Presents a method to constrain average galaxy star formation rates, star formation histories, and the intracluster light as a function of halo mass.

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

This report provides links to selected authoritative resources related to cybersecurity issues and includes information on various cybersecurity topics.

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This report provides an overview of federal budget issues, focusing on recent fiscal policy changes. It also discusses the major policy proposals contained in the President's FY2014 budget and the House and Senate budget resolutions.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In a series of reviews, GAO found that the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) retirement modernization efforts were hindered by weaknesses in key management practices that are essential to successful information technology (IT) modernization projects. For example, in 2005, GAO made recommendations to address weaknesses in the following areas:"

Proceedings of the Senate of Texas for the 56th day of the regular session of the 83rd Legislature documenting legislation, reports, discussions, votes, and points-of-order.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Less than 0.1 percent of payments Medicare made in 2011 were for amounts of services that exceeded certain unpublished limits for excess billing and where the claims did not include information from the providers to indicate why the additional services were medically necessary. These limits are set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)--an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)--as a means to avoid potentially improper payments. To implement these limits, CMS established automated controls in its payment systems called Medically Unlikely Edits (MUE). These MUEs compare the number of certain services billed against limits for the amount of services likely to be provided under normal medical practice to a beneficiary by the same provider on the same day--for example, no more than one of the same operation on each eye. GAO analysis of 2011 claims data found approximately $14 million out of a total of $23.9 billion in Medicare payments for services that exceeded unpublished MUE limits and where the claims did not include information from the providers to indicate why the additional services were medically necessary. As GAO …

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Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has made some recent progress gaining important knowledge for its Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) by successfully conducting several important tests. In addition, the agency made substantial improvements to the clarity of its cost and schedule baselines since first reporting them in 2010, and declared the first major deployment of U.S. missile defense in Europe operational in December 2011. MDA also took steps to reduce acquisition risk by decreasing the overlap between technology and product development for two of its programs."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In brief:"

This report examines the legislative history of the various proposals that ultimately emerged as the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and both identifies and provides an analysis of contemporary factors that may bear on its present and future viability.

This report focuses on some of the federal regulatory programs overseeing storage of ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia by retailers. It discusses federal occupational safety, environmental, and security statutes and regulations applicable to each chemical. Select policy issues regarding these federal regulatory programs will be highlighted.

This report analyzes the crisis leading to Old GM's bankruptcy, the U.S. government's assistance to, and role in, the new company, the progress that General Motors Company has made since it was created, and the recoupment of the U.S. government's assistance for GM.

This report discusses current laws that prohibit discrimination, in education, and continues with an analysis of the specific provisions contained in the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), including provisions relating to coverage, prohibited acts, and enforcement and remedies under the proposed legislation.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This statement today highlights the key findings of a report GAO released yesterday on the TWIC program that addressed the extent to which the results from the TWIC reader pilot were sufficiently complete, accurate, and reliable for informing Congress and the TWIC card reader rule. For the report, among other things, GAO assessed the methods used to collect and analyze pilot data since the inception of the pilot in August 2008. GAO analyzed and compared the pilot data with the TWIC reader pilot report submitted to Congress to determine whether the findings in the report are based on sufficiently complete, accurate, and reliable data. Additionally, we interviewed officials at DHS, TSA, and USCG with responsibilities for overseeing the TWIC program, as well as pilot officials responsible for coordinating pilot efforts with TSA and the independent test agent (responsible for planning, evaluating, and reporting on all test events), about TWIC reader pilot testing approaches, results, and challenges."

This report examines U.S. foreign assistance activities in the People's Republic of China (PRC), particularly U.S. Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programming, foreign operations appropriations, policy history, and legislative background.

This report provides an estimate of the initial impact of the changing oil prices on the nation's merchandise trade balance.

In this program, we developed new theoretical and experimental insights into understanding the relationships among fundamental universality and scaling phenomena, the solid-state physical and mechanical properties of materials, and the volume plasmon energy as measured by electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS). Particular achievements in these areas are summarized as follows: (i) Using a previously proposed physical model based on the universal binding-energy relation (UBER), we established close phenomenological connections regarding the influence of the valence electrons in materials on the longitudinal plasma oscillations (plasmons) and various solid-state properties such as the optical constants (including absorption and dispersion), elastic constants, cohesive energy, etc. (ii) We found that carbon materials, e.g., diamond, graphite, diamond-like carbons, hydrogenated and amorphous carbon films, exhibit strong correlations in density vs. Ep (or maximum of the volume plasmon peak) and density vs. hardness, both from available experimental data and ab initio DFT calculations. This allowed us to derive a three-dimensional relationship between hardness and the plasmon energy, that can be used to determine experimentally both hardness and density of carbon materials based on measurements of the plasmon peak position. (iii) As major experimental accomplishments, we demonstrated the possibility of in-situ monitoring of changes in the physical properties of …

This report looks at the history of women in US military roles and combat since the 1990's. It also discusses critic's views of exclusionary policy as a civil rights issue.