A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2002, the President and Secretary of Defense called for the creation of the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to anticipate and counter global threats. Currently, USSTRATCOM has responsibility for seven mission areas including nuclear deterrence and integrated missile defense. GAO was asked to determine the extent to which USSTRATCOM has made progress in (1) implementing its new missions and assessing mission results and (2) defining organizational responsibilities and establishing relationships with other Department of Defense (DOD) commands and organizations. To assess progress, GAO compared USSTRATCOM's efforts with lessons learned in implementing successful organizational transformations."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation's primary medical and behavioral research agency. NIH's need for leased space has more than doubled since 1996 to about 3.9 million square feet in 2005. In 1996, General Services Administration (GSA) delegated leasing authority to NIH that includes performing budget scoring and prospectus analysis. In light of NIH's increased use of leased space, GAO was asked to address two issues: (1) Is NIH complying with budget scorekeeping guidelines and Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) requirements for implementing the guidelines to determine if a lease should be classified as operating or capital and ensure that no violations of the Antideficiency Act occur because of improper budget scorekeeping? and (2) Is NIH complying with the congressional prospectus process for both leases and alterations to leased buildings? To address these issues we interviewed leasing and financial officials, reviewed laws and reviewed budget scoring and prospectus analysis of 59 leases."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During the course of our work for Congress examining the space acquisition workforce, we learned that the Department of Defense (DOD) may not be periodically publishing a list of designated critical acquisition positions as required by statute. We are bringing this matter to your attention not only because it is a requirement to publish this data, but because having it is critical to effectively managing DOD's current workforce. Operating without this critical information may result in flawed decisions regarding this part of the workforce and may put the organization's ability to sustain its mission or function effectively at risk. The designation "critical acquisition positions," according to the 1990 Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA), refers to certain senior-level military and civilian positions that carry significant responsibility and primarily consist of supervisory, oversight, and management duties in the DOD acquisition system. They are a key factor in ensuring that DOD acquisitions--some of which are very expensive and critical to the success of current combat operations--are effectively managed. In accordance with DAWIA and as was later codified in Title 10 of the United States Code, the Secretary of Defense is …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, natural gas prices spiked to more than $15 per thousand cubic feet, nearly seven times higher than in the late 1990s. As a result, policymakers have increasingly focused on better understanding how prices are overseen. The prices that consumers pay for natural gas are composed of (1) the commodity price, (2) the cost of interstate transportation, and (3) local distribution charges. Oversight of these components belongs to the federal government, through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and the states. In 1993, federal price controls over commodity prices were removed, but FERC is still charged with ensuring that prices are fair. Recently, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct 2005) broadened FERC's authority. GAO agreed to (1) analyze FERC's role overseeing natural gas prices, (2) summarize FERC's progress in implementing EPAct 2005, and (3) examine states' role in overseeing natural gas prices. In preparing this report, GAO met with officials from 10 states that regulate gas in different ways and analyzed relevant laws and documentation."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of State (State) has embassies in about 180 countries, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) maintains missions in about 90 of those countries. At many posts, State and USAID are located on separate compounds and maintain multiple support service operations, such as warehouses. However, the United States is in the process of building new embassy compounds that will collocate all agencies, creating opportunities for greater sharing of services. In September 2004, we recommended that State pursue the elimination of duplicative support structures at overseas facilities. We reviewed (1) the status of State and USAID's joint initiative to consolidate overseas services, and plans for advancing the initiative; and (2) the challenges State and USAID face in these efforts."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The opportunity for employment is an important magnet attracting immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, to countries. The policies and practices used by other countries to manage foreign workers, including actions to limit illegal immigration and to reduce the employment of unauthorized foreign workers, have been shaped by country-specific economic, demographic, and political factors. Immigration reform is a matter of continuing debate in the United States. This report examines selected countries' (1) programs for admitting foreign workers; (2) efforts to limit the employment of unauthorized foreign workers; and (3) programs for providing unauthorized immigrants with an opportunity to obtain legal status, referred to as regularization. To address these objectives, we examined reports from foreign countries, intergovernmental organizations, and research organizations. We also interviewed government officials and experts from 8 countries--Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom--and surveyed 6 other countries. We selected these countries based on their net immigration rate, population size, membership in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or World Bank classification as high income, range of immigration policies, and geographic location."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002 requires that operators (1) assess gas transmission pipeline segments in about 20,000 miles of highly populated or frequently used areas by 2012 for safety threats, such as incorrect operation and corrosion (called baseline assessments), (2) remedy defects, and (3) reassess these segments at least every 7 years. Under the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's (PHMSA) regulations, operators must reassess their pipeline segments for corrosion at least every 7 years and for all safety threats at least every 10, 15, or 20 years, based on industry consensus standards--and more frequently if conditions warrant. Operators must also carry out other prevention and mitigation measures. To meet a requirement in the 2002 act, this study addresses how the results of baseline assessments and other information inform us on the need to reassess gas transmission pipelines every 7 years and whether inspection services and tools are likely to be available to do so, among other things. In conducting its work, GAO contacted 52 operators that have carried out about two-thirds of the baseline assessments conducted to date."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002 established a risk-based program for gas transmission pipelines--the integrity management program. The program requires operators of natural and other gas transmission pipelines to identify "high consequence areas" where pipeline incidents would most severely affect public safety, such as those occurring in highly populated or frequented areas. Operators must assess pipelines in these areas for safety risks and repair or replace any defective segments. Operators must also submit data on performance measures to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). The 2002 act also directed GAO to assess this program's effects on public safety. Accordingly, we examined (1) the effect on public safety of the integrity management program and (2) PHMSA and state pipeline agencies' plans to oversee operators' implementation of program requirements. To fulfill these objectives, GAO interviewed 51 gas pipeline operators and surveyed all state pipeline agencies."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Responders to the World Trade Center (WTC) attack--individuals involved in rescue, recovery, or cleanup--included New York City Fire Department (FDNY) personnel, federal government workers, and others from New York and elsewhere. They were exposed to numerous hazards, and concerns remain about the long-term effects on their physical and mental health. In February 2006, GAO testified that four of the five key federally funded programs that were monitoring health effects in responders had made progress but that the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) WTC Federal Responder Screening Program, implemented by the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness (OPHEP), lagged behind (GAO-06-481T). GAO also reported that the Congress appropriated $75 million in December 2005 to HHS's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for monitoring and treatment for responders and that CDC was deciding how to allocate the funds. This statement updates GAO's February 2006 testimony. GAO examined (1) progress made by HHS's WTC federal responder program and (2) actions CDC has taken to award the $75 million appropriated. GAO reviewed program documents and interviewed HHS officials and others involved in WTC monitoring and treatment programs."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) is authorized under the River and Harbor Act of 1922 to issue contracts with a continuing contracts clause to carry out certain projects. This allows the Corps to award multi-year contracts without having received appropriations to cover the full contract amount. The Corps has used these contracts for decades, but modified their use in 2005, in response to congressional committee concerns that their use may have been ineffective. GAO was asked to determine (1) the number and dollar amount of continuing contracts the Corps awarded during fiscal years 2003?2005; (2) the circumstances in which the Corps used continuing contracts in fiscal years 2003-2005; and (3) how the Corps' process for approving and using continuing contracts changed since 2005, and whether the changes reduced the use of these contracts. For these objectives, GAO reviewed the Corps' contracting data, a random sample of 107 continuing contracts, and districts' requests to use continuing contracts"

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2004, over 5,000 people died on our nation's roads in crashes involving large trucks. The Department of Transportation's (DOT) Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) operates truck safety programs, including Share the Road Safely (STRS), which has a goal to improve driving behavior around large trucks. At congressional direction, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) assumed responsibility for funding STRS in 2004, but returned STRS to FMCSA in 2006. The current transportation authorization bill requested GAO to update its 2003 evaluation of STRS. This report (1) describes the STRS initiatives DOT has implemented since 2003 and their design, (2) reviews evaluations of STRS initiatives, and (3) assesses DOT's plans for the future of STRS. GAO interviewed DOT and state officials, and reviewed program plans and evaluations."

We are concerned with the solution of time-dependent electromagnetic eddy current problems using a finite element formulation on three-dimensional unstructured meshes. We allow for multiple conducting regions, and our goal is to develop an efficient computational method that does not require a computational mesh of the air/vacuum regions. This requires a sophisticated global boundary condition specifying the total fields on the conductor boundaries. We propose a Biot-Savart law based volume-to-surface boundary condition to meet this requirement. This Biot-Savart approach is demonstrated to be very accurate. In addition, this approach can be accelerated via a low-rank QR approximation of the discretized Biot-Savart law.

Ga-stabilized {delta}-Pu undergoes small changes in density with time. These have been associated with four different causes: an initial reversible expansion that saturates after a short time; a continuous change that can be attributed to the in-growth of helium and actinide daughter products from the radioactive decay of plutonium; possible void swelling; and phase instability. We review our present understanding of these processes and evaluate their contributions to density changes. It is shown that the initial transient expansion is intimately connected with the metastability of the {delta}-phase at ambient temperature.

BlueGene/L (BG/L), developed through a partnership between IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is currently the world's largest system both in terms of scale with 131,072 processors and absolute performance with a peak rate of 367 TFlop/s. BG/L has led the Top500 list the last four times with a Linpack rate of 280.6 TFlop/s for the full machine installed at LLNL and is expected to remain the fastest computer in the next few editions. However, the real value of a machine like BG/L derives from the scientific breakthroughs that real applications can produce by successfully using its unprecedented scale and computational power. In this paper, we describe our experiences with eight large scale applications on BG/L from several application domains, ranging from molecular dynamics to dislocation dynamics and turbulence simulations to searches in semantic graphs. We also discuss the challenges we faced when scaling these codes and present several successful optimization techniques. All applications show excellent scaling behavior, even at very large processor counts, with one code even achieving a sustained performance of more than 100 TFlop/s, clearly demonstrating the real success of the BG/L design.

On May 22, 2000, as required by Congress in its 1980 Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Regulatory Determination on Wastes from the Combustion of Fossil Fuels. On the basis of information contained in its 1999 Report to Congress: Wastes from the Combustion of Fossil Fuels, the EPA concluded that coal combustion wastes (CCWs), also known as coal combustion by-products (CCBs), did not warrant regulation under Subtitle C of RCRA, and it retained the existing hazardous waste exemption for these materials under RCRA Section 3001(b)(3)(C). However, the EPA also determined that national regulations under Subtitle D of RCRA were warranted for CCWs that are disposed of in landfills or surface impoundments. The EPA made this determination in part on the basis of its findings that 'present disposal practices are such that, in 1995, these wastes were being managed in 40 percent to 70 percent of landfills and surface impoundments without reasonable controls in place, particularly in the area of groundwater monitoring; and while there have been substantive improvements in state regulatory programs, we have also identified gaps in State oversight' (EPA 2000). The 1999 Report to Congress (RTC), however, …

This report discusses the production and prospects of Caspian Oil and Gas.

This report examines more than 90,000 U.S. horses which were slaughtered for human food in 2005, mainly for European and Asian consumers. Congress voted to limit the use of FY2006 appropriated funds for such slaughter, but the practice continues, funded by industry user fees. Debate continues on the acceptability of horse slaughter, and how to care for and/or humanely dispose of horses if they no longer went for human food. On September 7, 2006, the full House approved a bill (H.R. 503) to ban horse slaughter.

Constellation-X (Con-X) will carry out two powerful and independent sets of tests of dark energy based on X-ray observations of galaxy clusters, providing comparable accuracy to other leading dark energy probes. The first group of tests will measure the absolute distances to clusters, primarily using measurements of the X-ray gas mass fraction in the largest, dynamically relaxed clusters, but with additional constraining power provided by follow-up observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. As with supernovae studies, such data determine the transformation between redshift and true distance, d(z), allowing cosmic acceleration to be measured directly. The second, independent group of tests will use the exquisite spectroscopic capabilities of Con-X to determine scaling relations between X-ray observables and mass. Together with forthcoming X-ray and SZ cluster surveys, these data will help to constrain the growth of structure, which is also a strong function of cosmological parameters.

This document is the first time that Manhattan Project and Cold War era artifacts from the Hanford Site have been assembled within a publication. The publication presents photographic and written documentation of a number of Manhattan Project and Cold War era artifacts that were identified and tagged during assessment walk throughs of historic buildings on the Hanford Site but which could not be curated within the Hanford collection because they were too large for long-term storage and/or exhibit purposes or were radiologically contaminated. The significance of the artifacts in this publication and a proposed future appendix is based not on the individual significance of any single artifact but on their collective contribution to the science and engineering of creating plutonium and advancing nuclear technology in nuclear fuel and power.

This work was performed by Advanced Resources International (ARI) on behalf of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) in order to develop a user-friendly, PC-based interface that couples DOE's BOAST 98 software with the Monte Carlo simulation technique. The objectives of the work were to improve reservoir management and maximize oil recoveries by understanding and quantifying reservoir uncertainty as well as improving the capabilities of DOE's BOAST 98 software by incorporating a probabilistic module in the simulator. In this model, probability distributions can be assigned to unknown input parameters such as permeability, porosity, etc. Options have also been added to the input file to be able to vary relative permeability curves as well as well spacing. Hundreds of simulations can then automatically be run to explore the many combinations of uncertain reservoir parameters across their spectrum of uncertainty. Output data such as oil rate and water rate can then be plotted. When historical data are available, they can be uploaded and a least-square error-function run between the simulation data and the history data. The set of input parameters leading to the best match is thus determined. Sensitivity charts (Tornado plots) that rank the uncertain parameters according to the impact …

Mantle anisotropy along the Red Sea and across the Arabian Peninsula was analyzed using shear-wave splitting recorded by stations from three different seismic networks: the largest, most widely distributed array of stations examined across the Arabian Peninsula to date. Stations near the Gulf of Aqaba display fast orientations aligned parallel to the Dead Sea Transform Fault, most likely related to the strike-slip motion between Africa and Arabia However, most of our observations across Arabia are statistically the same (at a 95% confidence level), with north-south oriented fast directions and delay times averaging about 1.4 s. Since end-member models of fossilized anisotropy and present-day asthenospheric flow do not adequately explain these observations, we interpret them as a combination of plate and density driven flow in the asthenosphere. Combining northeast oriented flow associated with absolute plate motion with northwest oriented flow associated with the channelized Afar upwelling along the Red Sea produces a north-south resultant that matches the observations and supports models of active rifting.

We extend the resummation of dimensionally-regulated amplitudes to next-to-next-to-leading poles. This requires the calculation of two-loop anomalous dimension matrices for color mixing through soft gluon exchange. Remarkably, we find that they are proportional to the corresponding one-loop matrices. Using the color generator notation, we reproduce the two-loop single-pole quantities H{sup (2)} introduced by Catani for quark and gluon elastic scattering. Our results also make possible threshold and a variety of other resummations at next-to-next-to leading logarithm. All of these considerations apply to 2 {yields} n processes with massless external lines.

With new more aggressive coarsening algorithms that while reducing memory also degrade convergence often dramatically, it was imperative that new interpolation routines be implemented to recover this degradation. The implementation details and results for three new interpolation routines, standard, extended, and F-F, are presented in this paper. The project was focused on parallel implementation, so there is little theoretical analysis. The references contain much of the algorithmic design issues and analysis, if further understanding or exploration is needed, see [1][2][3]. It will be shown throughout this paper that long-range interpolation is needed for a number of problems, for some cases, there is almost a reduction in iterations by 2 orders of magnitude.

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