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Editors\u27 Introduction: Toward Transitional Justice in Ireland? Addressing Legacies of Harm
No full textThe testimony above comes from the CLANN report, an evidence gathering and advocacy project that facilitated survivor participation in the Republic of Ireland’s ongoing Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters. We open this special issue of Éire-Ireland, entitled Toward Transitional Justice in Ireland? Addressing Legacies of Harm, with survivors’ voices in order to acknowledge that the volume is concerned with the experience of hundreds of thousands of individuals who were born or grew up in Ireland, and of their families across multiple generations, who have been too frequently ignored. As academics and members of the Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR) advocacy group, for the past decade we have endeavored to place the motto of survivors, “nothing about us, without us,” at the center of our research and activism on the subject of Ireland’s class, race, disability, and gender-based abuses, so evident in Irish carceral institutions.2021-01-27 JG: PDF replaced with published version at publisher\u27s reques
Queer representation in Arab and Middle Eastern Films: A case study of women in Caramel (2007), Circumstance (2011), and In Between (2016)
No full textQueer representations have been present since the 1930s in Arab and Middle Eastern cinema, albeit always in coded forms. However, the idea of homosexuality or queerness in the Middle East is still not tolerated due to religious, political, social and cultural reasons. Middle Eastern filmmakers who represent homosexual relations in their films could face consequences ranging from censorship to punishment by the State or religious extremists. This article explores the representation of lesbians in three transnational Middle Eastern women’s films: Caramel (Sukkar banat, 2007) by Nadine Labaki, set in Lebanon, Circumstance (2011) by Maryam Keshavarz, set in Iran, and In Between (Bar Bahar, 2016) by Maysaloun Hamoud, set in Israel/Palestine. It analyses the position the female lesbian protagonists occupy in the narrative structure and their treatment within the cinematic discourse. The article will examine mise-en-scène elements and compare each director’s stylistic and directorial approach in representing homosexuality within different social and cultural contexts. It will also prompt discussions related to queer identity, queer feminism, women’s cinema, audience reception and spectatorship within the Middle East
A Comparison of the Uplink Performance of Cell-Free Massive MIMO using Three Linear Combining Schemes: Full-Pilot Zero Forcing with Access Point Selection, Matched-Filter and Local-Minimum-Mean-Square Error
No full textThe 31st Irish Signals and Systems Conference (ISSC 2020), Online Conference, 11-12 June 2020In this paper, three types of linear receiver for the uplink of cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) will be studied to gain a clear comparison and understanding of their performance. In a cell-free massive MIMO system, a large number of randomly distributed access points (APs) cooperate to serve a much smaller number of users in the same time-frequency resource. The three receivers of interest are matched-filter (MF) combining, full-pilot zero forcing (fpZF) combining and the local-minimum-mean-squared error (L-MMSE) combining. The APs use locally obtained channel state information to perform the combining. Max-min fairness power control is utilised for the MF and fpZF combining to ensure uniformly good service for all users in the system. We note that max-min fairness power control is not required for the L-MMSE combining since the L-MMSE scheme itself can provide the worst served users with the same spectral efficiency as the MF with max-min fairness. In this paper an AP selection scheme is proposed for the fpZF combining. In particular, the proposed AP selection scheme provides users with reasonably good spectral efficiency using a subset of APs rather than all APs serving all users, which proves to increase the overall energy efficiency of the system. The results show that the fpZF consistently outperforms the MF and L-MMSE even while using only a subset of the APs.Science Foundation IrelandUniversity College Dubli
Energy-Efficient Bit Allocation for Resolution-Adaptive ADC in Multiuser Large-Scale MIMO Systems: Global Optimality
No full textThe 45th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Barcelona, Spain, 4-8 May 2020We consider uplink multiuser wireless communications systems, where the base station (BS) receiver is equipped with a large-scale antenna array and resolution adaptive analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The aim is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) at the BS subject to constraints on the users\u27 quality-of-service. The approach is to jointly optimize both the number of quantization bits at the ADCs and the on/off modes of the radio frequency (RF) processing chains. The considered problem is a discrete nonlinear program, the optimal solution of which is difficult to find. We develop an efficient algorithm based on the discrete branch-reduce-and-bound (DBRnB) framework. It finds the globally optimal solutions to the problem. In particular, we make some modifications, which significantly improve the convergence performance. The numerical results demonstrate that optimizing jointly the number of quantization bits and on/off mode can achieve remarkable EE gains compared to only optimizing the number of quantization bits.Science Foundation IrelandUniversity College Dubli
Validity of Emotional Intelligence scale in pre-service Physical Education teachers.
No full textThe current study examined the factor structure and the internal consistency of the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence (SSREI) scale in two samples of Greek pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers (Sample 1 n = 516; Sample 2 n = 335). Method: Data were collected through a pencil-paper survey. Multiple confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test several proposed factor models from previous studies, as well as measurement invariance across gender. Reliability of the scale was measured with Cronbach a coefficients. Results: The analysis showed that the Ng et al. (2010) two-level factor model fit the current data best, while the exclusion of the scale\u27s reverse coded items made the current model structure more stable and interpretable, ultimately resulting in a higher order model with four factors. Conclusion: The proposed emotional intelligence model was complex with a high order factor. We further suggested either to rephrase the three items including negations to a positive meaning, or to remove these from the scale, to increase the validity and reliability scores. Implications of the study and usefulness of SSREI scale among pre-service PE teachers are further discussed
Water quality perceptions and private well management: The role of perceived risks, worry and control
No full textMismanagement of drinking water supplies can pose serious public health risks. There are many concerns about water source management among private well owners, as they are often solely responsible for maintaining their wells, and monitoring and testing of their own water quality. Lack of worry about contamination and a strong sense of control over risks in relation to drinking water quality have been identified as important factors that influence peoples’ perceptions and behaviour. In this paper, we investigated how worry and control moderate the influence of risk perceptions on water quality perceptions and well owners’ maintenance behaviours. We compare a sample of private well owners (N=167) with a sample of members of Group Water Schemes (GWS) (N=160) and people who are supplied via the public mains (N=195), to validate our results. We found that, in comparison to the other groups, well owners believe that water from private wells is superior and they express a high level of control over contamination risks of their drinking water. Moreover, strong feelings of control suppress their perceptions of risk in relation to water quality. However, well owners who feel largely in control also maintain their well more frequently. Our results suggest that communication strategies with well owners should aim to bring the current unrealistic levels of control perception down to more realistic levels, rather than removing all sense of control.Irish Research CouncilScience Foundation IrelandGeological Survey Irelan
Quantitative analysis of weakly bound insulin oligomers in solution using polarized multidimensional fluorescence spectroscopy
No full textBeing able to measure the size and distribution of oligomers in solution is a critical issue in the manufacture and stability of insulin and other protein formulations. Measuring oligomers reliably can however be complicated, due to their fragile self-assembled structures, which are held together by weak forces. This can cause issues in chromatographic based methods, where dissociation or re-equilibration of oligomer populations can occur e.g. upon dilution in a different eluting buffer, but also for light scattering based methods like dynamic light scattering (DLS) where the size difference involved (often less than a factor 3) does not allow mixtures of oligomers to be resolved. Intrinsic fluorescence offers an attractive alternative as it is non-invasive, sensitive but also because it contains scattered light when implemented via excitation emission matrix (EEM) measurements, that is sensitive to changes in particle size. Here, using insulin at formulation level concentrations, we show for the first time how EEM can both discriminate and quantify the proportion of oligomeric states in solution. This was achieved by using the Rayleigh scatter (RS) band and the fluorescence signal contained in EEM. After validating size changes with DLS, we show in particular how the volume under the RS band correlated linearly with protein/oligomer molecular weight, in agreement with the Debye-Zimm relationship. This was true for the RS data from both EEM and polarized EEM (pEEM) measurements, the latter providing a stronger scatter signal, more sensitive to particle size changes. The fluorescence signal was then used with multivariate curve resolution (MCR) to quantify more precisely the soluble oligomer composition of insulin solutions. In conditions that promoted the formation of mainly one type of oligomer (monomer, dimer, or hexamer), pEEM-MCR helped identify the presence of small amounts of other oligomeric forms, while in conditions that were previously said to favour the insulin tetramer, we show that in the presence of zinc, these insulin samples were instead a heterogenous mixture composed of mostly dimers and hexamers. These MCR results correlated in all cases with the observed discrimination by principal component analysis (PCA), and deviations observed in the RS data. In conclusion, using pEEM scatter and emission components with chemometric data analysis provides a unique analytical method for characterising and monitoring changes in the soluble oligomeric state of proteins.YCB was supported by an ‘EMBARK Initiative’ Postgraduate Scholarship (Grant number GOIPG/2015/3826) from the Irish Research Council
Utilising knowledge graph embeddings for data-to-text generation
No full textData-to-text generation has recently seen a move away from modular and pipeline architectures towards end-to-end architectures based on neural networks. In this work, we employ knowledge graph embeddings and explore their utility for end-to-end approaches in a data-to-text generation task. Our experiments show that using knowledge graph embeddings can yield an improvement of up to 2 3 BLEU points for seen categories on the WebNLG corpus without modifying the underlying neural network architecture.This work was conducted with the financial support of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for
Research Training in Artificial Intelligence under Grant No. 18/CRT/6223 and co-supported by
Science Foundation Ireland under grant number
SFI/12/RC/2289 2 (Insight), co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund
Safeguarding, Supporting, and Supervising Gender Minority Students in Institutes of Higher Education: Information, Advice, Considerations, and Reference Materials for the Inclusion and Protection of the Trans*, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming Community
No full text"I\u27m fearless." Above is a quote from one of 123 survey respondents from the inital project when asked about areas of Dublin where they felt unsafe. Gender minority students possess a unique courage in the face of numerous obstacles, increased politicization surrounding gender issues, and misinformation or sensationalism. However, these students generally have the same goals and dreams as every other student: to receive a quality education that will alow them to develop and achieve career goals, be treated with dignity and respect, and fully partake in student activities.Trinity College DublinRoyal College of Surgeons in Irelan