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Deconstructing the paradoxical role of managerialism in Irish DNA database policy and practice
Get PDFManagerialism is omnipresent in Western criminal justice systems, most
evident through an emphasis on efficiency, effectiveness, and value-formoney. However, closer examination of components of criminal justice
systems can reveal complexities for managerial ideologies in policy and
practice. Drawn from an empirical analysis of political debates, policy
documents and interviews with stakeholder groups, this article deconstructs the complex role of managerialism in Irish DNA database policy and practice. Despite the appeal of DNA databases to managerial values, this analysis reveals that complexities and tensions in the application of managerialist principles to database policy and practice remain. Notably, although central components of managerialism were promoted, there were significant and unanticipated challenges during the implementation stage of the Irish DNA database. This is evident through three key findings. First, there were differing emphases on ‘efficiency’ and how efficiency manifests in practice. Second, a disjuncture between resource commitments for the database and the reality in practice was identified. Finally, a tension between independence and systemisation in the case of policing and forensic sectors emerged. Taken collectively, this empirical account illustrates the value of real-world case studies and contributes to criminal justice scholarship on both managerialism and the implementation of DNA policy
Impact of Displaying Grades Vs. Not Displaying Grades on Academic Performance and Emotional Outcomes While Delivering Feedback Comments: A Longitudinal Study
Get PDFThis study investigates the impact of displaying grades versus not displaying
grades on student performance and emotions in secondary education, while
keeping feedback comments constant. Using a longitudinal design, we
examined intra-individual changes in performance and emotional responses
among 99 students across four classroom groups as they experienced phases
of grade display and non-display. Contrary to the notion of grades solely as
detrimental, our findings reveal a complex relationship. Initially, grade display decreased performance and evoked negative emotions, but these
effects dissipated over time, suggesting student adaptation. Our study highlights the significant impact of feedback comments, suggesting their importance independent of grades. These results call for a sophisticated
understanding of grading practices, emphasizing longitudinal research to
capture the evolving effects of grades and feedback. Practical implications for educators include maintaining stable grading practices and providing preparatory guidance to mitigate initial negative impacts, contributing to optimizing educational assessment strategies
Understanding Deep Representations in CNNs from Concepts to Relations to Rules
Get PDFThe field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI ) has recently gained prominence, driven by the demands for transparency and accountability in the application of AI models in critical decision-making scenarios. Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success, specifically in computer vision tasks, understanding the steps pertaining to their decision-making processes remains a significant hurdle due to the opaque nature of the model. Most existing methods for explanation in computer vision focus on low-level features (such as pixels) and their influence on the final classification. This relevance is then used to generate explanations based on visual cues (such as saliency maps), rather than providing higher-level human concepts and the relations among them. This thesis aims to
address this issue by proposing approaches to extract high-level human concepts, relations and rules from deep representations, thus enhancing the transparency of the model’s decision-making process. Specifically, we focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for image classification tasks and have leveraged our approach to make assumptions about what semantic concepts and relations are effectively learned and hidden in deep representations for computer vision models. Our results demonstrate the approach’s ability to provide a semantic understanding of what a trained image classification model has learned in a way that humans can comprehend without a deeper knowledge of machine learning techniques and concepts, thereby providing transparency and acceptance of the model’s results
Pancasila and Interreligious Dialogue Challenges and Opportunities
No full textThe Preamble to the State Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia (1945) contains the Five Principles of the foundational philosophical theory of Indonesia, called Pancasila. The Five Principles are: 1) Belief in One Supreme God 2) A just and civilized humanity 3) Indonesian unity 4) People’s democracy led by wisdom through consensus and representation 5) Social justice for all Indonesian People. This thesis focuses on the importance of building interreligious dialogue within Pancasila using the reality of the current situation. The aim is to investigate the historical origins and development of Pancasila as the foundation of Indonesia’s governing philosophy, as well as the methodological underpinnings of how interreligious dialogue helps to focus particular questions on Pancasila and religious diversity in Indonesia.
This thesis investigates how the invention of agama (religion) is essential to the Indonesian concept of citizenship. It highlights why and how the development of the concept of religion and its connection with the First Principle of Pancasila can promote or hinder interreligious harmony and true freedom of religion. Until recently, Indonesian citizens had to declare one of only six official religions on their essential civil documents in order to receive the services and civil rights guaranteed by the state. The identity card offers a concrete example of the intersection of religion and the state in Indonesia as one of the rubrics on the identity card is agama. The main concerns with Pancasila as the foundation of a state’s governing philosophy are two, and these are interconnected: the requirement of a belief in One Supreme God and the limited number of religions accepted within Indonesia.
This thesis also examines the Islamic perspective on interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism in Indonesia by investigating the reality of the current situation. This is done by looking at the historical origins and development of the MUI (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, the Council of Indonesian Ulama) and the part it played in Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime. It also assesses and draws upon Western Christian and Muslim thinkers in the field of interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism. These contributions not only provide an avenue for reconsidering the Pancasila state ideology in a pluralistic world but also lay the groundwork for an innovative approach towards interreligious dialogue in Indonesia
The human factor in translation technologies:The impact of a participatory approach on job satisfaction, motivation and attitude in public administration
Get PDFThe objective of this 12-month workplace research at the Ministry of Justice was to introduce translation technologies into a low-technology work environment with highly specialised linguistic skills. In doing so, the aim was to map the human-machine interaction and describe it using actor-network theory, investigating the impact of the introduction of such technologies on the motivation and satisfaction of linguists, and the influence of translators' attitude to translation tools on the acquisition of new skills. The ministerial environment and the use of translation technologies in legal translation are two other essential elements of this study.
In particular, the research aimed at verifying whether a participatory/bottom-up approach in line with the principles of augmented translation (Sakamoto and Yamada, 2020; Lommel, 2017), involving linguists in all the organisational aspects (Cadwell, O’Brien and Teixeira, 2018), as well as the improvement of technical skills through training (do Carmo, 2020), could have a positive impact on motivation, satisfaction and technological transformation. A three-phase convergent parallel mixed methods design was applied to carry out the study.
The results showed that the proposed approach helped some of the participants to find their own sustainable workflow (Moorkens, 2020), to adapt the use of NMT to their needs (Ehrensberger-Dow, 2014), and to stimulate their motivation and satisfaction (Herzberg, 1987; Rodriguez-Castro, 2015). On the other hand, some participants resisted the change, primarily due to the risks arising from the misconception on the part of management regarding the utilisation of translation technologies. Furthermore, the study provides a step towards a potential solution to MT adoption challenges, such as those reported in the article "The Present and Future of Machine translation" (Nimdzi, 2022)
Reconstituting the ‘Good Woman’: Gendered Visibility and Visual Political Performance in West Bengal, India
Get PDFThis thesis examines gendered visual political communication on social media within the context of electoral politics in the state of West Bengal (WB) in India. Digital visual politics is an expanding field in communications research. Yet, in non-Western contexts, its practice remains underexplored from critical socio-cultural perspectives. By focusing on a specific cultural and societal setting in South Asia, my research explores how women political candidates construct and negotiate their digital identities and visibilities as a form of non-verbal political performance. My study adopts a critical realist approach to frame visual political performance through a ‘two bodies’ formulation, thereby considering exchanges of meaning
between the physical and social body. Through two complementary investigations, I firstly examine the 2021 election campaign for
the state legislature in West Bengal on social media platforms. Here, I combine qualitative and quantitative visual content analysis to examine visual artefacts posted on Facebook and X by the four major parties contesting this election and their two most followed female candidates. My second investigation examines perspectives of those producing these visual artefacts through semi-structured interviews, with twenty-four female politicians in the state and reflexive thematic analysis of these testimonies. These two investigations reveal how female political candidates navigate a complex relational field between constituents, party leadership, and public expectations. They bring to light contemporary, embodied reconstitutions of the bhadramahila, a social construct of the good woman drawing from Bengal’s complex colonial and post-colonial experience. Finally, I show how female politicians balance societal
expectations, party interests, and personal aspirations, while navigating intense forms of public scrutiny that simultaneously makes them hyper-visible and invisible. By thus centring a culture-specific approach in the study of visual politics on digital media, my
research shows that the political visibility of women remains deeply embedded within societal power relations. It reveals the persistence of colonial and postcolonial societal norms in non-verbal political communication mediated by digital technology, and the plural constructions of acceptable femininity (the good woman) in a non-Western electoral context. The conceptual apparatus my study employs and its findings, I argue, have wider implications on expanding study of visual political communication through novel, de-westernised modes of inquiry, whose relevance extends far beyond the South Asian context
School choice - a level playing field? A Case Study on how parents choose a Catholic post-primary school for their children in Midwest Ireland
Get PDFThis study examines the factors that influence parents’ choice of a Catholic post-primary school for their children in Midwest Ireland. It seeks to address the dearth of scholarship regarding parental school choice in an Irish context and to extend the work of national and international scholars. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, which were then coded and interrogated using Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis (2022).
The research results revealed three key findings. First, they demonstrate that choosing a school relies on social and cultural capital, which is possessed in differing degrees by “New Irish” and
Irish parents. Second, the study reveals that together with previously recognised factors in school choice, such as academics and transportation, sport plays an increasingly significant role
in school choice. Third, parents choose a Catholic school for an education not necessarily a Catholic one.
This small-scale case study, though non-generalisable, contributes to the field by highlighting the experiences and views of parents when making school choices. It was observed that within
this sample group, there were inequities in school choice experienced by New Irish parents owing to a lack of social and cultural capital. It points to the difficulties of parents when
choosing schools in oversubscribed areas. The study offers evidence of the role of sport in parental school choice especially by Irish parents. A consideration of the study would be that parents who wish for a Catholic education make their feelings known to the Catholic school they wish to attend and that parents who have
difficulty with a school choice application consult school management and trustees. Furthermore, parents may also need to investigate and consider transport and logistical matters
well in advance and lobby if necessary. It is suggested that parents make themselves aware and prepare their children for different methods of learning in post-primary school. Finally, school
choice is a social matter where integration is a crucial issue that should be a consideration for all parents, as fostering diverse, inclusive environments can ultimately help create a more harmonious and equitable society
Moments in Focus: A Transformer-based Approach for Moment-centric Lifelog Retrieval
Get PDFLifelogging, the process of creating a personal digital record of daily activities, is gaining popularity as a form of digital diary. With this rise, the increasing demand for effective methods to extract specific activities from large, multimodal datasets becomes more crucial. This research explores novel approaches to improve information retrieval from personal lifelog data, focusing on moment-based retrieval to approximate human memory recall. This thesis begins with the development of LifeSeeker, a baseline image-based lifelog search engine utilising image concept-based indexing and retrieval techniques. Building on this foundation, the research leverages recent advancements in multimodal embedding models, particularly the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) from OpenAI, to enhance search capabilities. Through interactive user studies, the embedding-based enhanced retrieval model demonstrates significant improvements over the conventional concept-based approach across various evaluation metrics. Recognising that humans encode and retrieve their experiences as sequences of events, we propose a shift from single-image-based to moment-based retrieval units in lifelog data, more closely aligning with human memory processes. For this purpose, I investigate the application of video moment retrieval techniques to lifelog data, exploiting similarities between video and lifelog data as continuous frame sequences. This led to the development of a novel Parallel Transformer Framework (PaTF) for moment-level retrieval from continuous visual streams. In particular, the PaTF combines the strengths of the transformer architecture with enriched multimodal embeddings (visual and semantic features) to capture the temporal context of lifelog moments. The integration of the PaTF into a comprehensive moment-based lifelog retrieval system demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness compared to the baseline LifeSeeker. In summary, the primary contribution of this thesis is the development and validation of a moment-based lifelog search engine utilising a transformer-based framework. This approach is expected to advance the field of lifelog retrieval and benefit personal information management, memory augmentation, and retrospective life analysis
Slanguages Connect: Using Translation to Foster L2 Sociolinguistic Competence
Get PDFThis investigation focuses on the marginal presence of informal language in the L2 curriculum and advocates for its inclusion via translation-related tasks to develop sociolinguistic competence. Research in L2 teaching shows that classroom-based learners often overuse formal registers, tending towards monostylistic communication, which may hinder them in casual, day-to-day interactions with native speakers (Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner, 2010). This may also affect the learners’ agency and expression of identity if they feel the language they use is inappropriate in context. The ability to alternate between various styles, registers and discourse markers relates to identity, as it is a means to demonstrate in-group membership (Regan, 1996, 2010). Lasan and Rehner’s (2018) preliminary study also indicates a positive association between an understanding of sociolinguistic variation and the ability to express and perceive identity in the L2. Furthermore, the regular omission of informal registers and slang from the classroom contrasts with their widespread daily use (Mattiello, 2005).
Translation tasks can facilitate interaction with an endless number of authentic language samples rooted in various situations and styles, and have been shown to have great didactic potential in the L2 classroom (Bruton, 2007; Laufer and Girsai, 2008). In particular, they can increase awareness of communicative competence and strategies (Pintado Gutiérrez, 2012; Pintado Gutiérrez and Torralba, 2022) and L2 learning (Carreres, 2006, 2014; House, 2008; Carreres and Noriega-Sánchez, 2011; Machida, 2011; González Davies, 2014; González-Davies, 2017, 2020). It has also been argued that translation can help to develop the learner’s L2 style (Schaffner, 1998), although this relationship has yet to be fully investigated.
This investigation therefore lies at the intersection of learner agency and the use of informal language in the L2, the role of translation in L2 teaching as a tool to introduce informal language, and the relationship between sociolinguistic competence and identity in the L2
Development and Characterisation of Bioactive Coatings for Magnesium-based Medical Implants: Enhancing Corrosion Resistance and Biofunctionality in Skeletal Repair Applications
No full textIn this work, different configurations of bioactive CaP-based coatings, including dicalcium phosphate dehydrate (DCPD), octacalcium phosphate (OCP), and dual-layer DCPD OCP coatings, were applied to control the corrosion behaviour of pure Mg. The adhesion force results demonstrated that the DCPD coating provided a higher adhesion force to the Mg substrate than the OCP coating, indicating its potential to enhance the interface stability between the implant and tissue. The results from the potentiodynamic polarisation tests demonstrated a five-fold reduction in corrosion rate for DCPD-OCP-coated Mg compared to uncoated Mg. The incorporation of dual-layer CaP coatings leverages the synergistic advantages of each constituent, enhancing coating adhesion via the compact structure of the DCPD base layer and providing a hydrophilic surface (contact angle ≤ 15°) via the OCP layer. In subsequent research, a 3D-printed WE43 Mg alloy, considered commercially available and clinically utilised, was examined, and novel CaP-phosphoserine (PS) composite coatings were explored to overcome the challenge of low CaP coating adhesion on its surface. The incorporation of a PS enhanced coating adhesion, altered crystallinity, and improved degradation resistance to a five-fold. Among different molar ratio, OCP-PS-WE43 (1:2) exhibited lower corrosion rates and greater stability. In vitro studies revealed no cytotoxicity, with cell viability exceeding 100% in OCP-PS WE43 (1:2) specimen extracts after 72 hours. Moreover, the optimised coating composition developed through a wet chemistry approach was successfully translated from a regular geometric shape to an irregular porous wedge shape while maintaining physicochemical properties, coating uniformity, and improving corrosion resistance. Overall, this approach effectively enhanced the corrosion resistance of Mg-based orthopaedic implants, potentially making them more suitable for clinical applications