NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Jens Halfwassen, 1958-2020
No full textOn the 14 February 2020, Germany lost one of its great metaphysical thinkers, as well as one of its finest scholars of classical antiquity, Jens Halfwassen. Born just outside Cologne (Bergisch Gladbach) in North Rhine-Westphalia on 16 November 1958, the future Cusanus expert attended the Nicolaus-Cusanus-Gymnasium in a fitting indication of things to come. From there he went on to study at the University of Cologne with Karl Bormann and Klaus Düsing, completing the first Staatsexamen in 1985 (Philosophy, History, Classics and Pedagogy). The volumes resulting from his doctorate (Der Aufstieg zum Einen. Untersuchungen zu Platon und Plotin. The Ascent to the One. Investigations on Plato and Plotinus) and habilitation (Hegel und der spätantike Neuplatonismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik des Einen und des Nous in Hegels spekulativer und geschichtlicher Deutung. Hegel and late-antique Neoplatonism. Investigations on the Metaphysics of the One and of the Intellect in Hegel’s Speculative and Historical Interpretation) both ran into multiple editions. After a brief spell as professor at Munich (1997-98) and visiting professor at Tübingen (1998-99), he took up a professorship at Heidelberg in 1999. Several important works followed, including a volume of collected articles (Auf den Spuren des Einen. Studien zur Metaphysik und ihrer Geschichte. On the Traces of the One. Studies on Metaphysics and its History, 2015)
Control Twisting con Adaptación Basada en Cruce por Cero para un Sistema de Columna de Agua Oscilante con Generador Sincrónico
No full textEste trabajo presenta el control de un dispositivo de columna de agua oscilante, que incluye un generador sincrónico de imán permanente, para la extracción óptima de potencia. Se diseñan dos controladores de modo deslizante de segundo orden adaptables, que funcionan de manera robusta en modo deslizante real y muestran una notable mejora en la reducción del chattering cuando se los compara con el mismo esquema con ganancias fijas, al ser probados sobre el modelo completo del sistema
The Creative Word: Reflections on the Augustinian Episteme
No full textBook XI of his Confessions contains Augustine’s celebrated ‘treatise’ on time. In reality, however, the ‘treatise’ is no such thing, but rather an integral part of a discussion of God’s creation through the Word: if God creates by speaking, as Scripture affirms, then how can God speak, given the fact that he must be thought not to be subject to time? What is a timeless word? While these are the questions that Augustine explicitly addresses in Book XI, there is something very important that he does not justify at all: namely, the possibility of speaking the world into existence. My paper investigates the episteme within which such a claim can make sense. How must one conceive of the relationship between the world and words to be able to assume that the latter can ‘make’ the former
A bijection for Euler’s partition theorem in the spirit of Bressoud
No full textFor each positive integer n, we construct a bijection between the odd partitions of n and the distinct partitions of n. Our bijection extends a bijection of Bressoud between the odd-and-distinct partitions of n and the splitting partitions of n. We compare our bijection with the classical bijections of Glaisher and Sylvester, and also with one recently constructed by Chen, Gao, Ji and Li
Implementation of the Assistive Product List (APL) in Malawi through development of appropriate policy and systems: an action research protocol
No full textIntroduction: Assistive technology (AT) is important for the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for persons with disabilities (PWD). Increasingly, studies suggest a significant gap between the need for and demand for and provisions of AT for PWD in low-income and middle-income settings. Evidence from high income countries highlights the importance of robust AT policies to the achievement of the recommendations of the World Health Assembly on AT. In Malawi, there is no standalone AT policy. The objectives of the Assistive Product List Implementation Creating Enablement of inclusive SDGs (APPLICABLE) project, are to propose and facilitate the development of a framework for creating effective national AT policy and specify a system capable of implementing such policies in low-income countries such as Malawi. Ethics and dissemination: The study protocol was approved by Maynooth University Research Ethics Committee (SRESC-2019-2378566) and University of Malawi Research Ethics Committee (P.01/20/10). Findings from the study will be disseminated by publication in peer-reviewed journals, presentations to stakeholders in Malawi, Ireland and international audiences at international conferences.
Method and analysis: We propose an action research process with stakeholders in AT in Malawi. APPLICABLE will adopt an action research paradigm, through developing a shared research agenda with stakeholders and including users of AT. This involves the formation of an Action Research Group that will specify the priorities for practice—and policy-based evidence, in order to facilitate the development of contextually realistic and achievable policy aspirations on AT in Malawi and provide system strengthening recommendations that will ensure that the policy is implementable for their realisation. We will undertake an evaluation of this policy by measuring supply and support for specific AT prior to, and following the implementation of the policy recommendations
Team-teaching for inclusion: A critical analysis of disability discourse in Irish Post-Primary Schools
No full textEducational policy rhetoric in Ireland has consistently represented team-teaching as an effective way to support the deployment of inclusive pedagogy in post-primary schools. Yet, evidence for such assertions is equivocal and the practice remains problematic and underused. Much of the inertia reported in relation to the adoption of team-teaching in post-primary schools had been associated with the cultural colonisation of inclusive education by positivist epistemologies and a lack of ideological commitment to the principles of inclusion.
Using a multiple case study research design, this study investigated three purposely-chosen post-primary team-teaching initiatives, each in a different school, that were set up to support learners deemed to have disability. In each case, a series of team-teaching meetings held over the course of the 2015-2016 academic year was transcribed and subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) using Fairclough’s (2003, 2016) Dialectical-Relational approach. Particular emphasis was placed on identifying and problematizing the discourses that dominated teachers’ constructions of learners deemed to have disability and whether these were grounded in positivist epistemologies or those congruent with inclusive education. The work also sought to examine whether or not teachers’ representations of students deemed to have disabilities influenced their conceptualisation of team-teaching as a support to the inclusion of these learners. Critical Disability Studies was used to develop a socio-cultural analysis of these issues.
Findings suggested that the genre of team-teaching meetings significantly constrained how teachers made meaning about learners deemed to have disability. They also suggest that teachers relied disproportionately on essentialist and personal tragedy discourses to do so. This reliance limited their conceptualisations of team-teaching to a narrow set of normalising practices that required learners to accommodate to highly visible diminished identities and fit into existing mainstream educational programmes. In this context, team-teaching was used primarily to differentiate instruction and provide individual support to a broad range of learners, not just those deemed to have disability. It was deployed in ways that reproduced the power relations and disciplinary technologies of special education rather than the values and underlying epistemologies of inclusive education.
Within team-teaching dyads, individual teachers often varied greatly in their use of disability discourse. They enacted particular team-teaching identities to negotiate incongruence between their discourse positions and those of their partners. As well as essentialist and personal tragedy discourses, teachers also used a range of counter-hegemonic discourses to represent learners deemed to have disability. These were usually deployed in tandem with essentialist discourses, which limited their influence on teachers’ conceptualisations of team-teaching. The study documented these counter-hegemonic discourses as examples of what resistance to oppressive essentialist discourse can look like and how this might be developed further in the future. Conclusions were drawn about how Universal Design for Learning and Assessment for Learning could be used to enhance the inclusive orientation of team-teaching
Immune priming: the secret weapon of the insect world Gerard Sheehan, Gemma Farrell & Kevin Kavanagh
No full textInsects are a highly successful group of animals that inhabit almost every habitat and environment on Earth. Part of their success is due to a rapid and highly effective immune response that
identifies, inactivates, and eliminates pathogens. Insects possess an immune system that shows
many similarities to the innate immune system of vertebrates, but they do not possess an
equivalent system to the antibody-mediated adaptive immune response of vertebrates.
However, some insect do display a process known as immune priming in which prior exposure
to a sublethal dose of a pathogen, or pathogen-derived material, leads to an elevation in the
immune response rendering the insect resistant to a subsequent lethal infection a short time later.
This process is mediated by an increase in the density of circulating hemocytes and increased
production of antimicrobial peptides. Immune priming is an important survival strategy for certain
insects while other insects that do not show this response may have colony-level behaviors that
may serve to limit the success of pathogens. Insects are now widely used as in vivo models for
studying microbial pathogens of humans and for assessing the in vivo efficacy of antimicrobial
agents. Knowledge of the process of immune priming in insects is essential in these applications
as it may operate and augment the perceived in vivo antimicrobial activity of novel compounds
Exposure of Aspergillus fumigatus to Atorvastatin Leads to Altered Membrane Permeability and Induction of an Oxidative Stress Response
No full textAspergillus fumigatus is a serious cause of disease in immune-deficient patients and in those with pulmonary malfunction (e.g., cystic fibrosis (CF), asthma). Atorvastatin is a member of the statin drug family, which are the main therapeutic agents used to decrease high serum cholesterol levels by inhibiting (HMG-CoA) reductase enzyme. The aim of the work presented here was to analyse the antifungal activity of atorvastatin and assess its effect on the virulence of A. fumigatus. Atorvastatin demonstrated strong antifungal activity and reduced the growth and viability of A. fumigatus. Exposure of A. fumigatus to atorvastatin led to a reduction in ergosterol content and increased membrane permeability, as evidenced by the release of protein, amino acids and gliotoxin. Proteomic analysis revealed an increased abundance of proteins associated with an oxidative stress response, such as the glutathione s-transferase family protein (+8.43-fold), heat shock protein Hsp30/Hsp42 (+2.02-fold) and 5-demethoxyubiquinone hydroxylase, mitochondrial (+1.73-fold), as well as secondary metabolites such as isocyanide synthase A icsA (+8.52-fold) and non-ribosomal peptide synthetase fmpE (+3.06-fold). The results presented here indicate that atorvastatin has strong antifungal properties and may have potential application in the treatment of A. fumigatus infections alone or in combination with existing antifungal agent
Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages. Corpus-Based Approaches
No full textThis book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change
Valuing Blue Space for Health & Wellbeing: Survey Comparisons of Indoor and Outdoor Settings from Ireland.
No full textThere has been an upsurge of recent interest in blue spaces, especially evident in nature-based research associated with the health and wellbeing potential of ocean-ic, coastal and inland waters. This paper documents Irish studies that compare in-door and outdoor blue spaces for different user communities and practices. The studies employ qualitative methodologies including interviews, visual surveys and go-alongs, to enact a form of ‘place capture’ in three different types of blue space. The first study, based at an indoor swimming pool in West Dublin, identifies the benefits and value of swimming as a healthy practice, from three different cohorts of respondents (n=79). The second study of a single canal space in the Midlands looks at the benefits identified by mixed regular users, including Park Runners, of the blue-ways alongside the Royal Canal (n=12). A third study captured comparative in-situ user-perspectives from two very different blue spaces, canal and beach, in two locations in Central/South Dublin (n=8). What emerges from the studies are complex assemblages of identified therapeutic outcomes in both health and wellbe-ing terms, reflecting diverse user perspectives from different types of blue space. The accounts reflect the literature in identifying both health-promoting and health-reducing dimensions of blue space experience, as well as commonalities and variations in how users explicitly value blue spaces settings. Key additional themes include, self-discovery, socialisation and recovery that hint at the potential of quali-tatively focused ‘emplaced blue community’ studies to underpin and inform public health policy and promote health resilience in Ireland and beyon