DEFENSE BUDGETING DYNAMICS: THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG LATE BUDGETS AND LATE APPROPRIATIONS AND THE CONTENT OF CONTINUING RESOLUTIONS

To better prepare the Department of Defense (DOD) against the negative effects of late appropriations and their resultant continuing resolutions (CRs), our research covers three primary areas: 50 years of Presidential Budget (PB) submissions, Congressional Budget Resolutions (BR), and DOD Authorization and Appropriation Act data. First, our research conducts a historical trend analysis intended to highlight positive, negative, and neutral tendencies. Second, our research aims to determine which federal budgetary deliverable has the strongest correlation to appropriation timeliness. Finally, our research examines how CRs have evolved over time across six basic characteristics: frequency of CRs, CR anomalies, supplemental appropriations and anomalies, CR duration, CR page length, and funding rates. Our research indicated significant evidence to support that budgetary deliverable timeliness is getting worse, that political variables are both strongly correlated and highly influential throughout the data, and that CRs have dynamically shifted in funding structure, length, and frequency throughout the years covered by this research.Captain, United States ArmyLieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Developing a strategy for the national coordinated soil moisture monitoring network

Soil moisture is a critical land surface variable, affecting a wide variety of climatological, agricultural, and hydrological processes. Determining the current soil moisture status is possible via a variety of methods, including in situ monitoring, remote sensing, and numerical modeling. Although all of these approaches are rapidly evolving, there is no cohesive strategy or framework to integrate these diverse information sources to develop and disseminate coordinated national soil moisture products that will improve our ability to understand climate variability. The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network initiative has developed a national strategy for network coordination with NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System. The strategy is currently in review within NOAA, and work is underway to implement the initial milestones of the strategy. This update reviews the goals and steps being taken to establish this national-scale coordination for soil moisture monitoring in the United States

The Emergence of Emotions

Emotion is conscious experience. It is the affective aspect of consciousness. Emotion arises from sensory stimulation and is typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. Hence an emotion is a complex reaction pattern consisting of three components: a physiological component, a behavioral component, and an experiential (conscious) component. The reactions making up an emotion determine what the emotion will be recognized as. Three processes are involved in generating an emotion: (1) identification of the emotional significance of a sensory stimulus, (2) production of an affective state (emotion), and (3) regulation of the affective state. Two opposing systems in the brain (the reward and punishment systems) establish an affective value or valence (stimulus-reinforcement association) for sensory stimulation. This is process (1), the first step in the generation of an emotion. Development of stimulus-reinforcement associations (affective valence) serves as the basis for emotion expression (process 2), conditioned emotion learning acquisition and expression, memory consolidation, reinforcement-expectations, decision-making, coping responses, and social behavior. The amygdala is critical for the representation of stimulus-reinforcement associations (both reward and punishment-based) for these functions. Three distinct and separate architectural and functional areas of the prefrontal cortex (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex) are involved in the regulation of emotion (process 3). The regulation of emotion by the prefrontal cortex consists of a positive feedback interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal cortex resulting in the nonlinear emergence of emotion. This positive feedback and nonlinear emergence represents a type of working memory (focal attention) by which perception is reorganized and rerepresented, becoming explicit, functional, and conscious. The explicit emotion states arising may be involved in the production of voluntary new or novel intentional (adaptive) behavior, especially social behavior