The Vermont Transportation Energy Report: Vermont Clean Cities Coalition
The mission of the Vermont Clean Cities Coalition (VCCC) is to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels for transportation. This annual report provides policy makers with relevant and timely data on the status of fuel consumption, vehicle purchases, transportation expenditures, and travel behavior in Vermont. This information is intended to form the basis of data-driven policy discussions and initiatives.
Environmental Concern, Social Capital and the Social Context of Tailpipe Emissions-Related Knowledge in Northern Climates
Approximately a quarter of all greenhouse gases originate from motor vehicle tailpipe emissions (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). Along with reducing household energy usage, changes in transportation behavior would have the most direct impact on lowering consumer output of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide. Despite increased levels of awareness surrounding global warming and interest in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is little evidence that people have been willing to make changes in their lives to attain this collective goal. That technological improvements alone have not been able to reduce overall CO2 emissions draws attention to the motivations people have, if any, to reduce vehicle emissions as a matter of daily practice. This project has thus been motivated by three central questions: What do people know about vehicle tailpipe emissions? How does social context inform this knowledge and concern about environmental impacts, more generally?; and How do knowledge of vehicle tailpipe emissions and environmental concern grounded in social context affect individual transportation behavior?
Yet another application of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem for the sphere
where K and dAg denote the Gaussian curvature and the area element of g, respectively. In particular, this implies the existence of at least an elliptic point of (S, g). In this short note we prove the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra as a consequence of this fact. As far as the authors know, this proof is new. Moreover, it does have the advantage of being directly based on the work of Gauss, who was the first mathematician giving an universally accepted proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (see [2], [3]). Hence our argument can also have some historical and pedagogical interest. As it is well known, the stereographic projection allows to identify the sphere S with the one-point compactification Ĉ = C ∪ {∞} of the complex plane C. Let us take p(z) = a0 + a1z+ · · ·+ anz n with a0 an 6= 0 and let us assume that p(z) 6= 0 for all z ∈ C. We set p∗(z) = an + an−1z + · · ·a0z , that is, the i-th coefficient of p∗(z) is the (n− i)-th coefficient of p(z). Clearly, p∗(z) = z n p(1/z) for all z ∈ C \ {0}. Put