Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In May 2010, we issued our opinion on the fiscal years 2009 and 2008 financial statements of the Congressional Award Foundation (the Foundation). We also reported on our evaluation of the Foundation's compliance with provisions of selected laws and regulations for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2009, and our consideration of the Foundation's internal control over financial reporting. The Foundation was formed in 1979 under the Congressional Award Act and is a private, nonprofit, tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It was established to promote initiative, achievement, and excellence among young people in the areas of public service, personal development, physical fitness, and expedition. During fiscal year 2009, there were approximately 27,700 participants registered in the Foundation's award program. Although the organization does not receive government funding, we are responsible for conducting audits of the Foundation's financial statements annually in accordance with section 107 of the Congressional Award Act, as amended (2 U.S.C. 807). During our audit of the Foundation's fiscal years 2009 and 2008 financial statements, we identified a material weakness in the Foundation's internal control over financial reporting. The purpose of …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Weather Service's (NWS) weather products are a vital component of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control system. In addition to providing aviation weather products developed at its own facilities, NWS also provides on-site staff at each of FAA's en route centers--the facilities that control high-altitude flight outside the airport tower and terminal areas. NWS's on-site staff is called a center weather service unit. For several years, NWS and FAA have been exploring options for improving the aviation weather services provided at en route centers. GAO agreed to (1) determine the status of the agencies' efforts to restructure aviation weather services, (2) assess the agencies' progress in establishing performance baselines in order to measure the effect of any changes, and (3) evaluate plans to address key challenges. To do so, GAO evaluated agency progress and plans and compared agency efforts with leading practices."

A technique has been developed for measuring the properties of discharge-based plasma channels by monitoring the centroid location of a laser beam exiting the channel as a function of input alignment offset between the laser and the channel. The centroid position of low-intensity (<10{sup 14}Wcm{sup -2}) laser pulses focused at the input of a hydrogen-filled capillary discharge waveguide was scanned and the exit positions recorded to determine the channel shape and depth with an accuracy of a few %. In addition, accurate alignment of the laser beam through the plasma channel can be provided by minimizing laser centroid motion at the channel exit as the channel depth is scanned either by scanning the plasma density or the discharge timing. The improvement in alignment accuracy provided by this technique will be crucial for minimizing electron beam pointing errors in laser plasma accelerators.

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Energy saving has become a crucial concern in datacenters as several reports predict that the anticipated energy costs over a three year period will exceed hardware acquisition. In particular, saving energy for storage is of major importance as storage devices (and cooling them off) may contribute over 25 percent of the total energy consumed in a datacenter. Recent work introduced the concept of energy proportionality and argued that it is a more relevant metric than just energy saving as it takes into account the tradeoff between energy consumption and performance. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called FREP (Fractional Replication for Energy Proportionality), for energy management in large datacenters. FREP includes areplication strategy and basic functions to enable flexible energy management. Specifically, our method provides performance guarantees by adaptively controlling the power states of a group of disks based on observed and predicted workloads. Our experiments, using a set of real and synthetic traces, show that FREP dramatically reduces energy requirements with a minimal response time penalty.

The paper presents an overview of the authors contribution to the BANC-I Workshop on the flow past tandem cylinders (Category 2). It includes an outline of the simulation approaches, numerics, and grid used, the major results of the simulations, their comparison with available experimental data, and some preliminary conclusions. The effect of varying the spanwise period in the simulations is strong for some quantities, and not others.

Presentation highlighting practical considerations for photovoltaic technologies and strategies for future reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.

This report examines Kyrgyzstan's uneven political and economic reform efforts. It discusses U.S. policy and assistance for democratization and other programs. Basic facts and biographical information are provided. Related products include CRS Report RL33458, Central Asia: Regional Developments and Implications for U.S. Interests, by Jim Nichol.

This report focuses on the distribution of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) broadband funding with respect to project category, program, technology deployed, state-by-state distribution, and other factors.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides $7.2 billion primarily for broadband grant programs to be administered by two separate agencies: the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the Department of Commerce and the Rural Utilities Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This report is over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the implementation of the Broadband programs, and issues related to the implementation.

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This report contains the immigration policy and issues of the temporary protected status.

Semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te crystals offer a material that may compete well with the commonly used (Cd,Zn)Te crystals for manufacturing large-area X- and gamma-ray detectors. The Bridgman growth method yields good quality, high-resistivity (10{sup 9} - 10{sup 10} {Omega} {center_dot} cm) crystals of (Cd,Mn)Te:V. Doping the as-grown crystals with the compensating agent vanadium ({approx} 10{sup 16} cm{sup -3}) ensures their high resistivity; thereafter, annealing them in cadmium vapors reduces the number of cadmium vacancies. Applying the crystals as detectors necessitates having satisfactory electrical contacts. Accordingly, we explored various techniques of ensuring good electrical contacts to these semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te crystals, assessing metallic layers, monocrystalline semiconductor layers, and amorphous (or nanocrystalline) semiconductor layers. We found that ZnTe heavily doped ({approx} 10{sup 18} cm{sup -3}) with Sb, and CdTe heavily doped ({approx} 10{sup 17} cm{sup -3}) with In, proved satisfactory semiconductor contact layers. They subsequently enabled us to establish good contacts (with only narrow tunneling barriers) to the Au layer that usually constitutes the most external contact layer. We outline our technology of applying electrical contacts to semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te, and describe some important properties.

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii.

This report provides an overview of Mexico's economy post-financial crisis, effects of the global economic downturn, structural and other challenges in the Mexican economy, and implications for the United States.

This report focuses on the United States' relationship with Iran and how the Obama Administration is handling prior administration's economic sanctions against Iran. The Obama Administration's policy approach toward Iran has contrasted with the Bush Administration's by attempting to couple the imposition of sanctions to an active and direct U.S. effort to negotiate with Iran on the nuclear issue

This report analyzes the current crises that the U.S. newspaper industry is facing in light of the recent economic downturn and the increasing number of readers who turn to the Internet for their news instead of to traditional media. Congress has begun debating whether the financial problems in the newspaper industry pose a public policy issue that warrants federal action.