Future U.S. national security strategy is likely to be profoundly affected by the ongoing, rapid evolution of cyberspace--the global information infrastructure--and in particular by the growing dependence of the U.S. military and other national institutions and infrastructures on potentially vulnerable elements of the U.S. national information infrastructure. To examine these effects, the authors conducted a series of exercises employing a methodology known as the Day After ... in which participants are presented with an information warfare crisis scenario and asked to advise the president on possible responses. Participants included senior national security community members and representatives from security-related telecommunications and information-systems industries. The report synthesizes the exercise results and presents the instructions from the exercise materials in their entirety.

The U.S. armed services have different methods and processes for promoting enlisted personnel. All of the services, however, aim to ensure that promotion outcomes correspond to substantive differences in personnel quality. This report provides a snapshot of how the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force go about measuring duty performance, leadership potential, experience, knowledge, and skills to determine who among its enlisted force merits promotion, when they are eligible for promotion, and at what level promotion decisions are made. This report provides an overview of the enlisted promotion system in the 1990s as retention issues again move to the forefront of Defense Department concerns.

Particular focus on advances in understanding insect species and landscape ecology, which provide the foundations for effective IPM Covers latest research on classical, conservation and augmentative biological control Reviews key developments in use of entomopathogenic fungi, viruses and nematodes

This report summarizes more than a decade of research on how well neighborhood parks in Los Angeles support physical activity. Between 2003 and 2015, researchers at the RAND Corporation studied 83 parks in the city of Los Angeles, conducting thousands of observations and fielding nearly 28,000 surveys of park users and local residents. About half of all residents said that they used their neighborhood parks, most of them routinely. Parks are also the top venue that people choose for engaging in routine exercise. The majority of residents, including residents of low-income, high-crime neighborhoods, consider their neighborhood parks safe or very safe. We also found that parks get more use when they are larger, when they have more facilities, when they offer more planned activities and events, and when their services and activities are marketed to the public. While there is frequent activity in city parks, there is room for improvement. Parks are underutilized by girls and teenage girls, and they are especially underutilized by seniors. Overall, nearly half of all Los Angeles city residents living within 1 mile of a park did not use that park. Most did not know about the activities that were offered, and the majority of residents and more than a third of park users did not know the park’s staff. Recommendations include devoting more resources to outreach and marketing. Los Angeles should also devote a larger proportion of its budget to city parks: Park spending per capita in Los Angeles is currently less than half of the per capita amounts that are spent by New York, Seattle, and San Francisco.

This collection features three peer-reviewed literature reviews on pesticide residues in agriculture. The first chapter outlines the ways in which pesticide use can lead to increased pest problems, such as pest resurgence and replacement, and the development of pesticide resistance. The chapter examines current strategies for mitigating the impacts of pesticides and refers to a detailed case study on the diamondback moth (DBM) to demonstrate the practical application of these strategies. The second chapter explores the threat of pesticide poisoning to human health, either via deliberate self-poisoning or via occupational exposure. It discusses how best to monitor exposure to pesticides, as well as how to minimize the human health risks that may arise as a result of their use/exposure. The authors refer to a case study on smallholder cotton farmers in the Republic of Benin to emphasise the global pesticide poisoning crisis. The final chapter reviews the environmental impacts of pesticide use in agriculture, focussing on their contribution to global human and ecological health issues. It provides an overview of how pesticides are currently addressed in emission inventory and impact assessment, and discusses the relevance of spatiotemporal variability in modelling emissions and the toxicity and ecotoxicity impacts of pesticides. What is an Instant Insight? An Instant Insight gives you immediate access to key research on a topic, allowing you to get right to the heart of a subject in an instant and empowering you to contribute to sustainable agriculture

This document summarizes the requirements for promotion of enlisted personnel within each of the services of the U.S. military. This document is not a historical review and does not assess or evaluate the promotion systems. Furthermore, this document does not address the enlisted promotion systems used for the reserves. There is marked variety in the specific requirements for promotion across services. However, there is similarity in the tiered structure of the services' promotion systems. For example, each service developed a tiered enlisted promotion system (Figure S.1). Basically, the first level of the promotion systems controls the promotion of enlisted personnel up to paygrades E-3/E-4. At this level, advancement is noncompetitive and requirements are minimal; generally enlisted personnel need only meet time-in-service (TIS) and time-in-grade (TIG) requirements for advancement. The middle tier covers a wider range of enlisted personnel between paygrades E-4 and E-5/E-7 with competitive advancement based primarily on point systems. The advancement requirements in the top level vary across services. However, at this level, promotion decisions are made primarily by board reviews.

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to improve student outcomes-particularly high school graduation and college attendance among low-income minority students-by increasing student access to effective teaching. The RAND Corporation worked with the foundation to collect and warehouse data from participating sites and to produce annual data dashboards that presented quantitative information about key indicators of the progress of the reforms. During the course of this project, the RAND data team conducted four key activities: (1) defining the metrics that would be used to monitor and assess annual progress and that would appear in the dashboard, (2) collecting the data from the sites to compute the metrics, (3) managing and standardizing the data, and (4) creating the dashboard and reporting the metrics to the sites and the foundation. This report discusses the challenges in defining metrics and collecting data. It also describes how the RAND data team addressed those challenges. Specifically, the authors examine challenges and recommendations in four areas: (1) issues related to defining metrics used to track system performance; (2) issues related to data collection; (3) issues related to managing and standardizing data across sites; and (4) issues related to data confidentiality, data sensitivity, and partnerships. The authors also draw overarching lessons related to the systematic use of education data for periodic program monitoring.