Domestic Content Legislation: The Buy American Act and Complementary Little Buy American Provisions

[Excerpt] Congress has broad authority to place conditions on the purchases made by the federal government or with federal dollars. One of many conditions that it has placed on direct government purchases is a requirement that they be produced in the United States. The most familiar of these requirements is known as the Buy American Act, which is the major domestic preference statute governing procurement by the federal government. The Buy American Act applies to direct purchases by the federal government of more than $3,000, providing the purchase is consistent with the public interest, the items or services are reasonable in cost, and they are for use in the United States. The act requires that “substantially all” of the acquisition be attributable to American-made components. Regulations have interpreted this requirement to mean that at least 50% of the cost must be attributable to American content. While the act has only been substantively amended four times since its enactment in 1933, every Congress in the intervening years has seen fit to enact some form of additional domestic preference legislation. This legislation has been generally directed at purchases that for some reason were not governed by the Buy American Act and often took the form of temporary law that was enacted Congress after Congress, often as an appropriations rider to deny the use of funds to purchase goods that were not of domestic origin. While this approach has not been abandoned, the current trend appears to be to codify these “Little Buy American Acts” as permanent law. This report summarizes (1) the Buy American Act, what it does and does not cover; (2) the Little Buy American Acts found in permanent law, emphasizing what they govern, major exceptions, and why Congress felt them necessary in light of the requirements of the Buy American Act; and (3) the temporary Little Buy American provision found in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Effect of cowpea flour processing on the chemical properties and acceptability of a novel cowpea blended maize porridge

Childhood growth stunting is a pervasive problem in Malawi and is in large part due to low quality complementary foods and chronic gut inflammation. Introducing legumes such as cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) into the complementary diet has the potential to improve childhood growth by improving diet quality through improvements in macro- and micronutrients and also by reducing gut inflammation. However, cowpea is relatively underutilized in complementary feeding in Malawi due to its strong taste, long processing time, and high energy requirements for processing. Effective utilization of cowpea in complementary feeding requires processing which may affect chemical composition as well as sensory quality. The present study evaluated the effect of processing on the retention of zinc, crude fibre, and flavonoid in roasted, boiled, and dehulled cowpea flours, and assessed the acceptability of maize porridge (70%) enriched with one of the three cowpea flours (30%). Roasting, dehulling, and boiling did not have any effect on zinc content. Crude fibre content increased after processing by all methods. Processing had no effect on measurable flavonoids. Roasted, boiled, and dehulled cowpea blended maize porridges were acceptable to children with mean quantities of leftover food of less than 3g from the given 100g. Caregivers also rated the blended flours to be highly acceptable to them as well, with maize porridge blended with dehulled cowpea flour the most acceptable to both children and caregivers. These results demonstrate that cowpea flour, processed by any of these three different methods, could serve as a useful addition to maize porridge for complementary feeding of children in sub-Saharan Africa

Analog Content-Addressable Memory from Complementary FeFETs

To address the increasing computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, compute-in-memory (CIM) integrates memory and processing units into the same physical location, reducing the time and energy overhead of the system. Despite advancements in non-volatile memory (NVM) for matrix multiplication, other critical data-intensive operations, like parallel search, have been overlooked. Current parallel search architectures, namely content-addressable memory (CAM), often use binary, which restricts density and functionality. We present an analog CAM (ACAM) cell, built on two complementary ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs), that performs parallel search in the analog domain with over 40 distinct match windows. We then deploy it to calculate similarity between vectors, a building block in the following two machine learning problems. ACAM outperforms ternary CAM (TCAM) when applied to similarity search for few-shot learning on the Omniglot dataset, yielding projected simulation results with improved inference accuracy by 5%, 3x denser memory architecture, and more than 100x faster speed compared to central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) per similarity search on scaled CMOS nodes. We also demonstrate 1-step inference on a kernel regression model by combining non-linear kernel computation and matrix multiplication in ACAM, with simulation estimates indicating 1,000x faster inference than CPU and GPU

Considerations on the physical and mechanical properties of lime-stabilized rammed earth walls and their evaluation by ultrasonic pulse velocity testing

This study examines the influence of moulding moisture content on the compressive strength, dry density and porosity of a rammed earth wall, using ultrasound as a complementary technique. Non-parametric and multivariate statistical techniques were applied to analyse the behaviour of variables with a sufficiently large population. The statistical analysis demonstrated that excessive or insufficient moulding moisture content directly determines the physical-mechanical properties of such walls. Ultrasound was confirmed as a valid technique for assessing the quality of a wall, since its response, albeit with certain limitations, was consistent with physical-mechanical properties

Study of leptonic CP violation

The "complementary" Ansatz, Tr$(M_\nu)=0$, where $M_\nu$ is the prediagonal neutrino mass matrix, seems a plausible approximation for capturing in a self-contained way some of the content of Grand Unification. We study its consequences in the form of relations between the neutrino masses and CP violation phases.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, talk at MRST200

A Benchmark Suite for Template Detection and Content Extraction

Template detection and content extraction are two of the main areas of information retrieval applied to the Web. They perform different analyses over the structure and content of webpages to extract some part of the document. However, their objective is different. While template detection identifies the template of a webpage (usually comparing with other webpages of the same website), content extraction identifies the main content of the webpage discarding the other part. Therefore, they are somehow complementary, because the main content is not part of the template. It has been measured that templates represent between 40% and 50% of data on the Web. Therefore, identifying templates is essential for indexing tasks because templates usually contain irrelevant information such as advertisements, menus and banners. Processing and storing this information is likely to lead to a waste of resources (storage space, bandwidth, etc.). Similarly, identifying the main content is essential for many information retrieval tasks. In this paper, we present a benchmark suite to test different approaches for template detection and content extraction. The suite is public, and it contains real heterogeneous webpages that have been labelled so that different techniques can be suitable (and automatically) compared.Comment: 13 pages, 3 table