Tackling barriers to take-up of fuel poverty alleviation measures

Although there has been much work around the take-up of fuel poverty alleviation programmes carried out this has generally focussed on evidence from frontline managers and other stakeholders. Any investigation with end users has been minimal. Funded by Eaga Partnership Charitable Trust, Sustainable Cities Research Institute carried out a community-based investigation into barriers and possible solutions to the uptake of fuel poverty alleviation programmes. A combination of desk-based research with frontline staff and Participatory Appraisal (PA) techniques with communities were used to carry out this research. 362 people took part in the PA and 17 frontline staff returned detailed questionnaires. 4 areas were studied: 3 with poor and one with good take-up. Additionally vulnerable groups of consumers were identified; elderly, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups and rural consumers. Each of the 3 areas with poor take-up has a good concentration of one of the identified vulnerable groups

Many-body approach to infinite non-periodic systems: application to the surface of semi-infinite jellium

A method to implement the many-body Green function formalism in the GW approximation for infinite non periodic systems is presented. It is suitable to treat systems of known ``asymptotic'' properties which enter as boundary conditions, while the effects of the lower symmetry are restricted to regions of finite volume. For example, it can be applied to surfaces or localized impurities. We illustrate the method with a study of the surface of semi-infinite jellium. We report the dielectric function, the effective potential and the electronic self-energy discussing the effects produced by the screening and by the charge density profile near the surface.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Changes of partitioning and increased root lengths of spruce and beech exposed to ambient pollution concentrations in southern England

International audienc

Compensating for Missing Data from Longitudinal Studies Using WinBUGS

Missing data is a common problem in survey based research. There are many packages that compensate for missing data but few can easily compensate for missing longitudinal data. WinBUGS compensates for missing data using multiple imputation, and is able to incorporate longitudinal structure using random effects. We demonstrate the superiority of longitudinal imputation over cross-sectional imputation using WinBUGS. We use example data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health. We give a SAS macro that uses WinBUGS to analyze longitudinal models with missing covariate date, and demonstrate its use in a longitudinal study of terminal cancer patients and their carers.

Big and Little Feet Provincial Profiles: Territories

This communiqué provides a summary of the production- and consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounts for the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, as well as their associated trade flows. It is part of a series of communiqués profiling the Canadian provinces and territories.1 In simplest terms, a production-based emissions account measures the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions produced in the territories. In contrast, a consumption-based emissions account measures the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions generated during the production process for final goods and services that are consumed in the territories through household purchases, investment by firms and government spending. Trade flows refer to the movement of emissions that are produced in the territories but which support consumption in a different province or country (and vice versa). For example, emissions associated with the production of gold in Nunavut that is exported to Quebec for processing and sale are recorded as a trade flow from the territories to Quebec. Moving in the opposite direction, emissions associated with the production of British Columbia natural gas that is sold to a Northwest Territories utility and used to generate electricity for homes in the Northwest Territories are recorded as a trade flow from British Columbia to the territories. For further details on these results in a national context, the methodology for generating them and their policy implications, please see the companion papers to this communiqué series: (1) Fellows and Dobson (2017); and (2) Dobson and Fellows (2017). Additionally, the consumption emissions and trade flow data for each of the provinces and territories are available at: http://www.policyschool.ca/embodied-emissions-inputs-outputs-datatables-2004-2011/