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World Heritage Sites Race to Adapt to a Warming Planet
No full textThe effects of climate change could damage, and possibly even destroy, our collective heritage.Irish Research CouncilNational University of Irelan
The secondary labour market and employee protection: Employment relations in New Zealand and Denmark in the 1990s
No full textOne of the primary concerns of many academic and social commentators in the field of employment relations throughout the 1990s has been the impact of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 on the more vulnerable segments of the labour market. Prior to its introduction there were predictions that the removal of the Award system and the concomitant breakdown in collectivism would lead to increasing inequality (Brosnan & Rea, 1991; Walsh, 1992). Whether this has been the outcome remains somewhat contentious. While critics of the Act claim it has impacted disproportionately on the secondary labour market (Dannin, 1997; Gosche, 1992; Kelsey, 1995), supporters of the Act have maintained throughout that wages are rising, more people have jobs because of the Act, and many people are satisfied with their contracts (Kerr, 1996, 1997). Max Bradford (1999), the Minister of Labour, asserted in a recent address on industrial relations, that the Act had enabled employers and employees to negotiate mutually beneficial contracts, “while ensuring the outcomes were fair and acceptable to society”
Efficacy and safety of antidepressants for the treatment of back pain and osteoarthritis: systematic review and meta-analysis
No full textObjective:To investigate the efficacy and safety of antidepressants for back and osteoarthritis pain compared with placebo. Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Data Sources: Medline, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, CINAHL, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, ClinicalTrials.gov, and the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform from inception to 15 November and updated on 12 May 2020. Eligibility Criteria For Study Selection: Randomised
controlled trials comparing the efficacy or safety, or both of any antidepressant drug with
placebo (active or inert) in participants with low back or neck pain, sciatica, or hip or knee osteoarthritis. Data Extraction and Synthesis: Two independent reviewers extracted data. Pain and disability were primary outcomes. Pain and disability scores were converted to a scale of 0 (no pain or disability) to 100 (worst pain or disability). A random effects model was used to calculate weighted mean differences and 95% confidence intervals. Safety (any adverse event, serious adverse events, and proportion of participants who withdrew from trials owing to adverse events) was a secondary outcome. Risk of bias was assessed with the Cochrane Collaboration’s tool and certainty of evidence with the grading of recommendations assessment, development and evaluation (GRADE) framework
Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States, by Martin L. Johnson
No full textQueue Aware Resource Optimization in Latency Constrained Dynamic Networks
No full textThe 2020 IEEE 31st Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, Virtual Event, 31 August - 3 September 2020Low latency communications is one of the key design targets in future wireless networks. We propose a queue aware algorithm to optimize resources guaranteeing low latency in multiple-input single-output (MISO) networks. Proposed system model is based on dynamic network architecture (DNA), where some terminals can be configured as temporary access points (APs) on demand when connected to the Internet. Therein, we jointly optimize the user-AP association and queue weighted sum rate of the network, subject to limitations of total transmit power of the APs and minimum delay requirements of the users. The user-AP association is viewed as finding a sparsity constrained solution to the problem of minimizing ℓ q -norm of the difference between queue and service rate of users. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in terms of network latency and its fast convergence are demonstrated using numerical experiments. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm yields up to two-fold latency reductions compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.Enterprise IrelandScience Foundation IrelandUniversity College DublinAcademy of Finlan
Fast Adaptive Minorization-Maximization Procedure for Beamforming Design of Downlink NOMA Systems
No full textWe develop a novel technique to accelerate minorization-maximization (MM) procedure for the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) weighted sum rate maximization problem. Specifically, we exploit the Lipschitz continuity of the gradient of the objective function to adaptively update the MM algorithm. With fewer additional analysis variables and low complexity second-order cone program (SOCP) to solve in each iteration of the MM algorithm, the proposed approach converges quickly at a small computational cost. By numerical simulation results, our algorithm is shown to greatly outperform known solutions in terms of achieved sum rates and computational complexity.Science Foundation IrelandAcademy of Finlan
Liquid Phase Exfoliation of 2D Materials under Ambient Conditions
No full textA technique developed by the Coleman group in 2008 called liquid phase exfoliation (LPE) has been shown to be effective for the delamination of any material exhibiting a layered structure. Molybdenum dioxide (MoO2) was identified as promising candidate for exfoliation, and a natural successor to extensive work carried out previously on molybdenum trioxide (MoO3). This material shows promise for a number of applications in the electrochemical energy storage arena. Mostly studied as a bulk layered material, MoO2has not previously been exfoliated in large quantities.Chapter 3 of this thesis describes the work performed with MoO2, the primary goal of which was to use the increased surface area of the exfoliated material to maximise lithium storage capacity. After preliminary research the objectives were also revised to include achieving an understanding of the oxidation process of MoO2in ambient conditions and identifying a means to slow this process to facilitate battery fabrication.Initial tests of MoO2dispersions indicated a layered structure, contradicting the general perception of the material. Exfoliation conditions such as sonication time and subsequent centrifugation rates were optimised, and isopropanol (IPA) was identified as a suitable solvent for dispersion of the nanosheets.It was found that when dispersed in IPA under ambient conditions, MoO2nanosheets are gradually oxidized to higher oxides such as MoO3over a period of days. Conversely, if the nanosheets are processed into dried films immediately after exfoliation, and before oxidation has had a chance to progress, the nanosheets are relatively stable under ambient conditions, remaining unoxidised unless the films are heated. It was found that MoO2nanosheets could be size selected by controlled centrifugation and showed size-dependent optical properties, which allowed the proposal of spectroscopic metrics for concentration and size-estimation from extinction spectra. Liquid-exfoliated nanosheets were used to produce lithium ion battery anodes with capacities up to 1140 mAhg-1.Thepropensity of many 2D materials to oxidizein ambient conditions can complicate production and limit applications potential. Described in Chapter 4 is ambient liquid phase exfoliation of germanium sulfide (GeS), a layered material known for its chemical instability.The goal of this research was to gain an understanding of the degradation process and to potentially identify a means of alleviating the problem.The previously optimized parameters from the work on MoO2were utilised to easily identify the ideal exfoliation conditions for this material. Ambient exfoliation in organic solvents such as N-methyl-pyrrolidone yields good quality multi-layer GeS nanosheets. Although oxidation appears to occur with a time constant of ~10 days, the data suggests it to be limited to nanosheet edges leaving the basal plane intact. The rate of oxidation is slow enough to allow processing of the dispersions. For example, it was possible to size-select GeS nanosheets and characterize the size-dependence of nanosheet optical properties, leading to the observation of significant changes in bandgap with nanosheet thickness. Additionally, it is possible to incorporate the nanosheets into lithium ion battery anodes using carbon nanotubes as both binder and conductive additive. These electrodes were relatively stable and displayed near-theoretical capacity of 1523 mAh/g. Chapter 5 of this thesis entails the preliminary work in the extension of LPE to a new application –light emission. Light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) were first demonstrated in 1995 and have since been lauded as a potential successor to OLEDs for solid state artificial lighting due to their simpler architecture and lower production cost when compared to state of the art OLEDs. Solution processable luminescent material is ideally required for the fabrication of these devices and given that LPE dispersions can readily be spray-deposited, they potentially provide a largely untapped source of light-emitting material to compete with those currently in circulation
NimbleCache - low cost, dynamic cache allocation in constrained edge environments
No full textEdge computing and caching of data in the Internet such as reduced energy of Things (consumption by IoT end devices and increased availability of data and Quality of Service (QoS). In typical IoT scenarios, edge nodes (gateways) support several end devices, each of which may produce data in different patterns. In addition, data generated by different types of end devices varies in the application QoS requirements while also widely varying in the data access patterns by IoT services. Managing the data storage resources at edge nodes in such scenarios is a difficult task, especially since the edge nodes themselves may have limited computation capability and storage space. In this paper, we propose a dynamic, differentiated edge cache allocation strategy called NimbleCache that has low computational requirements and performs efficient cache allocation at edge nodes. Based on a Mixture Density Network (MDN), NimbleCache allocates varying portions of the edge cache to traffic of different IoT applications to achieve cache hit ratios very close to the target hit ratio. Simulation results show that NimbleCache achieves good average cache hit ratio with l cache space requirement and small computational overhead
Consequences of producing DNA gyrase from a synthetic gyrBA operon in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium
No full textDNA gyrase is an essential type II topoisomerase that is composed of two subunits, GyrA and GyrB and has an A 2 B 2 structure. Although both subunits are required in equal proportions to form DNA gyrase, the gyrA and gyrB genes that encode them in Salmonella (and in many other bacteria) are at widely separated locations on the chromosome, are under separate transcriptional control and are present in different copy numbers in rapidly growing bacteria ( gyrA is near the terminus of chromosome replication while gyrB is near the origin). We generated a synthetic gyrBA operon at the oriC -proximal location of gyrB to test the significance of the gyrase gene position for Salmonella physiology. Producing gyrase from an operon did not alter growth kinetics, cell morphology, competitive fitness index, or sensitivity to some gyrase-inhibiting antibiotics. However, the operon strain had altered DNA supercoiling set points, its SPI-2 virulence genes were expressed at a reduced level and its survival was reduced in macrophage. The gyrB gene could not be deleted from its oriC -proximal location, even in a gyrB merodiploid strain. We discuss the physiological significance of the different gyrA and gyrB gene arrangements found naturally in Salmonella and other bacteria
Polymer coating for improved redox-polymer-mediated enzyme electrodes: A mini-review
No full textRedox polymers have been widely used to facilitate and stabilize bioelectrochemical communication between the active sites of enzymes and electrodes, enabling development of high-performance enzyme electrodes for sensing, provision of power, and in synthesis. This review offers a brief overview of recent efforts in the use of additional
polymer layers on top of a redox polymer/enzyme layer, which can both improve the performance and expand the functionality of the resulting bioelectrodes