Expanding Voter Registration for Low-Income Virginians: The Impact of the National Voter Registration Act

Voter registrations in Virginia public assistance agencies declined by 87 percent between 1995-1996 and 2005-2006, despite increased enrollment in public benefit programs like food stamps. Field investigators in early 2008 confirmed that state offices were not offering voter registration, as required by the National Voter Registration Act. Working cooperatively with Demos and its state partners, Virginia has achieved a dramatic change of course. The first several data reports indicate an eightfold increase in voter registrations

Using SCUBA to place upper limits on arcsecond scale CMB anisotropies at 850 microns

The SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope has already had an impact on cosmology by detecting relatively large numbers of dusty galaxies at high redshift. Apart from identifying well-detected sources, such data can also be mined for information about fainter sources and their correlations, as revealed through low level fluctuations in SCUBA maps. As a first step in this direction we analyse a small SCUBA data-set as if it were obtained from a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) differencing experiment. This enables us to place limits on CMB anisotropy at 850 microns. Expressed as Q_{flat}, the quadrupole expectation value for a flat power spectrum, the limit is 152 microKelvin at 95 per cent confidence, corresponding to C_0^{1/2} < 355 microKelvin for a Gaussian autocorrelation function, with a coherence angle of about 20--25 arcsec; These results could easily be reinterpretted in terms of any other fluctuating sky signal. This is currently the best limit for these scales at high frequency, and comparable to limits at similar angular scales in the radio. Even with such a modest data-set, it is possible to put a constraint on the slope of the SCUBA counts at the faint end, since even randomly distributed sources would lead to fluctuations. Future analysis of sky correlations in more extensive data-sets ought to yield detections, and hence additional information on source counts and clustering.Comment: 12 pages, 9 postscript figures, uses mn.st