Promoting recovery and addressing stigma: mental health awareness through community development in a low-income area

One in four Scots will experience mental ill-health at some point in their lives, with increased prevalence in low-income communities. The associated stigma increases the negative impact on an individual's life. This paper outlines the development of a local anti-stigma programme that can be replicated in other areas, and presents key findings from the evaluation. This innovative model, which promotes recovery and addresses stigma, draws on a broad coalition of community support, and enables service users to lead its design and delivery. The paper argues that local initiatives, when complemented by a national programme, can achieve a positive additional impact on attitudes and behaviours; that multiple and flexible approaches are needed for different target groups; that the personal narrative about recovery has a particularly strong impact on participants; and that it may be desirable to tackle stigma in the context of addressing positive mental health. Refinements to the model are discussed

Dynamics of a linear beam with an attached local nonlinear energy sink

We provide numerical evidence of passive and broadband targeted energy transfer from a linear flexible beam under shock excitation to a local essentially nonlinear lightweight attachment that acts, in essence, as nonlinear energy sink—NES. It is shown that the NES absorbs shock energy in a one-way, irreversible fashion and dissipates this energy locally, without 'spreading' it back to the linear beam. Moreover, we show numerically that an appropriately designed and placed NES can passively absorb and locally dissipate a major portion of the shock energy of the beam, up to an optimal value of 87%. The implementation of the NES concept to the shock isolation of practical engineering structures and to other applications is discussed

Novel Families of Fractional Quantum Hall States: Pairing of Composite Fermions

Fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states have recently been observed at unexpected values of the filling factor nu. Here we interpret these states as a novel family of FQH states involving pairing correlations rather than Laughlin correlations among the quasiparticles (QP's). The correlations depend upon the behavior of the QP-QP pseudopotential V_QP(L'), the interaction energy of a pair as a function of the pair angular momentum L'. This behavior, known from numerical studies of small systems, is used to demonstrate that pairing correlations give rise to FQH states at the experimentally observed values of nu.Comment: to appear in Physics Letters

Residual interactions and correlations among Laughlin quasiparticles: Novel hierarchy states

The residual interactions between Laughlin quasiparticles can be obtained from exact numerical diagonalization studies of small systems. The pseudopotentials V_QP(R)$ describing the energy of interaction of QE's (or QH's) as a function of their "relative angular momentum" R cannot support Laughlin correlations at certain QP filling factors (e.g., nu_QE}=1/3 and nu_QH=1/5). Because of this the novel condensed quantum fluid states observed at nu=4/11, 4/13 and other filling fractions cannot possibly be spin polarized Laughlin correlated QP states of the composite Fermion hierarchy. Pairing of the QP's clearly must occur, but the exact nature of the incompressible ground states is not completely clear.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for Solid State Commu

A Symplectic Integrator for Hill's Equations

Hill's equations are an approximation that is useful in a number of areas of astrophysics including planetary rings and planetesimal disks. We derive a symplectic method for integrating Hill's equations based on a generalized leapfrog. This method is implemented in the parallel N-body code, PKDGRAV and tested on some simple orbits. The method demonstrates a lack of secular changes in orbital elements, making it a very useful technique for integrating Hill's equations over many dynamical times. Furthermore, the method allows for efficient collision searching using linear extrapolation of particle positions.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures; minor revisions; accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

Growth and its Discontents: Paving the Way for a More Productive Engagement with Alternative Economic Practices

Fragmented marketing debates concerning the role of alternative economies are attributable to the lack of a meaningful macromarketing dimension to which alternative economic practices can be anchored. This research frames an evaluation of existing macromarketing developments aimed at reformulating the mindless pursuit of economic growth. Raising concerns with the treadmill dynamics of marketing systems, three different approaches - green growth, a-growth and degrowth - are critically evaluated to: (a) introduce degrowth as a widely overlooked concept in the macromarketing literature; (b) expose how each perspective entails a specific organization of provisioning activities; and (c) foreground the role of alternative economic practices beyond the growth paradigm. We conclude that socially sustainable degrowth is the missing voice within macromarketing debates that lie central to elucidating the future direction of alternative economic practices