NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Cause we are living in a Machiavellian world, and I am a Machiavellian major: Machiavellianism and academic major choice
No full textStudents from diverse academic majors differ in their personalities. However, the study of the association between Machiavellianism (i.e., desire for power, status, and social dominance) and educational choices (i.e.,
academic major choices) that lay a path toward occupations that allow for those outcomes has been largely
ignored. Using a large multinational sample of 35,025 participants across 50 majors, we found overall support for
a significant association between Machiavellianism and academic major choice. We break down the results by
sex and provide a cross-country comparison
The Role of Connected Health Technologies in Supporting the Psychosocial Wellbeing of Families Impacted by Paediatric Cancer
No full textSurvival rates for paediatric cancers are increasing. With this comes a growing
need to investigate the factors which impact the wellbeing and quality of life (QOL) of
children and families affected. Across a series of eight interconnected studies, this
research examined the impact of paediatric cancer on the psychosocial wellbeing of
families, and the potential of Connected Health (CH) to mitigate burden and increase
wellbeing. CH is defined as any technology which gathers, analyses and interprets user
data in a manner intended to support health outcomes, and includes Electronic Health
Records (EHRs), Mobile Health (mHealth), and sensor technologies, amongst others.
Studies are presented across four sections, which outline a) the current evidence in
relation to CH; b) the unmet needs of families impacted by paediatric cancer; c) the
barriers and facilitators to CH use in paediatric cancer; and d) a pilot psychosocial CH
intervention for families of children with cancer.
The first two studies, presented in Section A, explored the current role of CH for
families impacted by paediatric cancer. As CH may derive from both empirical and
commercial sources, both forms were analysed to determine the current availability and
efficacy of such tools. Study 1 involved a systematic review of the literature regarding
CH use in supporting families with paediatric cancer, while Study 2 consisted of a
content analysis of commercially available CH mobile applications (apps). Positive
effects across both commercially available and empirically driven CH were found.
However, the limited number of CH interventions, alongside the high volume of
feasibility and acceptability analyses, suggests that further experimental analysis is
needed to determine the efficacy of CH.
Next, Section B explored the unmet needs of families living with paediatric
cancer in Ireland, through the lens of parents and healthcare providers (HCPs). Study 3
involved in-depth interviews with parents and supportive personnel (specifically HCPs
and hospital volunteers) to determine families’ unmet needs. The results of this
qualitative analysis highlighted the vast array of interconnected challenges encountered
by families, across both family and individual functioning. This in turn allowed
attention to be directed to several domains in which support may be meaningfully
targeted.
For CH to effectively address the needs of families, technologies must be
accessible to those for whom they are designed. To this end, the studies presented in
Section C examined the factors which facilitate or inhibit CH use by families. Using
secondary analysis of the Health Information National Trends dataset, Study 4
examined the impact of the digital divide on efficacy in health information seeking for
caregivers of children with illness, while Study 5 explored its impact on CH use. Next,
to determine the technological pre-requisite skills required to effectively use CH, Study
6, a survey of parents and HCPs, examined the role of eHealth literacy, technology use
and attitude on the ability to identify higher quality CH. Following this, Study 7
explored barriers and facilitators to CH use from the perspectives of parents and HCPs
in Ireland through in-depth interviews conducted in tandem with Study 3. While
positive perspectives on CH were found, the results obtained demonstrate the impact of
the digital divide and technological pre-requisite skills on CH access for parents.
Avenues through which CH may offer support included communication, care
individualisation and information sharing, though data security and pace of change
presented as hesitations to use.
Finally, drawing upon the results of Studies 1 to 7, and guided by public and
patient involvement (PPI), the efficacy of an online self-paced Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy (ACT) programme to support families living with paediatric
cancer is presented in Section D. In addition to exploring the feasibility and
acceptability of this CH mediated psychosocial programme, Study 8 sought to examine
the role of psychological flexibility on parental wellbeing through this online mediated
ACT programme. Specifically, a repeated measures design was used to explore the
impact of the CH mediated intervention on the psychological flexibility, burden and
wellbeing of parents of children with cancer. Results indicated acceptability of the
programme and positive effects on wellbeing, burden and psychological flexibility,
though challenges with post-intervention data collection was noted. Findings suggested
a key role of cognitive defusion on the psychological flexibility of parents, suggesting a
need for additional analysis in this area.
Taken as a whole, this research demonstrates the utility of CH to support
families impacted by paediatric cancer and identifies key factors which should be
considered to facilitate uptake in practice. Further, it presents a model through which
CH may be meaningfully applied to effectively address the needs of families impacted
by paediatric cance
Letter to the Editor: The Ukraine Crisis: Mental Health Resources for Clinicians and Researchers
No full textThe abstract is included in the text
Digital and Physical: The Role of Digital Twins in Praxis
No full textToday’s sustainability and urbanization challenges call for innovative urban solutions around the efficient use of latest technology and experimenting them in an urban living lab environment. 3D modelling technology presents an opportunity to transform the way we plan, build and operate infrastructure within our cities. Dublin City Council through its smart city unit has begun exploring this technology across a variety of topics including energy consumption, urban planning, public engagement, environment, tourism, and infrastructure management. Previously it has procured and released an open-source model of the Docklands Strategic Development Zone for a 3D hackathon to uncover new insights for efficient decision-making. Other models include the ones used by Dublin Fire Brigade for pre-incident planning and Smart DCU for real-time traffic monitoring. Smart Dublin has also been experimenting with state-of-art data-capture technologies such as drones, photogrammetry, LIDAR, mobile street mapper, and Google AirView. Advancing towards a more sophisticated system, Smart Dublin’s Digital Twin programme intends to apply a people-centric approach for effective stakeholder collaboration and explore novel forms of public engagement. While the concept of digital twins has existed for decades, the basis of constructing smart cities has gradually evolved from original static 3D modelling to a dynamic digital twinning using IoT, big urban data, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. One of the potential approaches is to use digital twins as a collaborative tool to engage internal and external stakeholders including citizens for decision-making and co-creating new ideas. The core objective is to ensure that the adoption of digital twin technology meets the needs both of the city, and the citizens who interact not just in technology deployments, but also in processes of engagement. By thinking together towards possible solutions through virtual environments may power new collaborations for future proofing our cities
Barriers to cultural participation by people with disabilities in Europe: a study across 28 countries
No full textThis article discusses the findings of a new qualitative study
conducted in 28 European countries, examining barriers to
cultural participation as perceived by representatives of organisations of people with disabilities. The study explores barriers
operating in all art-forms as well as in cultural heritage, and it
encompasses participation of people with a broad range of
disability types both as audiences and as creators of culture.
The article evidences that a range of interlinked barriers are
commonly perceived by people with disabilities in five areas
– lack of effective laws and policies; inadequate services and/
or funding; negative attitudes; lack of accessibility; and lack of
involvement of persons with disabilities in cultural organisations. The article argues for more systematic approaches to
enforcement of laws and policies, for greater knowledge
about disability to be embedded within cultural organisations
and policymaking, and for employment of people with disabilities at all levels within cultural sectors
Revisiting the Debate on Irish “Semi-Presidentialism”: Tradition or Evolution?
No full textIreland is generally (but often reluctantly) characterized as a semi-presidential
model of government. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland provides that the President of Ireland
must be elected by direct vote of the people, but also that the head of government and the
cabinet are dependent on the confidence of the lower house of the legislature. A certain
uneasiness around this semi-presidential categorization is linked to the weak powers of the
Irish Presidency. Recently, academic discussion has been revamped in light of a perceived
“activism” of the current President Michael D. Higgins. On foot of these recent occurrences,
this short contribution revisits the role of the President in the Irish constitutional system, and
reflects on its powers and prerogatives
GP-net: Flexible Viewpoint Grasp Proposal
No full textWe present the Grasp Proposal Network (GP-net), a
Convolutional Neural Network model which can generate 6-DoF
grasps from flexible viewpoints, e.g. as experienced by mobile manipulators. To train GP-net, we synthetically generate a dataset
containing depth-images and ground-truth grasp information. In
real-world experiments, we use the EGAD evaluation benchmark
to evaluate GP-net against two commonly used algorithms,
the Volumetric Grasping Network (VGN) and the Grasp Pose
Detection package (GPD), on a PAL TIAGo mobile manipulator.
In contrast to the state-of-the-art methods in robotic grasping,
GP-net can be used for grasping objects from flexible, unknown
viewpoints without the need to define the workspace and achieves
a grasp success of 54.4% compared to 51.6% for VGN and 44.2%
for GPD. We provide a ROS package along with our code and
pre-trained models at https://aucoroboticsmu.github.io/GP-net/
Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Anti-Cancer Platinum(IV) Glycoconjugates using CuAAC “Click” Chemistry
No full textCisplatin is the most widely used chemotherapeutic drug worldwide. Unfortunately, its use is hampered by severe dose-limiting side effects, intrinsic and acquired resistance and high toxicity. Furthermore, a major drawback associated with cisplatin therapy is its lack of selectivity for cancer cells with respect to healthy tissues.
One method to circumvent these side effects is to modify the chemical structure of the drug with selective targeting vectors whose receptors are overexpressed on the cell membrane of cancer cells. One example of this are sugars which are recognised by glucose transporters (GLUT). In this thesis, a series of glyco-functionalised platinum(IV) anticancer pro-drugs (where the sugar is glucose or galactose) are described, which were synthesised and characterised with the aim to create a library of novel selective metal-based chemotherapeutics. These complexes contain the Platinum metal centre in the +4 oxidation state, which have been shown to be more stable with respect to the classical Pt(II) complexes such as cisplatin. Our ligands consist of a combination of protected and deprotected glucose and galactose moieties conjugated to the axial positions of platinum(IV) complexes centre through the anomeric C1, and C2 positions, using CuAAC “click” chemistry. This thesis is divided in five chapters, with Chapter 1 containing an introduction outlining the aims and objectives of this thesis, together with a literature review which summarises the novelty of this research topic.
Chapter 2 reports the synthesis, characterisation and biological evaluation of a series of C1-acetylated Pt(IV) complexes which show similar activity to cisplatin against OS cell lines (SAOS-2, U-2 OS, MG63), but lack selectivity for cancer cells. This is probably due to the presence of the acetyl protecting groups that hamper the complexes’ ability to be internalised into the tumoral cells through GLUTs.
In Chapter 3, a novel series of C1 de-acetylated (free sugar) Pt(IV) pro-drug derivatives are described. Like their acetylated counterparts, these complexes show similar cytotoxicity to cancer cells (MG63 and SAOS-2) as the reference drug cisplatin but, when incubated with healthy cells (hFOBs), they show a reduced cytotoxicity, ascribable to the uptake through GLUTs.
Chapter 4 outlines our efforts to enhance the selectivity for cancer cells by functionalising the carbohydrate moiety in the C2 position, which has been shown to improve the drug uptake by GLUTs when compared to its C1 isomers. This series of complexes were found to display superior activity in comparison to cisplatin against cancer cells (SAOS-2, U-2 OS, MG63, MDA-MB-468, U-87 MG).
Finally, Chapter 5 details the synthesis and characterisation of multivalent galactose ligands which were intended to be coupled to our Pt(IV) scaffold. These ligands target the asialo-glycoprotein receptor (ASGPR), rather than GLUT, for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer in Asia and Africa. Synthetic problems are encountered during the experimental work which prevent the formation of the final complexes pure enough for biological studies. However, future work and perspectives are discussed in this chapter that may result in the successful formation of these complexes
Bayesian generalised additive models for quantifying sea-level change: Methods and Software
No full textRising sea levels pose significant risks to coastal regions worldwide, and the 2021
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 report emphasised that rates
of sea-level rise are the fastest in at least the last 3000 years. To understand
historical sea-level trends at regional and local scales, it is crucial to analyse the
drivers of sea-level change and their potential impacts. The influence of these
different drivers interact at a range of spatial (global, regional, local level) and
temporal (annual to millennia) scales. The development of a statistical model
that seeks to estimate a number of these characteristics would be of immeasurable
value to the sea level and climate impact communities. These characteristics would
include: exhibiting flexibility in time and space; having the capability to examine
the separate drivers; and taking account of uncertainty.
The aim of our project is to develop statistical models to examine historic sea-level
changes for North America’s Atlantic coast and extend to the North Atlantic region,
incorporating Ireland’s coastline. For our models, we utilise sea-level proxies
and tide gauge data which provide relative sea level estimates with uncertainty.
Proxy data can reconstruct sea-level variations over the late Holocene, spanning the
last 2000 years, providing a valuable pre-anthropogenic context for understanding
historical relative sea-level changes. We study a range of statistical models used to
examine relative sea-level data accounting for uncertainty and varying in space and
time. The statistical approaches employed range from simple linear regressions to
advanced Bayesian Generalised Additive Models (GAMs), which allow separate
components of sea-level change to be modelled individually and efficiently and for
smooth rates of change to be calculated.
Our most advanced models are built in a Bayesian framework which allows for external
prior information to constrain the evolution of sea-level change over space
and time. To investigate the drivers of sea-level change, we use flexible and extended
GAMs and effectively account for the uncertainty associated with proxy
data using the noisy input uncertainty method. Through the integration of statistical
models, proxy data, and tide gauge measurements, our findings reveal a
significant rise in current sea levels along North America’s Atlantic coast, reaching
the highest point in at least the last 15 centuries. The GAMs exhibit a remarkable
capability to examine various drivers of relative sea level change, including geological
processes (e.g. glacial isostatic adjustment; GIA), local factors, and barystatic
influences. Our models provide evidence that GIA primarily drove relative sealevel
change along North America’s Atlantic coast until the 20th century when a
notable rise in the rate of sea-level rise became apparent.
We present the open-source reslr package, which serves as a valuable resource
for the sea level community, offering a diverse range of statistical approaches.
This R package enables Bayesian modeling of relative sea level data, providing a
unified framework for loading data, fitting models, and summarising results. By
incorporating various statistical models, it offers flexibility and versatility in sea
level analysis. Notably, reslr takes into account measurement errors associated
with relative sea-level data in multiple dimensions, enhancing the accuracy and
reliability of the modelling process. With reslr, researchers and practitioners
can explore and compare different statistical methodologies for a comprehensive
understanding of historical sea-level changes, their uncertainties and importantly,
the rate of change of these sea-level variations.
One critical driver of sea-level change is ocean dynamics, commonly referred to
as dynamic sea-level change. Our statistical methodologies offer valuable insights
into dynamic sea-level changes over the last 2,000 years, using both proxy records
and tide gauges at a regional level. To investigate the dynamic sea-level component
along the North Atlantic coastline, we employ an extended noisy input GAM,
effectively decomposing the relative sea-level signal. In our investigation, we focus
on two key components of dynamic sea-level change in the North Atlantic: the
vertical (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - AMOC) circulation and
the quasi-horizontal circulation, involving surface-enhanced currents and gyres.
Our results highlight a decline in the AMOC over the studied period of 2,000
years with an unprecedented rate of decrease similar to previous studies. Additionally,
the quasi-horizontal circulation exhibits increased variability during the
same timeframe with a notably difference north and south of Cape Hatteras, USA.
This comprehensive analysis sheds light on the complex dynamics driving sea-level
changes in the North Atlantic region, contributing to a better understanding of
the factors influencing sea-level variations. Our approach places the present alterations
in ocean circulation patterns within the extended context of a 2,000-year
timeframe. However, the interpretability of these changes is constrained by the
resolution of the proxy data
Learning to grasp unknown objects in domestic environments
No full textFor robots to become valuable assistants in real-world scenarios, they must effectively
manipulate unknown objects in complex environments, such as homes with
multiple objects on shelves or desks. A critical aspect of manipulating objects is
grasping them with the robot’s end-effector. The key challenge for grasping an
unknown object lies in determining how to position and orientate the end-effector
relative to the object. While prior research has predominantly focused on tabletop
scenarios with fixed camera-workspace transforms, in this thesis, we extend
robotic grasping to domestic settings.
This thesis makes three principal contributions in this area: (i) extending a depthimage-
based grasp quality prediction method to accommodate 6-DoF grasps and
versatile camera poses, (ii) creating a depth-image-based grasp proposal method
tailored for 6-DoF grasps and unknown camera-workspace transforms, and (iii) applying
such a grasp proposal method in complex, domestic environments. For application
in domestic environments, we develop a simulation pipeline specifically
designed for training and evaluating grasp proposal models in domestic settings.
Quantitative experiments demonstrate competitive or superior performance of our
approach when compared with widely used techniques across a number of challenging
simulated experiments. Additionally, real-world experiments with a mobile
manipulator demonstrate successful grasping of unknown objects positioned
on tables and shelves in unknown poses. We make our code and pre-trained models
available for fellow researchers, facilitating the direct application of our models
when attempting to grasp unknown objects with mobile manipulators in domestic
environments