A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As financial institutions increasingly operate globally and diversify their businesses, entities with an interest in financial stability cite the need for supervisors to oversee the safety and soundness of these institutions on a consolidated basis. Under the Comptroller General's Authority, GAO reviewed the consolidated supervision programs at the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to (1) describe policies and approaches that U.S. consolidated supervisors use to oversee large and small holding companies; (2) review the management of the consolidated supervision programs, including use of program objectives and performance measures; and (3) evaluate how well consolidated supervisors are collaborating with other supervisors and each other in their activities. In conducting this study, GAO reviewed agency policy documents and supervisory reports and interviewed agency and financial institution officials."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Cleaning up the nation's three uranium enrichment plants will cost billions of dollars and could span decades. These plants--located near Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Paducah, Ky.; and Portsmouth, Ohio--are contaminated with radioactive and hazardous materials. In 1992, the Energy Policy Act created the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund (Fund) to pay for plant cleanup. Fund revenues come from an assessment on domestic utilities and federal government appropriations. In 2004, GAO reported on the Fund's sufficiency to cover authorized activities. GAO recommended that Congress consider reauthorizing the Fund for 3 more years, to 2010, and require the Department of Energy (DOE) to reassess the Fund's sufficiency before it expired to determine if further extensions were needed. Because decisions not yet made by DOE could affect the cost of cleanup and the Fund's sufficiency, GAO also recommended that DOE develop decontamination and decommissioning plans for the Paducah and Portsmouth plants that would identify the most probable time frames and costs for completing the cleanup work. This testimony is based on GAO's 2004 report. It summarizes the extent to which the Fund may be sufficient to cover authorized activities and the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has relied extensively on contractors to undertake major reconstruction projects and provide support to its deployed forces, but these efforts have not always achieved desired outcomes. Further, the Iraqi government must be able to reduce violence, sustain reconstruction progress, improve basic services, and make a positive difference in the daily lives of the Iraqi people. This statement discusses (1) factors affecting DOD's ability to promote successful acquisition outcomes on its contracts for reconstruction and for support to deployed forces in Iraq, (2) the deteriorating security situation and the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces, and (3) issues affecting the Iraqi government's ability to support and sustain future reconstruction progress. The testimony is based upon our work on Iraq reconstruction and stabilization efforts, DOD contracting activities, and DOD's use of support contractors spanning several years. This work was conducted in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Coast Guard's Deepwater program was designed to upgrade or replace its aging legacy aircraft and vessels with assets focusing on the Coast Guard's traditional at-sea roles. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Coast Guard took on additional security missions, resulting in revisions to the Deepwater plan. GAO's prior work raised concerns about Coast Guard's efforts to upgrade or acquire assets on schedule, and manage and effectively monitor the system integrator. This testimony provides GAO's preliminary observations on (1) events and issues surrounding the Coast Guard's bridging strategy to convert the legacy 110-foot patrol boats to 123-foot patrol boats; (2) the status of the Coast Guard's efforts to acquire new or upgraded Deepwater assets; and (3) the Coast Guard's ability to effectively manage the Deepwater program, hold contractors accountable, and control costs through competition. GAO's preliminary observations are based on audit work performed from August 2006 to February 2007."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In August 1997, Congress created the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) with the goal of significantly reducing the number of low-income uninsured children, especially those who lived in families with incomes exceeding Medicaid eligibility requirements. Unlike Medicaid, SCHIP is not an entitlement to services for beneficiaries but a capped allotment to states. Congress provided a fixed amount--approximately $40 billion from fiscal years 1998 through 2007--to states with approved SCHIP plans. Funds are allocated to states annually. Subject to certain exceptions, states have 3 years to use each year's allocation, after which unspent funds may be redistributed to states that have already spent all of that year's allocation. GAO's testimony addresses trends in SCHIP enrollment and the current composition of SCHIP programs across the states, states' spending experiences under SCHIP, and considerations GAO has identified for SCHIP reauthorization. GAO's testimony is based on its prior work, particularly testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on February 1, 2007 (see GAO-07-447T). GAO updated this work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) January 2007 approval of Tennessee's SCHIP program."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Despite substantial federal and state investment, states have had difficulty ensuring the safety, well-being, and permanency of children in foster care. Ensuring these outcomes becomes even more difficult in the event of disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when children and families may become displaced across state lines. This testimony discusses (1) the issues that states reported as most important to resolve now and in the future to improve outcomes for children under their supervision (2) initiatives states reported taking to address these issues and how recent law provides support for additional state efforts and (3) federal action taken to assist states' efforts in developing child welfare disaster plans. This testimony is primarily based on our October 2006 report on state child welfare challenges (GAO-07-75) and our July 2006 report on state child welfare disaster planning (GAO-06-944). The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Congress took action that addressed our July report recommendations. However, HHS disagreed with our October report recommendation to improve awareness of and access to federal social services by modifying the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance or other means. We continue …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In August 2006, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) substantially modified its passenger screening policies based on the alleged transatlantic bomb plot uncovered by British authorities. With the aim of closing security gaps revealed by the alleged plot, the revised policies severely restricted the amount of liquids, gels, and aerosols TSA allowed passengers to bring through the checkpoint. At the Committee's request, GAO tested whether security gaps exist in the passenger screening process. To perform this work, GAO attempted to (1) obtain the instructions and components needed to create devices that a terrorist might use to cause severe damage to an airplane and threaten the safety of passengers and (2) test whether GAO investigators could pass through airport security checkpoints undetected with all the components needed to create the devices. GAO conducted covert testing at a nonrepresentative selection of 19 airports across the country. After concluding its tests, GAO provided TSA with two timely briefings to help it take corrective action. In these briefings, GAO suggested that TSA consider several actions to improve its passenger screening program, including aspects of human capital, processes, and technology. GAO is currently performing …

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Presented is GAO's performance and accountability report for fiscal year 2007. In the spirit of the Government Performance and Results Act, this annual report informs the Congress and the American people about what we have achieved on their behalf. The financial information and the data measuring GAO's performance contained in this report are complete and reliable."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has seen increased competition from conventional mortgage and insurance providers. Additionally, because of the worsening performance of the mortgages it insures, FHA has estimated that its single-family insurance program would require a subsidy--that is, appropriations--in fiscal year 2008 in the absence of program changes. To help FHA adapt to the evolving market, proposed changes to the National Housing Act would allow greater flexibility in setting insurance premiums and reduce down-payment requirements. To assist Congress in considering the financial challenges facing FHA, this testimony provides information from recent reports GAO has issued and ongoing work concerning the proposed legislation that address different aspects of FHA's risk management. Specifically, this testimony looks at (1) FHA's management of risk related to loans with down-payment assistance, (2) instructive practices for managing risks of new products, (3) FHA's development and use of its mortgage scorecard, and (4) FHA's estimation of program costs."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spends nearly $1 billion yearly to support its information technology (IT) needs; yet it has encountered persistent challenges in managing IT projects. In October 2005, VA initiated a realignment to centralize its IT management program that it plans to complete by July 2008. GAO was requested to determine (1) whether the department's realignment plan includes critical factors for successful implementation and (2) how the centralized management approach is to ensure that the chief information officer (CIO) is accountable for the department's entire IT budget. To do so, GAO identified critical success factors, analyzed realignment and budget documents, and held discussions with VA officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Business Systems Modernization (BSM) program is a multibillion-dollar, high-risk, highly complex effort that involves the development and delivery of a number of modernized information systems that are intended to replace the agency's aging business and tax processing systems. As required by law, IRS submitted its fiscal year 2007 expenditure plan, in September 2006, to congressional appropriations committees, requesting $167.3 million from the BSM account. GAO's objectives in reviewing the plan were to (1) determine whether it satisfied the conditions specified in the law, (2) determine IRS's progress in implementing prior GAO recommendations, and (3) provide any other observations about the plan and IRS's BSM program. To address these objectives, GAO analyzed the plan, reviewed related documentation, and interviewed IRS officials."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over 25 years ago, Congress transformed federal freight rail transportation policy. At that time, after almost 100 years of economic regulation, the railroad industry was in serious economic decline, with rising costs, losses, and bankruptcies. In response, Congress passed the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980. Together, these pieces of legislation substantially deregulated the railroad industry. In particular, the 1980 act encouraged greater reliance on competition to set rates and gave railroads increased freedom to price their services according to market conditions, including the freedom to use differential pricing--that is, to recover a greater proportion of their costs from rates charged to those shippers with a greater dependency on rail transportation. At the same time, the 1980 act anticipated that some shippers--commonly referred to as "captive shippers"--might not have competitive alternatives and gave the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), and later the Surface Transportation Board (STB), the authority to establish a process through which shippers could obtain relief from unreasonably high rates. This process establishes a threshold for rate relief, allowing a rate to be challenged if it produces revenue …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In November 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) program to secure U.S. borders and reduce illegal immigration. One element of SBI is SBInet, the program responsible for developing a comprehensive border protection system. By legislative mandate, DHS developed a fiscal year 2007 expenditure plan for SBInet to address nine legislative conditions, including a review by GAO. DHS submitted the plan to the Appropriations Committees on December 4, 2006. To address the mandate, GAO assessed the plan against federal guidelines and industry standards and interviewed appropriate DHS officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report presents our opinion on the financial statements of the Congressional Award Foundation for the fiscal years ended September 30, 2006 and 2005. These financial statements are the responsibility of the Congressional Award Foundation. This report also presents (1) our opinion on the effectiveness of the Foundation's related internal control as of September 30, 2006, and (2) our conclusion on the Foundation's compliance in fiscal year 2006 with selected provisions of laws and regulations we tested. We conducted our audit pursuant to section 107 of the Congressional Award Act, as amended (2 U.S.C. 807), and in accordance with U.S. generally accepted government auditing standards."

This report describes the constituent parts of the intelligence budget, past practice in handling intelligence authorizations and appropriations, the arguments that have been advanced for and against making intelligence spending totals public, a legal analysis of these issues, and a review of the implications of post-Cold War developments on the question. It also describes past congressional interest in keeping intelligence spending totals secret.

Most streamline generation algorithms either provide a particular density of streamlines across the domain or explicitly detect features, such as critical points, and follow customized rules to emphasize those features. However, the former generally includes many redundant streamlines, and the latter requires Boolean decisions on which points are features (and may thus suffer from robustness problems for real-world data). We take a new approach to adaptive streamline placement for steady vector fields in 2D and 3D. We define a metric for local similarity among streamlines and use this metric to grow streamlines from a dense set of candidate seed points. The metric considers not only Euclidean distance, but also a simple statistical measure of shape and directional similarity. Without explicit feature detection, our method produces streamlines that naturally accentuate regions of geometric interest. In conjunction with this method, we also propose a quantitative error metric for evaluating a streamline representation based on how well it preserves the information from the original vector field. This error metric reconstructs a vector field from points on the streamline representation and computes a difference of the reconstruction from the original vector field.

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At the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we are investigating how to increase both the speed and resolution of synchrotron infrared imaging. Synchrotron infrared beamlines have diffraction-limited spot sizes and high signal to noise, however spectral images must be obtained one point at a time and the spatial resolution is limited by the effects of diffraction. One technique to assist in speeding up spectral image acquisition is described here and uses compressive imaging algorithms. Compressive imaging can potentially attain resolutions higher than allowed by diffraction and/or can acquire spectral images without having to measure every spatial point individually thus increasing the speed of such maps. Here we present and discuss initial tests of compressive imaging techniques performed with ALS Beamline 1.4.3?s Nic-Plan infrared microscope, Beamline 1.4.4 Continuum XL IR microscope, and also with a stand-alone Nicolet Nexus 470 FTIR spectrometer.

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Introduction - This procedure provides instructions forassembling the following CH packaging payload: Drum payload assembly Standard Waste Box (SWB) assembly Ten-Drum Overpack (TDOP)

Detailed spatial resolution tests were performed on beamline 1.4.4 at the Advanced Light Source synchrotron facility in Berkeley, CA. The high-brightness synchrotron source is coupled at this beamline to a Thermo-Electron Continumum XL infrared microscope. Two types of resolution tests in both the mid-IR (using a KBr beamsplitter and an MCT-A* detector) and in the near-IR (using a CaF2 beamsplitter and an InGaAS detector) were performed and compared to a simple diffraction-limited spot size model. At the shorter wavelengths in the near-IR the experimental results begin to deviate from only diffraction-limited. The entire data set is fit using a combined diffraction-limit and demagnified electron beam source size model. This description experimentally verifies how the physical electron beam size of the synchrotron source demagnified to the sample stage on the endstation begins to dominate the focussed spot size and therefore spatial resolution at higher energies. We discuss how different facilities, beamlines, and microscopes will affect the achievable spatial resolution.

Today's PCs incorporate multiple CPUs and GPUs and are easily arranged in clusters for high-performance, interactive graphics. We present an approach based on hierarchical, screen-space tiles to parallelizing rendering with level of detail. Adapt tiles, render tiles, and machine tiles are associated with CPUs, GPUs, and PCs, respectively, to efficiently parallelize the workload with good resource utilization. Adaptive tile sizes provide load balancing while our level of detail system allows total and independent management of the load on CPUs and GPUs. We demonstrate our approach on parallel configurations consisting of both single PCs and a cluster of PCs.

For nearly 150 years, the cross section of the heat collection tubes used at the focus of parabolic trough solar concentrators has been circular. This type of tube is obviously simple and easily fabricated, but it is not optimal. It is shown in this article that the optimal shape, assuming a perfect parabolic figure for the concentrating mirror, is instead oblong, and is approximately given by a pair of facing parabolic segments.

Genome sequences for most metazoans are incomplete due tothe presence of repeated DNA in the pericentromeric heterochromatin. Theheterochromatic regions of D. melanogaster contain 20 Mb of sequenceamenable to mapping, sequence assembly and finishing. Here we describethe generation of 15 Mb of finished or improved heterochromatic sequenceusing available clone resources and assembly and mapping methods. We alsoconstructed a BAC-based physical map that spans approximately 13 Mb ofthe pericentromeric heterochromatin, and a cytogenetic map that positionsapproximately 11 Mb of BAC contigs and sequence scaffolds in specificchromosomal locations. The integrated sequence assembly and maps greatlyimprove our understanding of the structure and composition of this poorlyunderstood fraction of a metazoan genome and provide a framework forfunctional analyses.