NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
Not a member yet
18159 research outputs found
Sort by
Self-perception of overweight and obesity: A review of mental and physical health outcomes
No full textThe obesity crisis is one of the largest public health challenges of the 21st century. Population-level adiposity has increased dramatically in recent times, and people not recognizing that they have overweight or obesity is now common. It has been widely assumed that not recognizing oneself as having overweight is detrimental to weight management and long-term health. Here, diverse research is reviewed that converges on the counterintuitive conclusion that not recognizing oneself as having overweight is actually associated with more favourable physical and mental health outcomes than recognizing oneself as having overweight. Drawing on existing models in social psychology and weight stigma research, an explanatory model of the health effects of self-perception of overweight is outlined. This model proposes that self-perception of overweight triggers social rejection concerns and the internalization of weight stigma, which in turn induce psychological distress and negatively impact health-promoting lifestyle behaviours. How self-perception of overweight may in part explain progression from overweight to obesity, and the public health implications of self-perception of overweight and obesity are also discussed
Evidence and Proportionality in Free Movement Cases: The Impact of the Scotch Whisky Case
No full textMarket interventions to protect public health are likely to be subject to EU law challenge as contrary to the rules on free movement. In the Scotch Whisky case the CJEU stressed the importance of defined public health objectives and supporting evidence in the analysis of whether interventions are justified as “appropriate” and “necessary”. This article considers the wider implications of this judgment for the application of the proportionality test in free movement cases and in the case of innovative interventions that are adopted on a complex evidence base. The article argues that the unusual development that Scotch Whisky made to the CJEU’s wider trend towards greater engagement with evidence should be treated with caution, and that it is possible for national courts to apply the new guidance on the role of evidence in the proportionality analysis with sensitivity. The article also argues that policymakers must now be more aware of how they frame innovative interventions and the evidence supporting them
Mining User Interests from Social Media
No full textSocial media users readily share their preferences, life events, sentiment and opinions, and implicitly signal their thoughts, feelings, and psychological behavior. This makes social media a viable source of information to accurately and effectively mine users' interests with the hopes of enabling more effective user engagement, better quality delivery of appropriate services and higher user satisfaction. In this tutorial, we cover five important aspects related to the effective mining of user interests: (1) the foundations of social user interest modeling, such as information sources, various types of representation models and temporal features, (2) techniques that have been adopted or proposed for mining user interests, (3) different evaluation methodologies and benchmark datasets, (4) different applications that have been taking advantage of user interest mining from social media platforms, and (5) existing challenges, open research questions and exciting opportunities for further work
On the relationship between Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown and global surface warming
No full textAccording to established understanding, deep-water formation in the North Atlantic and Southern
Ocean keeps the deep ocean cold, counter-acting the downward mixing of heat from the warmer
surface waters in the bulk of the world ocean. Therefore, periods of strong Atlantic meridional
overturning circulation (AMOC) are expected to coincide with cooling of the deep ocean and warming
of the surface waters. It has recently been proposed that this relation may have reversed due to global
warming, and that during the past decades a strong AMOC coincides with warming of the deep ocean
and relative cooling of the surface, by transporting increasingly warmer waters downward. Here we
present multiple lines of evidence, including a statistical evaluation of the observed global mean
temperature, ocean heat content, and different AMOC proxies, that lead to the opposite conclusion:
even during the current ongoing global temperature rise a strong AMOC warms the surface. The
observed weakening of the AMOC has therefore delayed global surface warming rather than
enhancing i
Reconstruction of hydrological drought in Irish catchments (1850–2015)
No full textWhile long-term records that extend into the nineteenth century exist for various meteorological variables, river flow records of concurrent length do not exist on the island of Ireland. This work attempts to reconstruct monthly river
flows for twelve Irish catchments using quality assured long-term precipitation records for the period 1850–2015. A conceptual rainfall-runoff model calibrated and verified on contemporary flow records is used to reconstruct monthly flows for each catchment. Reconstructions are then analysed to identify periods of drought using a threshold-based drought indicator. Results show that the catchments examined experienced protracted drought episodes with seven major
drought rich periods identified in 1887–88, 1891–94, 1902–12, 1933–34, 1944, 1953, 1971–76. The timing and severity of hydrological droughts are consistent with previous work that has examined meteorological drought. This work thus provides a first attempt to reconstruct historical river flows to examine hydrological drought in Ireland. We tease out directions for future work and the opportunities presented for using such reconstructions for drought risk management
European daily precipitation according to EURO-CORDEX regional climate models (RCMs) and high-resolution global climate models (GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP)
No full textIn this study, we evaluate a set of high-resolution
(25–50 km horizontal grid spacing) global climate models
(GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison
Project (HighResMIP), developed as part of the EU-funded
PRIMAVERA (Process-based climate simulation: Advances
in high resolution modelling and European climate risk assessment) project, and from the EURO-CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) regional
climate models (RCMs) (12–50 km horizontal grid spacing)
over a European domain. It is the first time that an assessment of regional climate information using ensembles of both GCMs and RCMs at similar horizontal resolutions has
been possible. The focus of the evaluation is on the distribution of daily precipitation at a 50 km scale under current climate conditions. Both the GCM and RCM ensembles are evaluated against high-quality gridded observations
in terms of spatial resolution and station density. We show
that both ensembles outperform GCMs from the 5th Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), which cannot capture the regional-scale precipitation distribution properly because of their coarse resolutions. PRIMAVERA GCMs generally simulate precipitation distributions within the range of EURO-CORDEX RCMs. Both ensembles perform better in summer and autumn in most European regions but
Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.
5486 M.-E. Demory et al.: European daily precipitation in EURO-CORDEX RCMs and HighResMIP GCMs
tend to overestimate precipitation in winter and spring. PRIMAVERA shows improvements in the latter by reducing
moderate-precipitation rate biases over central and western
Europe. The spatial distribution of mean precipitation is also improved in PRIMAVERA. Finally, heavy precipitation simulated by PRIMAVERA agrees better with observations in
most regions and seasons, while CORDEX overestimates
precipitation extremes. However, uncertainty exists in the observations due to a potential under catch error, especially during heavy-precipitation events.
The analyses also confirm previous findings that, although
the spatial representation of precipitation is improved, the effect of increasing resolution from 50 to 12 km horizontal grid spacing in EURO-CORDEX daily precipitation distributions is, in comparison, small in most regions and seasons outside mountainous regions and coastal regions. Our results show that both high-resolution GCMs and CORDEX RCMs provide adequate information to end users at a 50 km scal
Public intellectuals as policy makers: the democratization of culture and Sean O’Faoláin’s Arts Council, 1956–1959
No full textThis article examines the brief tenure of the writer Sean O’Faoláin as
Director of the Arts Council of Ireland. The article notes the generational
similarities and shared outlook between O’Faoláin and André Malraux,
the Minister of Culture for France from 1959 to 1969. However,
O’Faoláin’s tenure in office was shorter, less successful, and marked by
a bitter dispute with the administration and artists of the Royal Hibernian
Academy. This dispute serves as a useful case study for examining
competing conceptions of national culture, the purpose of cultural policy, and the role of the cultural elite as arbiters of taste
Improving a land surface scheme for estimating sensible and latent heat fluxes above grasslands with contrasting soil moisture zones
No full textKnowledge of soil–vegetation–atmosphere energy exchange processes is essential for examining the response of
agriculture to changes in climate in both the short and long term. However, there are relatively few sites where
all the flux measurements necessary for evaluating these responses are available; where they exist, data are often
incomplete and/or of limited duration. At the same time, there is often an extensive observation network
available that has gathered key meteorological data (sunshine, wind, rainfall, etc.) over decades. Simulating the terms of the surface energy balance (SEB) using available meteorological, soil and vegetation data can improve our understanding of how agricultural systems respond to climate and how this response will vary spatially. Here, we employ a physically-based scheme to simulate the SEB fluxes over a mid-latitude, maritime temperate
environment using routine weather observations. The latent heat flux is a critical SEB term as it incorporates the
response of the plant to environmental conditions including available energy and soil water. This response is
represented in modelling schemes through surface resistance (rs), which is usually expressed as a function of nearsurface water vapor alone. In this study, we simulate the SEB over two grassland sites, where eddy flux observations are available, representing imperfectly- and poorly- drained soils. We employ three different formulations of rs, representing varying degrees of sophistication, to estimate the surface fluxes. Due to differences
in soil moisture characteristics between the sites, we ultimately focused our attention on an rs formulation that
accounted for soil water retention capacity, based on the Jarvis conductance model; the results at both hourly
and daily intervals are in good agreement, with RMSE values of ≈ 40 W m−2 for sensible and latent heat fluxes
at both sites. The findings show the potential value of using routine weather observations to generate the SEB
where flux observations are not available and the importance of soil properties in estimating surface fluxes.
These findings could contribute to the assessment of past and future climate change on grassland ecosystems
phenModel: A temperature-dependent phenology/voltinism model for a herbivorous insect incorporating facultative diapause and budburst
No full textA comprehensive phenology/voltinism model was developed for Phratora vulgatissima, an important pest of
bioenergy crops. The model, phenModel, was developed based on development times of different life cycle stages
(eggs, larvae, pupae, pre-oviposition, oviposition, sexual maturation) obtained from constant temperature laboratory experiments. As part of this study, a number of linear and non-linear models which describe the
temperature-dependent development rate (inverse of development time) for each of the different life cycle stages were fitted. Based on the criteria of model parsimony and model fit, the non-linear Lactin-2 model was chosen as
the optimum model to describe temperature-driven development in P. vulgatissima. To account for the variation
in development times between individuals, an important but often ignored aspect in phenology models, a
number of stochastic models (2- and 3- parameter Weibull and logistic models) were evaluated, based on the
assumption that normalised development times conform to a similar shaped ('same shape') distribution. Novel
aspects of the phenology model include the incorporation of a biologically relevant biofix, based on a budburst
model for Salix viminalis, and a photoperiod threshold to induce facultative diapause. The model, which is
written in R for accessibility, requires inputs of daily minimum and maximum temperature and site latitude and
produces outputs describing the timing of completion of developmental stages for specified proportions of the
population. It was evaluated against available field data and found to largely reproduce the observations providing a measure of its potential utility. A key component of the model allows for a sensitivity analysis of the
model parameters. The model is structured so that it can easily be adapted for other leaf-feeding beetles which
display a facultative reproductive diapause cued by photoperiod, and where the onset of oviposition is dependent on budburst, assuming relevant life cycle stage parameters are available
Health and wellbeing under COVID-19: The green covid survey
No full textGiven the impact of COVID-19 on populations, especially under lockdown conditions, there has been more attention than ever focused on the role of nature, including green and blue spaces, to act as a form of health-enabler across societies. Access to green space, with its potential for physical activity and mental health support has been specifically identified within the literature as an important asset for neighbourhood and citizen health and wellbeing. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries have developed as part of their public health strategies, a series of lockdown measures in which citizens have either been confined to home, or at best, a small catchment area immediately surrounding their homes. AS part of a flurry of recent research on such relationships, the GreenCOVID study was carried out by a group of researchers in Spain, the UK and Ireland, all broadly operating to a similar framework and collecting information from the general adult population in each of the three countries. This short commentary introduces the survey alongside preliminary Irish results specifically focused on household characteristics, access to nearby green space as well as a measure of psychological wellbeing