NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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A Religious Test in America?: The 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat—A Re-Evaluation of the Primary Sources
No full textDuring 1776, but prior to announcing the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress instructed the state legislatures to call conventions to draft constitutions to regularize their local state governments so that each could be administered in the name of the People and absent royal governors and royal officers. North Carolina heeded the revolutionary call—in 1776, it implemented a new constitution with a bill of rights. One interesting feature of the 1776 North Carolina Constitution was that Article 32 imposed a religious test. Article 32 stated:
That no person, who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority either of the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department within this State
A New PRNG Hardware Architecture Based on an Exponential Chaotic Map
No full textRecent works have been claiming efficient hardware architectures, showing a considerable endeavor to implement chaotic maps in the digital domain. However, there is a critical issue with the chaotic degradation in the digital environment due to its finite numeric precision, that it is still an unsettled topic in the research community. Additionally, less attention has been given to synthesize a methodological approach to how to calculate the exponential function in hardware. In this paper, two novel hardware designs to represent the exponential chaotic map have been suggested. We have employed a perturbation method to avoid the chaotic degradation. 64-bit fixed-point and 32-bit floating-point formats were investigated. Moreover, an approximation of Euler's number by a finite series and the Horner's method have been undertaken to further minimize the proposed hardware. Results show that both proposed hardware architectures consume a fewer number of components. The designed systems present a positive Lyapunov exponent, which suggests a chaotic behavior. Ultimately, the NIST SP 800-22 test, the histogram, and the autocorrelation function show that the new hardware architectures present pseudo-random properties
Medieval Irish medical verse in the nineteenth century: some evidence from material culture
No full text. This article presents an edition and translation of an Irish didactic poem found in a large compilation of remedies, charms and prayers that was written in the early sixteenth century by the Roscommon medical scribe Conla Mac an Leagha. The contents of this poem, and of
the treatise in which it occurs more generally, are of inherent interest for our understanding of the
history of medical learning in medieval Ireland. However, the poem is also of particular significance due to the fact that its penultimate stanza, which invokes the authority of one ‘Colmán mac Oililla’, is attested in two much later sources that provide insight into the transmission and reception of medieval Irish medical texts in the early nineteenth century, as well as into the relationship
between manuscript, print and material culture during that period. The two sources in question,
one of which is a previously unprovenanced signboard now kept in the Wellcome Collection in London, can both be connected with the work of the Munster ‘herb doctor’ Michael Casey (1752?–1830/31), who in 1825 advertised the publication of a new herbal containing cures derived from much earlier Irish-language medical manuscript
An Overview of Verification and Validation Challenges for Inspection Robots
No full textThe advent of sophisticated robotics and AI technology makes sending humans into hazardous and distant environments to carry out inspections increasingly avoidable. Being able to
send a robot, rather than a human, into a nuclear facility or deep space is very appealing. However, building these robotic systems is just the start and we still need to carry out a range of verification and validation tasks to ensure that the systems to be deployed are as safe and reliable as possible. Based on our experience across three research and innovation hubs within the UK’s “Robots for a Safer World” programme, we present an overview of the relevant techniques and challenges in this area. As the hubs are active across nuclear, offshore, and space environments, this gives a breadth of issues common to many inspection robots
The effects of social comparison and depressive mood on adolescent social decision-making
No full textBackground: Based on social comparison theory, two experiments were conducted to explore the effects of depression and social comparison on adolescents, using the ultimatum game (UG). Methods: Before the formal experiment began, a preliminary experiment tested the effectiveness of social comparison settings. This study used the UG paradigm to explore adolescents’ social decision-making in the context of gain and loss through two experiments. These experiments were designed as a 2 (group: depressive mood group, normal mood group) × 2 (social comparison: upward, downward) × 3 (fairness level: fair 5:5, unfair 3:7, extremely unfair 1:9) three-factor hybrid study.
Results: (1) The fairer the proposal was, the higher the sense of fairness participants felt, and the higher their acceptance rate. (2) The acceptance rate of the participants for downward social comparison was significantly higher than that for upward social comparison, but there was no difference in fairness perception between the two social comparisons. (3) Under the context of gain, the acceptance rate of the depressive mood group was higher than that of the normal mood group, but there was no difference in the acceptance rate between the depressive mood group and the normal mood group under the loss context. Depressive mood participants had more feelings of unfairness in the contexts of both gain and loss. (4) The effects of depressive mood, social comparison and the fairness level of distribution on social decision-making interact. Conclusions: The interaction of social comparison, depressive mood and proposal type demonstrates that besides one’s emotion, cognitive biases and social factors can also have an effect on social decision-making. These findings indicate that
behavioral decision boosting may provide an avenue for appropriate interventions in helping to guide adolescents to make social decisions
VerifyThis 2019: a program verification competition
No full textVerifyThis is a series of program verification competitions that emphasize the human aspect: participants tackle the verification of detailed behavioral properties—something that lies beyond the capabilities of fully automatic verification and requires instead human expertise to suitably encode programs, specifications, and invariants. This paper describes the 8th edition of
VerifyThis, which took place at ETAPS 2019 in Prague. Thirteen teams entered the competition, which consisted of three verification challenges and spanned 2 days of work. This report analyzes how the participating teams fared on these challenges, reflects on what makes a verification challenge more or less suitable for the typical VerifyThis participants, and outlines the difficulties of comparing the work of teams using wildly different verification approaches in a competition focused on the human aspect
Creating Personas from Design Ethnography and Grounded Theory
No full textPersonas can be an effective means of communicating and
synthesizing design ethnographic field data by helping
designers maintain focus on users and make sense of
complex needs. Personas have however been criticized on
scientific grounding and methodological weakness in their
creation. Furthermore, few detailed examples of their
creation have been published. It is also evident from the
literature that there is a methodological gap in creating
personas from ethnographic studies.
Using a grounded theory approach, this paper offers a
systematic and detailed process of creating personas post
fieldwork and compares the approach against best practice.
Through a case study of design ethnography in product
development for people over 65, we reflect on and describe
the process in three phases: 1. Post Fieldwork Data
Management, 2. Coding and Grounded Theory, and 3. Data
Reduction and Data Display, which leads to the final design
of the persona. We conclude that using qualitative and
grounded theory approaches can assist to strengthen the
process of creating personas; however, the time to create
and manage the personas increases
Setting an example: Political leaders' cues and compliance with health policies in the early stages of the Covid‐19 pandemic in Mexico
No full textHow do political leaders' cues affect citizen behavior regarding a new and complex issue? We address this question in the context of the early stages of the Covid‐19
pandemic in Mexico, using electoral outcomes and
municipal‐level mobility data from Facebook's Movement
Range Maps. In March 2020, Mexico's president downplayed constantly the severity of the coming health crisis
by continuing his political rallies throughout the country
and encouraging people to leave their homes. Using an
event‐study analysis, we find that, after the first press
conference where his government declared mobility restrictions were not yet necessary, on March 13, citizens'
geographic mobility in pro‐government municipalities was
higher than in cities where support for the president was
less strong. Our results are robust to several specifications and definitions of political support. Moreover, we find evidence that our results are driven by cities with higher media penetration, which implies that they can be attributed to people's reactions to the president's cues rather than to systematic differences in the preferences of his supporters
Financial Inclusion with Hybrid Organizational Forms: Microfinance, Philanthropy, and the Poor Law in Ireland, c. 1836–1845
No full textThe turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance
institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form,
Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical
framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable
salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenabl
Beyond curriculum: Groundwork for a non-instrumental theory of education
No full textThis paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why, but can also be understood as a structural question, concerned with the way we understand education’s directional impetus. We suggest that it is possible to understand education as something other than a curricular instrument designed to facilitate a purpose external to itself. We challenge such an instrumental view by arguing that education is an emergent phenomenon with its own unique aesthetic qualities (like art or music); a phenomenon, moreover, that does not simply serve a purpose, but generates the purpose it serves. In this paper we lay down the groundwork for such a non-instrumental understanding of education by combining the notion of emergence with ideas from Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Aristotle’s teleological notion of the ‘ideal’ as self-generated and the Greek notion of ‘paideia.’ This provides an opportunity to theorise education’s directional impetus as the ongoing and open-ended coordination of three realms of human life: the symbolic, the individual and the political. Given the acute political and social dilemmas that instrumental understandings of education bring forth in multicultural, and so called ‘democratic’ and ‘inclusive’ societies, we hope that by opening the possibility to theorise education as a non-instrumental phenomenon, it may become possible to have more fruitful discussion regarding education than endless political debate about what the curricular ends of education should be