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This report contains the history and increases of the debt limit for the second time in 2008.

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Asian Pacific Americans have served in both houses of Congress representing California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Oregon, Virginia, American Samoa, and Guam. They have served in leadership positions, including committee and subcommittee chairmanships. This report presents information on Senators, Representatives, and Delegates, including party affiliations, length and dates of service, and committee assignments.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state entitlement program that pays for medical services on behalf of certain groups of low-income persons. It is the third largest social program in the federal budget, exceeded only by Social Security and Medicare and is typically the second largest spending item for states. This report discusses prescription drug policies under the program.

This report is one of a series on the legislative process. It contains a guide to individuals seated on the Senate Dais.

This report discusses the national security problem of China's role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response, including legislation, since the mid-1990's.

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This report discusses the President’s compensation and the three most recent increases to the salary enacted in 1949 (81st Congress), 1969 (91st Congress), and 1999 (106th Congress).

This report contains an overview and description of the Even Start program. It also contains the Even Start evaluations and an assessment whether the program should be eliminated and what improvements can be made.

This report describes the several types of waste streams that cruise ships may discharge and emit. It identifies the complex body of international and domestic laws that address pollution from cruise ships. It then describes federal and state legislative activity concerning cruise ships in Alaskan waters and activities in a few other states.

This report provides an overview of aspects of ESEA Title I-A that have been focus of substantial debate as the 110th Congress considers whether to extend and amend the ESEA.

This short paper summarizes the results we presented at the LEHTSC2007 conference. Recent doping and temperature dependence of angle-resolved photoemission data of underdoped superconducting cuprate Bi{sub 2}Sr{sub 2}CaCu{sub 2}O{sub 8} (Bi2212) have revealed the presence of two energy scales exhibiting distinct behaviours. One, which dominates the antinodal region, increases with underdoping and does not show obvious temperature dependence across Tc. This is a behaviour known for more than a decade and considered as the general gap behaviour in the underdoped regime. The other, which dominates the near-nodal regime, does not increase with less doping and opens near Tc via a BCS-like temperature dependence. This is a behaviour not previously observed in the single particle spectra. We propose a momentum space picture of these two energy scales or energy gaps that could resolve the seemingly contradictory gap measurements among different experimental techniques. Our results have also further constrained the theory for high-Tc superconducting cuprates.

This is the annual project report for the ASGRAD project - Amorphous Semiconductors for Gamma Radiation Detection. We describe progress in the development of new materials for portable, room temperature, gammaradiation detection at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. High Z, high resistivity, amorphous semiconductors are being designed for use as solid-state detectors at near ambient temperatures; their principles of operation are analogous to single-crystal semiconducting detectors. Compared to single crystals, amorphous semiconductors have the advantages of rapid, cost-effective, bulk-fabrication; nearnet-shape fabrication of complicated geometries; compositional flexibility; and greater electronic property control. The main disadvantage is reduced-charge carrier mobility. The focus of this project is to develop optimized amorphous semiconductor materials for gamma detection applications that leverage their material advantages while mitigating their limitations. During the second year of this project, several important milestones were accomplished. Major accomplishments were: (1) Significant processing - property and composition - property correlations were determined for Cd-Ge-As glasses; (2) Radiation response testing was successfully demonstrated on three different amorphous semiconductor materials (Cd-Ge-As, As-Se, and As-Se-Te systems) at ambient and near ambient temperatures; (3) Advanced, enabling Schottky contacts were developed for Cd-Ge-As compounds, this will allow these materials to perform at ambient temperatures; and (4) The collaborative …

A gap-filled, quality assessed eddy covariance dataset has recently become available for the AmeriFluxnetwork. This dataset uses standard processing and produces commonly used science variables. This shared dataset enables robust comparisons across different analyses. Of course, there are many remaining questions. One of those is how to define 'during the day' which is an important concept for many analyses. Some studies have used local time ?for example 9am to 5pm; others have used thresholds on photosynthetic active radiation (PAR). A related question is how to derive quantities such as the Bowen ratio. Most studies compute the ratio of the averages of the latent heat (LE) and sensible heat (H). In this study, we use different methods of defining 'during the day' for GPP, LE, and H. We evaluate the differences between methods in two ways. First, we look at a number of statistics of GPP. Second, we look at differences in the derived Bowen ratio. Our goal is not science per se, but rather informatics in support of the science.

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We discuss two recent calculations of higher-order QeD corrections to scattering of transversely polarized hadrons. A basic concept underlying much of the theoretical description of high-energy hadronic scattering is the factorization theorem, which states that large momentum-transfer reactions may be factorized into long-distance pieces that contain information on the structure of the nucleon in terms of its parton densities, and parts that are short-distance and describe the hard interactions of the partons. Two crucial points are that on the one hand the long-distance contributions are universal, i.e., they are the same in any inelastic reaction under consideration, and that on the other hand the short-distance pieces depend only on the large scales related to the large momentum transfer in the overall reaction and, therefore, may be evaluated using QCD perturbation theory. The lowest order for the latter can generally only serve to give a rough description of the reaction under study. It merely captures the main features, but does not usually provide a quantitative understanding. The first-order ('next-to-leading order' (NLO)) corrections are generally indispensable in order to arrive at a firmer theoretical prediction for hadronic cross sections, and in some cases even an all-order resummation of large perturbative corrections is …

Deletion of 11q23-q24 is frequent in a diverse variety of malignancies, including breast and colorectal carcinoma, implicating the presence of a tumor suppressor gene at that chromosomal region. We show here that LARG, from 11q23, has functional characteristics of a tumor suppressor. We examined a 6-Mb region on 11q23 by high-resolution deletion mapping, utilizing both loss of heterozygosity (LOH) analysis and microarray comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). LARG (also called ARHGEF12), identified from the analyzed region, was underexpressed in 34% of primary breast carcinomas and 80% of breast cancer cell lines including the MCF-7 line. Multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification on 30 primary breast cancers and six breast cancer cell lines showed that LARG had the highest frequency of deletion compared to the BCSC-1 and TSLC1 genes, two known candidate tumor suppressor genes from 11q. In vitro analysis of breast cancer cell lines that underexpress LARG showed that LARG could be reactivated by trichostatin A, a histone deacetylase inhibitor, but not by 5-Aza-2{prime}-deoxycytidine, a demethylating agent. Bisulfite sequencing and quantitative high-throughput analysis of DNA methylation confirmed the lack of CpG island methylation in LARG in breast cancer. Restoration of LARG expression in MCF-7 cells by stable transfection resulted in reduced proliferation and …

Emergent sandbar habitat (ESH) in the Missouri River Mainstem System is a critical habitat element for several federally listed bird species: the endangered interior least tern (Sterna antillarum) and the threatened Northern Great Plains piping plover (Charadrius melodus). The Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) provides the primary operational management of the Missouri River and is responsible under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to take actions within its authorities to conserve listed species. To comply with the 2000 USFWS BiOp and the 2003 amended USFWS BiOp, the Corps has created habitats below Gavins Point Dam using mechanical means. Initial monitoring indicates that constructed sandbars provide suitable habitat features for nesting and foraging least terns and piping plovers. Terns and plovers are using constructed sandbars and successfully reproducing at or above levels stipulated in the BiOp. However, whether such positive impacts will persist cannot yet be adequately assessed at this time.

During Run-8, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provided collisions of spin-polarized proton beams at two interaction regions. Physics data were taken with vertical orientation of the beam polarization, which in the 'Yellow' RHIC ring was significantly lower than in previous years. We present recent developments and improvements as well as the luminosity and polarization performance achieved during Run-8, and we discuss possible causes of the not as high as previously achieved polarization performance of the 'Yellow' ring.

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Phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT pathway aberrations are common in cancer. By applying mass spectroscopy-based sequencing and reverse phase protein arrays to 547 human breast cancers and 41 cell lines, we determined the subtype specificity and signaling effects of PIK3CA, AKT and PTEN mutations, and the effects of PIK3CA mutations on responsiveness to PI3K inhibition in-vitro and on outcome after adjuvant tamoxifen. PIK3CA mutations were more common in hormone receptor positive (33.8%) and HER2-positive (24.6%) than in basal-like tumors (8.3%). AKT1 (1.4%) and PTEN (2.3%) mutations were restricted to hormone receptor-positive cancers with PTEN protein levels also being significantly lower in hormone receptor-positive cancers. Unlike AKT1 mutations, PIK3CA (39%) and PTEN (20%) mutations were more common in cell lines than tumors, suggesting a selection for these but not AKT1 mutations during adaptation to culture. PIK3CA mutations did not have a significant impact on outcome in 166 hormone receptor-positive breast cancer patients after adjuvant tamoxifen. PIK3CA mutations, in comparison with PTEN loss and AKT1 mutations, were associated with significantly less and indeed inconsistent activation of AKT and of downstream PI3K/AKT signaling in tumors and cell lines, and PTEN loss and PIK3CA mutation were frequently concordant, suggesting different contributions to pathophysiology. PTEN loss but not …

A new commercial cutting tool software package replaced an internally created legacy system. This report describes the issues that surfaced during the migration and installation of the commercial package and the solutions employed. The primary issues discussed are restructuring the data between two drastically different database schemas and the creation of individual component graphics.

In calculating the strengths of depolarizing resonances it may be convenient to reformulate the equations of spin motion in a coordinate system based on the actual trajectory of the particle, as introduced by Kondratenko, rather than the conventional one based on a reference orbit. It is shown that resonance strengths calculated by the conventional and the revised formalisms are identical. Resonances induced by radiofrequency dipoles or solenoids are also treated; with rf dipoles it is essential to consider not only the direct effect of the dipole but also the contribution from oscillations induced by it.