NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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DIVERSITY – Including migrants through organisational development and programme planning in adult education.
No full textThe value of diversity in inclusive adult education was the
subject discussed by over 150 participants from more than
20 countries at the Austrian EPALE conference, which was
held online for the second consecutive year in May 2021.
The present publication comprises the reports presented at
the conference.
During the last decade, immigration put the European
educational systems to the test. The large influx of refugees
and migrants from different educational, economic and
cultural contexts made the rapid creation of emergency
response mechanisms imperative, resulting in a plethora
of language and cultural awareness courses to promote
integration. By the same token, those contingency schemes
polarised the Adult Education (AE) system in most European
countries, leading to a differentiation between ‘AE
for migrants’ and ‘traditional AE’ along the entire cycle of
the Adult Education value chain (i.e. from policy formulation,
programme development, implementation, curriculum
development, service delivery, etc). In many cases, ‘AE for
migrants’ is even further subdivided into ‘AE for refugees’
and ‘AE for other migrants’. Thus, migrants have been
considered as a ‘special’ target group of AE with specifically
tailored solutions. While this approach may be appropriate
when responding to and managing needs resulting from
the contingency of sudden migrant inflow, it left migrants
outside the mainstream AE provision; once migrants have
completed the courses especially designed (and financed)
for integration purposes, the current AE systems offer them
little further perspective and few migrants transition into
‘ordinary’ courses. The next step must be a ‘normalisation’
of this target group in the eyes of AE and their strategic
integration into the established pool of target audiences.
To achieve this goal and to remain attractive, even longterm
facilitators and provider organisations need to shift
their perspectives and change up their internal processes,
adapting management and programme planning strategies
Exploring neighbourhood-level mobility inequity in Chicago using dynamic transportation mode choice profiles
No full textThis paper develops a method to dynamically model urban passenger mode trade-offs at fine-grained spatial and
temporal scales using data from OpenTripPlanner (OTP) and the City of Chicago’s Transportation Network
Providers (TNP) dataset. This approach can be used to calculate dynamic modal cost-distance trade-offs for
specific times, routes, and geographic areas of interest, providing a framework for creating aggregate mode
choice profiles for individual cities and neighbourhoods that can be used to assess structural differences in
transportation investment and mobility, as well as to test various assumptions about travel behaviour, observe
temporal changes in modal trade-offs, and model the system-wide implications of changes to the transportation
system to modal trade-offs. Using this dynamic mode choice framework, this paper explores the features underlying observed structural heterogeneity in the ratio of cost to distance (i.e., speed or potential mobility) for
observed flows across the city for each mode. It finds that Census tracts with larger proportions of Black and
Hispanic population tend to have significantly larger cost-distance ratios (i.e., slower speeds/lower potential
mobility) for non-auto modes, while Census tracts with higher proportions of “creative class” employment and
features of walkable built environments have significantly lower cost-distance ratios (i.e., faster speeds/higher
potential mobility)
Patents, Governance and Control: Ethics and the Patentability of Novel Beings and Advanced Biotechnologies in Europe
No full textThis article focuses primarily on to what extent novel beings, and particularly, beings which display something
akin to human consciousness or agency would be (or should be) patentable under current European patent
law. Patents grant the patent holder a right to exclude others from using the patented invention for the period
of patent grant (usually 20 years). This allows the patent holder to control how that invention can or cannot be
used by others downstream, granting patent holders a governance like function over the patented technology
for the duration of the patent. Accordingly, the potential for patentability of novel beings gives rise to a myriad
of ethical issues including: to what extent is it appropriate for patent holders to retain and exercise patents
over “novel beings”; how issues of “agency” displayed by any “novel beings” would fit within the current
patent framework, if at all; and to what extent existing exclusions from patentability might exclude patents on
“novel beings” or whether changes within patent law may be needed if patents in relation to “novel beings”
are deemed ethically problematic. This article focuses on such issues, and in doing so, also sheds light on the
role of ethical issues within the patenting of advanced biotechnologies more generally
A design-led framework for engaged research: Using a design approach to understand and place the public at the core of health and social care
No full textThis paper offers a multi-perspective approach on the role of engaged
research in health and social care. Each of the authors focuses on their
individual experiences of this domain, from the perspective of an academic
partner of the Health Research Board’s PPI Ignite programme, a CEO of an
umbrella organisation for health research charities and a researcher in design
innovation, focusing on health research. The paper outlines the values which
underpin public and patient involvement, as well as examples of its application
as engaged research. It details how organisations like Health Research Charities Ireland support and enable engaged research within health and
social research and policy. This paper offers a framework for facilitating
dialogue and response across all stakeholders in the engaged research process,
illustrating the importance of engaged research and how we can further our
understanding and application of it within health and social care policy by
adopting a design-led approach. We argue that a design-led approach can
both facilitate engaged research as well as support policymakers in the design
of new policies and practices
Shared decision‐making and maternity care in the deep learning age: Acknowledging and overcoming inherited defeaters
No full textIn recent years there has been an explosion of interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
both in health care and academic philosophy. This has been due mainly to the rise of
effective machine learning and deep learning algorithms, together with increases in
data collection and processing power, which have made rapid progress in many areas.
However, use of this technology has brought with it philosophical issues and practical
problems, in particular, epistemic and ethical. In this paper the authors, with backgrounds in philosophy, maternity care practice and clinical research, draw upon and
extend a recent framework for shared decision-making (SDM) that identified a duty of
care to the client's knowledge as a necessary condition for SDM. This duty entails
the responsibility to acknowledge and overcome epistemic defeaters. This framework
is applied to the use of AI in maternity care, in particular, the use of machine learning
and deep learning technology to attempt to enhance electronic fetal monitoring
(EFM). In doing so, various sub-kinds of epistemic defeater, namely, transparent,
opaque, underdetermined, and inherited defeaters are taxonomized and discussed. The
authors argue that, although effective current or future AI-enhanced EFM may
impose an epistemic obligation on the part of clinicians to rely on such systems' predictions or diagnoses as input to SDM, such obligations may be overridden by
inherited defeaters, caused by a form of algorithmic bias. The existence of inherited
defeaters implies that the duty of care to the client's knowledge extends to any situation in which a clinician (or anyone else) is involved in producing training data for a
system that will be used in SDM. Any future AI must be capable of assessing women
individually, taking into account a wide range of factors including women's preferences, to provide a holistic range of evidence for clinical decision-making
Developing inclusive and resilient systems: COVID-19 and assistive technology
No full textAssistive technology is a critical component of maintaining health, wellbeing, and the realization of rights for persons with disabilities. Assistive technologies, and their associated services, are also paramount to ensuring individuals with functional limitations have access to important health and social service information, particularly during a pandemic where they may be at higher risk than the general population. Social isolation and physical distancing have further marginalized many within this population. We have an opportunity to learn from the COVID-19response to develop more inclusive and resilient systems that will serve people with disabilities more effectively in the future. In this Current Issues piece, we present a starting point for discussion, based on our experiences working to promote access to assistive technologies through inclusive and sustainable systems and policies
Rooting and reaching: insights from Love Leitrim’s successful resistance to fracking in Ireland
No full textWhat can community development learn from frontline community
resistance to extractivism and the fossil fuel industry? In the global North,
environmental governance often operates within the dominant mode
of neoliberal ‘environmentality’ (Luke. 1999. Environmentality as green
governmentality, in E. Darier ed, Discourses of the Environment, Black-
well, Oxford), conceptualizing environmental action in individualized and
depoliticized ways. This is compounded by the discursive hegemony of
the educated middle-classes, which frames environmental issues in ways
that render invisible the concerns of marginalized communities and work-
ers. In this paper, I present an activist ethnography and case study of Love
Leitrim, a community group that played a crucial role in the successful
Irish movement to resist fracking. I suggest that local environmental
justice struggles point to the possibility of a ‘liberation environmentality’
(Fletcher. Environmentality unbound: multiple governmentalities in envi-
ronmental politics, Geoforum, 2017;85, 311–315); which challenges capi-
talist modes of environmental governance that facilitate the exploitation
of the environment for capital accumulation. The paper identifies how a
combination of (i) relational local organizing; (ii) trans-local networking
with other frontline communities and (iii) creative political engagement
enabled campaigners to organize collectively around the environment,
navigate power asymmetries and secure political change across spatial
scales. I conclude by suggesting that Love Leitrim’s frontline community
struggle offers important insights for community development workers
who wish to address the environment as a political issue and play a role in bringing about a just transition for marginalized communities and
workers
Power Consumption Profiling of a Lightweight Development Board: Sensing with the INA219 and Teensy 4.0 Microcontroller
No full textAt the heart of most technological advancements is a network of processors executing code and consuming energy. Understanding those systems’ energy consumption profiles provides optimisation possibilities and thus contributes to strategies for reducing energy consumption in general. This paper assesses the power consumption characteristics of a highly competitive low cost, small form factor development board (the Raspberry Pi4 model B), powered with the minimal load associated with its bare-metal configuration and the related impact on baseline power consumption. We also consider the load associated with an out-of-box operating system, running at several underclocking frequency scaling levels and the associated impact on baseline power consumption. Our experimental set-up consists of integrating an INA219 high-side current sense amplifier for the capturing of power, current, and voltage measurements; and a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller for sampling. Overall, our results indicate statistically significant differences in overall power consumption distribution characteristics across all models. Our results also indicate the presence of three distinct power phase envelopes and statistically significant differences in mean and median power measurements between the different underclocking frequency test cases and the bare-metal cases. Our results also indicate that power consumption is an increasing monotonic function across test scenarios. Finally, our results have also shown that isolating power consumption composite distributions increases model predictability from 67% to 97%
Consumer Health Search at CLEF eHealth 2021
No full textThis paper details materials, methods, results, and analyses of the Consumer Health Search Task of the
CLEF eHealth 2021 Evaluation Lab. This task investigates the effectiveness of information retrieval (IR)
approaches in providing access to medical information to laypeople. For this a TREC-style evaluation
methodology was applied: a shared collection of documents and queries is distributed, participants’
runs received, relevance assessments generated, and participants’ submissions evaluated. The task generated a new representative web corpus including web pages acquired from a 2021 CommonCrawl and
social media content from Twitter and Reddit, along with a new collection of 55 manually generated
layperson medical queries and their respective credibility, understandability, and topicality assessments
for returned documents. This year’s task focused on three subtask: (i) ad-hoc IR, (ii) weakly supervised
IR, and (iii) document credibility prediction. In total, 15 runs were submitted to the three subtasks: eight
addressed the ad-hoc IR task, three the weakly supervised IR challenge, and 4 the document credibility
prediction challenge. As in previous years, the organizers have made data and tools associated with the
task available for future research and development
Ordered Reliability Bits Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding
No full textModern applications are driving demand for ultra-
reliable low-latency communications, rekindling interest in the
performance of short, high-rate error correcting codes. To that
end, here we introduce a soft-detection variant of Guessing
Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) called Ordered Re-
liability Bits GRAND that can decode any moderate redundancy
block-code. For a code of n bits, it avails of no more than
dlog2(n)e bits of code-book-independent quantized soft detection
information per received bit to determine an accurate decoding
while retaining the original algorithm’s suitability for a highly
parallelized implementation in hardware. ORBGRAND is shown
to provide similar block error performance for codes of distinct
classes (BCH, CA-Polar and RLC) with low complexity, while
providing better block error rate performance than CA-SCL, a
state of the art soft detection CA-Polar decoder