NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
Not a member yet
18159 research outputs found
Sort by
Can subjective perceptions of trauma differentiate between ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD? A cross-cultural comparison of three African countries
No full textBackground: The primary aim of the current study was to establish the cutoffs scores for the Subjective Traumatic Outlook (STO), a relatively new tool that examines the introspective worldview of those exposed to traumatic events. This tool was developed as a complementary scale to be used in conjunction with the observed-phenomenological measures of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) complex PTSD (CPTSD). The present study examines the predictive power of STO for distinguishing between PTSD and CPTSD in African countries. Method: A national representative (based on age and gender) sample of 2,554 participants was drawn from 3 African countries (Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana) who completed the International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ) and the STO. We conducted a set of analyses examining that alignment of ITQ probable PTSD and CPTSD and different STO cutoff scores. Results: Results suggest that the STO single-factor structure was stable across countries, had a strong association with PTSD and CPTSD levels, and had predictive utility in differentiating between PTSD and CPTSD. Moreover, we found that there are different cutoffs for the STO in the different countries. Conclusion: There is a strong but distinctive association between the introspective and the observed-phenomenological approaches of PTSD and CPTSD. Our findings call for more integrative approaches for the assessment of PTSD and CPTSD and suggest that there are cultural differences in STO
Beyond categorisation: refining the relationship between subjects and objects in health research regulation
No full textIn this article, we argue that the relationship between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is
poorly understood in health research regulation (HRR), and that it is a fallacy
to suppose that they can operate in separate, fixed silos. By seeking to
perpetuate this fallacy, HRR risks, among other things, objectifying persons
by paying insufficient attention to human subjectivity, and the experiences
and interests related to being involved in research. We deploy the
anthropological concept of liminality – concerned with processes of
transformation and change over time – to emphasise the enduring
connectedness between subject and object in these contexts. By these
means, we posit that regulatory frameworks based on processual regulation
can better recognise and encompass the fluidity and significance of these
relationships, and so ground more securely the moral legitimacy and social
licence for human health research
The poetics of irony in Middle Irish literature
No full textThis article seeks to establish a poetics of irony in Early Middle Irish
literature centring on anticlerical irreverence, misogyny, and ethnic stereotyping.
Using a cluster of tenth-century narratives in the Book of Leinster, this study reads
within and between texts to attempt to delineate conventions of genre and style
which can be used to make the case for ironic readings of these and other texts. It
is tentatively suggested that such anecdote-length humorous texts may have been
used for pedagogical purposes, and the relationship between anticlerical texts and
those which critique poets is briefly explored
Analysis of the institutional landscape and proliferation of proposals for global vaccine equity for COVID-19: too many cooks or too many recipes?
No full textThis article outlines and compares current and proposed global institutional mechanisms to increase equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, focusing on their institutional and operational complementarities and overlaps. It specifically considers the World Health Organization's (WHO’s) COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) model as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) initiative, the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) initiative, the proposed TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement) intellectual property waiver and other proposed WHO and World Trade Organization technology transfer proposals. We argue that while various individual mechanisms each have their specific individual merits—and in some cases weaknesses—overall, many of these current and proposed mechanisms could be highly complementary if used together to deliver equitable global access to vaccines. Nonetheless, we also argue that there are risks posed by the proliferation of proposals in this context, including the potential to disperse stakeholder attention or to delay decisive action. Therefore, we argue that there is now a clear need for concerted global multilateral action to recognise the complementarities of specific models and to provide a pathway for collaboration in attaining global equitable access to vaccines. The institutional infrastructure or proposals to achieve this amply exist at this point in time—but much greater cooperation from industry and clear, decisive and coordinated action from states and international organisations are urgently needed
Markets as networks evolving step by step: Relational Event Models for the interbank market
No full textWe introduce a modeling framework for continuous-time relational data that allows detecting the fine-grained dynamics of network formation and change in financial markets. We propose newly derived Relational Event Models with time-weighting functions and corresponding time-weighted statistics as a suitable approach to capture the temporal aspects of observed network processes (i.e., memory) as well as a variety of extra-dyadic microstructures that include tie frequency (i.e., trading intensity) and tie value (i.e., traded amount). By specifying novel statistics and fine tuning weighting-function parameters, we show how this framework allows (1) obtaining more accurate representation of market dynamics, (2) disentangling competing micromechanisms of network formation and change, and (3) assessing their relevance. Also, by comparing alternative specifications of time effects, we emphasize the parsimony afforded by our approach. We illustrate the merits of our modeling framework in a study of the interbank liquidity market during the 2008 financial crisis
Navigating indifference: Irish jobseekers’ experiences of welfare conditionality
No full textThis paper analyses the impact of the intensification of work-related conditionality on the lived experience of jobseekers in Ireland. Post-crisis Ireland has witnessed the emergence of a definitive policy trajectory which
seeks to enable a lifelong attachment to the labour force through work-related conditionality buttressed by sanctions. This mode of governing unemployment attempts a restructuring of the caseworker–claimant relationship through
increased engagement, claimant adherence to mandatory conditions, and surveillance underpinned by potential reduction, suspension or loss of benefit.
The paper provides a qualitative investigation of the lived experience of this impact through a thematic analysis of forty-two interviews with jobseekers in a county in the east of Ireland. The focus on the agency of jobseekers
illustrates a system based on superficial engagement in which conditionality primarily operates as bureaucratic formality. This is reflective of a systemic indifference to claimants’ needs and circumstances, producing a performance
of feigned compliance in response
A Review of Verification and Validation for Space Autonomous Systems
No full textPurpose of Review The deployment of hardware (e.g., robots, satellites, etc.) to space is a costly and complex endeavor. It
is of extreme importance that on-board systems are verified and validated through a variety of verification and validation
techniques, especially in the case of autonomous systems. In this paper, we discuss a number of approaches from the
literature that are relevant or directly applied to the verification and validation of systems in space, with an emphasis on
autonomy.
Recent Findings Despite advances in individual verification and validation techniques, there is still a lack of approaches that
aim to combine different forms of verification in order to obtain system-wide verification of modular autonomous systems.
Summary This systematic review of the literature includes the current advances in the latest approaches using formal
methods for static verification (model checking and theorem proving) and runtime verification, the progress achieved so far
in the verification of machine learning, an overview of the landscape in software testing, and the importance of performing
compositional verification in modular systems. In particular, we focus on reporting the use of these techniques for the
verification and validation of systems in space with an emphasis on autonomy, as well as more general techniques (such as
in the aeronautical domain) that have been shown to have potential value in the verification and validation of autonomous
systems in space
Biomass-fuelled combined heat and power: integration in district heating and thermal-energy storage
No full textConventional approaches towards energy-system modelling and operation are based upon the system design
and performance optimization. In system-design optimization, the thermal or mechanical characteristics of
the systems providing for the heat or electricity demands were derived separately without integration with the
energy source and without interaction with demand, which results in low-efficiency energy performance. This
paper presents a key review on the integration of biomass-powered combined heat and power (BCHP) systems in
district-heating systems as well as coupling with thermal-energy storage. In BCHP design, the appropriate sizing
of the associated components as part of the district-heating system is very important to provide the optimal
dispatch strategy as well as minimized cost and environmental impact while it co-operates with thermal-energy
storage. Future strategies for the feasibility, evaluation and integration of biomass-powered energy systems in the
context of district systems are also studied
Complex Event Processing in Smart City Monitoring Applications
No full textManaging multi-tenant edge devices with heterogeneous capabilities scattered across an urban
area requires significant communication and computing power, which is challenging when devices are also
resource-constrained. These devices play a crucial role in smart city monitoring systems by notifying various
municipal organizations about a wide range of ongoing complex events. Some recent approaches in complex
event processing use a publish-subscribe architectural pattern to decouple simple event producers from
complex event consumers. However, they did not fully address communication efficiency or diverse quality
of service (QoS) requirements in aggregating events. This paper proposes a new architecture that integrates
the publish-subscribe architectural pattern with software-defined network technology for urban monitoring
applications. The architecture enhances monitoring applications with capabilities of distributed processing
and detection of complex events. It also enables application developers to define QoS requirements and
supports the TESLA complex event specification language. The main focus of our work is on energy and
network efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in energy consumption and
data packet traffic compared to three close baselines
A Community Needs Analysis With Refugees and People Seeking Asylum: Exploring Access & Barriers to Higher Education Ireland
No full textThis Community Needs Analysis (CNA) was carried out by College Connect in collaboration with the Irish Refugee Council. The research was carried out from October 2020 to March 2021. Participative, peer-to-peer, and creative methods were used to explore the views and insights of over 100 participants with lived experience of the protection process on the access issues and barriers that affect their participation or progression in further or higher education. The research generates key insights on the experiences of this community of people and puts forward a series of recommendations