NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Sharing out Stories: From Nigeria to Kilcock - Philomena Abulu Obasi
No full textFrom Nigeria to Kilcock: Philomena Abulu
Obasi tells her family’s story
Early Stopping Criterion for Recursive Least Squares Training of Behavioural Models
No full textAs the physical makeup of cellular base-stations evolve into systems with multiple parallel transmission paths the effort involved in modelling these complex systems increases considerably. One task in particular which contributes to signal distortion on each signal path, is the power amplifier. In power amplifier modelling, Recursive Least Squares has been used in the past to train Volterra models with memory terms, however instability can occur when training the model weights. This manuscript provides a computationally efficient technique to detect the onset of instability and subsequently to inform the decision when to stop adaptive training of dynamic nonlinear behavioural models and avoid the onset of instability. This technique is experimentally validated using four different signal modulation schemes
For or Against ‘The Business of Benchmarking’?
No full textThis short response does two things. First, it argues that urban benchmarks have specific and structural limits not identified in the principal essay in this intervention, which curtail the kinds of constructive and critical work such benchmarks might be expected to perform. ISO 37120 is discussed as an example. Second, it proposes a pluralistic approach to engagement and offers six suggestions for how academics might take urban benchmarks and their makers seriously without becoming fully embedded in their business. These are: ethnography, discourse analysis, self-reflexive critique, critical urban benchmarking, alternative publication channels and scholarly debate
Piloting Open Publishing Initiatives at Maynooth University Library
No full textAbstract is included in the tex
ArchiSmartCity: Modelling the Alignment of Services and Information in Smart City Architectures
No full textDigital transformation in the public sector describes the shift from traditional creation
and delivery of services, into the massive use of digital technologies to enhance public
services. The digitalisation of public administration presents significant challenges for
many municipalities in the social, economic, environmental, and sustainable dimensions.
Cities take advantage of the rapid advances in information and communication technologies
capabilities to make the provision of city services (e.g., health service, transport service,
air-quality service, education service) more efficient. These modern urban environments are
commonly referred to as Smart Cities, where advanced and innovative services are offered
to improve the overall quality of life for the citizens. Smart Cities are complex systems
that involve diverse stakeholders and concerns, use heterogeneous information systems and
technologies, and aim to fulfill multiple and conflicting goals. Such complexity challenges
the provision of services that may fail to achieve city goals and meet the needs of citizens
due to the lack of alignment between city services and the information systems that support
them. Evidence of this is the existence of city services and systems that fail to address the
real needs of stakeholders, and are not perceived as valuable by them because they do not
interoperate, leading to duplication of work and incompatible solutions.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an established planning and governance approach to
manage the complexity of corporate systems. EA presents a holistic view of organisational
business strategies and IT initiatives to achieve organisational goals by adopting a comprehensive
perspective on the overall architecture. Smart Cities can be seen as urban enterprises
with more complex and multi-dimensional systems that require integration among smarter
services from different domains (e.g., mobility, energy, public safety, emergency, education,
culture, etc.) to respond to diverse interests and objectives from a range of stakeholders.
Existing research on EAs for Smart Cities uses the concept of layers and views to describe
architecture content and guide its implementation. However, these approaches do not identify
the concepts to describe and model the relationships between the service and information
layers which are essential to address the strategic alignment. Furthermore, there is an absence
of such concepts in languages and metamodels for Enterprise Modelling. These architectures
and metamodels mostly emphasize technical aspects that constitute Smart Cities and they
rarely focus on city services and their strategic aspects towards delivering the cities vision
and objectives.
This research introduces ArchiSmartCity, a metamodel that addresses the alignment
between city services and information systems according to Smart City strategies to assist
in the digitalisation of public city services. In this thesis, design principles and design
requirements are defined and instantiated by designing the ArchiSmartCity metamodel that
explicitly expresses this alignment, following a design science research approach. Further,
ArchiSmartCity is developed and implemented as a coherent extension of an EA metamodel
to describe an expository instantiation and its application. ArchiSmartCity is evaluated in an
iterative manner within multiple-case studies, by creating real-world services models that are
validated by Smart City domain experts. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates and evaluates
ArchiSmartCity by developing a computer-based solution for semantic alignment analysis.
Ex-post evaluation results demonstrate the quality and practical relevance of the developed
metamodel extension for cities and municipalities. This study contributes to the current
understanding of how city strategies should be aligned with Smart City implementations by
providing a prescriptive view and metamodel to guide coherent and unambiguous architecture
design in the Smart Cities field
A New History of the Stowe Missal: Towards an Edition of the Stowe John and the Irish Tract on the Mass
No full textThe Stowe Missal is one of the earliest surviving documents of the Early Irish church and is a
key witness to the Early Irish liturgy, as well as one of the few manuscripts dating back to the
Old Irish period to contain a number of continuous texts in the Irish language. This thesis
investigates the origins and history of the Stowe Missal by means of a close study of the
manuscript and its scribes. Chapter 1 sets out the manuscript’s contents and the makeup of its
quires, and offers a detailed discussion of the Stowe Missal’s scribes. The relative order of their
activities is of particular concern and it is shown that the manuscript’s Irish language texts were
added to the Stowe Missal by (one of) its original scribe(s). The original purpose for which the
manuscript was made is also considered. Chapter 2 examines the available evidence for the
Stowe Missal’s dating and its place of origin, before considering the manuscript’s early travels.
It is argued that the manuscript’s traditional dating must be reconsidered and that there are
strong signs that the manuscript did not long remain where it was made. In Chapter 3, the
circumstances of the Stowe Missal’s early nineteenth century rediscovery are explored by
reviewing both the contemporary evidence and the more recent hypotheses for the manuscript’s
history in the centuries leading up to its rediscovery. Basic editions consisting of a diplomatic
transcription and normalised text of the Stowe Missal’s incomplete copy of the Gospel of John,
as well as the manuscript’s Irish Tract on the Mass are presented in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2,
respectively. For the latter, a new translation and full vocabulary are also included. A third
appendix contains an overview of the abbreviations found in these texts
On quadratic forms in multivariate generalized hyperbolic random vectors
No full textCountless test statistics can be written as quadratic forms in certain random vectors, or ratios
thereof. Consequently, their distribution has received considerable attention in the literature. Except
for a few special cases, no closed-form expression for the cdf exists, and one resorts to numerical
methods. Traditionally the problem is analyzed under the assumption of joint Gaussianity; the
algorithm that is usually employed is that of Imhof (1961). The present manuscript generalizes this
result to the case of multivariate generalized hyperbolic random vectors. This
exible distribution
nests, among others, the multivariate t, Laplace, and variance gamma distributions. An expression
for the first partial moment is also obtained, which plays a vital role in financial risk management.
The proof involves a generalization of the classic inversion formula due to Gil-Pelaez (1951). Two
numerical applications are considered: first, the finite-sample distribution of the two stage least
squares estimator of a structural parameter. Second, the Value at Risk and expected shortfall of a
quadratic portfolio with heavy-tailed risk factors. An empirical application is examined, in which
a portfolio of Dow Jones Industrial Index stock options is optimized with respect to its expected
shortfall. The results demonstrate the benefits of the analytical expression
Preparation and Antimicrobial Properties of Alginate and Serum Albumin/Glutaraldehyde Hydrogels Impregnated with Silver(I) Ions
No full textCalcium alginate (CaALG) hydrogel beads and two sets of composite beads, formed from a combination of calcium alginate/propylene glycol alginate/human serum albumin (CaALG/PGA/HSA) and from calcium alginate with the quaternary ammonium salt, (3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl)-octadecyldimethylammonium chloride (QA), (CaALG/QA), were prepared. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) was condensed with glutaraldehyde (GLA) to form a BSA/GLA hydrogel. The corresponding Ag+-containing gels of all of the above hydrogels were also formed, and slow leaching of the biocidal transition metal ion from the gels bestowed broad spectrum antimicrobial activity. In the absence of added Ag+, CaALG/QA was the only material to deliver marginal to moderate antibacterial and antifungal effects. The Ag+ impregnated hydrogel systems have the potential to maintain the antimicrobial properties of silver, minimising the risk of toxicity, and act as reservoirs to afford ongoing sterility
Electrochemical determination of acetaminophen at a carbon electrode modified in the presence of β‑cyclodextrin: role of the activated glassy carbon and the electropolymerised β‑cyclodextrin
No full textAcetaminophen is a well-known drug commonly used to provide pain relief, but it can also lead to acute liver failure at high concentrations. Therefore, there is considerable interest in monitoring its concentrations. Sensitive and selective acetaminophen electrochemical sensors were designed by cycling a glassy carbon electrode (GCE) to high potentials in the presence of β-CD in a phosphate electrolyte, or by simply activating the GCE electrode in the phosphate solution. Using cyclic voltammetry, adsorption-like voltammograms were recorded. The acetaminophen oxidation product, N-acetyl benzoquinone imine, was protected from hydrolysis, and this was attributed to the adsorption of acetaminophen at the modified GCE. The rate constants for the oxidation of acetaminophen were estimated as 4.3 × 10–3 cm2 s–1 and 3.4 × 10–3 cm2 s–1 for the β-CD-modified and -activated electrodes, respectively. Using differential pulse voltammetry, the limit of detection was calculated as 9.7 × 10–8 M with a linear concentration range extending from 0.1 to 80 μM. Furthermore, good selectivity was achieved in the presence of caffeine, ascorbic acid and aspirin, enabling the determination of acetaminophen in a commercial tablet. Similar electrochemical data were obtained for both the β-CD-modified and activated GCE surfaces, suggesting that the enhanced detection of acetaminophen is connected mainly to the activation and oxidation of the GCE. Using SEM, EDX and FTIR, no evidence was obtained to indicate that the β-CD was electropolymerised at the GCE
Irish language reading homework: Developing my practice through collaboration with parents/guardians and pupils.
No full textThis thesis examines the difficulties and challenges that pupils and parents/guardians face in relation to Irish reading homework and the lack of resources available to teachers to assist them in this area. It aims to explore the experiences of pupils and parents/guardians of Irish reading at home as well as my own approach to assigning Irish reading homework. As this is a self-study action research project, I, as a researcher, was prompted to examine my core values and my role in the challenges in this area. This was with a view to possibly creating change in school practice and policy and improving the experience of Irish reading homework for all.
The research stems from my interest in the difficulties parents/guardians experienced with Irish reading homework during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, and the study aims to explore this area solely from their perspectives. Recordings of Irish readers were provided in naíonáin mhóra (senior infants) and rang a haon (first class), to assist with Irish reading during school closures. I then decided to focus primarily on the recordings as a valuable learning tool for the development of pupils’ Irish reading skills. A mixed methods approach of qualitative and quantitative data collection was chosen for this study using a variety of data collection tools. Participants included pupils and parents/guardians from rang a haon (first class) in an Irish medium primary school. Key findings from the study are (i) difficulties with pronunciation in Irish reading, (ii) the value of the recordings as an additional learning tool, and (iii) positive engagement with the recordings. It is important to note that the home setting itself impacts significantly on pupils’ development of Irish reading skills and analysis of the findings in this study provides an insight into the demands placed on parents/guardians and how resources such as recordings has a direct impact on their experience of Irish reading