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Tracking the psychological and socio‐economic impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the UK: A methodological report from Wave 5 of the COVID‐19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study
No full textObjectives
The COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study was established in March 2020 to monitor the psychological and socio-economic impact of the pandemic in the UK and other countries. This paper describes the protocol for Wave 5 (March–April 2021).
Methods
The survey assessed: COVID-19 related experiences; experiences of common mental health disorders; psychological characteristics; and social and political attitudes. Adults who participated in any previous wave (N = 4949) were re-invited to participate. Weights were calculated using a survey raking algorithm to ensure the longitudinal panel was nationally representative in terms of gender, age, and household income, amongst other factors.
Results
Overall, 2520 adults participated. A total of 2377 adults who participated in the previous survey wave (November–December 2020) were re-interviewed at Wave 5 (61.5% retention rate). Attrition between these two waves was predicted by younger age, lower household income, children living in the household, and treatment for mental health difficulties. Of the adults recruited into the C19PRC study at baseline, 57.4% (N = 1162) participated in Wave 5. The raking procedure re-balanced the longitudinal panel to within 1.5% of population estimates for selected socio-demographic characteristics.
Conclusion
This paper outlines the growing strength of the publicly available C19PRC Study data for COVID-19-related interdisciplinary research
A critique of innovation districts: Entrepreneurial living and the burden of shouldering urban development
No full textThis article critically investigates the global trend toward urban innovation districts, a distinctly 21st-century spatial form. Innovation districts are a place-based, economic development strategy to concentrate the actors, entities, and infrastructure considered essential to process and product innovation. Built on the idea that today's innovation requires continuous interaction, the design of innovation districts incorporates a density of living and working amenities to accommodate a 24-7 live–work–play environment. At the heart of the innovation district strategies are the entrepreneurs meant to benefit from the built-in supports that help them scale their ideas and introduce products to the market. Despite an embrace by policymakers, to date, there has been little systematic analysis and critique of innovation district strategies or attempts to understand them as tools of neoliberal urban economic development. This article tracks how planners and other city development officials endorsed innovation districts during the Global Financial Crisis. The districts were a stopgap policy measure to accumulate economic benefits while waiting for market activity to resume. Furthermore, this paper argues that the emergence of innovation district strategy points to new governance arrangements that shift the burden of urban revitalization onto entrepreneurs who catalyze growth through their consumption and production activities. The findings are based on content analysis, site observations, and interviews with the creators, implementers, stakeholders, and users of innovation districts in Boston, St. Louis, and Dublin
The Implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty in the European Union: An Important Piece in the Accessibility Jigsaw?
No full textThe Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (Marrakesh Treaty) aims to enable the creation and cross-border exchange of copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to individuals with disabilities. To that end, it requires Contracting Parties to introduce a set of limitations and exceptions to existing copyright rules. Following Opinion 3/15 of the Court of Justice, the Marrakesh Treaty was concluded by the European Union (EU) on behalf of its Member States. It was implemented by means of a Directive governing the substantive rights of reproduction, distribution and making available of published works in accessible formats, and a Regulation governing the cross-border exchange of accessible format works with Third Countries, both based on Article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). This article examines the role of the Marrakesh Directive and Regulation in enhancing access to printed material to persons with disabilities. In that connection, it discusses common trends and perceptions of such a Marrakesh framework on the basis of empirical research consisting of a set of semi-structured interviews conducted with key stakeholders across twelve Member States. It locates the Directive and Regulation within the growing body of EU legislation that aims to ensure accessibility of an array of materials, products and services for persons with disabilities, while driving forward economic integration. In doing so, it conceives of the Marrakesh Directive and Regulation as part of the broader remit of EU disability law, which is an emerging cross-cutting area of EU action. On the whole, this article argues that the Marrakesh Treaty and its implementing legislation contribute to the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities within the internal market, but form just one piece – albeit an important one – of the accessibility ‘jigsaw’.
Marrakesh Treaty, Directive 2017/1564/EU (Marrakesh Directive), Disability, Copyright exceptions, Accessibility, European Accessibility Act, European Union Law, Implementation, Empirical Researc
Banking for Jesus: Financial Services, Charity, and an Ethical Economy in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
No full textThis essay extends current analysis of the relationship between charity and capitalism by examining one charity's engagement with financial capitalism. The Salvation Army, established in 1878, transformed charity-run financial services from a welfare initiative into a model of ethical capitalism. Historical analysis addressing the relationship Christian confessions had with money has focused largely on the United Statesand studied the morals around managing money rather than its acquisition. Histories of finance and accounting, meanwhile, have concentrated on large commercial banks, while scholarship on smaller savings banks is still emergent (and much stronger on US banks). This essay is situated in the matrix of these scholarships to, first, demonstrate on a micro level how a charity could bring about social change by pioneering "ethical" financial services and, second, consider the macro implications of such attempts for understanding the challenges inherent in reforming capitalist practices and the paradoxical "capitalocentrism" of even those that sought to advance alternative economies
Smart City Data in Urban Wellbeing Estimation
No full textAbstract—Mental wellbeing is a global health concern. Within the urban context, it is well understood that factors associated with urban living can impact individuals’ wellbeing. For example, the relationship between wellbeing and environmental factors, such as air quality, has been shown. We postulate that such factors can be automatically derived from data sources available in smart cities and used, as contextual cues to form automatic indicators of the wellbeing levels of individuals within a city. In this paper we provide a realistic vision for this new approach to mental wellbeing estimation for an urban population, focusing on contextual cues associated with environmental information and green infrastructure. Outcomes from initial investigations are discussed and a roadmap for the future is presented
"Do you see this Woman?" (Luke 7:44): Encounters with the Lukan Jesus as Windows on the Nattative Anthropology of the Third Gospel
No full textThis dissertation aims to explore aspects of the anthropology of Luke’s Gospel, where
anthropology is understood as “the study of what it means to be a human being.” It asks the
question, What is Luke’s view of the person and how does he narrate it? Given the vast
possibilities of this area of research and the ongoing development of New Testament
methodologies (or hermeneutics), a single dissertation can no longer provide a comprehensive
account of the many aspects of anthropology. Instead, the study seeks to make a contribution
to this field of inquiry by considering some of the diverse ways in which the Lukan author
depicts humans (that is, the characters in the Gospel’s narrative), their relationship to one
another, and to the Lord Jesus, with whom they interact in the narrative world. Because the
Gospel is a narrative text, its anthropology is necessarily a narrative one; it will therefore be
examined by means of a narrative-critical approach. In addition, since the Gospel of Luke is
long and features many interesting characters, the focus of the study must be narrowed. The
dissertation therefore undertakes a close reading of four pericopae—the Anointing Woman and
Simon the Pharisee (7:36–50), Martha and Mary (10:38–42), Zacchaeus and the “Grumblers”
(19:1–10), and the Two Wrongdoers (23:32, 39–43)—chosen as representative examples of
Gospel encounters with Jesus where some aspects of the human—the anthropos—might be
revealed
Psychomotor learning theory informing the design and evaluation of an interactive augmented reality hand hygiene training app for healthcare workers
No full textHand hygiene is critical for infection control, but studies report poor transfer from
training to practice. Hand hygiene training in hospitals typically involves one classroom session per year, but psychomotor skills require repetition and feedback for
retention. We describe the design and independent evaluation of a mobile interactive augmented reality training tool for the World Health Organisation (WHO)
hand hygiene technique. The design was based on a detailed analysis of the underlying educational theory relating to psychomotor skills learning. During the evaluation forty-seven subjects used AR hand hygiene training over 4 weeks. Hand
hygiene proficiency was assessed at weekly intervals, both electronically and via
human inspection. Thirty eight participants (81%) reached proficiency after 24.3
(SD=17.8) two-minute practice sessions. The study demonstrated that interactive
mobile applications could empower learners to develop hand hygiene skills independently. Healthcare organizations could improve hand hygiene quality by using
self-directed skills-based training combined with regular ward-based assessments
AcWriMo @Maynooth University Library: a guide to running an academic writing programme
No full textIn 2020 and 2021, Maynooth University (MU) Library ran an academic writing programme for library staff,
loosely based on the international Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) model. This model originated
in the U.S. with the aim of encouraging and supporting writing among early career academics and
researchers. Individuals or teams set November as a time to advance their writing substantially through
establishing specific writing goals and recording both time spent writing and output. The MU Library
version of AcWriMo was offered in November 2020 (AcWriMo1) and February 2021 (AcWriMo2).
The goal for AcWriMo1 (November 2020) was to write a blog post of between 800 and 1,000 words.
The goal for AcWriMo2 (February 2021) was similar – to complete a piece of writing of between 1,000 and
1,500 words for either a blog post or a professional journal. No prior experience of academic writing was
necessary, and the programme was offered to library staff across all grades.
Following a brief review of the literature relating to academic writing groups, this article provides a
step-by-step description of the content of the writing programme, which could be adapted and developed
by other academic writing groups. It then discusses the outputs from the group, their evaluation of the
process and the key emerging issues
Hierarchical reinforcement learning for efficient and effective automated penetration testing of large networks
No full textPenetration testing (PT) is a method for assessing and evaluating the security of digital
assets by planning, generating, and executing possible attacks that aim to discover and
exploit vulnerabilities. In large networks, penetration testing becomes repetitive, complex
and resource consuming despite the use of automated tools. This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) to make penetration testing more intelligent, targeted, and efficient. The proposed approach called Intelligent Automated Penetration Testing Framework
(IAPTF) utilizes model-based RL to automate sequential decision making. Penetration
testing tasks are treated as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) which
is solved with an external POMDP-solver using different algorithms to identify the most
efficient options. A major difficulty encountered was solving large POMDPs resulting from
large networks. This was overcome by representing networks hierarchically as a group of
clusters and treating each cluster separately. This approach is tested through simulations
of networks of various sizes. The results show that IAPTF with hierarchical network modeling outperforms previous approaches as well as human performance in terms of time,
number of tested vectors and accuracy, and the advantage increases with the network size.
Another advantage of IAPTF is the ease of repetition for retesting similar networks, which
is often encountered in real PT. The results suggest that IAPTF is a promising approach to
offload work from and ultimately replace human pen testing
Mesoporous carbon-based materials and their applications as non-precious metal electrocatalysts in the oxygen reduction reaction
No full textCarbon is truly astonishing and the only element that can form so many different compounds and materials. In
recent years, numerous nanostructured carbon-based materials have emerged and within this family, meso-
porous and ordered mesoporous carbon have attracted considerable attention. In this paper, we review the recent
developments in the applications of mesoporous carbon as an electrocatalyst for the oxygen reduction reaction
(ORR). The ORR is one of the most studied electrochemical reactions with applications in the energy and
environmental sectors. Following a short introduction to the methodologies employed in the fabrication of
mesoporous and ordered mesoporous carbon, the performance of these materials in the ORR is reviewed.
Initially, metal free heteroatom doped mesoporous carbon electrocatalysts are described, highlighting the roles
of N, S and B as dopants. Next, mesoporous carbon materials with Fe, Co, Mn and Ni, as isolated single atom
catalysts, are introduced. The role of mesoporous carbon as a support for nanostructured electrocatalysts is then
discussed. Finally, the selectivity of the mesoporous carbon-based electrocatalysts for the four and two-electron
ORR is discussed.
While further developments and advancements are needed, it is clear that these mesoporous carbon-based
materials have the potential to give highly efficient electrocatalysts for both the four and two electron ORR.
Indeed, many of the reported electrocatalysts can outperform the commercial Pt/carbon electrocatalysts in
alkaline solutions