NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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When design meets power: design thinking, public sector innovation and the politics of policymaking
No full textResponding to the need for innovation, governments have begun experimenting with ‘design thinking’ approaches to reframe policy issues and generate and test new policy solutions. This paper examines what is new about design thinking and compares this to rational and participatory approaches to policymaking, highlighting the difference between their logics, foundations and the basis on which they ‘speak truth to power’. It then examines the impact of design thinking on policymaking in practice, using the example of public sector innovation (PSI) labs. The paper concludes that design thinking, when it comes in contact with power and politics, faces significant challenges, but that there are opportunities for design thinking and policymaking to work better together
Welfare conditionality and blaming the unemployed
No full textWelfare recipients are increasingly subject to various forms of work-related conditionality that, critics argue, presuppose a ‘pathological’ theory of unemployment that stigmatises welfare recipients as de-motivated to work. Drawing on surveys of Australian frontline employment services staff, we examine the extent to which caseworkers attribute being on benefits to recipients’ lack of motivation, and whether this problem figuration of unemployment is associated with a ‘harder edged’ approach to activation. We find that it is, although it is diminishing. This reflects how frontline discretion has become more routinised from the application of more intensive forms of performance monitoring and compliance auditing
An Investigation of the Role Programming Support Services Have for Mature Students
No full textProgramming support services for introductory programmers have seen a rise
in popularity in recent years with third level institutions around the world
providing “safe spaces” for students to practice their programming skills and
get supports without the risk of being judged by anyone. These services appear
in many different structures including Support Centres, Software Studios and
help desks. The common trend however is that all the users of these services,
in general, report that the service has helped them in their studies and
garnered them with more confidence in their ability.
This paper examines the role which our Computer Science Centre played for
students who attended the support service during an intensive higher diploma
course. The intensive course is a 3-week course tailored to students who have
previously completed a degree in a field not related to CS and covers CS1 and
CS2 material. The structure and design of the support service is outlined in
this paper along with the supports offered. A high-level survey was conducted
to investigate the effect of the service on students programming self-efficacy.
Study design and methodology are described in detail. Early findings suggest
that the support services offered to these students improved their belief in their
own programming ability which in turn improved their exam grade outcome.
The findings provide valuable evidence to justify future research into the
functions of support services with the computer science domain
Learning from pastoralism in a time of uncertainty
No full textBlog post: the abstract is included in the post
lcc: an R package to estimate the concordance correlation, Pearson correlation and accuracy over time
No full textBackground and Objective: Observational studies and experiments in medicine,
pharmacology and agronomy are often concerned with assessing whether different
methods/raters produce similar values over the time when measuring a quantitative
variable. This article aims to describe the statistical package lcc, for are, that can
be used to estimate the extent of agreement between two (or more) methods over
the time, and illustrate the developed methodology using three real examples.
Methods: The longitudinal concordance correlation, longitudinal Pearson
correlation, and longitudinal accuracy functions can be estimated based on fixed
effects and variance components of the mixed-effects regression model. Inference is
made through bootstrap confidence intervals and diagnostic can be done via plots,
and statistical tests.
Results: The main features of the package are estimation and inference about the
extent of agreement using numerical and graphical summaries. Moreover, our
approach accommodates both balanced and unbalanced experimental designs or
observational studies, and allows for different within-group error structures, while
allowing for the inclusion of covariates in the linear predictor to control systematic
variations in the response. All examples show that our methodology is flexible and
can be applied to many different data types.
Conclusions: The lcc package, available on the CRAN repository, proved to be a
useful tool to describe the agreement between two or more methods over time,
allowing the detection of changes in the extent of agreement. The inclusion of
different structures for the variance-covariance matrices of random effects and
residuals makes the package flexible for working with different types of databases
The Leinster Arms – Through the pages of 19th century newspapers
No full textAbstract is included in the text
Big issues for big data: challenges for critical spatial data analytics
No full textIn this paper we consider some of the issues of working with big data and big spatial data and highlight the need for an open and critical framework. We focus on a set of challenges underlying the collection and analysis of big data. In particular, we consider 1) inference when working with usually biased big data, challenging the assumed inferential superiority of data with observations, n, approaching N, the population n -> N. We also emphasise 2) the need for analyses that answer questions of practical significance or with greater emphasis on the size of the effect, rather than the truth or falsehood of a statistical statement; 3) the need to accept messiness in your data and to document all operations undertaken on the data because of this, in support of openness and reproducibility paradigms; and 4) the need to explicitly seek to understand the causes of bias, messiness etc in the data and the inferential consequences of using such data in analyses, by adopting critical approaches to spatial data science. In particular we consider the need to place individual data science studies in a wider social and economic contexts, along with the role of inferential theory in the presence of big data, and issues relating to messiness and complexity in big data
Dense two-color QCD towards continuum and chiral limits
No full textWe study two-color QCD with two flavors of Wilson fermion as a function of quark chemical potential
μ
and temperature
T
, for two different lattice spacings and two different quark masses. We find that the quarkyonic region, where the behavior of the quark number density and the diquark condensate are described by a Fermi sphere of almost free quarks distorted by a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer gap, extends to larger chemical potentials with decreasing lattice spacing or quark mass. In both cases, the quark number density also approaches its noninteracting value. The pressure at low temperature is found to approach the Stefan–Boltzmann limit from below
Dataset on the mass spectrometry-based proteomic profiling of the kidney from wild type and the dystrophic mdx-4cv mouse model of X-linked muscular dystrophy
No full textThe proteomic data presented in this article provide supporting information to the related research article "Proteomic and cell biological profiling of the renal phenotype of the mdx-4cv mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy" (Dowling et al., 2019) [1]. This article supplies additional datasets on protein species with increased versus decreased concentration in the kidney from the dystrophic mdx-4cv mouse, as well as tables with mass spectrometrically identified kidney marker proteins that exhibit characteristic tissue distributions, subcellular localizations and physiological functions. Information is provided on the underlying multi-consensus protein listings from the proteomic screening of both wild type and mdx-4cv mouse kidneys. The data article provides comprehensive information on the systematic and mass spectrometric identification of the mouse kidney proteome
Protocol for the Bottom-Up Proteomic Analysis of Mouse Spleen
No full textThis protocol describes the comparative proteomic profiling of the spleen of wild
type versus mdx-4cv mouse, a model of dystrophinopathy. We detail sample
preparation for bottom-up proteomic mass spectrometry experiments, including
homogenization of tissue, protein concentration measurements, protein digestion, and removal of interfering chemicals. We then describe the steps for mass
spectrometric analysis and bioinformatic evaluation.
For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to
Dowling et al. (2020)