Are Agricultural PACs Monolithic? An Empirical Investigation

This paper analyzes donation strategies of agricultural PACs by examining and testing a variety of variables theoretically related to contributions and formally testing for equivalence of donation strategies across PACs of varying levels of aggregation. Both chambers of the 108th Congress were modeled, with particular attention paid to the targeting of different power or influence sources within the legislature. Results showed significant heterogeneity across PAC subaggregates within a chamber, as well as between chambers, in terms of overall strategy and magnitude of marginal impacts. Evidence supporting the conditional party government hypothesis where PACs target top Party officials rather than influential legislative members was mixed and subindustry specific, with chairmanships apparently less important in the Senate than in the House.Monolithic Behavior, Political Action Committee, Political Donation Strategies, Tobit model, Agricultural and Food Policy,

AALS Constitutional Law Panel on \u3ci\u3eBrown\u3c/i\u3e, another Council of Nicaea?

When considering the product of the AALS Constitutional Law Panel, entitled What Brown Should Have Said, held in January 2000, in Washington, D.C., we have experienced considerable disorientation. We therefore ask the question asked by Lucretia in Machievelli\u27s play, The Mandragola, Do you mean it or are you laughing at me? We fear that the Panelists may be laughing at us. Because, in short, their writings criticize the formalism that they use in the panel court opinions. In this article, we pick four of the Panelists, more or less at random, and confront the question of whether their writings before and after Brown square with their panel Brown opinions

Analysis of a Low-Pass Filter Employing a 4-pin Capacitor

Capacitors with two or three leads tend to make poor low-pass filters at high frequencies (e.g. greater than 100 MHz) due to the mutual inductance between the input and output sides of the filter. This work proposes a four-lead low-pass filter capacitor design that minimizes the magnetic flux coupling between the input and output. Measurements of a prototype capacitor confirm that it performs significantly better than a typical two-lead capacitor at high frequencies

Development and Validation of a ReaxFF Reactive Force Field for Cu Cation/Water Interactions and Copper Metal/Metal Oxide/Metal Hydroxide Condensed Phases

To enable large-scale reactive dynamic simulations of copper oxide/water and copper ion/water interactions we have extended the ReaxFF reactive force field framework to Cu/O/H interactions. To this end, we employed a multistage force field development strategy, where the initial training set (containing metal/metal oxide/metal hydroxide condensed phase data and [Cu(H_2O)_n]^(2+) cluster structures and energies) is augmented by single-point quantum mechanices (QM) energies from [Cu(H_2O)_n]^(2+) clusters abstracted from a ReaxFF molecular dynamics simulation. This provides a convenient strategy to both enrich the training set and to validate the final force field. To further validate the force field description we performed molecular dynamics simulations on Cu^(2+)/water systems. We found good agreement between our results and earlier experimental and QM-based molecular dynamics work for the average Cu/water coordination, Jahn−Teller distortion, and inversion in [Cu(H_2O)_6]^(2+) clusters and first- and second-shell O−Cu−O angular distributions, indicating that this force field gives a satisfactory description of the Cu-cation/water interactions. We believe that this force field provides a computationally convenient method for studying the solution and surface chemistry of metal cations and metal oxides and, as such, has applications for studying protein/metal cation complexes, pH-dependent crystal growth/dissolution, and surface catalysis

Synthetic biology - the next phase of biotechnology and genetic engineering. TAB-Fokus

Scientific and technological progress allows to genetically redesign natural organisms in ever more profound ways (synbio in the broader sense). In the long term, the aim is to create artificial biological systems (synbio in the narrow sense). Application areas are chemical and energy production, environmental protection as well as the medical sector. Considering the current, early state of research and development, it is impossible to forecast reliably which approaches of synbio will prevail against procedures that make use of the available biological diversity or that are limited to more subtle interventions. Risk assessment and the evaluation of substantially modified organisms will require the development and exploration of new methods and procedures. Opportunities for different societal groups to participate in the responsible development of synbio are ranging from stakeholder involvement in setting research agendas to DIY biology. Dealing with intellectual property within the framework of an increasingly digital economy will also represent a major challenge for the future use of synbio

Numerical Modeling of Electrostatic Discharge Generators

The discharge current and the transient fields of an electrostatic discharge (ESD) generator in the contact mode are numerically simulated using the finite-difference time-domain method. At first the static field is established. Then the conductivity of the relay contact is changed, which initiates the discharge process. The simulated data are used to study the effect of design choices on the current and fields. They are compared to measured field and current data using multidecade broadband field and current sensors. The model allows accurate prediction of the fields and currents of ESD generators, thus it can be used to evaluate different design choices