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

Collisionless hydrodynamics for 1D motion of inhomogeneous degenerate electron gases: equivalence of two recent descriptions

Recently I. Tokatly and O. Pankratov (''TP'', Phys. Rev. B 60, 15550 (1999)) used velocity moments of a semiclassical kinetic equation to derive a hydrodynamic description of electron motion in a degenerate electron gas. Independently, the present authors (Theochem 501-502, 327 (2000)) used considerations arising from the Harmonic Potential Theorem (Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 2244 (1994)) to generate a new form of high-frequency hydrodynamics for inhomogeneous degenerate electron gases (HPT-N3 hydrodynamics). We show here that TP hydrodynamics yields HPT-N3 hydrodynamics when linearized about a Thomas-Fermi groundstate with one-dimensional spatial inhomnogeneity.Comment: 17p

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.

Local exchange-correlation vector potential with memory in Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory: the generalized hydrodynamics approach

Using Landau Fermi liquid theory we derive a nonlinear non-adiabatic approximation for the exchange-correlation (xc) vector potential defined by the xc stress tensor. The stress tensor is a local nonlinear functional of two basic variables - the displacement vector and the second-rank tensor which describes the evolution of momentum in a local frame moving with Eulerian velocity. For irrotational motion and equilibrium initial state the dependence on the tensor variable reduces to that on a metrics generated by a dynamical deformation of the system.Comment: RevTex, 5 pages, no figures. Final version published in PR