinitio density functional theory (DFT) calculations for large systems.This method cancels out the artificial boundary effects that arise fromthe spatial decomposition. As a result, the LS3DF results are essentiallythe same as the original full-system DFT results with errors smaller thanthe errors introduced by other sources of numerical approximations. Inaddition, the resulting computational times are thousands of timessmaller than conventional DFT methods, making calculations with 100,000atom systems possible. The LS3DF method is applicable to insulator andsemiconductor systems, which covers a current gap in the DOE's materialsscience code portfolio for large-scale ab initio simulations.

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We present a simple spreadsheet-based tool for estimating window-related energy consumption in the United States. Using available data on the properties of the installed US window stock, we estimate that windows are responsible for 2.15 quadrillion Btu (Quads) of heating energy consumption and 1.48 Quads of cooling energy consumption annually. We develop estimates of average U-factor and SHGC for current window sales. We estimate that a complete replacement of the installed window stock with these products would result in energy savings of approximately 1.2 quads. We demonstrate that future window technologies offer energy savings potentials of up to 3.9 Quads.

This report mainly focuses on Regional Developments and Implications for U.S. Interests in Central Asia after the collapse of soviet union in 1991.

This report consists of the budget for fiscal year 2007.

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Fish and marine mammals are important resources in open ocean and nearshore coastal areas. Many laws and regulations guide the management of these resources by federal agencies. This report contains information on commercial and sport fisheries, aquaculture, and marine mammals and issues related to the 109th Congress.

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This report

This report is on The Basel Accords: The Implementation of II and the Modification of I.