Buying Broadband a Boost: The Information Super Buy-Way?

The federal government and many state governments are making efforts to increase or improve access to broadband internet services. With this attention in the states, communication companies are spending millions of dollars on state campaigns and hiring thousands of state-level lobbyists.Fast FactsThe five communications companies in the report hired 2,609 lobbyists around the country. Again, AT&T and Verizon led the pack, with 1,373 and 868, respectively.The five communications companies this report gave almost evenly to Republican and Democratic candidates across the country. Republicans received $7.6 million and Democrats received$6.8 million. However, the companies gave $6 million to Republican party committees, almost twice the$3.5 million given to Democratic party committees.California received the most contributions from the five communications companies in the report, by far. Recipients in California got $8.2 million. Florida was second with$2.8 million.Of the five communications companies studied, AT&T and Verizon dominated the contributing, giving $14.9 million and$10.8 million respectively. Qwest, Embarq, and U.S. Cellular combined for an additional $2.4 million

Liquid Assets? Industry Raised The Bar to Resist Alcohol Taxes

States coping with the budget woes often raise taxes to help cover shortfalls. Frequently, "sin taxes" are among the first to face a potential increase. Businesses in the alcohol trade have responded with familiar tactics, contributing millions of dollars to state political campaigns all over the country.Fast FactsDuring the 2001-2007 period, California political parties and campaigns received $13 million from the alcohol industry, more than any other state. Illinois was second with$6.6 million.Many states are considering raising taxes on alcohol to help address budget issues. Over the last several years, the alcohol industry gave more than $34 million to winning candidates and to officials not up for election: the very people who decide the fate of legislation affecting alcohol tax levels.During the 2001-2007 time period, the alcohol industry gave$62.5 million to state political parties and campaigns. Anheuser-Busch and its affiliates led the pack, giving nearly $10 million

Asymptotic enumeration of magic series

A magic series is a set of natural numbers that, by virtue of its size, sum, and maximum value, could fill a row of a normal magic square. In this paper, we derive an exact two-dimensional integral representation for the number of magic series of order N. By applying the stationary phase approximation, we develop an expansion in powers of 1/N for the number of magic series and calculate the first few terms. We find excellent agreement between our approximation and the known exact values. Related results are presented for magic cube and hypercube series, bimagic series, and trimagic series

Immigration Measures: Support On Both Sides Of The Fence

Immigration issues have inspired hot debates in recent years. This was true in 2008, as four states -- Florida, Missouri, Oregon and Arizona -- had immigrant-related measures on their ballots. Only Oregon and Arizona had committees relating to these ballot measures. Take a look at who supported and who opposed these measures.Fast FactsIn Arizona, committees concerned with a business-backed 2008 ballot measure that would have made changes to the state's laws regarding the hiring of illegal immigrants garnered $1,141,546, over$1 million of which was raised in support of the measure.The committee supporting Arizona's business-backed Proposition 202 in 2008 raised $22,492 from individuals, or 2.2 percent of its$1 million total. The committee opposing the measure raised $28,260 from individuals, or 20.1 percent of its$140,350 total.The committee supporting Arizona's Proposition 202 in 2008, which would have made various changes to the state's laws on the hiring of illegal immigrants, raised more than $1 million.$879,634 came from the General Business sector, mostly from a $802,634 sum from an organization of business leaders called Wake Up Arizona

The Hipparcos Transit Data: What, why and how?

The Hipparcos Transit Data are a collection of partially reduced, fully calibrated observations of (mostly) double and multiple stars obtained with the ESA Hipparcos astrometry satellite. The data are publicly available, as part of the CD-ROM set distributed with the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues (ESA SP--1200, 1997), for about a third of the Hipparcos Catalogue entries including all confirmed or suspected non-single stars. The Transit Data consist of signal modulation parameters derived from the individual transits of the targets across the Hipparcos focal grid. The Transit Data permit re-reduction of the satellite data for individual objects, using arbitrarily complex object models in which time-variable photometric as well as geometric characteristics may be taken into account. We describe the structure and contents of the Transit Data files and give examples of how the data can be used. Some of the applications use standard astronomical software: Difmap or AIPS for aperture synthesis imaging, and GaussFit for detailed model fitting. Fortran code converting the data into formats suitable for these application programs has been made public in order to encourage and facilitate the use of Hipparcos Transit Data.Comment: A&AS, accepted for publication, 17 pages, 9 figures, 1 Table, Software available via http://www.astro.lu.se/~lennart/TD/index.html, Figures 4, 5, 6 and 7 need to copied separately, A complete postscript file can be found at http://www.astro.lu.se/~lennart/TD/ds1699.ps.g