28,540 research outputs found
Goodbye Warm Front: Evaluating the Delivery of Energy Efficiency Retrofits in Low-income Homes in England from 2005 to 2012
For over 10 years, the Warm Front scheme (WFS) was the primary tool through which Government sought to improve the energy efficiency of owner occupied homes in or at risk of fuel poverty in England. Beginning in 2000, and closing in 2012/13, the WFS provided energy efficient heating and insulation measures to low income households. Targeting and delivery of retrofit measures to vulnerable households is limited by the ability to identify them from available data. Vulnerable households may be ‘unseen’ or be unable to access government programmes because they lack the means or awareness. Key questions to be addressed in evaluating the WFS are: how effective was the targeting in meeting fuel poverty need? How did changes in eligibility affect applications? And, what factors affected application success? A database collected on all WFS applications (successful and unsuccessful) was used to examine the targeting and delivery of measures. The findings show that the uptake of measures among vulnerable households broadly mirrored the concentration of fuel poverty risk across England. Ethnic minority households made fewer applications to the scheme, but were more likely be approved. The WFS was able to treat a significant proportion of the target population over the scheme period examined, over 1.5 million households. However, higher uptake rates were affected by ethnicity, suggesting that engagement may need to be more specifically tailored in the future
Piezoelectric rotator for studying quantum effects in semiconductor nanostructures at high magnetic fields and low temperatures
We report the design and development of a piezoelectric sample rotation
system, and its integration into an Oxford Instruments Kelvinox 100 dilution
refrigerator, for orientation-dependent studies of quantum transport in
semiconductor nanodevices at millikelvin temperatures in magnetic fields up to
10T. Our apparatus allows for continuous in situ rotation of a device through
>100deg in two possible configurations. The first enables rotation of the field
within the plane of the device, and the second allows the field to be rotated
from in-plane to perpendicular to the device plane. An integrated angle sensor
coupled with a closed-loop feedback system allows the device orientation to be
known to within +/-0.03deg whilst maintaining the sample temperature below
100mK.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Three-Body Dynamics with Gravitational Wave Emission
We present numerical three-body experiments that include the effects of
gravitational radiation reaction by using equations of motion that include the
2.5-order post-Newtonian force terms, which are the leading order terms of
energy loss from gravitational waves. We simulate binary-single interactions
and show that close approach cross sections for three 1 solar mass objects are
unchanged from the purely Newtonian dynamics except for close approaches
smaller than 1.0e-5 times the initial semimajor axis of the binary. We also
present cross sections for mergers resulting from gravitational radiation
during three-body encounters for a range of binary semimajor axes and mass
ratios including those of interest for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs).
Building on previous work, we simulate sequences of high-mass-ratio three-body
encounters that include the effects of gravitational radiation. The simulations
show that the binaries merge with extremely high eccentricity such that when
the gravitational waves are detectable by LISA, most of the binaries will have
eccentricities e > 0.9 though all will have circularized by the time they are
detectable by LIGO. We also investigate the implications for the formation and
growth of IMBHs and find that the inclusion of gravitational waves during the
encounter results in roughly half as many black holes ejected from the host
cluster for each black hole accreted onto the growing IMBH.Comment: 34 pages, 14 figures, minor corrections to match version accepted by
Ap
Enhanced Zeeman splitting in Ga0.25In0.75As quantum point contacts
The strength of the Zeeman splitting induced by an applied magnetic field is
an important factor for the realization of spin-resolved transport in
mesoscopic devices. We measure the Zeeman splitting for a quantum point contact
etched into a Ga0.25In0.75As quantum well, with the field oriented parallel to
the transport direction. We observe an enhancement of the Lande g-factor from
|g*|=3.8 +/- 0.2 for the third subband to |g*|=5.8 +/- 0.6 for the first
subband, six times larger than in GaAs. We report subband spacings in excess of
10 meV, which facilitates quantum transport at higher temperatures.Comment: [Version 2] Revtex4, 11 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in
Applied Physics Letter
The Ranger 4 Flight Path and Its Determination from Tracking Data
The ranger iv flight path and its determination from tracking dat
Further characterization of glycine-containing microcystins from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica
Microcystins are hepatotoxic cyclic peptides produced by several cyanobacterial genera worldwide. In 2008, our research group identified eight new glycine-containing microcystin congeners in two hydro-terrestrial mat samples from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Eastern Antarctica. During the present study, high-resolution mass spectrometry, amino acid analysis and micro-scale thiol derivatization were used to further elucidate their structures. The Antarctic microcystin congeners contained the rare substitution of the position-1 D-alanine for glycine, as well as the acetyl desmethyl modification of the position-5 Adda moiety (3S-amino-9S-methoxy-2S,6,8S-trimethyl-10-phenyldeca-4E,6E-dienoic acid). Amino acid analysis was used to determine the stereochemistry of several of the amino acids and conclusively demonstrated the presence of glycine in the microcystins. A recently developed thiol derivatization technique showed that each microcystin contained dehydrobutyrine in position-7 instead of the commonly observed N-methyl dehydroalanine
The social cognition of medical knowledge, with special reference to childhood epilepsy
This paper arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analysed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The paper argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically, in terms of the knowledge which they produce, transmit and reproduce
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