Energy Poverty in Buffalo\u27s West Side: PUSH, National Fuel, and the Fight for Equitable Energy Access

Energy poverty, the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes, is a chronic problem resulting from low income, high fuel prices, and poorly insulated, energy inefficient houses. In addition to financial strain, energy poverty causes severe social and health problems for people living in under-heated homes (Boardman 1991; 2013). Despite its seriousness and pervasiveness, energy poverty has been ignored too often in the US. Those that suffer through energy poverty each year, trapped in bitterly cold homes and facing exorbitant fuel bills, have only rarely organized effectively to demand necessary changes, making the case of People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) so significant. Through community organizing, advocacy, and protest, PUSH catalyzed unprecedented shifts in the distribution of energy conservation funding in Western New York, ensuring that a greater share went toward low-income households for weatherization

Scale dependence of galaxy biasing investigated by weak gravitational lensing: An assessment using semi-analytic galaxies and simulated lensing data

Galaxies are biased tracers of the matter density on cosmological scales. For future tests of galaxy models, we refine and assess a method to measure galaxy biasing as function of physical scale $k$ with weak gravitational lensing. This method enables us to reconstruct the galaxy bias factor $b(k)$ as well as the galaxy-matter correlation $r(k)$ on spatial scales between $0.01\,h\,{\rm Mpc^{-1}}\lesssim k\lesssim10\,h\,{\rm Mpc^{-1}}$ for redshift-binned lens galaxies below redshift $z\lesssim0.6$. In the refinement, we account for an intrinsic alignment of source ellipticities, and we correct for the magnification bias of the lens galaxies, relevant for the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal, to improve the accuracy of the reconstructed $r(k)$. For simulated data, the reconstructions achieve an accuracy of $3-7\%$ (68\% confidence level) over the above $k$-range for a survey area and a typical depth of contemporary ground-based surveys. Realistically the accuracy is, however, probably reduced to about $10-15\%$, mainly by systematic uncertainties in the assumed intrinsic source alignment, the fiducial cosmology, and the redshift distributions of lens and source galaxies (in that order). Furthermore, our reconstruction technique employs physical templates for $b(k)$ and $r(k)$ that elucidate the impact of central galaxies and the halo-occupation statistics of satellite galaxies on the scale-dependence of galaxy bias, which we discuss in the paper. In a first demonstration, we apply this method to previous measurements in the Garching-Bonn-Deep Survey and give a physical interpretation of the lens population.Comment: 31 pages, 16 figures; corrected typos in Eqs. (31), (34), and (36

One Upper Estimate on the Number of Limit Cycles of Even Degree Li\'enard Equations in the Focus Case

We give an explicit upper bound for a number of limit cycles of the Li\'enard equation $\dot{x}=y-F(x)$, $\dot{y}=-x$ of even degree in the case its unique singular point $(0,0)$ is a focus.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

The science of color and color vision

A survey of color science and color vision