NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Changing geographies of voter turnout: Michigan and the urban/rural divide
No full textVoter turnout is a key measure of the legitimacy of any given democracy. A government elected in a high-turnout contest has a strong mandate from the state's citizens to make key decisions on their behalf. Low turnout raises questions about why citizens have chosen not to participate in the decision-making process, and about the representativeness of the elected government. Often, changes in levels of engagement and in the geography of participation are relatively small, but they may be decisive in key competitive elections. Using the state of Michigan as a case study, this brief commentary considers the changing geographies of participation in U.S. Presidential elections from 2012 to 2020. In Michigan, a notable voter-turnout upsurge in what traditionally had been low-turnout rural areas had a significant bearing on the victory of Donald Trump in 2016. This upsurge in rural support for Trump continued in the 2020 contest but was counteracted by a more positive (though not overwhelming) level of turnout in urban centres. After explaining these trends, this commentary briefly compares the case of Michigan with the Republic of Ireland in general elections from 2007 to 2016 to highlight the importance of urban-rural distinctions in competitive electoral settings
Early introduction of high-intensity eccentric loading into hamstring strain injury rehabilitation
No full textObjectives
This study aimed to investigate the number of days following hamstring strain injury (HSI) taken to introduce high-intensity eccentric loading (HIEL) into rehabilitation based on exercise-specific progression criteria, and whether pain resolution during isometric knee flexion strength testing occurred before or after this milestone.
Design
Cohort study.
Methods
We included 42 men (mean ± sd; age = 26 ± 5 years; height = 181 ± 8 cm; mass = 86 ± 12 kg) with HSIs, who performed fully supervised rehabilitation twice per week until they met return to play clearance criteria. Isometric knee flexion strength testing was completed before every rehabilitation session and HIEL was introduced via the Nordic hamstring exercise and unilateral slider once participants could perform a bilateral slider through full eccentric knee flexion range of motion. We reported the median (IQR) number of days following HSI taken to introduce HIEL, along with participant's pain rating during isometric knee flexion strength testing before that rehabilitation session. We also reported the median (IQR) number of days following HSI taken for participants to achieve pain resolution during isometric knee flexion.
Results
HIEL was introduced 5 (2–8) days following HSI, despite 35/42 participants reporting pain during isometric knee flexion strength testing immediately prior to that rehabilitation session, which was rated as 3.5 (3–5) on a 0–10 numeric rating scale. Pain resolution during isometric knee flexion strength testing was achieved 11 (9–13) days following HSI.
Conclusion
HIEL can be safely introduced into early HSI rehabilitation based on exercise-specific progression criteria, without needing to wait for pain resolution during isometric knee flexion strength testing before doing so
Smart cities as hubs: Connect, collect and control city flows
No full textRegardless the Smart City (SC) broad scope, which ranges from a service-oriented ecosystem with the use of almost all the emerging technologies to a resilient urban environment, practice shows that the SC is mostly capitalized for utility upgrades, urban renovation, and real-time city monitoring. Moreover, recent city implementations register attempts to utilize technology for controlling the entire city flows. The aim of this communication paper is to discuss the SC hubness and more specifically the fact that the SC can become a “hub” that collects, processes, and transmits data; brings together people to co-design and evolve; and controls service, material and people flows in all city types. As a result, this paper defines the role, the uses and the architecture of this “SC-as-a-Hub” operation labeled “SCHub”, which can standardize and control all the city flows
Imagining Diversity: An Irish Case Study of Graduates’ Perceptions of Inequality in Media Work
No full textRecent international challenges to the hegemonic structures in the media industries—particularly
regarding gender, sex and class—have resulted in a range of institutional-level responses. In Ireland, state bodies
such as Screen Ireland and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland have developed gender action plans. Funding
incentives in screen production are now tied to increasing women’s participation. The national broadcaster, RTÉ
and various independent companies have published diversity and inclusion strategies. The Irish media workforce
today, it seems, should be open and inclusive to all. However, contemporary scholarship on media work suggests
that structural barriers remain (O’Brien and Kerrigan; French). Media work is still a site of privilege, with
working conditions and cultures reproducing class and gender hierarchies. (O’Brien et al., “Are”; Malik; Banks
and Oakley). Our article proposes to add to this body of knowledge by prioritising the relatively neglected point
of view of aspirant new entrants to industry. Generation Z graduate entrants articulate how graduates conceive
of diversity and equality in the workplace, whether they believe they will experience structural or cultural
exclusions, and how they interpret organisational efforts to achieve change
Proceedings of workshop: “Neuroglycoproteins in health and disease”, INNOGLY cost action
No full textThe Cost Action "Innovation with glycans: new frontiers from synthesis to new biological targets" (INNOGLY) hosted the Workshop "Neuroglycoproteins in health and disease", in Alicante, Spain, on March 2022. This event brought together an european group of scientists that presented novel insights into changes in glycosylation in diseases of the central nervous system and cancer, as well as new techniques to study protein glycosylation. Herein we provide the abstracts of all the presentations
Semantics in Multi-objective Genetic Programming
No full textSemantics has become a key topic of research in Genetic Programming (GP). Semantics refers to the outputs (behaviour) of a GP individual when this is run on a dataset. The majority of works that focus on semantic diversity in single-objective GP indicates that it is highly beneficial in evolutionary search. Surprisingly, there is minuscule research conducted in semantics in Multi-objective GP (MOGP). In this work we make a leap beyond our understanding of semantics in MOGP and propose SDO: Semantic-based Distance as an additional criteriOn. This naturally encourages semantic diversity in MOGP. To do so, we find a pivot in the less dense region of the first Pareto front (most promising front). This is then used to compute a distance between the pivot and every individual in the population. The resulting distance is then used as an additional criterion to be optimised to favour semantic diversity. We also use two other semantic-based methods as baselines, called Semantic Similarity-based Crossover and Semantic-based Crowding Distance. Furthermore, we also use the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II and the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 for comparison too. We use highly unbalanced binary classification problems and consistently show how our proposed SDO approach produces more non-dominated solutions and better diversity, leading to better statistically significant results, using the hypervolume results as evaluation measure, compared to the rest of the other four methods
Eugene Linden, Fire & Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present
No full textBook review
A young climate activist from Uganda, Hilda Nakabuye, told
political leaders at a recent UN Climate Conference: “You’ve
been negotiating for the last 25 years, even before I was born. I am the voice of the dying children, displaced women, and people suffering at the hands of a climate crisis created by rich countries.” It is a stark reminder of the long-term failure by states, institutions, companies, and individuals to arrest the climate change–led degradation of planet Earth both for present and future generations. In this award-winning book, author Eugene Linden seeks to explain how this failure has come about by chronicling, decade by decade, the personalities and events that have contributed to placing the planet on the edge of potentially catastrophic climate tipping points
Positive (p,n)-intermediate scalar curvature and cobordism
No full textIn this paper we consider a well-known construction due to Gromov and Lawson, Schoen
and Yau, Gajer, and Walsh which allows for the extension of a metric of positive scalar
curvature over the trace of a surgery in codimension at least 3 to a metric of positive
scalar curvature which is a product near the boundary. We extend this construction for
(p,n)-intermediate scalar curvature for 0≤p≤n−2 for surgeries in codimension at least
p + 3. We then use it to generalize a well known theorem of Carr. Letting Rsp,n>0(M)
denote the space of positive (p,n)-intermediate scalar curvature metrics on an n-manifold
M, we show for 0≤p≤2n−3 and n ≥ 2, that for a closed, spin, (4n − 1)-manifold M
admitting a metric of positive (p, 4n − 1)-intermediate scalar curvature, Rsp,4n−1>0(M) has
infinitely many path components
What makes mindful self‐initiated expatriates bounce back, improvise and perform: Empirical evidence from the emerging markets
No full textDrawing upon the self-determination theory (SDT), this study examines
what makes individual employees leverage improvisational capability to act
extemporaneously to find relevant solutions for enhanced task performance.
Using supervisor-subordinate dyadic self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) samples, we
used structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine this study’s hypotheses. We
found that mindfulness influences resilience and improvisation in the workplace.
Furthermore, we found improvisation to mediate the influence of resilience on
task performance. We discussed in detail the essential findings and their contributions to advance theory and practice in the field
Bayesian multi-species N-mixture models for unmarked animal communities
No full textWe propose an extension of the N-mixture model that enables the estimation of abundances of multiple species as well as the correlations between them. Our novel multi-species N-mixture model (MNM) is the first to address the estimation of both positive and negative inter-species correlations, which allows us to assess the influence of the abundance of one species on another. We provide extensions that permit the analysis of data with excess of zero counts, and relax the assumption that populations are closed through the incorporation of an autoregressive term in the abundance. Our approach provides a method of quantifying the strength of association between species’ population sizes and is of practical use to population and conservation ecologists. We evaluate the performance of the proposed models through simulation experiments in order to examine the accuracy of both model estimates and coverage rates. The results show that the MNM models produce accurate estimates of abundance, inter-species correlations and detection probabilities at a range of sample sizes. The MNM models are applied to avian point data collected as part of the North American Breeding Bird Survey between 2010 and 2019. The results reveal an increase in Bald Eagle abundance in south-eastern Alaska in the decade examined