NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Two Early Irish Inscriptions from Co. Cavan
No full textThis article presents two stones with short inscriptions in Early Irishthat were discovered by Brian Callaghan of the Moybologue Historical Societyat Moybologue Old Graveyard and at Enniskeen Graveyard, in 2017 and 2019respectively. Both sites are on the Cavan-Meath border and are approximately10.5 km distant from each other
Different ethical standards for different ethical problems? A commentary on ‘Responsibility, Prudence and Health Promotion’
No full textThis short note offers a few comments on the interesting
paper ‘Responsibility, Prudence and Health Promotion’ by
Brown, Maslen and Savulescu. We agree that the development
of NCDs is powerfully influenced by social and environmental forces beyond an individual’s direct control. Thus,
undue emphasis on individuals ‘taking responsibility’ for
making healthy choices is unethical, sometimes stigmatizing
and always unscientific. It ignores the complexity of NCD
causation and promotes ineffective and inequitable NCD
prevention strategies. An emphasis on ‘personal responsibility’ is also a well-recognized distraction tactic used
by supporters of harmful commodity industries such as
tobacco, alcohol and junk food.1 Conversely, effective and
successful strategies such as tobacco control comprehensively address the ‘3As’ of affordability, acceptability and availability
SumHEIs Handbook of Summer School Development in Higher Education in Europe
No full textThis document "Desk research and Best Practices research on Summer Schools" is developed in
the framework of the Erasmus+ project "SumHEIS - Summer School Development
Programme for European HEIs" (High Education Institutions) financed by the European
Commission, Key Action 2 - KA203 - Strategic Partnerships for higher education (project
reference number 2019-1-IT02-KA203-062984) and implemented by a consortium of 7 partners
from 4 European countries – Italy, Greece, Latvia and Ireland.
This report – named "SWOT Analysis on Summer School Programmes in HEIs" - is the output
of the Intellectual Output 1 of the project, and belongs to its preliminary/foundation phase.
Despite all the knowledge and information the seven partners have in the context of the project's
subjects, they also find it very important to update and access accurate information within the
scope of the project. This paper is an initial cornerstone giving further directions and mainly
contextualizing the next intellectual outputs.
This report derives from a dual focus: (a) desk-based literature review to identify existing Summer
School initiatives, synergies, core features and dynamics identified by the partners, (b) best practices
research on Summer School Development in each participating country. This report will present
the synthesis of the findings from a SWOT analysis conducted with the responsible persons for
the operation of summer schools in the relevant partner institutions representing all the Countries
involved in the project (i.e. Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia)
“I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”: Liminality in Undergraduate Writing
No full textAccording to Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2006), along with being troublesome, integrative, transformative, and probably irreversible, threshold
concepts are characterized as liminal. Their liminal nature is summarized by Linda Adler- Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (2016): “Threshold
concepts involve what the name implies— thresholds. But the movement
toward and the (hopeful) crossing of those thresholds isn’t straightforward; instead, it happens in a two- steps- forward- one- step- back kind of
way as learners push against troublesome knowledge” (ix). Glynis Cousin
(2006) observes that the idea of liminal states aids “our understanding
of the conceptual transformations students undergo” in challenging
learning situations, like the grasping of threshold concepts (4). And
yet, Ray Land, Julie Rattray, and Peter Vivian (2014) suggest that the
liminal space “has remained relatively ill- defined, something of a ‘black
box’ within the conceptual framework of Threshold Concepts” (201).
This chapter focuses on this liminal space. Specifically, we wanted to
better understand the nature, occurrence, and impact of liminality in
undergraduate writing through the lens of threshold concepts of writing, through which those concepts could in turn provide an effective
theoretical and pedagogical framework for our particular context. Our
setting is a relatively new writing center (established 2011) in an Irish
university that has an undergraduate population of 10,050 students and
a postgraduate enrollment of 1,900. Following a presentation of our
distilled findings, we explore and contextualize one key action- oriented
insight about undergraduates’ experiences with threshold concepts of
writing that emerged from the data, that of the coexistence of apparent liminality, a stage that can be paralyzing for students, and authentic
liminality, a stage that is important for students grappling with threshold
concepts and that is therefore productive and potentially transformative.
In the next section, we review literature that has contributed to these
ideas of liminality; following that review, we describe the research that
led us to these definition
‘Personal’ troubles and public spaces: the community as a site of care and social action
No full textThe crisis in community development in Ireland has been discussed by
community workers, academics and equality experts. This article contributes to this analysis with empirical research encompassing the voice of
people living with inequality, including a number of community activists.
The research shows how affective relations take precedence in women’s
discussions about social class inequality and activism at a community level.
Yet, this everyday concern with the affective is not given a legitimate status
in academic and political discourse about community development. It is
argued that this depoliticization of affective relations is part of the crisis in
community development when it fails to incorporate a political analysis of
what matters most to people at a community level
Development of a Pedagogical Graphical Interface for the Reinforcement Learning
No full textIn this paper the development of a pedagogical
graphical interface for the Reinforcement Learning is presented.
The proposed framework aims to help students from simulations of traditional domains in literature: Travelling Salesman
Problem, Multidimensional Knapsack Problem and Autonomous
Navigation. The modules developed in MATLAB are described
and case studies are exemplified in the text
National Governance of Public Health Responses in a Pandemic?
No full textThe world is currently facing the worst pandemic in a century and we were caught unprepared. COVID-19 has proven highly contagious and with severe consequences that are still unfolding. As of 16 April 2020, there were over 2 million confirmed cases and over 136,000 related deaths reported worldwide.Footnote1 Over 1 million of those confirmed cases were in the preceding 14 days, with the USA accounting for nearly half of those. Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now warning that the world is about to suffer the worst economic recession since the Great Depression in the 1920s.Footnote2
However, although the World Health Organization (WHO) provides scientific expertise globally and some other examples of limited centralisation exist (eg the European Union (EU) provides for minimum quality standards regarding medical products or food), public health is primarily governed at a national level or regional level (within the nation state). Consequently, despite some overlap in mechanisms such as contact tracing and social distancing, responses have varied considerably in objectives, timing and degree – even within the EU or across the USA.
This raises the fundamental question of whether national decision-making is effective or indeed appropriate in the context of the COVID-19 or similar future pandemics,Footnote3 or whether a supranational or international approach would be more appropriate. In order to address this question, the nature of COVID-19 and the policy responses are analysed through the lens of subsidiarity
Env2Vec: accelerating VNF testing with deep learning
No full textThe adoption of fast-paced practices for developing virtual network functions (VNFs) allows for continuous software delivery and creates a market advantage for network operators. This adoption, however, is problematic for testing engineers that need to assure, in shorter development cycles, certain quality of highly-configurable product releases running on heterogeneous clouds. Machine learning (ML) can accelerate testing workflows by detecting performance issues in new software builds. However, the overhead of maintaining several models for all combinations of build types, network configurations, and other stack parameters, can quickly become prohibitive and make the application of ML infeasible.
We propose Env2Vec, a deep learning architecture that combines contextual features with historical resource usage, and characterizes the various stack parameters that influence the test execution within an embedding space, which allows it to generalize model predictions to previously unseen environments. We integrate a single ML model in the testing workflow to automatically debug errors and pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Results obtained with real testing data show an accuracy between 86.2%-100%, while reducing the false alarm rate by 20.9%-38.1% when reporting performance issues compared to state-of-the-art approaches
Patents, access to health and COVID-19 – The role of compulsory and government-use licensing in Ireland
No full textAs the race for effective vaccines/treatments for Covid-19 develops, attention has turned to how such vaccines/treatments will be accessed globally. Patents play a significant role in this context because they give the patent-holder the right to stop others using patented inventions. Patents are available on medicines/vaccines and could form significant access obstacles for Covid-19. Moreover, whilst many patent-holders may be willing to license health-technologies reasonably, others may not. Therefore, it is imperative that national governments ensure effective avenues exist to intervene with patent-holder discretion via compulsory and government-use licensing. This article focuses on the legal framework applicable in Ireland for such compulsory licensing interventions, interrogating the effectiveness of this framework in alleviating access issues posed by patents for Covid-19. It demonstrates how the current framework could be reformed to make it more effective in tempering patent-holder control, where needed, whilst remaining in compliance with Ireland’s international obligations
“Neither Fish nor Fowl nor Yet Good Red Herring”—Joint Institutions, Single-Service Priorities, and Amphibious Capabilities in Postwar Britain
No full textA joint approach to institutional responsibility for amphibious warfare served British needs during the Second World War but contributed to poor results after 1945. British capabilities did not recover until amphibious warfare became the particular responsibility of the naval service