If you've ever golfed or know a golfer or just love a story with a happy ending, A Really Good Day will capture and hold your attention from start to finish. It follows amateur golfer Scott Hanover as he has the most amazing day of his life. Along the way he manages to enlighten a golf-hating sportscaster, provide salvation to a washed up sports agent, and humble and educate a pretentious amateur golfer, Andrew Patterson, who finds his chance to turn pro in serious jeopardy.Interspersed with the humorous, touching, and sometimes unbelievable scenes, are bits of golf philosophy that can be applied to all aspects of life. Set on the beautiful George Dunne National Golf Course in Oak Forest, IL, you will follow a rich mix of characters along eighteen holes of laughter, tears and suspense and find yourself rooting for the biggest underdog in history. When it almost comes to an end after an unexpected incident on the 17th hole you will be biting your nails waiting to see what happens.

To offer insights into the challenges faced by active-duty service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and their families in coping with these challenges, and the adequacy of defense manpower policy in assisting members and families, this monograph draws on the perspectives of economics, sociology, and psychology; provides a formal model of deployment and retention; reviews published work; reports on the results of focus groups conducted in each of the services; and presents findings from an analysis of survey data.

The military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the United States' longest military engagements since the Vietnam War and the most severe test of the all-volunteer force, with the possible exception of the Gulf War in 1991. More than 1.5 million service members were deployed between 2002 and 2007, many of them more than once, and the fast pace of deployment has been felt throughout the military. Soldiers and marines have faced a steady cycle of predeployment training and exercises, deployment itself, and postdeployment reassignment and unit regeneration. Service members not on deployment are nonetheless busy planning and supporting military operations, caring for injured service members, and attending to recruiting, training, and other responsibilities at home and abroad. Many service members are married, and deployments have disrupted their family routines and created stress from separation and reintegration. At the same time, the long hours, tension, uncertainty, and violence of deployments have stressed the service members sent to fight. Remarkably, despite the pressures from deployments on service members and their families, reenlistment rates have been stable since 2002. The purpose of this monograph is to enhance understanding of whether deployments affected service members' willingness to stay in the military, as the stress caused by deployments would suggest, and how it was that reenlistment held steady.

Focusing on military wives' contribution to family income, the authors find that, in contrast to civilian wives, military wives are willing to accept lower wages rather than search longer for jobs. They work less than civilian wives if they have young children but more if their children are older; are less probable to work as they get older; and respond to changes in the unemployment rate as workers with a permanent attachment to the work force, not as "added workers."

Is the United States in danger of losing its competitive edge in science and technology "S & T"? In response to this concern, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness asked RAND to convene a meeting, held on November 8, 2006, to review evidence presented by experts from academia, government, and the private sector. The papers presented at the meeting addressed a wide range of issues surrounding the United States' current and future S & T competitiveness, including science policy, the quantitative assessment of S & T capability, globalization, the rise of Asia "particularly China and India", innovation, trade, technology diffusion, the increase in foreign-born S & T students and workers in the United States, new directions in the management and compensation of federal S & T workers, and national security and the defense industry. These papers provide a partial survey of the facts, challenges, and questions posed by the potential erosion of U.S.S & T capability. The importance of S & T to U.S. prosperity and security warrants that policymakers pay careful attention to the various high-level reports issued over the past ve years that warn of pressures on the U.S. lead in S & T. The intellectual point of embarkation for the RAND meeting was the foremost recent such report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, by the National Academy of Sciences.

Is the United States in danger of losing its competitive edge in science and technology (S & T)? This concern has been raised repeatedly since the end of the Cold War, most recently in a wave of reports in the mid-2000s suggesting that globalization and the growing strength of other nations in S & T, coupled with inadequate U.S. investments in research and education, threaten the United States' position of leadership in S & T. Galama and Hosek examine these claims and contrast them with relevant data, including trends in research and development investment; information on the size, composition, and pay of the U.S. science and engineering workforce; and domestic and international education statistics. They find that the United States continues to lead the world in science and technology and has kept pace or grown faster than other nations on several measurements of S & T performance; that it generally benefits from the influx of foreign S & T students and workers; and that the United States will continue to benefit from the development of new technologies by other nations as long as it maintains the capability to acquire and implement such technologies. However, U.S. leadership in science and technology must not be taken for granted, and Galama and Hosek conclude with recommendations to strengthen the U.S.S & T enterprise, including measures to facilitate the immigration of highly skilled labor and improve the U.S. education system.

Dr. Atticus Klammeraffe, Dr. At for short, is not a morning person, but an early emergency call starts a series of events which land him in the middle of several mysteries. Atty, as he is known affectionately by his friends, is a veterinarian with a house call practice on the north side of Chicago. He also has the unfortunate distinction of bearing a passable resemblance to the actor, Oliver Platt. He is a connoisseur of fine burgers and fries, likes his coffee black and strong, and never met a cheesecake he didn't like. He is assisted by Sheila, who operates a remote receptionist service and answers Atty's calls. Her shameless flirting and playful nagging show Atty how much she cares for him. The mysteries start to pile up when an apparently simple illness fails to respond to his best efforts. Then the unexpected death of another patient leads to a shocking discovery. Finally, a DOA dog, snagged by customs from a flight from Khazakhstan at O'Hare Airport, puts him in the middle of a Homeland Security smuggling investigation. There he meets Chicago cop, Marcy Avers, who uses her skills as a cop to track down the smugglers, and her feminine wiles to help Atty trace the source of a deadly infection. Give a Dog a Bone Is filled with laughs, tears, and unexpected turns at every page. It's a great read for pet lovers and mystery fans. Once you start, you won't be able to put it down.

Contains the testimony of James Hosek and Beth J. Asch, March 3, 1999 as well as a follow-up letter dated April 5, 1999 with further assessments.

The purpose of this report is to analyze the employment and earnings of military wives compared with those of civilian wives between 1987 and 1999. Today's military is a military of families. About half of active-duty members are married as they enter their fifth year of service, and about three-fourths are married as they enter their tenth year of service. Therefore, in supporting the service member, manpower policy must often also support the member's family. Family considerations are apparent in policies on housing, health care, child care, dependents' schools, and compensation for separation from family members. Many military spouses work in the labor force and contribute to their family's material well-being, yet at the same time they must accommodate the demands the military makes of the member in the form of training, drills, inspections, education, exercises, peacetime operations, and hostile deployment. Also, the member is periodically reassigned, and permanent change-of-station (PCS) moves generally require the working wife to leave one job and find another. Thus, this report assesses the labor supply and wage of the military wife, recognizing the wife's contribution to family earnings and realizing that the military's demands on the member also affect the wife. The analysis is based on a sample of husband-and-wife families drawn from the 1988-2000 Current Population Survey March Supplement and containing retrospective information for the previous year. The sample has two subsamples: one for military families and one for civilian families. We weighted each subsample for each year to reflect the male age, education, and race/ethnicity composition of the active-duty force in that year. We focused on military wives because there were not enough observations to study the husbands of female military members.

This report assesses the contribution of defense spending in Hawaii to the overall levels of output, employment, and earnings in Hawaii's economy. The analysis finds that spending on defense procurement and personnel was related to 18 percent of Hawaii's 2009 GDP and 101,000 jobs. A sensitivity analysis indicates that defense personnel savings rates and where some earnings are spent could decrease the result by around 10 percent.