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Religion on the island of Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic: piety in the public sphere?
No full textThis article examines how religious institutions and religious media on the island of Ireland framed religion’s place in the public sphere during Covid-19. Through qualitative analysis of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Humanist organisations’ public documents and religious media, it finds religious institutions supported government restrictions and adopted secular reasoning to justify their actions. The major churches also avoided claiming special status or religious freedom protections. This reveals a constrained religious input to public debates, reflecting a realistic assessment by religious leaders that they lack policy influence due to long-term declines in church power. The pandemic provides evidence of a reformulation of the relationships between religion, state, and society on the island, albeit with religion retaining more influence in Northern Ireland. Religious media outlets largely reproduced institutional discourses, with the exception of a weekly newspaper, the Irish Catholic. The Irish Catholic argued that stringent restrictions in the Republic of Ireland violated religious freedom, and made a case for the value of piety in the public sphere. But while religious actors still seek to contribute to public debates, there is little consensus or vision about religions’ distinctive contributions, even around existential questions posed by the pandemic
Experiences of health services for adults with cerebral palsy, their support people, and service providers
No full textAimTo explore the experiences of health services among adults with cerebral palsy (CP) in Ireland, from the perspectives of adults with CP, their support people, and service providers.MethodA qualitative descriptive study design was used. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted between March and August 2021 with adults with CP, people who supported them, and health professionals. Thematic analysis was used to evaluate the data.ResultsTwenty-one adults with CP, seven support people (family carer[s], spouse or partner, or friend), and 15 service providers participated in the study. Adults had a mean age of 38 years 5 months (range 22–58 years) and were classified in Gross Motor Function Classification System levels I to V. Five themes were identified from the data: (1) access challenges in adult services; (2) knowledge and understanding of CP; (3) support people's role and care burden; (4) communication and interaction in adult services; and (5) health system challenges.ConclusionAdults with CP in Ireland face multiple challenges accessing the health services they need. Services were reported to be inadequate, with limited resources and understanding of CP. Participants highlighted a need for system-level interventions, including enhanced training for health professionals to effectively meet the needs of adults with CP.<br/
Belief in belief: even atheists in secular countries show intuitive preferences favoring religious belief
No full textWe find evidence of belief in belief—intuitive preferences for religious belief over atheism, even among atheist participants—across eight comparatively secular countries. Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, yet explicit markers of religiosity have rapidly waned in large parts of the world in recent decades. We explored whether intuitive religious influence lingers, even among nonbelievers in largely secular societies. We adapted a classic experimental philosophy task to test for this intuitive belief in belief among people in eight comparatively nonreligious countries: Canada, China, Czechia, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam (total N = 3,804). Our analyses revealed strong evidence that 1) people intuitively favor religious belief over atheism and that 2) this pattern was not moderated by participants’ own self-reported atheism. Indeed, 3) even atheists in relatively secular societies intuitively prefer belief to atheism. These inferences were robust across different analytic strategies and across other measures of individual differences in religiosity and religious instruction. Although explicit religious belief has rapidly declined in these countries, it is possible that belief in belief may still persist. These results speak to the complex psychological and cultural dynamics of secularization.<br/
Managing customer waiting times in an inventory system using Conditional Value-at-Risk measure
No full textIn today’s fast-paced world, delays or prolonged customer waiting times pose a threat to the firm’s profitability. This study utilizes the mean-CVaR metric to incorporate the risk associated with prolonged customer waiting times into the optimal trade-off decisions. For this purpose, we consider a single inventory system that faces Poisson demand and utilizes a base-stock policy to replenish its inventory, which takes a fixed amount of time. The firm implements a preorder strategy, encouraging customers to place their orders a fixed amount of time in advance of their actual needs, a period referred to as the commitment lead time. The firm rewards customers with a bonus termed the commitment cost, which increases with the length of the commitment lead time. We aim to determine the optimal control policy, including the optimal base-stock level and optimal commitment lead time, that minimizes the long-run average cost. The cost includes inventory holding, commitment, and customer waiting costs, with the latter adjusted for the firm’s degree of risk aversion. The optimal policy depends on the interdependence of the decisions, with the optimal commitment lead time following a “bang-bang” pattern, and the corresponding optimal base-stock level taking an “all-or-nothing” form. For linear commitment costs with a cost factor per time unit, we identify a threshold that increases with the firm’s risk aversion degree. Firms with greater risk aversion typically favor the buy-to-order strategy, while those with lower risk aversion may opt for either buy-to-stock or buy-to-order depending on their assessment of waiting costs.<br/
Thirst in adult patients in the intensive care unit: A scoping review
No full textPurpose: To review the literature on thirst in intensive care unit (ICU) patients and report potential causes, risk factors, diagnosis and measurement tools, as well as potential co-occurrence with other distressing symptoms, and the management of thirst in the ICU. Design: A scoping review employing the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Methods: PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL were searched from inception to April 2024. Any type of empirical study reporting thirst or associated xerostomia in adult patients (≥18 years) admitted to an ICU or high dependency unit for more than 24 h were included. Results: The search yielded 907 unique records, and after evaluating 65 full-text publications, 21 studies were included. Thirst intensity was addressed most often (eleven studies), whereas the experience (or quality) of thirst and the validation of a measurement instrument, were addressed in only one study. Although co-occurrence of symptoms was addressed in four studies, only one pilot study looked into the interaction of thirst with other symptoms. Intervention studies have been focussing primarily on mouth-care interventions. Conclusion: Thirst is a distressing symptom in the ICU, with reported high prevalence and intensity. Knowledge about its causes, interventions that incorporate minimising its risk, occurrence and intensity are limited. Implications for clinical practice: Health care providers should acknowledge thirst as a prominent symptom for ICU patients. They should possess knowledge on the factors that potentially evoke or aggravate thirst. Regular and timely relief of thirst by oral care with cold swabs and the application of menthol can be regarded as a first choice of intervention.</p
Dynamic mode decomposition analysis of very low frequency oscillations on the Irish grid
No full textThe routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire: continued racialised, geopolitical inequalities in the academic staff composition and employment conditions of UK universities
No full textTwo problematics are exposed and explored within this paper which currently undermine the United Kingdom’s international commitments to address racial inequality and injustice: (1) the routes to national, regional, and international intellectual authority via the academic profession, particularly the assigned leadership position of full professor or ‘chair’; and (2) the effects of dysconscious data literacy, which is out of step with international mechanisms and agendas to combat racism and xenophobia. This is undertaken through a critical quantitative analysis of administrative data about the socio-demographic composition and employment conditions of academic staff in the devolved nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Iniquitous employment conditions revealed how the social determinants of ‘race’, ‘sex’, ‘nationality’, and ‘religious belief impact academics’ access to employment and participation once employed; particularly in the discipline of Education. Shortcomings in categorisation and reporting of official data serve to obfuscate transparency and accountability about inequality.<br/
Active RIS-aided NOMA-enabled space-air-ground integrated networks with cognitive radio
No full textIn this work, we investigate an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) with cognitive radio, leveraging the flexible deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the ubiquitous coverage of satellite networks. The UAV serves uplink and downlink users in the secondary network via NOMA and time division multiple access mechanisms, respectively, while satellites provide wireless backhaul for the UAV and primary users. We aim to maximize the weighted sum mean rate and energy efficiency for the secondary network by jointly the optimizing power allocation, the RIS reflection coefficients (RC), the user matching factors, and the UAV trajectory. We propose an alternating optimization framework based on the block coordinate ascent (BCA) technique, which decouples the problem into multiple variable blocks for alternating optimization until convergence. Moreover, we investigate the performance of energy-efficient active RIS with a sub-connected architecture, decoupling the RIS RC optimization into amplification factor and phase shift subproblems to be solved separately. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes, and demonstrate weakness of passive RIS and rationality and economics of sub-connected active RIS architecture
The who, when, and why of pacifier use
No full textBackgroundSocial and familial consequences of pacifier use remain poorly understood. The present study attempts to shed more light on the characteristics of parents using pacifiers with their infants and to explore how pacifier use affects perceptions of infant emotionality, maternal stress, and parental efficacy.MethodsThe study sample consisted of 428 mothers (range: 17–49 years) of infants (0–36 months) who completed a comprehensive questionnaire assessing infant and parent characteristics as well as parenting practices and pacifier use. We compared attitudes toward pacifiers, parenting stress, children’s levels of reactivity and self-regulation, and maternal efficacy among Pacifier Users, Never-Users, and families that Tried-Pacifiers.ResultsThe reported results reveal benefits of pacifier use for the family relationships, namely reduced parenting stress (p = 0.018), better parent-child dynamics (p < 0.001), and more positive perceptions of child’s affectivity (p = 0.006), which are all important aspects of infant development.ConclusionOur findings highlight developmental benefits of pacifier use, a practice that is known to have both positive and negative long-term consequences for healthy child development. It is, therefore, important for health professionals to have discussions about the pros and cons of pacifier use with parents.<br/
Anti-malicious ISAC using proactive monitoring
No full textIn this paper, we investigate proactive monitoring to mitigate malicious activities in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Our focus is on a scenario where a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) architecture is exploited by malicious actors. Malicious actors use multiple access points (APs) to illegally sense a legitimate target while communicating with users (UEs), one of which is suspected of illegal activities.In our approach, a proactive monitor overhears the suspicious UE and simultaneously sends a jamming signal to degrade the communication links between the APs and suspicious UE. Simultaneously, the monitor sends a precoded jamming signal toward the legitimate target to hinder the malicious sensing attempts. We derive closed-form expressions for the sensing signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR), as well as the received SINR at the UEs and overheard SINR at the monitor. The simulation results show that our anti-malicious CF-mMIMO ISAC strategy can significantly reduce the sensing performance while offering excellent monitoring performance