Jon Krosnick Thank you Karen. Thank you all for coming and I want to begin by thanking the University of Michigan for offering the opportunity to us to join them in this enterprise and to let everybody in Ann Arbor know that a little piece of my heart is there and I'm very happy that we can join in this project together. But a big piece of my heart is here in Palo Alto and I especially want to thank Karen Cook and Chris Thompson and Chris Hennessy and everybody here who has made it possible for us to create this project here as we progress into the future. I will tell you, I'm sure in Ann Arbor that as Skip shared the news with folks that this grant had been funded the response he got mostly was "Terrific!" And I will tell you that the response here has been a little different. When I tell people here the grant was funded they say "Terrific, what is it?" So at various requests have decided to take two minutes and explain that to you very quickly with these slides that the folks at Michigan will see on paper. We could not begin to talk about this study and what it means without acknowledging the creators who put it together in the first place. These are photographs of the four professors who did that, the arrow here in this first one points to Angus Campbell, this is Phil Converse, this is Warren Miller and this is Don Stokes. The four of these gentlemen put together a vision for the project that continues today, 50 years later and we follow in their footsteps. They intellectually established a direction for research on voting with this book called "The American Voter" which for some reason had to be published in an unabridged edition as you can see here because it did appear in an abridged edition for undergrads as well. This book must be cited in anything that gets written on voting and elections these days, still, even though it was published in 1960, many years later. It's also been flattered through imitation many times with books for example, "The Changing American Voter," "The Unchanging American Voter," "The New American Voter," "The Disappearing American Voter," and "The Duping of the American Voter." The tradition continues and we plan to be there with more data. The funding for this project began from the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and has been supported for decades now by the National Science Foundation. We thank them very much as well for their support. For anyone who wonders, we are involved in asking two fundamental questions: "Why do citizens vote and other don't? and "How do citizens evaluate candidates and select the candidates they vote for?" That's the focus of this project. And as you heard from James Jackson earlier, this has been done remarkably ambitiously and I tell you this only to give you a sense of the history that we feel we are now taking the helm of. So every presidential election year since 1948 has been the occasion for a national survey, that's 15 multi-wave national surveys with large national samples and interviews at least an hour before and then with the same folks for an hour and after the election. Face-to-face interviewing with respondents has been the gold standard for survey methodology and it will continue to be what we do now. And on top of all that, 27 additional studies have been conducted over the last 50 years tracking congressional elections. I just list here every year in which a time series survey was done by the election study, just because it's a lot of numbers and it somehow shows, I think, more vividly here than in the prior slide just how much work has gone on. There have been a series of more ambitious designs where we re-interviewed the same people many times over longer periods and this is a list of some of those studies, as early as the 1950s and as recently as 2000. And we have also done a series of pilot studies developing new methodologies for additional surveys and we will continue that traditional as well. On top of all that, we've had a series of special design studies looking at methodology, looking at data being collected every single day of the campaign over a period of months, and other designs as well. I’m not going to read this entire list of variables to you which stretches across 3 slides, but this gives you a sense of, “how can you fill up two hours of interviewing with questions?” We ask questions on all kinds of things shown here on this first slide, and this next slide, and this last one. I'm happy to send you the slides if you’d like to read the list in detail or you can go to our website. I just thought I’d show off one very quick figure which might be reassuring to those who wonder. This is the actual election result of the proportion of votes achieved by the winning candidate as compared to the proportion of votes reported by our survey respondents having gone to that one candidate. As you can see at the bottom of this figure, the correlation between the 2 lines is .92, so if you wonder, "Are surveys actually worth the trouble?" Well at least this is some of the evidence that there is some validity to the data. The future of NSF support for NES comes as, I think, Professor Coleman said, a series of workshops that NSF held reconsidering what the National Election Studies should be in the future. And we are delighted that those workshops came out in support of an ambitious vision and as you heard, the budget is nearly tripled, and you heard as well from James Jackson that the study design involves multiple parts: the traditional time series, pre and post in 2008, the panel study that will stretch across 21 interviews, questions to be put on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that will allow us to measure the political behavior every year in both a sample of children and their parents and their grandparents. And in addition we will do a pilot study to develop new measures and perhaps most excitingly, we have a plan to ambitiously welcome in the participation of scholars of many disciplines. And on that note I will pass the baton to Skip who will explain our vision in that regard.