This report provides an overview on Coordinated Party Expenditures in Federal Elections.Federal campaign finance law provides political parties with three main options :direct contributions,coordinated expenditures,independent expenditures.

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This report provides a side-by-side comparison of the HEA reauthorization proposals in the Senate-passed version of S. 1642 and the House committee-passes version of H.R. 4137 to current law.

This report examines the use of across-the-board spending cuts in the end-of-session appropriations acts for FY2000-FY2006 identified above, assessing the budgetary context leading to the spending cut, recounting the legislative action on the spending cut provision, and reviewing the provision’s design and implementation.

This report provides brief descriptions of the budget volumes and related documents, together with internet addresses Government Printing Office stock number, and prices to obtain the publications for FY 2008.

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On June 1, 200, the European Union (EU) began to implement a new law governing chemicals in EU commerce: Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). It is intended to protect human health and the environment from hazardous chemicals while at the same time protecting the competitiveness of European industry. This report contains information on the background and views on the law.

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This report provides an analysis of litigation regarding school financing, including an overview of the legal issues involved in such litigation and a description of the leading school finance cases at both the federal and state level.

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Aquaculture — the farming of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic animals and plants in a controlled environment — is expanding rapidly abroad, with more modest advances in the United States. This report discusses the federal laws and regulations that guide the management of resources in open ocean and near-shore coastal areas.

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This report summarizes the subsidies that are available for about 25 agricultural commodities representing about one-third of gross farm sales.

The possibility of neutron and neutrino detection using water Cerenkov detectors doped with gadolinium holds the promise of constructing very large high-efficiency detectors with wide-ranging application in basic science and national security. This study addressed two major concerns about the feasibility of such detectors: (1) the transparency of the doped water to the ultraviolet Cerenkov light, and (2) the effect of the doped water on detector materials. We report on the construction of a 19-meter water transparency measuring instrument and associated materials test tank. The first sensitive measurement of the transparency of doped water at 337nm has been made using this instrument (> 35 meters). This transparency is sufficient to proceed to the next stage of building a prototype detector. Materials testing is not yet complete, as materials must be soaked for a year or more to assess the effects. We have measured a 30% decrease in the attenuation length of 337 nm laser light after the addition of GdCl3 to pure water. The capability to measure at other wavelengths exists, and this will be done over the next few months by William Coleman, a student from LSU who will use this experiment as the topic for his Ph.D. thesis. …

Identifying small groups of lines, whose removal would cause a severe blackout, is critical for the secure operation of the electric power grid. We show how power grid vulnerability analysis can be studied as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Our analysis reveals a special structure in the formulation that can be exploited to avoid nonlinearity and approximate the original problem as a pure combinatorial problem. The key new observation behind our analysis is the correspondence between the Jacobian matrix (a representation of the feasibility boundary of the equations that describe the flow of power in the network) and the Laplacian matrix in spectral graph theory (a representation of the graph of the power grid). The reduced combinatorial problem is known as the network inhibition problem, for which we present a mixed integer linear programming formulation. Our experiments on benchmark power grids show that the reduced combinatorial model provides an accurate approximation, to enable vulnerability analyses of real-sized problems with more than 10,000 power lines.

Bursts of ~60 kHz activity on Mirnov coils occur frequently in NSTX plasmas and these are accompanied by bursts of neutral beam ion loss over a range in pitch angles. These losses have been measured with a scintillator type loss probe imaged with a high speed (>10,000 frames/s) video camera, giving the evolution of the energy and pitch angle distributions of the lost neutral beam ions over the course of the events. The instability occurs below the TAE frequency in NSTX (~100 kHz) in high beta plasmas and may be a beta driven Alfvén acoustic (BAAE) mode.

Recent research on the high-field, high-density diverted Alcator C-MOD tokamak has focussed on the plasma physics and plasma engineering required for ITER and for attractive fusion reactors. Experimental campaigns over the past two years have focused on understanding the physical mechanisms that affect the plasma performance realized with all-molybdenum walls versus walls with low-Z coatings. RF sheath rectification along flux tubes that intersect the RF antenna is found to be a major cause of localized boron erosion and impurity generation. Initial lower-hybrid current drive (LHCD) experiments (PLH < 900 kW) have demonstrated fully noninductive current drive at Ιρ ~ 1.0 MA with good efficiency, Ιdrive = 0.4PLH/neoR (MA,MW,1020m−3,m). Disruption mitigation via massive gas-jet impurity puffing has proven successful at high plasma pressure, indicating this technique has promise for implementation on ITER. Pressure gradients in the near SOL of Ohmic L-mode plasmas are observed to scale consistently as Ι 2(over)ρ, and show a significant dependence on X-point topology. Modeling of H-mode edge fueling indicates high self-screening to neutrals in the pedestal and scrape-off layer (SOL), and reproduces experimental density pedestal response to changes in neutral source. Detailed measurements of the temperature and density profiles in the near sol and fast framing …

This report describes research conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) as part of the Fish and Wildlife Program directed by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. The study evaluated the restoration potential of Snake River fall Chinook salmon spawning habitat within the impounded lower Snake River. The objective of the research was to determine if hydroelectric dam operations could be modified, within existing system constraints (e.g., minimum to normal pool levels; without partial removal of a dam structure), to increase the amount of available fall Chinook salmon spawning habitat in the lower Snake River. Empirical and modeled physical habitat data were used to compare potential fall Chinook salmon spawning habitat in the Snake River, under current and modified dam operations, with the analogous physical characteristics of an existing fall Chinook salmon spawning area in the Columbia River. The two Snake River study areas included the Ice Harbor Dam tailrace downstream to the Highway 12 bridge and the Lower Granite Dam tailrace downstream approximately 12 river kilometers. These areas represent tailwater habitat (i.e., riverine segments extending from a dam downstream to the backwater influence from the next dam downstream). We used a reference site, …

The CTMC method is used to calculate emission cross sections following charge exchange collisions involving highly charged ions of astrophysical interest and typical cometary targets. Comparison is made to experimental data obtained on the EBIT machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for O{sup 8+} projectiles impinging on different targets at a collision energy of 10 eV/amu. The theoretical cross sections are used together with ion abundances measured by the Advanced Composition Explorer as well as those obtained by a fitting procedure using laboratory emission cross sections in order to reproduce the x-ray spectrum of comet C/LINEAR S4 measured on July 14th 2001.

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The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) contracted with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to provide technical analytical support for system-wide fish passage information (BPA Project No. 2006-010-00). The goal of this project was to produce rigorous technical analysis products using independent analysts and anonymous peer reviewers. In the past, regional parties have interacted with a single entity, the Fish Passage Center to access the data, analyses, and coordination related to fish passage. This project provided an independent technical source for non-routine fish passage analyses while allowing routine support functions to be performed by other well-qualified entities.

Increasingly, research and education institutions are realizing the strategic value and challenge of deploying and supporting institutional cyberinfrastructure (CI). Cyberinfrastructure is composed of high performance computing systems, massive storage systems, visualization systems, and advanced networks to interconnect the components within and across institutions and research communities. CI also includes the professionals with expertise in scientific application and algorithm development and parallel systems operation. Unlike ?regular? IT infrastructure, the manner in which the components are configured and skills to do so are highly specific and specialized. Planning and coordinating these assets is a fundamental step toward enhancing an institution?s research competitiveness and return on personnel, technology, and facilities investments. Coordinated deployment of CI assets has implications across the institution. Consider the VC for Research whose new faculty in the Life Sciences are now asking for simulation systems rather than wet labs, or the Provost who lost another faculty candidate to a peer institution that offered computational support for research, or the VC for Administration who has seen a spike in power and cooling demands from many of the labs and office spaces being converted to house systems. These are just some of the issues that research institutions are wrestling with as …

This report is one in the series of ''POINT'' reports that over the years have presented temperature dependent cross sections for the then current version of ENDF/B. In each case I have used publicly available nuclear data (the current ENDF/B data, available online at the National Nuclear Data Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/) and publicly available computer codes (the current PREPRO codes, available on-line at the Nuclear Data Section, IAEA, Vienna, Austria http://wwwnds. iaea.or.at/ndspub/endf/prepro/). I have used these in combination to produce the temperature dependent cross sections used in applications and presented in this report. The preceding POINT 2004 report [R1] presented results for the now frozen last version of ENDF/B-VI, Release 8. The current POINT 2007 report is based on data from recently released ENDF/B-VII.0, which is the first release of ENDF/B-VII.