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The lived experience of mothers of children who have been sexually abused- an interpretative phenomenological analysis
No full textObjectiveMothers of children who are survivors of sexual violence experience significant distress from the discovery of their child's abuse. Previous research has mostly focused on the mental health symptoms arising from this type of trauma, rather than the personal journey and meaning mothers take from these incidents. This study aimed to examine the lived experiences of non-offending mothers of children who have been sexually abused.MethodsSix mothers, aged 34–53 years-old, whose children had experienced sexual abuse took part in the study. All participants were attending a specialist multidisciplinary service in Northern Ireland for the investigation and treatment of sexual violence. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and content was analysed via interpretative phenomenological analysis.ResultsThree superordinate themes emerged from the interviews: (1) “The Sins of the Mother”, comprising three subordinate themes centering on negative evaluations of the self and perceived judgements from others; (2) “Impotent Anger”, relating to injustice and revenge fantasies; and (3) “It Changed Me as a Parent”, comprising two subordinate themes on how the mothers perceived and parented their child after the abuse.ConclusionsMothers perceived the abuse of their child as incompatible with their view of themselves as good parents, leading to internalized feelings of shame as well as externalized feelings of anger and injustice. This had implications for the mothers' relationship with their child and confidence in parenting.<br/
A tale of signalling and chromatin – how GSK3/WNT pathway controls cell fate decision through CHD4 regulation in stem cells
No full textInnovation grant (s)hopping: unpacking SMEs’ support choices between multiple potential funding sources
No full textIn many national contexts, firms encounter a complex support landscape for research and development (R&D) and innovation, which includes national and local grant schemes. How do small and medium enterprises (SMEs) navigate these landscapes? What factors influence their decision-making processes and choices regarding funding applications? Understanding these processes is crucial for creating more effective and precisely targeted innovation support systems. Using frameworks for contingent and hedonic decision-making, we conceptualise how SMEs choose between different innovation funding options. Interview data indicate a strong experiential element in SMEs' decision-making. Decisions between alternative funding sources tend to be reactive and driven by intuition in emerging SMEs, more planned and hedonic in early-trading SMEs, and based on strategic and hedonic reasoning in mature, revenue-generating SMEs. The findings provide valuable insights into the dynamics of SMEs' innovation funding strategies and offer practical implications for designing funding programmes that meet the needs of SMEs at various stages of development.<br/
Postdigital epistemology
No full textThis entry discusses epistemology with respect to the postdigital condition. It provides a necessarily simple overview of traditional and social epistemology, before discussing what postdigital epistemology means in online environments where distortions in knowledge practices and procedures can be difficult to detect and rectify. The procedures are the same as with offline epistemology, requiring research and digital literacy, the motivation to evaluate, verify, evaluate, compare, and contrast, and an open mind about the truth claims of any assertion or image
Anglophone political song in eighteenth-century Ireland: the evidence of print
No full textAmong the earliest-printed songs in Ireland are the political songs of Dublin’s prosperous English-speaking population—politicians, lawyers, clergy, tradespeople, and gentry. With the political campaigns and controversies which arise across the eighteenth century—particularly the Wood’s halfpence affair (1722–1725), the candidacy of Charles Lucas for a parliamentary seat (1748–1749), and the Volunteer movement (1779–1784)—the printing of partisan song becomes a marked feature of Dublin print culture and, increasingly, that of Irish regions: Belfast, Cork, and Downpatrick, for example. These three political controversies of the eighteenth century can be seen to inaugurate the strong traditions in which print culture bolsters the dissemination of political song, which would proliferate in the revolutionary years of the 1790s and beyond.<br/
Vision-audio multimodal object recognition using hybrid and tensor fusion techniques
No full textTraditional fusion methods often encounter challenges related to temporal misalignment and signal variability, resulting in suboptimal performance. This study proposes a novel hybrid fusion model that integrates early and late fusion strategies to capture low-level feature interactions and high-level modality-specific abstractions. Advanced feature extraction techniques are employed to ensure robust multimodal representation: visual features are extracted using Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP), while audio features are processed using Spectral Centroid and Pitch-Synchronous Speech Features. Additionally, the Ridgelet Transform enhances spatial–temporal representation. A preprocessing pipeline further reduces data noise, applying Different Resolution Total Variation (DRTV) for visual noise suppression and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) for audio feature extraction. Furthermore, we incorporated an xLSTM-based hierarchical multi-scale temporal encoder in the audio branch and implemented an attention-based fusion stream with Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) for dynamic alignment based on different modalities. Class imbalance is addressed by applying SMOTE in the latent feature space and using class-weighted cross-entropy loss to improve model sensitivity to minority classes. Evaluated on a collected dataset of 22,133 audio-visual samples across 21 object categories, our proposed fusion model achieves an F1 score of 97.89% and a PR AUC of 98.02%. The attention-based fusion variant converged in 14 epochs but required more resources, totaling 19.1M parameters, 9.26G FLOPs, and 14.6 ms of inference latency. In contrast, hybrid fusion with LSTM provided a more efficient option with 12.0M parameters, 4.73G FLOPs, and 9.0 ms latency, making it ideal for low-resource edge applications. These results prove the proposed model’s flexibility in real-time multimodal applications such as autonomous systems, surveillance, and recycling automation
A robust approach to text similarity detection with LSTM networks based on embedding and attention synergy
No full textSimilarity detection in text is critical in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for applications like duplicate question detection (DQP). In this work, we propose an enhanced approach that leverages Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks integrated with attention mechanisms to effectively capture contextual dependencies and semantic similarity. Unlike traditional LSTM models, our method utilizes multiple pre-trained embeddings-GloVe, FastText, and Paragram, which enrich the semantic representation of text. The attention layer dynamically emphasizes the most relevant parts of input sequences, allowing the model to focus on critical semantic features. We further address class imbalance using data resampling techniques such as SMOTE, ADASYN, and SMOTE-Tomek, improving the model's robustness. Evaluation on the Quora dataset demonstrates that our model significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving 95.64 % accuracy and a 97.68 % F1-score. These results validate the effectiveness of our integrated Bi-LSTM and attention-based architecture in accurately identifying semantically similar question pairs. In addition, the source code for the proposed approach is available at the following Code.<br/
Assessing states’ obligations under the UN guiding principles on business and human rights post-Brexit
No full textPrivate economic actors wield unprecedented influence over the enjoyment of human rights, yet legal systems remain uneven in their regulation of corporate responsibility. Against this backdrop, this article examines a largely underexplored post-Brexit trajectory, the regulatory divergence in the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). While the broader effects of the withdrawal of the UK from the EU have been extensively scrutinised, little attention has been paid to how each jurisdiction has sought to prevent and mitigate corporate human rights abuses. Situating its analysis within the UNGP framework, the article offers a comparative examination of the EU emphasis on preventative regulation and the UK reliance on a largely minimalist adjudicative framework. It argues that the UK risks being shaped by external legal pressures while lacking a coherent domestic agenda. Northern Ireland, partially aligned with EU law, is presented both as an example of this fragmented approach to business and human rights regulation and as a hybrid space where the effects of ongoing regulatory developments might be traced and assessed. Ultimately, the analysis situates this divergence within a wider contest over the legitimacy of transnational human rights governance, where state apathy remains a critical but neglected factor in addressing corporate accountability.<br/
The Windsor Framework and its impact for Northern Ireland and EU-UK Relations?
No full textThe successful conclusion of the Windsor Framework was announced to much fanfare in February 2023 and portrayed in some quarters as the beginning of a new dawn for the operation of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol and EU-UK relations. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond such rhetoric and examine the nature of the reforms under the WF package and the extent to which it represents a significant departure from the rules of the Protocol. It also highlights some of the potential pitfalls associated with these reforms and shows that by seeking to address certain difficulties, the WF creates entirely new ones that undermine the central aims of the Protocol and have the potential threaten the sense optimism and trust between the parties
