The Federal Cybersecurity Workforce: Background and Congressional Oversight Issues for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security

[Excerpt] This report examines congressional oversight of two strategies undertaken by Congress and the executive branch to strengthen the federal cybersecurity workforce: (1) initiatives to define and identify the federal cybersecurity workforce, and (2) hiring and pay flexibilities applicable to cybersecurity positions at DOD and DHS. This report focuses on DOD and DHS because of their key roles in federal cybersecurity and because the majority of hiring and pay flexibilities for cybersecurity professionals authorized by Congress apply to DOD and DHS

Numerical precision radiative corrections to the Dalitz plot of baryon semileptonic decays including the spin-momentum correlation of the decaying and emitted baryons

We calculate the radiative corrections to the angular correlation between the polarization of the decaying and the direction of the emitted spin one-half baryons in the semileptonic decay mode. The final results are presented, first, with the triple integration of the bremsstrahlung photon ready to be performed numerically and, second, in an analytical form. A third presentation of our results in the form of numerical arrays of coefficients to be multiplied by the quadratic products of form factors is discussed. This latter may be the most practical one to use in Monte Carlo simulations. A series of crosschecks is performed. Previous results to order (alpha/pi)(q/M_1) for the decays of unpolarized baryons are reviewed, too, where q is the momentum transfer and M_1 is the mass of the decaying baryon. This paper is self-contained and organized to make it accessible and reliable in the analysis of the Dalitz plot of precision experiments involving heavy quarks and is not compromised to fixing the form factors at predetermined values. It is assumed that the real photons are kinematically discriminated. Otherwise, our results have a general model-independent applicability.Comment: 34 pages, 4 tables, no figures. Some sections have been shortened. Conclusions remain unchange

Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability I: Background and Survey of Existing Work

This is the first of three planned papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the performance characteristics of modern high-performance solvers. The fundamental idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our goal is to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can easily be exploited to improve computational performance. This paper is a survey of the work underlying ZAP, and discusses previous attempts to improve the performance of the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland algorithm by exploiting the structure of the problem being solved. We examine existing ideas including extensions of the Boolean language to allow cardinality constraints, pseudo-Boolean representations, symmetry, and a limited form of quantification. While this paper is intended as a survey, our research results are contained in the two subsequent articles, with the theoretical structure of ZAP described in the second paper in this series, and ZAP's implementation described in the third

Radiative Corrections to the Ke3±K_{e3}^{\pm} Decay Revised

We consider the lowest order radiative corrections for the decay $K^{\pm}\to \pi^0 e^{\pm} \nu$, usually referred as $K_{e3}^{\pm}$ decay. This decay is the best way to extract the value of the $V_{us}$ element of the CKM matrix. The radiative corrections become crucial if one wants a precise value of $V_{us}$. The existing calculations were performed in the late 60's \cite{B,G} and are in disagreement. The calculation in \cite{G} turns out to be ultraviolet cutoff sensitive. The necessity of precise knowledge of $V_{us}$ and the contradiction between the existing results constitute the motivation of our paper. We remove the ultraviolet cutoff dependence by using A.Sirlin's prescription; we set it equal to the $W$ mass. We establish the whole character of small lepton mass dependence based on the renormalization group approach. In this way we can provide a simple explanation of Kinoshita--Lee--Nauenberg cancellation of singularities in the lepton mass terms in the total width and pion spectrum. We give an explicit evaluation of the structure--dependent photon emission based on ChPT in the lowest order. We estimate the accuracy of our results to be at the level of 1%. The corrected total width is $\Gamma=\Gamma_0(1+\delta)$ with $\delta=0.02\pm0.0002$. Using the formfactor value $f_+(0)=0.9842\pm 0.0084$ calculated in \cite{CKNRT} leads to $|V_{us}|=0.2172 \pm0.0055$.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, uses feynmf.st

Data management study, volume 5. Appendix J - Contractor data package procurement and contracting /PC/ Final report

Contractor data package for administration of procurement and contracting of Voyager spacecraft system

Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability II: Theory

This is the second of three planned papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the performance characteristics of modern high performance solvers. The fundamental idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our goal is to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can easily be exploited to improve computational performance. This paper presents the theoretical basis for the ideas underlying ZAP, arguing that existing ideas in this area exploit a single, recurring structure in that multiple database axioms can be obtained by operating on a single axiom using a subgroup of the group of permutations on the literals in the problem. We argue that the group structure precisely captures the general structure at which earlier approaches hinted, and give numerous examples of its use. We go on to extend the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland inference procedure to this broader setting, and show that earlier computational improvements are either subsumed or left intact by the new method. The third paper in this series discusses ZAPs implementation and presents experimental performance results

Generalizing Boolean Satisfiability III: Implementation

This is the third of three papers describing ZAP, a satisfiability engine that substantially generalizes existing tools while retaining the performance characteristics of modern high-performance solvers. The fundamental idea underlying ZAP is that many problems passed to such engines contain rich internal structure that is obscured by the Boolean representation used; our goal has been to define a representation in which this structure is apparent and can be exploited to improve computational performance. The first paper surveyed existing work that (knowingly or not) exploited problem structure to improve the performance of satisfiability engines, and the second paper showed that this structure could be understood in terms of groups of permutations acting on individual clauses in any particular Boolean theory. We conclude the series by discussing the techniques needed to implement our ideas, and by reporting on their performance on a variety of problem instances

Brief of Amici Curiae Andrea Armstrong, Sharon Dolovich, Betsy Ginsberg, Michael B. Mushlin, Alexander A. Reinert, Laura Rovner, and Margo Schlanger in Support of Plaintiff-Appellee

Amici are legal scholars who study the treatment of incarcerated people under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Writing and teaching about this topic is a central focus of their work. Amici have a shared interest in the lawful treatment of incarcerated men and women and fidelity to the principles established by the Supreme Court of the United States in Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976). They believe that all people, regardless of their gender identity, are entitled to constitutionally adequate medical treatment consistent with the rule of Estelle

Downsizing Democracy

Originally publushed in 2002. In Downsizing Democracy, Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg describe how the once powerful idea of a collective citizenry has given way to a concept of personal, autonomous democracy. Today, political change is effected through litigation, lobbying, and term limits, rather than active participation in the political process, resulting in narrow special interest groups dominating state and federal decision-making. At a time when an American's investment in the democratic process has largely been reduced to an annual contribution to a political party or organization, Downsizing Democracy offers a critical reassessment of American democracy

Recreation of the terminal events in physiological integrin activation.

Increased affinity of integrins for the extracellular matrix (activation) regulates cell adhesion and migration, extracellular matrix assembly, and mechanotransduction. Major uncertainties concern the sufficiency of talin for activation, whether conformational change without clustering leads to activation, and whether mechanical force is required for molecular extension. Here, we reconstructed physiological integrin activation in vitro and used cellular, biochemical, biophysical, and ultrastructural analyses to show that talin binding is sufficient to activate integrin alphaIIbbeta3. Furthermore, we synthesized nanodiscs, each bearing a single lipid-embedded integrin, and used them to show that talin activates unclustered integrins leading to molecular extension in the absence of force or other membrane proteins. Thus, we provide the first proof that talin binding is sufficient to activate and extend membrane-embedded integrin alphaIIbbeta3, thereby resolving numerous controversies and enabling molecular analysis of reconstructed integrin signaling