NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
Not a member yet
18159 research outputs found
Sort by
Enhancing Cultural Participation of Persons with Disabilities in the European Union: A Policy Brief
No full textCultural participation is a human right and a vital part
of being a member of society. Yet, persons with disabilities face multiple obstacles when participating in
cultural life. In the European Union (EU), Eurostat data
have shown the significant and persistent ‘disability
gap’ in cultural participation, with data showing lower
rates of cultural participation among people with disabilities compared with the overall population aged 16
and over across all EU Member States (MS).
Barriers faced by persons with disabilities include the
absence of adequate or effective legislation ensuring
the right to cultural participation, as well as the insufficient consultation and involvement of persons with
disabilities in relevant decision-making processes.
Additionally, the lack of physical and informational accessibility of cultural sites, goods and services, as well
as persistent negative attitudes and stigma around
participation of people with disabilities in the Cultural
and Creative Sectors (CCS) are significant barriers for
persons with disabilities. Structural barriers - such as
poverty, social marginalisation and exclusion, along
with the lack of adequate support services - contribute to the exclusion of people with disabilities from
cultural life. Further, in the EU, barriers to cultural participation are linked to the existing fragmentation of
EU accessibility legislation, piecemeal approaches to
funding for accessible cultural initiatives as well as to
relatively low prioritisation of cultural participation of
persons with disabilities in EU disability policy.
As provided for in Article 26 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), persons with disabilities have
the right ‘to benefit from measures designed to ensure their independence, social and occupational integration and participation in the life of the community’,
which includes participation in culture. Furthermore,
Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) articulates the right of
persons with disabilities to participate in cultural life
- alongside the right to participate in sport, leisure,
and recreation – and lists a number of obligations to
be complied with by States Parties to the Convention.
Having ratified the CRPD, the EU, alongside its MS,
shall implement Article 30 and promote the right to
culture of persons with disabilities. However, ensuring
meaningful participation in cultural life for people with
disabilities is not only a matter of compliance with the
CRPD and social justice, but it is also a vital contribution to the richness and diversity of society. When cultural spaces, programmes, and policies are accessible
and inclusive, everyone benefits
Climate change turns warm summer days in England into health threat
No full textWorld Weather Attribution uses weather observations and climate models to understand how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of extreme weather events. The studies also assess the role of human vulnerability and exposure in the impacts to highlight the actions needed to prepare for changing weather extremes.
WWA performed a super rapid analysis, analysing observations only on this early summer heat in the Southeast of the UK, defined (1) by the official heatwave definition of reaching 28°C in many of the so-called home counties and greater London (dark red region in figure 1, Met Office) and (2) the hottest predicted day in the same area. While this is not a full attribution study, the results are in agreement with the study undertaken in July 2022 over a similar region (Zachariah et al., 2022), thus we have high confidence in the results. calm, sunny days and gradually rising temperatures
What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary
No full textTulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension) . We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y)
Comprehensive examination of thermal energy storage through advanced phase change material integration for optimized building energy management and thermal comfort
No full textSeveral countries all over the world are interested in the energy business. The scientific community is creating new
energy-saving experiments in response to the present fossil fuel problems. Buildings are one of the components
that use more energy, so it is highly desirable that knowledge is being generated and technology is developing to
provide answers to this energy demand. When used in building elements for heating and cooling like coatings,
blocks, panels or wall panels, phase change materials (PCMs) have been demonstrated to enhance the capacity
for heat storage by absorbing heat as latent heat. Thus, during the past 20 years, research has been done on
the application of phase change materials (PCMs) in latent heat storage systems. The most practical way to
incorporate PCMs into construction parts is through the macro encapsulation approach, which is examined in this
review together with the microencapsulation method. Furthermore, given that additional research is required to
process biobased PCMs, we must pay greater attention to them, as evidenced by our examination of the literature
on the encapsulation process of PCMs. Due to the lack of information provided in other reviews, there is a section
dedicated to the superior PCM with lightweight material to ascertain its macro and microscale thermophysical
and mechanical characteristics as well as to determine whether it would be feasible to switch from PCM that
are made from petroleum to more ecologically friendly bio-based ones. Above all, this study also focuses on
reviewing recent PCM research and evaluating the thermal performance of prototypes used in experimental PCM
investigations, i.e., how the layout of design affects several variables and potential applications of PCM
On the wind-driven European shelf sea-level variability and the associated oceanic circulation
No full textThe shelf to the west of Ireland, France and the United Kingdom is a region where currents and sea level respond to the wind activity in a remarkable manner throughout a range of timescales. Using altimetry-obtained measurements and a wind reanalysis, we demonstrate in the present contribution how the sub-annual sea-level variability can be understood as a response to the wind action. The winds drive water towards (away from)
the coastline through Ekman transport, yielding sea-level changes coherent along and across the shelf and with maximum amplitude at the coast. The alignment of the winds with the isobaths determines the magnitude of sea-level changes. To investigate the impacts of these changes on the circulation variability, we bring together a comprehensive dataset of 30+ in-situ observations of recent current changes. Using these measurements, we
show that sub-annual changes in the shelf-edge circulation from the Goban Spur to the Faroe-Shetland Channel arise from the geostrophic adjustment to shelf sea-level variations induced by the Ekman-driven accumulation of water towards the coastline. Our analysis suggests that the along-isobath current generated through this
mechanism are primarily found over the shelf, only impinge on the upper slope, and do not affect the circulation above greater depth (>500 m). Nonetheless, important slope circulations such as the Rockall Slope Current are substantially influenced on their shoreward side by this simple geostrophic adjustment process. Because sea-level changes co-vary over large distances on the shelf, there also is remarkable along-isobath coherence in the associated current changes but we warn against concluding this is evidence for the continuity of an‘European Slope Current’ circumnavigating the European slope from Portugal to Norway
Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes
No full textHow exactly do we know that a text is a law? This paper argues that purely legalistic explanations are inadequate because they do not explain why certain voting rules possess the authority to alter the statute book. Rejecting the modern tendency to view legislatures as a “they, not an ‘it’,” I critically examine Michael Bratman’s proceduralist theory, which draws on the traditional idea of a single legislative author. Bratman holds that statutes express the legislature’s collective intentions, understood as the outcome of legislators’ shared preferences regarding procedural matters. I argue that Bratman’s approach overemphasizes rational coherence and confers undue power on individual minority legislators. To address these concerns, the paper revises Bratman’s framework to a) incorporate a majoritarian rule of aggregation and, b) conceive of legislation as a mental act involving the formation of a collective policy “will” rather than a collective policy “intention.” This conceptual shift relaxes the rationality threshold for legislative action and aligns Bratman’s framework more closely with the pragmatic realities of legislative assemblies
Climate change risks illustrated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “burning embers”
No full textThe completion of the Sixth Assessment Cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a unique opportunity to understand where the world stands on climate-change-related risks to natural and human systems at the global level, as well as for specific regions and sectors. Since its Third Assessment Report (AR3), released 2 decades ago, the IPCC has developed a synthetic representation of how risks increase with global warming, with risk levels reflected by the colours used, including shades of yellow and red, which led to the nickname “burning embers”. While initially designed to illustrate five overarching Reasons for Concern, these diagrams have been progressively applied to risks in specific systems and regions over the last 10 years. However, the information gathered through expert elicitation and the resulting quantitative risk assessments have hitherto remained scattered within and across reports and specific data files. This paper overcomes this limitation by developing a database containing all embers from AR3 to AR6 and an associated online “Climate Risks Embers Explorer” (CREE) to facilitate the exploration of the assessed risks. The data are also available in an archive file in a widely accessible format (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12626976, Marbaix et al., 2024). Important aspects of data homogenization are discussed, and an approach to structuring information on assessed risk increases is presented. Potential uses of the data are explored through aggregated analyses of risks and adaptation benefits, which show that, excluding high-adaptation cases, half of the assessed risk levels increase from a moderate risk to a high risk between 1.5 and 2 to 2.3 °C of global warming, a result which is consistent with the separate assessment of the Reasons for Concern by the IPCC. The database lays the groundwork for future risk assessments and the development of burning embers by providing a standardized baseline of risk data. It also highlights important areas for improvement in the forthcoming Seventh Assessment Cycle of the IPCC, particularly towards the systematic, homogeneous, and structured collection of information on illustrated risk increases; comprehensive coverage of impacted regions; a systematic consideration of adaptation and/or vulnerability levels; and, possibly, the coverage of risks from response measures. In the context of an ever-growing body of literature and knowledge, the facility described herein has the potential to help in synthesizing and illustrating risks across scales and systems in a more consistent and comprehensive way
Spatio-temporal dynamics of speleothem growth and glaciation in the British Isles
No full textReconstructing the spatio-temporal dynamics of glaciations and permafrost largely relies on surface deposits and is therefore a challenge for every glacial period older than the last due to erosion. Consequently, glaciations and permafrost remain poorly constrained worldwide before ca. 30 ka. Since speleothems (carbonate cave deposits) form from drip water and generally indicate the absence of an ice sheet and permafrost, we evaluate how speleothem growth phases defined by U series dates align with past glacial–interglacial cycles. Further, we make the first systematic comparison of the spatial distribution of speleothem dates with independent reconstructions of the history of the British–Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS) to test how well geomorphologic ice reconstructions are replicated in the cave record. The frequency distribution of 1020 U series dates based on three different dating methods between 300 and 5 ka shows statistically significant periods of speleothem growth during the last interglacial and several interstadials during the last glacial. A pronounced decline in speleothem growth coincides with the Last Glacial Maximum before broad reactivation during deglaciation and into the Holocene. Spatio-temporal patterns in speleothem growth between 31 and 15 ka agree well with the surface-deposit-based reconstruction of the last BIIS. In data-rich regions, such as northern England, ice dynamics are well replicated in the cave record, which provide additional evidence about the spatio-temporal distribution of permafrost dynamics. Beyond the Last Glacial Maximum, the distribution of speleothem dates across the British Isles offers the opportunity to improve chronological constraints on past ice sheet variability, with evidence for a highly dynamic Scottish ice sheet during the last glacial. The results provide independent evidence of ice distribution complementary to studies of surface geomorphology and geology, and the potential to extend reconstructions into permafrost and earlier glacial cycles. Whilst undersampling is currently the main limitation for speleothem-based ice and permafrost reconstruction even in relatively well-sampled parts of the British Isles, we show that speleothem dates obtained using modern mass spectrometry techniques reveal a higher spatio-temporal resolution of glacial–interglacial cycles and glacial extent than previously possible. Further study of leads and lags in speleothem growth compared to surface deposition may provide new insights into landscape-scale dynamics during ice sheet growth and retreat
Ogam, cryptography and healing charms in the nineteenth century: observations on ‘The Minchin Manuscript’
No full textOgam is well known as a writing system invented for the Irish language and
used extensively for inscriptions on stone monuments across Ireland and
Britain between the late fourth and seventh centuries. Although the script has
primarily been examined in the context of early medieval archaeology and
epigraphy, its long afterlife as an integral part of Irish manuscript culture from
the medieval to modern periods has also been acknowledged. The present contribution seeks to add to the existing scholarship on manuscript ogam by discussing the transmission of ideas about the script as a cryptic device into the
nineteenth century, with a particular focus on a recently discovered notebook,
National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh) Advocates’ Manuscript 50.3.11 (or
‘The Minchin Manuscript’), which consists almost entirely of healing charms
written in ogam