Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Under the Defense Environmental Restoration Program (DERP), the Department of Defense (DOD) is responsible for cleaning up about 5,400 sites on military bases that have been closed under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, as well as 21,500 sites on active bases and over 4,700 formerly used defense sites (FUDS), properties that DOD owned or controlled and transferred to other parties prior to October 1986. The cleanup of contaminants, such as hazardous chemicals or unexploded ordnance, at BRAC bases has been an impediment to the timely transfer of these properties to parties who can put them to new uses. The goals of DERP include (1) reducing risk to human health and the environment (2) preparing BRAC properties to be environmentally suitable for transfer (3) having final remedies in place and completing response actions and (4) fulfilling other established milestones to demonstrate progress toward meeting program performance goals. This testimony is based on prior work and discusses information on (1) how DOD allocates cleanup funding at all sites with defense waste and (2) BRAC cleanup status. It also summarizes other key issues that GAO has identified in the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has numerous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems--including manned and unmanned airborne, space-borne, maritime, and terrestrial systems--that play critical roles in support of current military operations. The demand for these capabilities has increased dramatically. Today's testimony addresses (1) the challenges the military services and defense agencies face processing, exploiting, and disseminating the information collected by ISR systems and (2) the extent to which the military services and defense agencies have developed the capabilities required to share ISR information. This testimony is based on GAO's January 2010 report on DOD's ISR data processing capabilities. GAO reviewed and analyzed documentation, guidance, and strategies of the military services and defense agencies in regard to processing, exploiting, and disseminating ISR data as well as information-sharing capabilities. GAO also visited numerous commands, military units, and locations in Iraq and the United States."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The media industry plays a vital role in informing and entertaining the public. Media ownership and the availability of diverse programming have been a long-standing concern of Congress. Despite numerous programming choices in television and radio available to the public, some studies have reported that independently produced programming--that is, programming not affiliated with broadcast networks or cable operators--has decreased through the years. This requested report discusses (1) the extent to which the sources of television programming have changed over the last decade, (2) the factors industry stakeholders identified as affecting the availability of independent television programming, and (3) the factors industry stakeholders identified as influencing programming decisions in radio. To address these issues, GAO analyzed data from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and industry on sources of broadcast television programming in prime time (weeknights generally from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.) and companies owning cable networks, as well as radio format data to determine programming variety. GAO also reviewed legal, agency, and industry documents and interviewed industry stakeholders, public interest groups, and others. GAO provided FCC with a draft of this report for comment. In response, …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses highlights of GAO's report about the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) efforts to institutionalize the protection of children's health. EPA's mission is to protect human health and the environment. As a result of mounting evidence about the special vulnerabilities of the developing fetus and child, the federal government and EPA took several bold steps to make children's environmental health a priority in the late 1990s. In 1996, EPA issued the National Agenda to Protect Children's Health from Environmental Threats (National Agenda) and expanded the agency's activities to specifically address risks for children, documenting EPA's plans to achieve seven goals, such as (1) ensuring that all standards set by EPA are protective of any heightened risks faced by children; (2) developing new, comprehensive policies to address cumulative and simultaneous exposures faced by children; and (3) expanding community right-to-know to allow families to make informed choices concerning environmental exposures to their children. EPA's Advisory Committee has raised concerns about whether the agency has continued to maintain its earlier focus on protecting children or capitalized on opportunities to tackle some significant and emerging environmental health challenges. For example, the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the U.S. Government Accountability Office's (GAO) budget request for fiscal year 2011. This has put us in a better position to assist the Congress in confronting the many difficult challenges facing the nation. In fiscal year 2009, GAO supported Congressional decision making and oversight on a range of critical issues, including the government's efforts to help stabilize financial markets and address the most severe recession since World War II. In addition to providing oversight for the 2008 Economic Stabilization Act and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), we continued to provide the Congress updates on programs that are at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement or are in need of broad reform, and delivered advice and analyses on a broad array of pressing domestic and international issues that demand urgent attention and continuing oversight. These include modernizing the regulatory structure for financial institutions and markets to meet 21st century demands; controlling escalating health care costs and providing more effective oversight of medical products; restructuring of the U.S. Postal Service to ensure its financial stability; and improving the Department of …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) allows Part D plans to utilize different tiers with different levels of cost sharing as a way of managing drug utilization and spending. One such tier, the specialty tier, is designed for high-cost drugs whose prices exceed a certain threshold set by CMS. Beneficiaries who use these drugs typically face higher out-of-pocket costs than beneficiaries who use only lower-cost drugs. This testimony is based on GAO's January 2010 report entitled Medicare Part D: Spending, Beneficiary Cost Sharing, and Cost-Containment Efforts for High-Cost Drugs Eligible for a Specialty Tier (GAO-10-242) in which GAO examined, among other things, (1) Part D spending on these drugs in 2007, the most recent year for which claims data were available; (2) how different cost-sharing structures could be expected to affect beneficiary out-of-pocket costs; (3) how negotiated drug prices could be expected to affect beneficiary out-of-pocket costs; and (4) information Part D plan sponsors reported on their ability to negotiate price concessions. For the second and third of these objectives, this testimony focuses on out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries responsible for paying the full cost-sharing amounts required …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The attempted bombing of Northwest flight 253 highlighted the importance of detecting improvised explosive devices on passengers. This testimony focuses on (1) the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) efforts to procure and deploy advanced imaging technology (AIT), and related challenges; and (2) TSA's efforts to strengthen screening procedures and technology in other areas of aviation security, and related challenges. This testimony is based on related products GAO issued from March 2009 through January 2010, selected updates conducted from December 2009 through March 2010 on the AIT procurement, and ongoing work on air cargo security. For the ongoing work and updates, GAO obtained information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and TSA and interviewed senior TSA officials regarding air cargo security and the procurement, deployment, operational testing, and assessment of costs and benefits of the AIT."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) relies greatly on contractors to support its current operations and is likely to continue to depend on contractors in support of future operations. As of December 2009, DOD estimated that over 207,000 contractor personnel were supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. DOD expects to increase the number of contractors as more troops deploy to Afghanistan. The use of contractors in contingencies has challenged DOD in overseeing and managing contractors. This testimony addresses (1) the challenges DOD faces when trying to provide management and oversight of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and (2) the extent to which DOD has made progress in institutionalizing a department- wide approach to managing and overseeing operational contract support. Today's testimony is based on GAO's ongoing audit work in Iraq and Afghanistan, looking at planning for operational contract support and at DOD's efforts to manage and oversee contractors, as well as on recently published related GAO reports and testimonies."

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The FHFA regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks (the government-sponsored enterprises - GSEs). On June 18, 2009, James B. Lockhart III, then Director of FHFA, released a letter expressing concern about the negative impact of energy loan tax assessment programs (ELTAPs) - also known as Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs - on both the housing finance system and homeowner program participants. Subsequently, a number of PACE proponents responded to the concerns laid out in the FHFA letter. In early Fall 2009, word circulated that FHFA was planning to follow its June letter with guidance to other agencies, possibly including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, discouraging them from buying loans on properties subject to PACE-type assessment liens. This triggered a second round of stakeholder letters, several of which were addressed to President Obama. On October 18, 2009, the White House, in what some believe was an attempt to obviate the need for FHFA guidance, released a Policy Framework for PACE Financing Programs that outlined best practices guidance for homeowner and lender protection. As of February 2010, FHFA and the GSEs have agreed to monitor PACE programs and work with stakeholders and the Administration to …

This volume archives the presentations at the RIKEN BNL Research Center workshop 'Progress in High-PT Physics at RHIC', held at BNL in March 2010. Much has been learned from high-p{sub T} physics after 10 years of RHIC operations for heavy-ion collisions, polarized proton collisions and d+Au collisions. The workshop focused on recent progress in these areas by both theory and experiment. The first morning saw review talks on the theory of RHIC high-p{sub T} physics by G. Sterman and J. Soffer, and on the experimental results by M. Tannenbaum. One of the most exciting recent results from the RHIC spin program is the first observation of W bosons and their associated single-spin asymmetry. The new preliminary data were reported on the first day of our workshop, along with a theoretical perspective. There also were detailed discussions on the global analysis of polarized parton distributions, including the knowledge on gluon polarization and the impact of the W-data. The main topic of the second workshop day were single-transverse spin asymmetries and their analysis in terms of transverse-momentum dependent parton distributions. There is currently much interest in a future Drell-Yan program at RHIC, thanks to the exciting physics opportunities this would offer. This …

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Future climate change has emerged as a national and a global security threat. To carry out the needed adaptation and mitigation steps, a quantification of the expected level of climate change is needed, both at the global and the regional scale; in the end, the impact of climate change is felt at the local/regional level. An important part of such climate change assessment is uncertainty quantification. Decision and policy makers are not only interested in 'best guesses' of expected climate change, but rather probabilistic quantification (e.g., Rougier, 2007). For example, consider the following question: What is the probability that the average summer temperature will increase by at least 4 C in region R if global CO{sub 2} emission increases by P% from current levels by time T? It is a simple question, but one that remains very difficult to answer. It is answering these kind of questions that is the focus of this effort. The uncertainty associated with future climate change can be attributed to three major factors: (1) Uncertainty about future emission of green house gasses (GHG). (2) Given a future GHG emission scenario, what is its impact on the global climate? (3) Given a particular evolution of the …

The motivation for this work is to gain experience in the methodology of verification and validation (V&V) of astrophysical radiation hydrodynamics codes. In the first period of this work, we focused on building the infrastructure to test a single astrophysical application code, Castro, developed in collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). We delivered several hydrodynamic test problems, in the form of coded initial conditions and documentation for verification, routines to perform data analysis, and a generalized regression test suite to allow for continued automated testing. Astrophysical simulation codes aim to model phenomena that elude direct experimentation. Our only direct information about these systems comes from what we observe, and may be transient. Simulation can help further our understanding by allowing virtual experimentation of these systems. However, to have confidence in our simulations requires us to have confidence in the tools we use. Verification and Validation is a process by which we work to build confidence that a simulation code is accurately representing reality. V&V is a multistep process, and is never really complete. Once a single test problem is working as desired (i.e. that problem is verified), one wants to ensure that subsequent code …

This paper presents results of experiments on some data sets using bagging on the MLEM2 rule induction algorithm. Three different methods of ensemble voting, based on support (a non-democratic voting in which ensembles vote with their strengths), strength only (an ensemble with the largest strength decides to which concept a case belongs) and democratic voting (each ensemble has at most one vote) were used. Our conclusions are that though in most cases democratic voting was the best, it is not significantly better than voting based on support. The strength voting was the worst voting method.

In 2007, we began to explore alternative x-ray sources for application to refraction-enhanced (phase contrast) x-ray radiography of cryogenic NIF ignition capsules containing frozen deuterium-tritium (D-T) ice layers. These radiographs are currently obtained using Kevex microfocus tubes as backlights, and for these sources the x-ray source size is approximately 5 {micro}m. As part of this exploration, we obtained refraction-enhanced radiographs of empty plastic capsules using the Janus laser facility at LLNL, demonstrating that even large ({approx} 100 {micro}m) sources can be utilized in refraction-enhanced radiography provided the source/sample distance is sufficiently large, and provided the final x-ray detector has sufficient spatial resolution. Essentially, in the current geometry, we rely on a small source to provide spatial resolution and on the source/sample distance to provide refraction contrast, but an equally useful alternative geometry is to use a large source and rely on fine detector spatial resolution to provide spatial resolution and on the sample/detector distance to provide refraction contrast.

Carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) sensors are often deployed in commercial buildings to obtain CO{sub 2} data that are used, in a process called demand-controlled ventilation, to automatically modulate rates of outdoor air ventilation. The objective is to keep ventilation rates at or above design specifications and code requirements and also to save energy by avoiding excessive ventilation rates. Demand controlled ventilation is most often used in spaces with highly variable and sometime dense occupancy. Reasonably accurate CO{sub 2} measurements are needed for successful demand controlled ventilation; however, prior research has suggested substantial measurement errors. Accordingly, this study evaluated: (a) the accuracy of 208 CO{sub 2} single-location sensors located in 34 commercial buildings, (b) the accuracy of four multi-location CO{sub 2} measurement systems that utilize tubing, valves, and pumps to measure at multiple locations with single CO{sub 2} sensors, and (c) the spatial variability of CO{sub 2} concentrations within meeting rooms. The field studies of the accuracy of single-location CO{sub 2} sensors included multi-concentration calibration checks of 90 sensors in which sensor accuracy was checked at multiple CO{sub 2} concentrations using primary standard calibration gases. From these evaluations, average errors were small, -26 ppm and -9 ppm at 760 and 1010 …

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This report addresses debris resulting from a "major disaster" or "emergency" declared by the President. First, it discusses the types of debris commonly generated during and after a disaster and selected factors that can make "debris removal"2 such a costly, complex operation. Second, it discusses the roles of federal, state, and local agencies after a disaster has been declared--with regard to both funding debris removal and the actual physical process of removal.

This report discusses the state of the El Salvadoran government and recently elected President Mauricio Funes. This report also discusses the relationship between El Salvador and the United States, notably U.S. efforts to restore democracy and initiate economic reform in El Salvador. This report also briefly addresses the effects of the current financial crisis on El Salvador's economy, poverty levels, and crime rates.

This report provides information regarding the role of U.S. and other foreign companies in facilitating Internet censorship by repressive regimes overseas. The report is divided into several sections: Examination of repressive policies in China and Iraq, Relevant U.S. laws, U.S. policies to promote Internet freedom, Private sector initiatives, and Congressional action.

This report discusses the European Union's response to the global financial crisis. As the crisis has ebbed, coordination among European capitals and between Europe and the United States has become more elusive and growing differences threaten the adoption of a coordinated long-term solution to regulatory reform and coordination of financial policies.