Public private leasing arrangements: an effective response to the rapid growth in rent supplement claims?

In 2004 a public private leasing arrangement, the Rental accommodation Scheme, was introduced into the housing system of the Republic of Ireland. Lauded as a more structured, accommodation-based approach to the use of the private rented sector to meet long-term housing need, the Scheme was designed as a means of eliminating dependence on temporary income support payments. However over the last ten years expenditure on the rent supplement scheme has increased fivefold while long term dependency on temporary income supports remains an acute housing policy concern. As a result the effectiveness of the Rental Accommodation Scheme has come in for robust criticism. Yet while the Scheme has encountered a number of operational difficulties the Irish Government remains committed to hybrid leasing arrangements as a long term policy instrument. This paper considers the extent to which this hybrid leasing arrangement offers an effective and sustainable housing policy intervention, particularly in light of the onset of the economic recession. The paper begins by explaining the position the Rental Accommodation Scheme within the broader Irish housing system before describing the Scheme’s design and structure. The paper goes on to examine the various difficulties which the scheme has encountered to date before considering the role which regulatory oversight of the hybrid scheme as set out in the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 may play in the coming years

Properties of measures supported on fat Sierpinski carpets

In this paper we study certain conformal iterated function schemes in two dimensions that are natural generalizations of the Sierpinski carpet construction. In particular, we consider scaling factors for which the open set condition fails. For such ‘fat Sierpinski carpets’ we study the range of parameters for which the dimension of the set is exactly known, or for which the set has positive measure

Structural-acoustic coupling and psychophysical effects in the active control of noise in vehicles

Active noise control systems offer a potential method of reducing the weight of passive acoustic treatment and, therefore, increasing vehicles' fuel efficiency. These can be particularly cost-efficient if integrated with the entertainment system. A combined system is presented employing feedforward control of engine noise and feedback control of road noise, using a `modal' error signal. Due to the dependence of the feedback system on the modal response of the vehicle cabin, the influence of structural-acoustic coupling on this response and the consequent effects on the control performance are investigated. Simulations of the performance of the control systems in rigid and non-rigid enclosures show that the feedforward component is largely unaffected by structural-acoustic coupling, whilst the modal feedback performance is reduced by 3 dB due to the shift in the frequency of the targeted acoustic mode. The simulation results are confirmed through experiments conducted in a structural-acoustic coupled enclosure

The CARL metadata harvester and search service

This paper documents the use of unqualified Dublin Core (uDC) elements in the metadata harvested from the repositories participating in the CARL harvester, and identifies patterns in the use of that metadata. It also compares these findings with a similar study, and identifies areas for further research

The Self-Education of Systems Librarians

This article outlines the common duties and responsibilities of systems librarians, and describes how library school students and others interested in entering the field can take advantage of freely available tools to gain relevant experience. It discusses attitudes and traits of systems librarians and their importance to potential and practicing systems librarians. It also lists and describes technologies that people entering systems librarianship can use to gain experience