SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A national health policy nonprofit on Thursday announced it is making California the focal point of a long-term research project to examine whether the Affordable Care Act lives up to expectations for the uninsured.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released the initial results of interviews with 2,000 randomly selected Californians who had lacked health insurance for at least two months.

The study will follow the respondents for two years, as they examine their options under the federal health care law. The act reaches its most notable public milestone Tuesday when the exchanges that act as marketplaces for insurance shopping open for business.

The initial study, conducted from mid-July to the end of August, found a relatively favorable response regarding expectations, with about 40 percent of those who are uninsured believing the Affordable Care Act will improve their ability to get affordable health insurance. Yet it also found a huge communication gap between the law’s boosters and those who could benefit from it: About seven in 10 uninsured Californians told researchers they did not have enough information to understand how the law will affect their families.

California is home to roughly 15 percent of the nation’s uninsured residents. About 7 million people in the state were without health insurance at some point in 2012, including about 6 million adults.

Of that number, 5.5 million are expected to be able to participate in the health insurance exchange in California based on their income and immigration status, according to data contained in the Kaiser report from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

High costs and loss of a job were the most frequented reasons cited for going without health insurance.

California represents a credible laboratory to study the effects of the federal law because of its sheer size and diversity, and because the state has embraced the Affordable Care Act, said Mollyann Brodie, director of survey research at Kaiser Family Foundation headquarters in Menlo Park. The state’s health benefits exchange, called Covered California, is seen as a bellwether for the rollout of open enrollment nationwide.

While the uninsured and self-insured can begin enrolling Tuesday, actual coverage starts Jan. 1.

Brodie said the nonprofit developed the study as a way to create an independent and objective picture of the law’s consequences, rather than having its effects seen through the lens of just a few individuals. The idea was to track “what’s really happening” through a representative group of uninsured.

“We feel like it’s the only way really to assess the impact of the law on real people’s lives — to talk to them and let them have a voice in telling us how it’s working for them or not working for them,” she said.

Kaiser’s initial survey found widespread confusion about the law. Nearly three-quarters of uninsured Californians who would be eligible for government subsidies to buy insurance did not know they were eligible or believed they would be ineligible. The subsidies, which can greatly lower the cost of insurance for lower-income people, will be available on a sliding scale to individuals making up to $45,960 a year or a family of four with an annual income $94,200.

Nearly half of those whose incomes were low enough to qualify for Medicaid coverage didn’t know it or thought they were not eligible. Medicaid will cover individuals whose incomes top out at $15,400 a year, or a family of four with an annual income of about $31,000.

More than 40 percent of the uninsured were unaware that the law includes a penalty for those who do not obtain health insurance, starting out at a minimum of $95 a year but rising to at least $695 by 2016.

Even when informed of the penalty, four of every 10 uninsured Californians said they still would not get coverage or that their decision would depend on the cost.

Anthony Wright, director of the nonprofit Health Access California, said those initial results weren’t surprising given the level of attacks by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. He expects that to change once people begin shopping for insurance on the exchanges and can see what the law means for them.

“The political question is, ‘What side are you on?’ It’s a very different question to say, ‘How do I benefit and what are my new health care options now?’” he said. “That can change the dynamics.”

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Twitter is U.S. Senate candidate Cory Booker’s preferred method of communication. He’s often seen at public events pecking away at his phone, sending his 1.4 million followers staccato updates, inspirational quotations, shoutouts to campaign volunteers and nerdy musings on “Star Trek.”

But his social media habit raised some eyebrows this week after the website Buzzfeed disclosed that he direct messaged with a stripper from Oregon.

The 44-year-old Booker, who is single, exchanged the private messages earlier this year with Lynsie Lee. She works at Casa Diablo in Portland, Ore., which bills itself as “the world’s first vegan strip club.”

Booker and Lee both had appeared in a documentary about using Twitter. In February, Lee wrote Booker to say the West Coast loved the Newark mayor. Booker wrote back to say the East Coast loves her, “and by the East Coast, I mean me.”

“Well now I’m blushing,” Lee wrote back.

“It’s only fair,” Booker responded.

Lee provided a screenshot of the exchange to BuzzFeed, which published a story Wednesday.

The playful exchange is typical of how Booker engages on Twitter, sending out cheeky answers to marriage proposals, responding to a man with a play on the lyrics to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” retweeting people with risque usernames and regularly asking followers to send him direct messages.

Booker brushed off the exchanges with Lee on Thursday, reiterating that he communicates with “thousands of people” on Twitter. Booker said he doesn’t care what people do for work and the “puritanical judgment” of Lee was “over the top.”

Booker said he talks to everybody and has no plans to stop.

“You guys might have some prurient interest,” he said, “but at the end of the day this is about extending kindness to folks.”

Lee told The Associated Press that the interaction was “G-rated flirting” that had been blown out of proportion. She called it a “1 out of 10″ compared with some of the messages she receives.

“I flirted with him publically, as I do with a lot of people,” Lee said about Booker. “There was nothing secret or sexy about it.” She said she and mayor never communicated outside Twitter.

Lee said she resents any implication that she deliberately leaked the conversation for fame or money. She said a jokey, catty feud among the girls in the documentary — all of whom, she said, had a crush on Booker — led her to post the image.

She also had fun with her newfound political notoriety.

“If you come to see me at @CasaDiablo tonight, bring your wallets. I’m prime meat for the next couple of days! ” she tweeted Thursday.

A vegan strip club run by a long-haired guy who calls himself Johnny Diablo sounds like something out of the sketch comedy show “Portlandia,” which had a cast member document his trip to the establishment earlier this year. But it’s real, tucked into an isolated industrial corner of Portland.

It has a large, reasonably priced menu of vegan food, including $4 homemade taquitos and drunk bread, which is described as “Whatever bread we have toasted into Garlic Bread because you’re drunk & need cheap food.”

A printed sign asks dancers not to wear fur, feathers, silk, wool or leather on stage. “Thank you — The Animals,” it reads, and reminds employees to park in the lower lot.

Booker is a vegetarian, though not vegan. Lee said she’s also not vegan.

Booker Republican opponent, Steve Lonegan, called the tweets another distraction in a “rather bizarre campaign of a cult personality,” complaining that the issues have taken a back seat to Booker’s celebrity and use of social media.

Booker joked that the fascination had to do with more than a strip club.

“I really think it’s because the press corps is obsessed with vegan living,” he said.

PHOENIX (AP) — Colorado got off to a superb start under new coach Mike MacIntyre, doubling its win total from last season by beating rival Colorado State and Central Arkansas.

The Buffaloes haven’t played a game since.

Because of flooding in Boulder, Colorado had to postpone its game against Fresno State, leaving a huge hole in the schedule.

It’s not exactly the kind of preparation the Buffaloes wanted heading into their first Pac-12 game, Saturday against Oregon State.

“It seems like three years ago since we last played,” MacIntyre said Tuesday during the Pac-12 coaches’ teleconference. “We’ve been trying to do everything we can to keep the speed of the game, but this is almost like another opening game for us in a way.”

It’s also what amounts to opening weekend in the Pac-12.

After a handful of games between conference opponents the opening month of the season, the Pac-12 season goes into full swing this weekend.

While UCLA and Utah will have a weekend off before playing Oct. 3 in Salt Lake City, the conference’s 10 other teams will face each other, including five playing their first Pac-12 games of the season.

The most lopsided game, at least on paper, appears to be Stanford at Washington State, though the Cougars are improved in their second season under Mike Leach and have a road victory over Southern California on their resume.

California likely faces the toughest opener.

The Bears had a tough nonconference schedule, wrapping loses to Northwestern and Ohio State around a win over Portland State. Cal lost by at least two touchdowns in its games against the two ranked opponents and held off the FCS Vikings 37-30 in a shootout, so facing the No. 2 Ducks in Eugene will be daunting.

Oregon has rolled through its first three games, entering Saturday’s game ranked second nationally with 61.3 points and 672 yards per game. The Ducks also have had a week off and play at a tempo few teams can match.

The Bears have played fast under new coach Sonny Dykes — 95 plays per game — but keeping up with a team that’s become the standard for the speed game won’t be easy.

“You have to adjust your practice schedule, the way you implement things when you’re preparing to play against an offense like this,” Dykes said. “There’s some changes that have to be made, but the good thing is our guys, probably 75 percent of our practices are against fast-paced offenses.”

There should be plenty of offense in Seattle on Saturday, when Arizona and No. 16 Washington meet in their first conference games.

Playing a new up-tempo style, the Huskies are third nationally with over 600 yards per game and have outscored opponents 128-30 to open 3-0 in nonconference for the first time since 2000. Washington blew out Idaho State 56-0 in its last game by piling up 680 yards of offense, second-highest total in school history.

Arizona was one of the nation’s fastest teams in its first season under coach Rich Rodriguez and let up only a little this year, mostly because it faced three overmatched opponents to open the season.

The Wildcats had a week off before playing their first Pac-12 game in one of the conference’s toughest environments.

“I’m sure the players are excited to be back in action,” Rodriguez said. “They all know how important this one is and, obviously, conference play begins. It’s a great challenge for us, up there in a tough environment against a very good team.”

The series between Southern California and Arizona State has been a mismatch in recent years, with the Trojans winning 11 of the past 12 games since 2000.

The teams appear to be more evenly matched heading into Saturday night’s game in the desert.

USC is no longer the offensive juggernaut it once was, entering the game 106th nationally in total offense, though they still have plenty of playmakers, led by All-American receiver Marqise Lee. USC opened the Pac-12 with a disappointing 10-7 loss to Washington State at home, but has one of the nation’s best scoring defenses — 11 points per game — after wins over Boston College and Utah State.

Arizona State got its second season under Todd Graham off to a solid start, rolling over Sacramento State before pulling out a tight home victory over a ranked Wisconsin team.

That set up a measuring-stick game for the Sun Devils last weekend at Stanford. They fell short after a miserable start, but did rally with three touchdowns in the fourth quarter to get within 42-24 and catch the attention of USC’s coaches.

“They’re a talented team with great players,” USC coach Lane Kiffin said. “It’s going to be a tough test, especially playing on the road.”

And it won’t get any easier from here.

Now that the Pac-12 is in full gear, teams can expect a tough game pretty much every week.

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Xcel Energy has donated $300,000 to a group backing an amendment that would require Boulder voters to approve any changes in municipal debt limits — a measure opponents claim would make it harder for Boulder to set up its own electric utility.

Xcel currently serves the Boulder area and opposes efforts by the city to create its own utility.

Issue 310 would require a popular vote on the debt limit of any municipal utility before Boulder could issue debt to pay for it. Residents of unincorporated Boulder County who would be customers of a city-run utility could vote on the issue.

Backers say it allows voters to sign off before taking on significant debt. Opponents say it would make it so difficult to issue debt that it would be hard to operate a municipal utility.

A spokeswoman for Voter Approval of Debt Limits, which received the Xcel donation, told The Daily Camera (http://bit.ly/19BiWXs) that it was meant to counter donations from the Sierra Club and others who support a city utility. Backers of a city utility claim it would charge lower rates and use more renewable energy.

“We reached out to Xcel to just remind them that the opponents of our measure are putting a lot of resources into opposing us,” said Katy Atkinson, a spokeswoman for Voter Approval. “If Xcel was going to get involved, now was the time.”

Xcel Energy spokeswoman Michelle Aguayo said the money didn’t come from ratepayers.

The Boulder City Council has authorized a purchase of Xcel Energy’s local assets.

Representatives of Empower Our Future, a Boulder group opposing the debt limit, said Xcel’s donation made it clear that the proposed charter amendment is not about fiscal responsibility but a bid by Xcel to stop a new utility in its tracks.

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks are mostly lower at the close of trading, and the Dow Jones industrial average posted its fourth straight day of declines.

Stocks faded in the last half-hour of trading Tuesday after staying positive most of the day.

Traders struggled with conflicting news about the economy. One report on Tuesday showed that home prices in July rose the most in more than seven years. Another showed that Americans’ confidence in the economy slipped in September.

The Dow fell 66 points to close at 15,334. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index eased four points to 1,697.

The Nasdaq composite, however, edged up two points to 3,768.

Software company Red Hat slid $6.20, or 12 percent, to $46.73, after it reported lower-than-expected quarterly billings and issued disappointing revenue forecasts.

DENVER (AP) — Federal researchers have been working on a system to measure and predict the destructiveness of wildfires — similar to the way officials use the magnitude scale for earthquakes and other tools to rate and evaluate tornadoes and hurricanes.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology hopes its Wildland Urban Interface Hazard Scale will tell residents the likely intensity of a wildfire burning into their neighborhood. The scale would allow city planners to assign better building codes for the millions of people who live in fire-prone areas in the West and would also measure how those homes could contribute to the spread of a fire.

The proposed scale would range from E1 to E4 — with E4 being a location’s highest exposure to fire, be it from grasslands to a forest in a remote mountain canyon. Building codes and buffer zones between homes and forest could then be set accordingly.

Nelson Bryner, research engineer for the institute’s fire research division, envisions the day when TV stations report that a wildfire is burning in an E4 community. But he said the scale is primarily meant to form the technical foundation for tougher building codes to be developed by states, cities and communities for high-risk areas.

“If you’re going to build there, then you need to use the following designs,” said Bryner, who introduced the scale at a recent International Association of Fire Fighters conference in Denver.

Insurers also are eager for results. Payouts after western wildfires have grown exponentially. In the 1970s, wildfires destroyed about 400 homes nationwide. Since 2000, wildfires have destroyed about 3,000 homes per year, according to NIST.

In Colorado alone, wildfires accounted for more than $858 million in insurance claims in 2012 and 2013, according to the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. More than 1,100 homes have been destroyed in 2012 and 2013.

Alex Maranghides, manager of NIST’s Large Fire Laboratory, and William “Ruddy” Mell, a combustion engineer for the U.S. Forest Service, came up with the idea, which would be applied to forest, grasslands and other wildland where homes have been built or are being constructed — a vast area known as the Wildland Urban Interface.

Researchers are analyzing building materials, grasses, trees, shrubs, topography, weather patterns and especially the behavior of wind-driven embers as ignition fuel.

Embers sailing up to a half-mile ahead of a fire destroy more than 50 percent of homes during wildfires, according to insurance and fire experts. But they haven’t been closely studied.

Several agencies and states already have fire prediction tools or maps. But Mell said those models are based on research conducted in the 1960s and only consider similar types of fuels — large stands of trees, for example. Most building codes are based on direct flame exposure and don’t factor in dangerous ember showers, Maranghides said.

The NIST, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, developed an ember generator it calls “The Dragon” that it uses to test the flammability of homes. It used the device in a test to shower a house with embers at the International Institute for Business and Home Safety’s test facility in Richburg, S.C., and more tests are planned.

Many assumptions behind building codes haven’t been tested under real-world conditions, NIST researcher say. Buffer zones between forest and homes, for example, frequently are 100 feet. Bryner and Maranghides suggest that’s not enough. One reason: the ember threat.

Roof tiles billed as fireproof often fail because embers racing well ahead of a fire can infiltrate tiny cracks between the tiles. They also can ignite wooden house frames beneath fire-resistant siding, said Steve Quarles, senior scientist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

NIST has already developed a mobile app and is developing other computer programs that will allow fire marshals, building inspectors and others to rate an area before a fire starts. Researchers caution it will be several years before that happens.

LYONS, Colo. (AP) — The storms that raged through the Rocky Mountain foothills instantly remade the landscape and disrupted thousands of lives. They may have also changed the character of the funky mountain hamlets that dot the Front Range.

The disaster hit rich and poor alike, but some residents will be able to afford to wait and rebuild, while others will not.

In Lyons, 20 minutes north of Boulder, two low-lying mobile home parks bore the brunt of the damage. Residents say their landlords have told them they will not rebuild, in part because a river now flows through a portion of the property.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to go back,” said Holly Robb, a Lyons native whose grandfather was mayor and who lived with her husband and two young children in the River Bend Mobile Home park, which dates to the 1960s.

“The people who’ve lived there, who’ve gone to school there, can’t go back,” she said.

The flood has accelerated a process that was already underway in the region’s towns. Young, affluent families from places like Boulder and Denver have flocked here, attracted to the slower pace of life, bohemian flavor and pristine natural beauty.

In Lyons, a quarry town turned tourist haven, the number of renters fell by half between 2000 and 2010, while the portion paying more than $1,500 a month quadrupled. The median price of a home rose by 71 percent to $340,000, according to the U.S. Census.

Newcomers have historically moved into the hills above Main Street, while the lower income residents lived in the flood plain below. When the storm came, it swept away mobile homes, but left the new cafes, sushi shop, and revamped high school intact.

A website for the town’s mayor, Julie Van Domelen, a consultant for the World Bank, says she moved to Lyons four years ago. She did not respond to calls and emails from The Associated Press, but told the Denver Post she intends to build the town into something better than it was before.

Some resident fear there will be no place for the manual laborers, retirees and artists that have given Lyons its character.

Carmel Ross, 66, an artist and caretaker for the elderly, thought about the town’s future amid the splintered trailers that now surround the mobile home she rents for $430 a month.

“Who rebuilds a trailer park?” she asked, laughing through tears. “Lyons is going to become a different story now. It’s a loss of a way of life. The things could always be bought again, but there will no longer be any low-income housing in this town.”

Former Mayor Tim Combs said the new Lyons might look more like Aspen, a tony, celebrity refuge that began as a working class hamlet.

“It’s going to upgrade the town. We’re going to see nicer houses replace a house that wasn’t so nice,” he said. “Lyons is surrounded by protected open space, so there will be no place for the poor people to go.”

Up the hill from the mobile home parks, beautiful homes sit essentially untouched, their soggy lawns the only evidence of the disaster that’s crippled the region and re-routed its waterways. Some residents are planning to stay in these homes until the roads reopen.

Among them is David Tiller, a bluegrass musician who believes the home he owns will be condemned. He said he feels lucky to have a sturdy support system, and friends with guest rooms, especially when he thinks of his neighbors taking refuge in churches.

“We have so many friends that are offering us places. We have an amazing community — it’s almost overwhelming,” he said.

Lyons residents were told at a town meeting Thursday that it might take officials six months to restore drinking water and working sewage.

Robb, a caterer, and her husband, who installs wood floods, said that even if they could find a new rental in Lyons, they cannot afford to crash around for that long. For Robb, the realization that she could not go home dawned slowly in the hectic days after the flood.

“It’s really a second blow to a lot of people that live there,” she said.

Residents of the even more remote community of Jamestown have been told it could be a year before they can return.

When helicopter rescuers took Jamestown resident Meagan Harrington and her husband to a makeshift shelter in Boulder with no running water, they did not have to follow their neighbors inside and look for a bed.

Instead, the couple sat in front of the school waiting for their ride. A college friend of Harrington’s in Boulder had offered them a guest room.

“We’ve got it made compared to other people in Jamestown,” said Harrington, an industrial hygienist.

Ross, who spent the days after the flood dragging out her muddy carpet singlehandedly while other flooded residents called private cleaning services, is unsure where she will go after the shelters close. Her friends do not have extra rooms for her to stay in, and she has no family in the region.

Combs, the ex-mayor, said he feels for people like her, but believes that part of the town was already on the path to getting washed out.

“Nobody wants to see those McMansions built that people live in only three weeks of the year,” he said. “But it’s the way this country works — the poor people are always getting pushed out, without or without a flood.”