A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As the world's population tripled during the past century, demand for the finite amount of freshwater resources increased six-fold, straining these resources for many countries, including the United States. The United Nations estimates that, worldwide, more than 1 billion people live without access to clean drinking water and over 2.4 billion people lack the basic sanitation needed for human health. Freshwater supply shortages--already evident in the drought-ridden western United States--pose serious challenges and can have economic, social, and environmental consequences. Multiple federal agencies share responsibility for managing freshwater resources, but consolidated information on the federal government's financial support of these activities is not readily accessible. GAO was asked to determine for fiscal years 2000 through 2004 how much financial support federal agencies provided for freshwater programs in the United States and abroad. For the purposes of this report, freshwater programs include desalination, drinking water supply, flood control, irrigation, navigation, wastewater treatment, water conservation, water dispute management, and watershed management."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Overfishing may have significant environmental and economic consequences. One tool used to maintain fisheries at sustainable levels is the individual fishing quota (IFQ), which sets individual catch limits for eligible vessel owners or operators. This is GAO's third study on IFQ programs. For this study, GAO determined (1) the costs of managing (i.e., administering, monitoring, and enforcing) IFQ programs and how these costs differ from pre-IFQ management costs; (2) what, if any, IFQ management costs are currently being recovered by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and (3) ways to share the costs of IFQ programs between government and industry."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Diesel engine emissions pose health risks, but one major source--heavy-duty diesel vehicles--is critical for our economy. To reduce risks, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set stringent emissions standards for diesel engines. In 1998, EPA found that some engine makers were violating standards, so they agreed to build engines that meet 2004 standards early, by October 2002. EPA has set even more stringent standards for 2007. GAO was asked to (1) assess the October 2002 deadline's effects on industry and emissions, and (2) obtain stakeholders' views on the readiness of technology for the 2007 standards and EPA's efforts to ensure this. GAO analyzed information from EPA, 10 large trucking companies, the engine makers subject to the early deadline, and other stakeholders."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program seeks to produce and field three aircraft variants for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and eight international partners. The estimated total investment for JSF now approaches $1 trillion to acquire and maintain 2,458 aircraft. Under congressional mandate, GAO has annually reviewed the JSF program since 2005. GAO's prior reviews have identified a number of issues and recommended actions for reducing risks and improving the program's outcomes. This report, the fourth under the mandate, focuses on the program's progress in meeting cost, schedule, and performance goals; plans and risks in development and test activities; the program's cost-estimating methods; and future challenges facing the program. To conduct its work, GAO identified changes in cost and schedule from prior years and their causes, evaluated development progress and plans, assessed cost-estimating methodologies against best practices, and analyzed future budget requirements."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Federal law enforcement actions against criminals who manufacture and distribute counterfeit and pirated goods are important to enforcing intellectual property (IP) rights and protecting Americans from unsafe or substandard products. GAO was asked to: (1) examine key federal agencies' roles, priorities, and resources devoted to IP-related enforcement; (2) evaluate agencies' IP-related enforcement statistics and achievements; and (3) examine the status of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. GAO reviewed relevant documents, interviewed officials in five key agencies, and analyzed agency IP enforcement data from fiscal years 2001 through 2006."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) ability to provide superior capabilities to the warfighter is dependent on its ability to incorporate rapidly evolving, cutting-edge microelectronic devices into its defense systems. While many commercial microelectronics advances apply to defense systems, DOD has some unique microelectronics needs not met by industry. Therefore, to maintain military superiority, DOD has the challenge of exploiting state-of-the-art commercial microelectronics technology and focusing its research investments in areas with the highest potential return for defense systems. Given the importance of advanced microelectronics to defense systems and the rapid changes in these technologies, Congress asked GAO to (1) identify and describe DOD and federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) facilities that receive funding from DOD for microelectronics production or research prototyping and (2) describe how DOD coordinates investments in microelectronics research."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare physician fee schedule adjusts physician fees for area differences in physicians' costs of operating a private medical practice. Three separate indices, known as geographic practice cost indices (GPCI), raise or lower Medicare fees in an area, depending on whether the area's physician practice costs are above or below the national average. The three GPCIs correspond to the three components of a Medicare fee: physician work, practice expense, and malpractice expense. Advocates for rural physicians have criticized the GPCIs, which lower fees in areas where costs are below the national average. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 directed GAO to evaluate Medicare's method of geographic adjustment. This report examines the extent to which Medicare's GPCIs are valid in their design and appropriate in the data and methods used in their construction, and affect physician incomes, location, recruitment, and retention."

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 multi-billion-dollar, high-risk, highly complex effort that involves the development and delivery of a number of modernized systems that are intended to replace the agency's aging business and tax processing systems. As required, IRS submitted its fiscal year 2009 expenditure plan in August 2008 to the congressional appropriations committees, requesting $222 million from the BSM account. GAO's objectives in reviewing the expenditure plan were to (1) determine whether it satisfies the applicable legislative conditions, (2) determine IRS's progress in implementing prior expenditure plan review recommendations, and (3) provide additional observations about the plan and the BSM program. To accomplish the objectives, GAO analyzed the plan, reviewed related documentation, and interviewed IRS officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report is a publicly available version of our report on the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated our original report as Limited Official Use because of the sensitive and specific nature of the information it contained. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DHS bureau responsible for protecting the nation's borders at and between the official ports of entry, has the dual goals of preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States and also facilitating the flow of legitimate trade and travel. Approximately 90 percent of the world's cargo moves by container. Addressing the threat posed by the movement of containerized cargo across U.S. borders has traditionally posed many challenges for CBP, in particular balancing the bureau's border protection functions and trade enforcement mission with its goal of facilitating the flow of cargo and persons into the United States. CBP has said that the large volume of imports and its limited resources make it impossible to physically inspect all oceangoing containers without disrupting the flow of commerce, and it is unrealistic to expect that all containers warrant …

None

The report presents results of a workshop held August 6-8, 2007, by DOE SC Basic Energy Sciences to determine the basic research needs for catalysis research.

Composition projections for Sludge Batch 5 (SB5) were developed to evaluate possible impacts of the Al-dissolution process on the availability of viable frit compositions for vitrification at the DWPF. The study included two projected SB5 compositions that bound potential outcomes (or degrees of effectiveness) of the Al-dissolution process, as well as a nominal SB5 composition projection based on the results of the recent Al-dissolution demonstration at SRNL. A Nominal Stage assessment was used to evaluate the two SB5 projections combined with an array of 19,305 frit compositions over a range of waste loading (WL) values against the DWPF process control models. The Nominal Stage results allowed for the down-selection of a small number of frits that provided reasonable projected operating windows (typically 25 to 40 wt %) and permitted some compositional flexibility (i.e., the ability to further tailor the frit to improve melt rate). Variation Stage assessments were then performed using the down-selected frits and the two SB5 composition projections with variation applied to each sludge component. The Variation Stage results showed that the operating windows were somewhat reduced in width, as expected when sludge variation is applied. Three of the down-selected frits continued to perform well for both SB5 …

The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Project (ISEMP) program monitors the status and trend of water quality elements that may affect restoration project effectiveness in the Entiat subbasin. As part of this effort, the PNW Research Station (PNW) measures, analyzes and interprets temporal trends in natural stream water pH, dissolved oxygen, specific conductance and temperature. The Entiat River is currently on the Clean Water Act 303(d) list for pH exceedence, and there is insufficient information to determine the spatial and temporal extent or potential causes of this exceedence. In the late spring 2007, PNW deployed data-logging, multiparameter probes at four locations in the Entiat subbasin to measure water quality parameters, focusing on pH. Data collection was seasonally interrupted by river ice in early December. Daily average pH did not exceed the water quality standard of 8.5 at any of the measurements sites. However, instantaneous values did exceed this standard near the mouth of the Entiat River during late summer-fall period. This suggested that in the lowest portion of the river peaks in pH may be occurring because of photosynthesis caused by high rates of periphyton productivity in response to increased sunlight, temperature, and possible nutrient enrichment. Conversely, dissolved oxygen reached …

None

None

This report discusses China’s Economic Conditions.

This report discusses the Global Information Grid (GIG), which is the enabling infrastructure for Network Centric Warfare (NCW), a concept that relies on communications technology to link together U.S. military personnel, ground vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels through integrated wide and local area networks to provide improved battle space awareness for joint military forces

This report examines the issues and their implications for future regulatory reforms, but begins with a brief background discussion of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) itself.

This report discusses the information related to recent developments and U.S interests in Georgia.

This report discusses the seller-funded down-payment assistance that qualify for FHA-insured home loans.

None

Renewable power technologies are inherently capital-intensive, often (but not always) with relatively high construction costs and low operating costs. For this reason, renewable power technologies are typically more sensitive to the availability and cost of financing than are natural gas power plants, for example. In the United States, the bulk of renewable project finance in recent years has been provided by 'tax equity investors' (typically large investment banks and insurance companies) who partner with project developers through highly specialized financing structures (Bolinger, 2009; Cory et al., 2008; Harper et al., 2007). These structures have been designed primarily to capitalize on federal support for renewable power technologies, which has historically come in the form of tax credits and accelerated depreciation deductions. The number of tax equity investors active in the renewable power market has declined precipitously, however, as a result of the financial crisis that began unfolding across the globe in the summer of 2008. The resulting shortage and increased cost of project financing has, in turn, slowed the development of new renewable power projects, leading to layoffs throughout the entire industry supply chain. In recognition of the fact that tax-based policy incentives are not particularly effective when tax burdens are …

The trans-polyproline (PII) oligomers (Figure 1) are unusually rigid peptide structures which have been extensively studied by our group for peptide mediated intramolecular electron transfer (ET) at long distances. We have previously studied ET across a series of metal ion donor (D) acceptor (A) oligoproline peptides with different distances, driving forces and reorganizational energies. The majority of these experiments involve generating the ET intermediate using pulse radiolysis methods, although more recently photochemical methods are also used. Results of these studies showed that ET across peptides can vary by more than twelve orders of magnitude. Using ruthenium bipyridine donors, ET reaction rate constants across several proline residues (n = 4 - 9) occurred in the millisecond (ms) to {micro}s timescale, thus limiting the proline peptide conformational motions to only minor changes (far smaller than the large changes that occur on the ms to sec timescale, such as trans to cis proline isomerization). The present report describes our large data base of experimental results for D-peptide-A complexes in terms of a model where the involvement of both superexchange and hopping (hole and electron) mechanisms account for the long range ET rate constants observed. Our data shows that the change from superexchange to …

This report summarizes work performed on this project from October 2004 through March 2005. In previous work, a surfactant modified zeolite (SMZ) was shown to be an effective system for removing BTEX contaminants from produced water. Additional work on this project demonstrated that a compost-based biofilter could biodegrade the BTEX contaminants found in the SMZ regeneration waste gas stream. However, it was also determined that the BTEX concentrations in the waste gas stream varied significantly during the regeneration period and the initial BTEX concentrations were too high for the biofilter to handle effectively. A series of experiments were conducted to determine the feasibility of using a passive adsorption column placed upstream of the biofilter to attenuate the peak gas-phase VOC concentrations delivered to the biofilter during the SMZ regeneration process. In preparation for the field test of the SMZ/VPB treatment system in New Mexico, a pilot-scale SMZ system was also designed and constructed during this reporting period. Finally, a cost and feasibility analysis was also completed. To investigate the merits of the passive buffering system during SMZ regeneration, two adsorbents, SMZ and granular activated carbon (GAC) were investigated in flow-through laboratory-scale columns to determine their capacity to handle steady and …