Letter from McGregor Gray to Anthony Principi in support of Naval Air Station Brunswick.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Prior to 2001, military retirees who turned age 65 and became eligible for Medicare lost most of their Department of Defense (DOD) health benefits. The DOD-Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) demonstration was one of several demonstrations established to examine alternatives for addressing retirees' lack of Medicare supplemental coverage. The demonstration was mandated by the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 (NDAA 1999), which also required GAO to evaluate the demonstration. GAO assessed enrollment in the demonstration and the premiums set by demonstration plans. To do this, GAO, in collaboration with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and DOD, conducted a survey of enrollees and eligible nonenrollees. GAO also examined DOD enrollment data, Medicare and OPM claims data, and OPM premiums data."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since the Department of Energy (DOE) was established in 1977, one of its missions has been to promote the nation's energy security through research, development, and demonstration of advanced technologies for meeting future energy demands and diversifying the nation's energy portfolio. As part of this mission, DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy conducts research, development, and demonstration activities in partnership with industry to advance a diverse supply of clean power technologies. The fiscal year 2008 budget for these activities was $1.7 billion. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, the first comprehensive energy legislation in more than a decade, includes provisions to address the nation's long-term energy challenges. Key goals of the act include diversifying the nation's energy supply by promoting alternative and renewable sources of energy and by investing in science and technology. Provisions in the act promote the use of solar and wind power, establish a loan-guarantee program to encourage private investment in new energy technologies, and authorize demonstration projects for producing ethanol from cellulosic sources such as forest residues, agricultural residues, and scrap wood. To provide DOE with more flexibility to enter into agreements …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In its role as the nation's tax collector, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has a demanding responsibility in annually collecting over $2 trillion in taxes, processing hundreds of millions of tax and information returns, and enforcing the nation's tax laws. Since its first audit of IRS's financial statements in fiscal year 1992, GAO has identified a number of weaknesses in IRS's financial management operations. In related reports, GAO has recommended corrective action to address those weaknesses. Each year, as part of the annual audit of IRS's financial statements, GAO not only makes recommendations to address any new weaknesses identified but also follows up on the status of weaknesses GAO identified in previous years' audits. The purpose of this report is to (1) assist IRS management in tracking the status of audit recommendations and actions needed to fully address them and (2) demonstrate how the recommendations fit into IRS's overall management and internal control structure."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program features multiple new systems linked by a first-of-a-kind information network. The Army contracted with a lead systems integrator (LSI) for FCS that could serve in a more expansive role than a typical prime contractor would. In response to a congressional mandate, this report addresses (1) why the Army decided to employ an LSI for the FCS program; (2) the nature of the LSI's working relationship with the Army; and (3) how FCS contract fees, provisions, and incentives work. In conducting its work, GAO reviewed extensive program documentation and held discussions with key officials at DOD and throughout the FCS program."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Memphis Housing Authority's (MHA) use of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds, focusing on: (1) MHA's receipt of funds from HUD's Comprehensive Grant, HOPE VI, and Public Housing Drug Elimination programs from fiscal year (FY) 1994 through fiscal 1998; and (2) a comparison of MHA's draw down of funds from these programs with that of three other public housing authorities that are similar in the number of housing units they manage and the amount of Comprehensive Grant, HOPE VI, and Public Housing Drug Elimination funds that they receive from HUD."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The electricity industry is currently undergoing a restructuring, evolving from an industry characterized by monopoly utilities that provide consumers with electricity at regulated rates to a competitive industry in which prices are largely determined by supply and demand. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been engaged in this restructuring effort and is currently working, among other things, to foster competitive wholesale energy markets across the nation while protecting consumers against abuses of market power. At the retail level, about half the states have pursued restructuring their retail electricity markets in order to allow consumers such as residential, commercial, and industrial customers to choose their electricity suppliers. Proponents of electricity restructuring believe that it will ultimately provide consumers with lower electricity prices, more services, and technological innovation. However, opponents cite extremely high prices and market manipulation in California as evidence that, without more stringent oversight, restructuring may leave consumers vulnerable to higher prices, market manipulation, and less reliable service. In light of ongoing electricity restructuring efforts, Congress asked us to describe FERC's role in protecting electricity consumers."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "With the current governmentwide telecommunications contracts set to expire, the General Services Administration's (GSA) Federal Technology Service (FTS) and its customer agencies must prepare to transition their services to a new contract vehicle. The previous federal effort to transition telecommunications services proved to be a large, complex task. GAO was asked to determine to what extent (1) selected agencies used sound practices in preparing for the transition and (2) GSA's FTS has prepared for the transition by addressing previous lessons learned and providing agencies with guidance on sound transition planning."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Financial Management Improvement Act (FFMIA) of 1996 ensures that agency financial management systems routinely provide reliable and timely financial information on the investment of resources, reduced costs and programs oversight. Although many agencies are receiving unqualified opinions on their financial statements, auditor determinations of FFMIA compliance are lagging. To achieve the financial management improvements envisioned by the Chief Financial Officers Act, FFMIA, and more recently, the President's Management Agenda, agencies need to modernize their financial systems to generate reliable, useful, and timely financial information throughout the year and at year-end."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the American Battle Monuments Commission's (ABMC) financial statements audits, focusing on: (1) the legislative initiatives that were designed to improve financial management across the federal government; (2) the history of ABMC's financial accountability, focusing specifically on the World War II memorial fund; and (3) the results of GAO's most recent financial audits."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government has spent billions of dollars attempting to reduce the consumption of petroleum in the transportation sector for over 25 years. Throughout the period, the government has tried tax incentives, mandates to use vehicles that run on alternative fuels, and laws designed to enhance fuel efficiency. More recently, the federal government conducted a $1.2 billion partnership between industry and government, the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicle, to develop a highly fuel-efficient car. The administration has proposed a new initiative, known as FreedomCAR, focused on developing hydrogen fuel cells that will provide the technology necessary to create cars and trucks that do not require petroleum and have no polluting emissions--without sacrificing safety or convenience. FreedomCAR will operate as a cooperative research effort between the Department of Energy and General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler, and the Ford Motor Company. The FreedomCAR initiative should make sure that it (1) performs research that private industry would not do on its own, (2) specifies a clear and measurable goal, (3) devises a strategy to directly address that goal, and (4) considers whether consumers will buy the products resulting from the research …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "During World War I, the U.S. Army operated a large research facility to develop and test chemical weapons and explosives in the area that became the Spring Valley neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Buried ordnance, discovered there in 1993, led to the designation by the Department of Defense (DOD) of 61 acres as a formerly used defense site. Through fiscal year 2001, DOD had spent over $50 million to identify and remove hazards at the site. The government entities involved have identified and removed a large number of hazards, but the number remaining is unknown. The health risks influencing cleanup activities at Spring Valley are the possibility of injury or death from exploding or leaking ordnance and containers of chemical warfare agents and potential long-term health problems from exposure to arsenic-contaminated soil. As of April 2002, the U.S. Army estimated that the remaining cleanup activities would cost $7.1 million and take 5 years. But these estimates are unreliable. GAO summarized this report in congressional testimony (See GAO-02-836T)."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The military services face significant challenges in addressing facility sustainment, restoration, and modernization needs with limited funds. These challenges are magnified by the 20 to 25 percent of the Department of Defense's (DOD) real property that it views as not being needed to meet current mission requirements, but that adds to costs. To reduce these costs and acquire additional resources to maintain its facilities, DOD has developed a multi-part strategy involving base realignment and closure, housing and utility privatization, competitive sourcing of non-inherently governmental functions, and demolition of facilities that are no longer needed. Although the services continue to use the leasing authority provided for traditional type of leases, they have made limited efforts to use the expanded leasing authority enacted by Congress in fiscal year 2001. The services have identified a number of impediments that have limited the use of the expanded leasing authority and that could adversely affect the program in the future."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on Department of Defense's (DOD) contingency operations costs and funding for fiscal year (FY) 2000, focusing on: (1) how DOD components identify incremental costs in support of contingency operations; and (2) the need for, and average cost of, mission rehearsal exercises conducted by the Army in preparation for contingency deployments."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony describes China's development of rule of law practices related to the commitments China made to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which it joined in November 2001. When China joined the WTO, it agreed that its legal measures would be consistent with its WTO obligations. GAO found 60 commitments that specifically obligate China to enact, repeal, or modify trade-related laws or regulations. In addition, China has made a substantial number of other WTO commitments related to the rule of law in transparency, judicial review, uniform enforcement of laws, and nondiscriminatory treatment. Chinese government officials described how their efforts for reform go beyond China's WTO commitments and include broad reforms of laws and regulations at the national and provincial levels, as well as reforms of judicial and administrative procedures. However, Chinese officials acknowledged the challenges they face in completing the necessary reforms and identified the need for outside training assistance. According to GAO's survey, U.S. businesses in China consider rule of law-related WTO commitments to be important, especially the consistent application of laws, regulations, and practices in China, and enforcement of intellectual property rights. However, a majority of …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the challenges most of the major federal department agencies face in meeting the basic expectations laid out in the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 (FFMIA), focusing on: (1) problems with agencies' systems that prevent them from meeting the expectations of FFMIA; (2) how agencies are able to receive a "clean" audit opinion on their financial statements even though their financial systems do not comply with FFMIA's requirements; and (3) key elements in addressing these systems problems, including the importance of sound information technology investment and control processes."

A chapter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The 2004 general election was the first presidential election that tested substantial changes states made to their election systems since the 2000 election, including some changes required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). HAVA required some major changes in the nation's elections processes, not all which had to be implemented by the November 2004 election. HAVA addressed issues of people, processes, and technology, all of which must be effectively integrated to ensure effective election operations. GAO initiated a review under the authority of the Comptroller General to examine an array of election issues of broad interest to Congress. For each major stage of the election process, this report discusses (1) changes to election systems since the 2000 election, including steps taken to implement HAVA, and (2) challenges encountered in the 2004 election. For this report, GAO sent a survey to the 50 states and the District of Columbia (all responded) and mailed a questionnaire to a nationwide sample of 788 local election jurisdictions about election administration activities (80 percent responded). To obtain more detailed information about experiences for the 2004 election, GAO also …

Memorandum of meeting with Military Sealift Command (MSC) representatives regarding the collection of information for HAS-0114, Consolidate Transportation Command Components.

Understanding the cognitive and behavioral consequences of brain exposures to low-dose ionizing radiation has broad relevance for health risks from medical radiation diagnostic procedures, radiotherapy, environmental nuclear contamination, as well as earth orbit and space missions. Analyses of transcriptome profiles of murine brain tissue after whole-body radiation showed that low-dose exposures (10 cGy) induced genes not affected by high dose (2 Gy), and low-dose genes were associated with unique pathways and functions. The low-dose response had two major components: pathways that are consistently seen across tissues, and pathways that were brain tissue specific. Low-dose genes clustered into a saturated network (p < 10{sup -53}) containing mostly down-regulated genes involving ion channels, long-term potentiation and depression, vascular damage, etc. We identified 9 neural signaling pathways that showed a high degree of concordance in their transcriptional response in mouse brain tissue after low-dose radiation, in the aging human brain (unirradiated), and in brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer's disease. Mice exposed to high-dose radiation did not show these effects and associations. Our findings indicate that the molecular response of the mouse brain within a few hours after low-dose irradiation involves the down-regulation of neural pathways associated with cognitive dysfunctions that are also …

I will review the role that Monte Carlo methods play in the physical sciences. They are very widely used for a number of reasons: they permit the rapid and faithful transformation of a natural or model stochastic process into a computer code. They are powerful numerical methods for treating the many-dimensional problems that derive from important physical systems. Finally, many of the methods naturally permit the use of modern parallel computers in efficient ways. In the presentation, I will emphasize four aspects of the computations: whether or not the computation derives from a natural or model stochastic process; whether the system under study is highly idealized or realistic; whether the Monte Carlo methodology is straightforward or mathematically sophisticated; and finally, the scientific role of the computation.

We further investigate the dimensional duality (D-duality) proposed in arXiv: 0705.0550 by mainly focusing on the properties of D-branes in this background. We derive the world-sheet correspondence of static D-branes, and discuss the fate of non-static D-branes from the world-sheet viewpoint. The quantum string production with or without D-branes is also studied fromthe time-like Liouville theory. We find that the closed string production from the background is much larger than that from D-branes decaying into nothing.

Isopiestic vapor pressure measurements were made for {l_brace}yMgCl{sub 2} + (1-y)MgSO{sub 4}{r_brace}(aq) solutions with MgCl{sub 2} ionic strength fractions of y = 0, 0.1997, 0.3989, 0.5992, 0.8008, and (1) at the temperature 298.15 K, using KCl(aq) as the reference standard. These measurements for the mixtures cover the ionic strength range I = 0.9794 to 9.4318 mol {center_dot} kg{sup -1}. In addition, isopiestic measurements were made with NaCl(aq) as reference standard for mixtures of {l_brace}xNa{sub 2}SO{sub 4} + (1-x)MgSO{sub 4}{r_brace}(aq) with the molality fraction x = 0.50000 that correspond to solutions of the evaporite mineral bloedite (astrakanite), Na{sub 2}Mg(SO{sub 4}){sub 2} {center_dot} 4H{sub 2}O(cr). The total molalities, m{sub T} = m(Na{sub 2}SO{sub 4}) + m(MgSO{sub 4}), range from m{sub T} = 1.4479 to 4.4312 mol {center_dot} kg{sup -1} (I = 5.0677 to 15.509 mol {center_dot} kg{sup -1}), where the uppermost concentration is the highest oversaturation molality that could be achieved by isothermal evaporation of the solvent at 298.15 K. The parameters of an extended ion-interaction (Pitzer) model for MgCl2(aq) at 298.15 K, which were required for an analysis of the {l_brace}yMgCl{sub 2} + (1-y)MgSO{sub 4}{r_brace}(aq) mixture results, were evaluated up to I = 12.025 mol {center_dot} kg{sup -1} from published isopiestic …

Recent advances in the dust transport modeling in tokamak devices are discussed. Topics include: (1) physical model for dust transport; (2) modeling results on dynamics of dust particles in plasma; (3) conditions necessary for particle growth in plasma; (4) dust spreading over the tokamak; (5) density profiles for dust particles and impurity atoms associated with dust ablation in tokamak plasma; and (6) roles of dust in material/tritium migration.

The ultrafast dynamics of electronic excitations of the surface dangling bond states of Si(111) 7 x 7 has been investigated by second harmonic generation as a probe of transient spectral hole burning. Spectral holes induced by a 100 fs pump at {approx_equal} 1.5 eV and their decay are interpreted in terms of electronic dephasing times as short as 15 fs. This fast time scale together with the strong excitation-induced dephasing observed is interpreted in terms of carrier-carrier scattering. In addition, strong coupling of the electronic excitation to surface optical phonons is observed and attributed to the localization at adatom sites of a surface electronic excitation and a surface phonon mode.