NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Homoheroic or homophobic? Leo Varadkar, LGBTQ politics and contemporary news narratives
No full textThis article explores Irish and international news reporting on the gay Irish politician Leo Varadkar during his term as Irish Prime Minister (2017–2020). Focusing on two media events occurring in 2019 – first, the outing of Varadkar as a Kylie Minogue fan in the Kylie Gate scandal and, second, his St. Patrick’s Day meeting with then U.S.Vice President Mike Pence – the article argues that the Irish and
international media differentially employed both homoheroic and homophobic narratives in their accounts. The article introduces the concept of homoheroism, which exists in tension with lingering homophobic scripts, as a structuring dynamic for understanding the contemporary media’s affirmative rendering of the cultural capital
associated with being an out-LGBTQ politician. Whereas the
international press hailed Varadkar as a homoheroic intersectional leader capable of challenging homophobia internationally and forging a progressive internationally respected identity for Ireland, the Irish press treated Varadkar’s gay, Indian-Irish identities as evidence of political illegitimacy in coverage laced with anti-gay
stereotypes. The Varadkar case speaks more broadly to the
emergence of a generation of global political leaders whose LGBTQ status poses challenges for media representation, may raise expectations around homonationalism, and carries geopolitical implications for the branding of the politicians and their countries
The Agri-Cultural Imagination: Present and Future Imaginations of Alternative Agriculture, the Human-non-Human Relationship, and the Impact of Time
No full textFirstly, this thesis aims to highlight a form of alternative agriculture through an anthropological lens,
through an exploration of alternative farming practices, focusing on what is known as Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA). Through ethnographic fieldwork carried out over 2 years I learned about
the motivations, fears, hopes, imagined presents and futures and ways of seeing the world of those who
involve themselves with CSA practices. Secondly, in the broadest sense I want to highlight the role the
human imagination plays in constructing our present(s) and future(s). Our imaginations are powerful
tools, enabling people to see the present in many different ways, and project themselves into multiple
contingent futures. We rely on it to construct ourselves and much of the world around us. And so, I
believe for us to understand anything about what it means to be human we must understand how and
what we imagine. Thirdly, I discuss the human-non-human relationship, in a general “beyond the
human” sense but also with specific reference to plants. While having somewhat of a renaissance in
anthropological discourse, there is still a lacuna of knowledge concerned with the relationships we have
with the non-humans of this world. An emphasis of much alternative agriculture is the nurturing of the
connection between the human and the non-human and CSA is no exception. Thus, CSA makes an
excellent opportunity to better understand some aspects of these relationships, particularly in the urban
environment. All of this is framed through larger scale issues with a major focus on human induced
climate change and its very real effects on the present world but also the myriad of potential future
effects the continued acceleration of climate change will have
A trial of resources to support students with Dyslexia
No full textIn this paper we report on a pilot of resources to support students with dyslexia conducted at a university in Ireland. We give brief background to the development of these resources and describe the steps taken to pilot them in a mathematics support centre. We outline the feedback received from tutors and students, and close with observations on how the pilot outcomes may influence the future implementation of these and other similar resources
Climate Change Policy Narratives and Pastoralist Predicaments in the Horn of Africa: Insights from Ethiopia and Kenya
No full textDrawing on the findings of a two-country case study this paper examines the discourses and narratives found
in contemporary climate change and national development policy in Ethiopia and Kenya, the actors and
networks shaping those policy narratives, and in turn, their consequences for pastoralism. The research
reveals that while concerns around climate change and calls for strengthening resilience of dryland
communities have given a new impetus to pastoral development, old arguments and assumptions that depict
pastoral areas, and pastoralists, as unproductive and in need of modernisation remain deeply embedded in
policy making. These open up spaces for the state, investors, and local elites to extend control over natural
resources previously managed under customary institutions. The resultant climate policy solutions and
dryland investments are, in turn, leading to new patterns of social differentiation and vulnerability among
pastoralists. Clearer overarching national land-use policies that integrate principles of ‘pastoral governance’,
and that put measures in place to prevent the further loss of key pastoral resources would make a difference
in terms of enhancing pastoralists’ rights and livelihoods
Hybrid Method Based on NARX models and Machine Learning for Pattern Recognition
No full textThis work presents a novel technique that integrates the methodologies of machine
learning and system identification to solve multiclass problems. Such an approach allows
to extract and select sets of representative features with reduced dimensionality, as well
as predicts categorical outputs. The efficiency of the method was tested by running case
studies investigated in machine learning, obtaining better absolute results when compared with
traditional classification algorithms
Research Progress on Strategies that can Enhance the Therapeutic Benefits of Mesenchymal Stromal Cells in Respiratory Diseases With a Specific Focus on Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome and Other Inflammatory Lung Diseases
No full textRecent advances in cell based therapies for lung diseases and critical illnesses offer
significant promise. Despite encouraging preclinical results, the translation of efficacy to the
clinical settings have not been successful. One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of
understanding of the complex interaction between mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) and
the host environment. Other challenges for MSC cell therapies include cell sources, dosing,
disease target, donor variability, and cell product manufacturing. Here we provide an
overview on advances and current issues with a focus on MSC-based cell therapies for
inflammatory acute respiratory distress syndrome varieties and other inflammatory lung
diseases
Energy-maximising moment-based constrained optimal control of ocean wave energy farms
No full textSuccessful commercialisation of wave energy technology inherently incorporates the concept of an array of wave energy converters (WECs). These devices, which constantly
interact via hydrodynamic effects, require optimised control that can guarantee maximum energy extraction from incoming ocean waves while ensuring, at the same time,
that any physical limitations associated with device and actuator systems are being consistently respected. This paper presents a moment-based energy-maximising optimal control
framework for WECs arrays subject to state and input constraints. The authors develop a
framework under which the objective function (and system variables) can be mapped to
a finite-dimensional tractable quadratic program (QP), which can be efficiently solved using
state-of-the-art solvers. Moreover, the authors show that this QP is always concave, i.e. existence and uniqueness of a globally optimal solution is guaranteed under this moment based framework. The performance of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through a
case study, where (state and input constrained) energy-maximisation for a WEC farm composed of CorPower-like WEC devices is conside
Intelligent control of a DC microgrid consisting of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) and Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS)
No full textGreater efficiency, and the relatively more
straightforward structure of DC microgrids, give rise to DC
microgrid technology for renewable energy integration. In
this work, an intelligent controller is proposed for a DC
microgrid that comprises a wave energy converter and a
hybrid energy storage system. A wave energy converter
oscillating in heave, which drives a linear permanent
magnet generator as a power take-off (PTO) mechanism, is
used in this study. Additionally, HESS, consisting of battery
and supercapacitor, is used for power quality improvement
and DC bus voltage regulation. The DC bus connects
with each system component through dedicated power
converters, with the WEC device using an active rectifier,
and the HESS (battery and ultra-capacitor) utilising two
bidirectional DC-DC converters. In the paper, a model is
derived for the individual components of the microgrid.
Then, Lyapunov-based intelligent controllers are designed
for the power converters in such a way that they achieve
the control objectives. An energy management strategy is
also used to ensure proper power-sharing among the HESS
components. The controller system is then simulated in a
MATLAB/Simulink environment, and the result shows that
the proposed controllers achieve the desired control objectives and perform well under various operating conditions
Reactive control of wave energy devices – the modelling paradox
No full textThe implementation of energy maximising control systems (EMCSs) in wave energy converter (WEC) devices is
an important step towards commercially viable operation of WECs. During the design stage of such EMCSs, linear
hydrodynamic models are commonly used and are, in fact, the most viable option due to the real–time
computational requirements of optimisation routines associated with energy-maximising optimal control techniques. However, the objective function of EMCSs, i.e. maximising the generated power by exaggerating WEC
motion, inherently violates the underlying assumption of the linear hydrodynamic control design models, i.e.
small amplitude device motion (compared to the device dimensions). Consequently, the linear models, used as a
basis for EMCSs, in fact conspire to violate the very assumption upon which they were built - hence leading to a
modelling paradox. It is important to evaluate WEC controllers in realistic physical or numerical environments,
to gain knowledge of the disparity between the performance prediction from the EMCS design and performance
evaluation models. This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the performance prediction by a linear
and non–linear hydrodynamic model of three different EMCSs, implemented in two different WEC structures, in
an attempt to quantify the severity of this modelling disparity, or paradox
Preferences for the Scope of Protests
No full textThis paper studies a dimension of protest largely overlooked in the literature: protest scope, that is, whether protests seek large, structural, changes for a large share of the population or focus on small-scale improvements for small groups. We argue that this protest dimension is relevant for understanding the political consequences of protests. We show empirically that protests vary substantially in scope and that scope is not collinear with other protest dimensions, such as size, motive, or tactics. We explore drivers of individual preferences for protest scope with a survey experiment in two South African townships. We find that respondents made to feel more efficacious tend to support protests of broader scope. This effect operates via a social psychology channel whereby efficacy leads people to assign blame for their problems to more systemic causes