Considers legislation to authorize location of Federal offices in D.C. suburbs.

The origins and development of the modern American emergency state From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends. The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events. Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.

Over three hundred years ago, Galileo is reported to have said, "The laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics." Often mathematics and science go hand in hand, with one helping develop and improve the other. Discoveries in science, for example, open up new advances in statistics, computer science, operations research, and pure and applied mathematics which in turn enabled new practical technologies and advanced entirely new frontiers of science. Despite the interdependency that exists between these two disciplines, cooperation and collaboration between mathematical scientists and scientists have only occurred by chance. To encourage new collaboration between the mathematical sciences and other fields and to sustain present collaboration, the National Research Council (NRC) formed a committee representing a broad cross-section of scientists from academia, federal government laboratories, and industry. The goal of the committee was to examine the mechanisms for strengthening interdisciplinary research between mathematical sciences and the sciences, with a strong focus on suggesting the most effective mechanisms of collaboration. Strengthening the Linkages Between the Sciences and the Mathematical Sciences provides the findings and recommendations of the committee as well as case studies of cross-discipline collaboration, the workshop agenda, and federal agencies that provide funding for such collaboration.