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Power, discourse and participation in nature conflicts: the case of turf cutters in the governance of Ireland's raised bog designations
Get PDFThis paper explores how participatory processes and the politics of contestation and resistance converge to influence changes in discourses and institutional structures underpinning the implementation of the EU Habitats Directive in Ireland. It highlights the potential of environmental partnership processes to disrupt the usual scalar hierarchy for regulation. The focus is specifically on the designation of raised bogs and the role of power relations and legitimacy discourses in participatory governance processes established by government. In particular this paper critiques the participatory governance process and attempts to legitimise the enforcement of the Habitats Directive in the face of resistance by the TCCA (Turf Cutters and Contractors Association). Whilst the purpose of the designation is to protect unique habitats, another effect has been to prohibit the traditional right to cut turf on Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). The rationale behind the designation and the mechanisms by which this process has been mediated has been highly contested, with the TCCA claiming the scope inherent in the Directive to consider the de-classification of SACs to have been inadequately addressed by government. The paper concludes with a Foucauldian critique of regulatory authority, legitimacy discourses and agency in the application of participatory processes underpinning environmental regulatio
Incubating engineers: entrepreneur-student collaboration in the teaching of entrepreneurship to mechanical engineers
Get PDFThis paper will provide an example of using student-entrepreneur collaboration in the teaching of a module on entrepreneurship to Mechanical Engineering final year students at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) based in Ireland. Problem-based learning is one of the most significant recent innovations in the area of education for the professions. The focus in this type of learning is to provide the students with problem scenarios so that they can learn through a process of action and reflection. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the best pedagogical approach to developing engineering undergraduate skills to meet the requirements of contemporary complex\ud
working environments. The work proposes to make an original contribution by directly interfacing with\ud
industry in order to simulate a real-life entrepreneur interaction for the students. Finally I argue that this work contributes new insights to the debate on “pedagogies of engagement”
Cooperatively Extending the Range of Indoor Localisation
Get PDF̶Whilst access to location based information has been mostly possible in the\ud
outdoor arena through the use of GPS, the provision of accurate positioning estimations and\ud
broad coverage in the indoor environment has proven somewhat problematic to deliver.\ud
Considering more time is spent in the indoor environment, the requirement for a solution is\ud
obvious. The topography of an indoor location with its many walls, doors, pillars, ceilings\ud
and floors etc. muffling the signals to \from mobile devices and their tracking devices, is one\ud
of the many barriers to implementation. Moreover the cha racteristically noisy behaviour of\ud
wireless devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cordless phones and microwaves can cause\ud
interference as they all operate in the same band as Wi -Fi devices. The limited range of\ud
tracking devices such as Wireless Access Point s (AP), and the restrictions surrounding their\ud
positioning within a buildings’ infrastructure further exacerbate this issue, these difficulties\ud
provide a fertile research area at present.\ud
The genesis for this research is the inability of an indoor location based system (LBS) to\ud
locate devices beyond the range of the fixed tracking devices. The hypothesis advocates a\ud
solution that extends the range of Indoor LBS using Mobile Devices at the extremities of\ud
Cells that have a priori knowledge of their location, and utilizing these devices to ascertain\ud
the location of devices beyond the range of the fixed tracking device. This results in a\ud
cooperative localisation technique where participating devices come together to aid in the\ud
determination of location of device s which otherwise would be out of scope
Online estimation of VVoIP quality-of-experience via network emulation
Get PDFWe describe a testing framework that can provide online estimates of audio and video call quality on network paths, without requiring either end-user involvement or prior availability of audio/video sequences or network traces. The framework includes a tool that emulates the audio and video traffic of IP calls and employs an extended E-Model to measure the audio quality and VQM to estimate video quality. Additionally, it can emulate network impairments to run experiments in different network conditions. Our experiment results show that the quality measurements acquired using the framework compare well to the most commonly applied industry standard for objective voice and video offline testing-PESQ and PSNR respectively
Detection and characterization of acoustic signals from a granulation process
Get PDFThis paper presents the development of an acoustic emission monitoring system and its application to the investigation of acoustic emissions from a high-shear granulation. The system utilizes two piezoelectric sensors which between them cover a frequency range of 0 Hz-300 kHz. Granulations were performed in a 10 Litre granulator at 400g and 1kg scales. The acoustic emissions monitoring was successful for both scale granulations. The results show a correlation between the mean granule size and average frequency emitted by the process
Impact of DFT properties on the inherent resolution of compressed sensing reconstructed images
Get PDFCompressed sensing (CS) algorithms exploit sparseness properties to reconstruct high spatial resolution magnetic resonance (MR) images from k-space data acquisitions significantly under sampled to reduce imaging times. CS algorithm effectiveness is frequently shown using under-sampled k-space data from NxN simulated images. These demonstration reconstructions are near perfect with quality higher than reconstructions using under-sampled NxN experimental k-space data sets. These differences are explained in terms of the interaction between the explicit transform domain sparsity requirement employed during iterative CS reconstruction and an inherent frequency domain property of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). We report on experiments to overcome the limitations imposed by this DFT property by modifying the CS objective function to use a sparseness transform with a resolution higher that the standard transform related to the acquired NxN data matrix size. We demonstrate the relative effectiveness and limitations of standard CS and our proposed highresolution k-space extrapolation enabled (Hi-KEE) CS reconstruction on underand fully-sampled, simulated and experimental MR k-space data
Formal verification of ‘full chip’ containing ‘shell’ partitions with and without feed-thrus
Get PDFThe `Full Chip' module of an ASIC is made up of various partitions and similar to individual partitions, it also goes through various stages of the physical design. The initial design-planning works on the existing pins of a partition, adds feed-thru pins and performs custom placement and routing on signal and clock nets. Near tape-in, ECO (Engineering Change Order) forces manual changes to design as opposed to taking it through full implementation cycle. At the final stages, when layout database of each partition meets the requirements, a bottom up integration is carried out to create full chip layout. All these stages can create logical differences between layout and RTL of the top level interface. In order to verify that no unintentional logical change has happened to full chip, a robust formal verification strategy with numerous practical considerations is necessary. Designers also make use of 100% or partial shell models at the floor-planning phase which does bring advantages but also creates challenges for the formal verification flow. This article documents these challenges by explaining the formal verification approach taken on Intel's next generation network processing chip
The Táin March: an analysis of a regional walking/heritage festival
Get PDFThis paper owes its origins to the research interests of Paul Gosling, a lecturer in Built Heritage in the College of Tourism and Arts, Galway- Mayo-Institute of Technology (GMIT). Having conducted many fieldtrips through the historic landscapes of Cooley, Co. Louth, he has developed an interest in the topography of Ireland’s most famous literary epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge. Arising from this, he is researching the toponymic aspects of the story (Gosling 2011; 2012a; 2012b). When The Táin March was established in 2011, Paul made contact with the organisers and began working with them on ensuring, as far as possible, the historic accuracy of the route being followed. Aron Donnelly is currently a fourth year student on the BA (Honours) in Heritage Studies programme in GMIT. For his final year research dissertation, he has been evaluating The Táin March as an example of community-based heritage tourism along with researching a wholeway walking route from Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon to Carlingford, Co. Louth (Donnelly 2013
Innovation ecosystems: a conceptual framework
Get PDFThis paper addresses the need for a theoretical framework to stimulate research in the area of innovation ecosystems by building on historical analysis of innovation definitions. The work is a response to the assessment by scholars that there are significant research questions to be addressed in this important topic. The approach involved a review of antecedent models from the innovation literature. Arising from the analysis, we proposed a new theoretical lens to stimulate research in the innovation ecosystems. The result is an adaptation of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (EST) that incorporates a technological component. The EST for innovation is an important theoretical contribution because it provides a fresh perspective for academic researchers to investigate the phenomenon; and it offers an accessible conceptual structure to navigate the increasingly complex innovation ecosystem