Emerging Policy and Practice Issues (2016)

This paper, presented at the West Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2015), attempts to identify the key trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement, grant, and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity. The paper discusses, in addition to the macro-level data, initiatives from OFPP and DoD, including the Better Buying Power 3.0\u27s less-than-obvious focus on innovation, the need for investment in research and development, information technology and category management, acquisition performance measurement (or metrics), and cost drivers

The Contract Management Body of Knowledge: Understanding an Essential Tool for the Acquisition Profession

The collective knowledge of any profession is commonly referred to as its body of knowledge. In the acquisition, procurement, or government contracting profession, the collective wisdom of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) organizes, and periodically updates, a broadly accepted conceptual inventory of the profession’s acquired knowledge. This article describes the NCMA Guide to the Body of Knowledge, how it was developed and is maintained, and its importance and relevance to people concerned with the contract management profession

The Contract Management Body of Knowledge: Understanding an Essential Tool for the Acquisition Profession

The collective knowledge of any profession is commonly referred to as its body of knowledge. In the acquisition, procurement, or government contracting profession, the collective wisdom of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) organizes, and periodically updates, a broadly accepted conceptual inventory of the profession’s acquired knowledge. This article describes the NCMA Guide to the Body of Knowledge, how it was developed and is maintained, and its importance and relevance to people concerned with the contract management profession

L'évaluation des connaissances en nutrition des entraineurs et des pratiques alimentaires recommandées à leurs athlètes

Les objectifs de cette étude étaient d’évaluer les connaissances en nutrition sportive des entraineurs du secondaire et les pratiques alimentaires que ces derniers recommandent à leurs athlètes. Quarante-sept entraineurs du secondaire de la région de Québec impliqués dans différents types de sports ont complété un questionnaire sur les connaissances en nutrition et les pratiques alimentaires. La moyenne des résultats a été de 68.4 % pour la section nutrition. Il n’y a pas eu de différence significative entre les connaissances des entraineurs des différents types de sports. Le genre, le nombre d’années d’expérience et le niveau d’entrainement n’ont pas eu d’influence sur les connaissances en nutrition des entraineurs, par contre, le niveau d’éducation et le fait d’avoir suivi une formation spécifique en entrainement ont significativement et positivement influencé les connaissances en nutrition des entraineurs. Les pratiques alimentaires les plus recommandées afin d’améliorer les performances étaient d’augmenter l’hydratation et la consommation d’aliments riches en protéines. Les résultats démontrent que les entraineurs ont besoin de formations en nutrition.The objectives of this study were to evaluate high school coaches’ knowledge in sports nutrition and the nutrition practices they recommend to their athletes. Forty-seven high school coaches in “leanness” and “non-leanness” sports from the greater region of Quebec completed a questionnaire on nutritional knowledge and practices. Participants obtained a total mean score of 68.4 % for the nutrition knowledge part of the questionnaire. No significant difference in nutrition knowledge was observed between coaches from “leanness” and “non-leanness” sports. Gender, number of year of experience, level of coaching did not influence nutrition knowledge in coaches whereas education level and specific coaching certification significantly and positively influence coaches’ nutrition knowledge. The most popular nutrition practices that coaches recommended to improve athlete performance were hydration and consumption of protein-rich foods. Overall, findings from this study indicate that coaches need sports nutrition education and specific training that will give them the knowledge to properly advise their athletes

Patterns in the Fermion Mixing Matrix, a bottom-up approach

We first obtain the most general and compact parametrization of the unitary transformation diagonalizing any 3 by 3 hermitian matrix H, as a function of its elements and eigenvalues. We then study a special class of fermion mass matrices, defined by the requirement that all of the diagonalizing unitary matrices (in the up, down, charged lepton and neutrino sectors) contain at least one mixing angle much smaller than the other two. Our new parametrization allows us to quickly extract information on the patterns and predictions emerging from this scheme. In particular we find that the phase difference between two elements of the two mass matrices (of the sector in question) controls the generic size of one of the observable fermion mixing angles: i.e. just fixing that particular phase difference will "predict" the generic value of one of the mixing angles, irrespective of the value of anything else.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures, references added, to appear in PR

Improved beam waist formula for ultrashort, tightly focused linearly, radially, and azimuthally polarized laser pulses in free space

We derive an asymptotically accurate formula for the beam waist of ultrashort, tightly focused fundamental linearly polarized, radially polarized, and azimuthally polarized modes in free space. We compute the exact beam waist via numerical cubature to ascertain the accuracy with which our formula approximates the exact beam waist over a broad range of parameters of practical interest. Based on this, we describe a method of choosing parameters in the model given the beam waist and pulse duration of a laser pulse

Running Speed in Mammals Increases with Muscle n-6 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Content

Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are important dietary components that mammals cannot synthesize de novo. Beneficial effects of PUFAs, in particular of the n-3 class, for certain aspects of animal and human health (e.g., cardiovascular function) are well known. Several observations suggest, however, that PUFAs may also affect the performance of skeletal muscles in vertebrates. For instance, it has been shown that experimentally n-6 PUFA-enriched diets increase the maximum swimming speed in salmon. Also, we recently found that the proportion of PUFAs in the muscle phospholipids of an extremely fast runner, the brown hare (Lepus europaeus), are very high compared to other mammals. Therefore, we predicted that locomotor performance, namely running speed, should be associated with differences in muscle fatty acid profiles. To test this hypothesis, we determined phospholipid fatty acid profiles in skeletal muscles of 36 mammalian species ranging from shrews to elephants. We found that there is indeed a general positive, surprisingly strong relation between the n-6 PUFAs content in muscle phospholipids and maximum running speed of mammals. This finding suggests that muscle fatty acid composition directly affects a highly fitness-relevant trait, which may be decisive for the ability of animals to escape from predators or catch prey

Catching Element Formation In The Act

Gamma-ray astronomy explores the most energetic photons in nature to address some of the most pressing puzzles in contemporary astrophysics. It encompasses a wide range of objects and phenomena: stars, supernovae, novae, neutron stars, stellar-mass black holes, nucleosynthesis, the interstellar medium, cosmic rays and relativistic-particle acceleration, and the evolution of galaxies. MeV gamma-rays provide a unique probe of nuclear processes in astronomy, directly measuring radioactive decay, nuclear de-excitation, and positron annihilation. The substantial information carried by gamma-ray photons allows us to see deeper into these objects, the bulk of the power is often emitted at gamma-ray energies, and radioactivity provides a natural physical clock that adds unique information. New science will be driven by time-domain population studies at gamma-ray energies. This science is enabled by next-generation gamma-ray instruments with one to two orders of magnitude better sensitivity, larger sky coverage, and faster cadence than all previous gamma-ray instruments. This transformative capability permits: (a) the accurate identification of the gamma-ray emitting objects and correlations with observations taken at other wavelengths and with other messengers; (b) construction of new gamma-ray maps of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies where extended regions are distinguished from point sources; and (c) considerable serendipitous science of scarce events -- nearby neutron star mergers, for example. Advances in technology push the performance of new gamma-ray instruments to address a wide set of astrophysical questions.Comment: 14 pages including 3 figure