Military Survivor Benefit Plan: Background and Issues for Congress

[Excerpt] This report describes the categories of beneficiaries eligible for survivor benefits under the military Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP), the formulas used in computing the income level (including the integration of SBP benefits with other federal benefits), and the costs of SBP participation incurred by the retiree and/or the beneficiary. While this report focuses primarily on SBP, survivors of military members may be eligible for other benefits, including life insurance, TRICARE health benefits, Annuity for Certain Military Surviving Spouses (ACMSS), the Minimum Income Widow Annuity, Department of Defense (DOD) death gratuity, commissary and exchange privileges, and other federal benefits, such as Social Security

Decorous lower bounds for minimum linear arrangement

Minimum Linear Arrangement is a classical basic combinatorial optimization problem from the 1960s, which turns out to be extremely challenging in practice. In particular, for most of its benchmark instances, even the order of magnitude of the optimal solution value is unknown, as testified by the surveys on the problem that contain tables in which the best known solution value often has one more digit than the best known lower bound value. In this paper, we propose a linear-programming based approach to compute lower bounds on the optimum. This allows us, for the first time, to show that the best known solutions are indeed not far from optimal for most of the benchmark instances

FY2018 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Issues

[Excerpt] Military personnel issues typically generate significant interest from many Members of Congress and their staffs. This report provides a brief synopsis of selected sections in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2018 (H.R. 2810), as passed by the House on July 14, 2017, and the Senate on September 18, 2017. The FY2018 NDAA conference report was passed by the House on November 14, 2017, and the Senate on November 16, 2017. On December 12, President Donald J. Trump signed the bill into law (P.L. 115-91). Issues include military end-strengths, pay and benefits, and other personnel policy issues. This report focuses exclusively on the NDAA legislative process. It does not include language concerning appropriations, or tax implications of policy choices, topics that are addressed in other CRS products. Issues that have been discussed in the previous year’s defense personnel reports are designated with an asterisk in the relevant section titles of this report

Agency, Liberation, and Intersectionality among Latina Scholars: Narratives from a Cross-institutional Writing Collective

Among United States residents, the number of doctoral degrees conferred to Latinx students represents a small percentage compared to other groups. For example, from 2009–2010, the percentage of degrees conferred to Latinx students was 5 percent compared to 74 percent for White students, 11 percent for Asian/Pacific Islanders, 7 percent for African Americans, and 0.7 percent for Indian/Alaska Natives. During the same period, the proportion of doctoral degrees conferred to females was 55 percent for Latinas compared to 65 percent for African American students, 56 percent for Asian/Pacific students, 54 percent for American Indian/Alaska Native students, and 51 percent for White female students (National Center for Education Statistics). Historically, underrepresented minority (URM) students encounter a plethora of issues that influence their educational experiences, yet there is a scarcity of scholarship that elucidates the quality of experience of women of color (WOC) pursuing doctorate degrees (Aryan and Guzman). As multi-marginalized, firstgeneration college students, we continuously struggle to find a place within higher education. Our educational pathways to becoming doctoral recipients have occurred primarily within the context of alienation, significantly influencing our need to connect with other WOC who have also felt isolated and disconnected. Consequently, we needed to find each other because knowing that there were other Latinas in doctoral programs, and actually getting to know them, validated our existence within academiaUniversity Writing Cente

Caracterización fisicoquímica del agua del estero Nonguén y su confluencia con el río Andalién, región del Biobío. Variación en relación a los distintos usos de suelo en su cuenca.

La cuenca del estero Nonguén es un ejemplo de la realidad que se observa en la mayoría de las cuencas localizadas en zonas urbanas, debido al alto grado de intervención que presenta en su parte baja, influenciada por el constante aumento de la alta densidad poblacional. Sin embargo, en su parte alta aún es posible observar sitios con muy poca intervención que permiten la conservación de ecosistemas acuáticos en condiciones relativamente prístinas. Se realizó una caracterización fisicoquímica del agua del estero Nonguén y de la zona de confluencia con el río Andalién. Los resultados mostraron que la parte alta de la cuenca presenta aguas de muy buena calidad, pero en la parte baja, a medida que la actividad urbana comienza a ser más intensa, esta calidad comienza a disminuir mostrando condiciones fisicoquímicas completamente distintas a las demás zonas evaluadas (ANOSIM, parwise test R = 1; p = 0.333). Palabras clave: calidad de agua, contaminación, cuenca

FY2016 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Issues

[Excerpt] Military personnel issues typically generate significant interest from many Members of Congress and their staffs. Ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the regular use of the reserve component personnel for operational missions, further heighten interest in a wide range of military personnel policies and issues. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has selected a number of the military personnel issues considered in deliberations on H.R. 1735 as passed by the House and by the Senate and the final bill, S. 1356, as enacted (P.L. 114-92). This report provides a brief synopsis of sections in each bill that pertain to selected personnel policy. These include major military retirement reforms, end strengths, compensation, health care, and sexual assault, as well as less prominent issues that nonetheless generate significant public interest

"Set in Poland, that is to say Nowhere": Alfred Jarry and the Politics of Topological Space

This article is intended to shed light on philosophical considerations on the ontology of space (situation) as put forward in the prose and dramatic writings of French iconoclast Alfred Jarry, by posing that Jarry's notion of space is dynamic in a twofold sense. Firstly, Jarry's sense of space is consistently described in terms of a sense of temporality (duration), which is why Jarry's sense of space is distinctly higher-dimensional (space- time). Secondly, I argue that Jarry's reaction against conventional modalities of scientific and artistic thinking take the form of a subversive turn (which Deleuze calls the Great Turning), via the pseudoscience of pataphysics, which is directed not only against metaphysics, but also a geometric understanding of the physical and metaphysical worlds. I argue that Jarry's conception of a spatio-temporal ontology is distinctly non-geometric, or topological in nature. Topological imagery allows Jarry to present a more vital and fleshed out sense of living space-time, within which a new politics of space and time is activated by the forces of endless change and continuous deformation. I argue that through the topological corporeality of Ubu, Jarry promotes a sense of ABSTRACT theatre within which the dynamic properties of topological space become actualised in the way of a politics of the unimaginable, an Ubuesque realm where, through the power of technology and the imagination, the exceptional and unrealisable rule

Taxonomic results of the Bryotrop expedition to Zaire and Rwanda : 16., Leucophanaceae

Plants glaucous green, in loose to dense turfs; stems sparingly branched; leaves lanceolate from a broad to narrow base, slightly to strongly keeled, + overlapping when dry, slightly spreading when moist, acuminate, acute apiculate to truncate-retuse and revolute; hyaline lamina occupying 1/5-1/3 length of leaves; hyalocysts quadrate, oblong rectangular to hexagonal in 1- 3(-4) layers on the abaxial and adaxial sides of the central chlorophyllous layer; costa narrow or broad, spinose at apex or smooth; margins serrate to smooth