20 research outputs found
Impeachment: An Online Discussion of its use in the United States and its British Origins
No full textJoin us for a thought-provoking discussion on the use of impeachment in the United States and its British Origins. The speakers are leading experts on impeachment, politics, and history. The speakers have all contributed to British Origins and American Practice of Impeachment (which was published by Routledge in 2024.
The speakers are:
Professor Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, Stanford University. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and the editor of seven others, including The Unfinished Election of 2000 (2001).
Dr Clodagh Harrington is a Lecturer in American politics in the Departments of History and Government and Politics at University College Cork. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Politics at De Montfort University in Leicester where she taught American Politics and History since 2006.
Professor Daniel Plesch is Professor of Diplomacy and Strategy at SOAS University of London and is a 'door tenant' at the legal chambers of 9 Bedford Row, in London. His most recent research Women and the UN: a new history of women’s international human rights with Professor Rebecca Adami is published in 2021. He is the author of Human Rights After Hitler - featured on Netflix, reported on US National Public Radio and in other international media. His previous books include: America Hitler and the UN, Wartime Origins and the Future UN (with Prof. Weiss) and the Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace.
Dr Chris Monaghan is a Principal Lecturer in Law at the University of Worcester. He co-edited British Origins and American Practice of Impeachment (with Matthew Flinders) which was published by Routledge in 2024. He also wrote Accountability, Impeachment and the Constitution: The Case for a Modernised Process in the United Kingdom which was published by Routledge in 2022
Evoking the Possibility of Presence:Textual and Ideological Effects of Linguistic Negation in Written Discourse
No full textThis thesis explores the textual and ideological effects of linguistic negation in written texts. It argues that when language users process negation, understanding its use in context is as much about the possibility of presence as it is about the actuality of absence. This gives rise to a variety of effects in texts from contributing to the construction of fictional characters to potentially influencing readers’/hearers’ view of the world they inhabit. This thesis brings together research on the theoretical aspects of how negation works to present a new approach to linguistic negation in written discourse. It also demonstrates how this approach can be applied in the analysis of the conceptual practice of negating. The approach presented is made up of three main elements; negation is presuppositional, is realised through a wide variety of linguistic forms beyond the morphosyntactic core forms (not, no, never, none, un-, in-, and so on) and includes semantic and pragmatically implied forms. These two elements combine to give rise to implied meaning in context. Having outlined this approach to negation, it is then applied in the analysis of literary and non-literary texts to explain the textual and ideological effects that arise from its use
Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Tips for Players and Athletes COVID-RECOVER
No full textFirst paragraph: The aim of this guidance is to provide a framework for athletes to cope, thrive and engage in personal growth during the current pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely led to wide-scale disruption of your sporting trajectories for 2020. This has included the cancellation or postponement of sporting events, limits to group training due to social distancing, restrictions on use of sporting facilities and loss of face-to-face access to coaches and support personnel. In the context of a threat to public health, arguably sports competition sinks into lesser importance, but for athletes like you, for whom sport is a fulltime job or major life goal, or for those who identify sports competition as a key part of their identity, it is important to share recommendations based on evidence and theory on how to support athletes and players through this time. The unprecedented situation means that evidence from similar or related contexts and relevant theories needs to be used to extrapolate to COVID-19 and all its challenges. Each of the guidelines below should be viewed like a menu to choose from and try, test and review, and be seen as a road to discovery instead of passive prescription of activities. Our team of practitioners and researchers have collated the knowledge below based on four premises: 1. Psychological Strengths: As a performer on the sporting stage, you have, in all likelihood, developed many skills and habits to support your on-field performance. Pre-performance routines for penalty taking, for example, may include relaxation and focusing components which aid emotional regulation. This can be also applied to help you cope in world outside of sport (i.e. outside the bubble). Awareness of your repertoire of psychological skills and the ability to use them across different contexts is highly important. 2. Resilience: The capacity to mobilise resources both in advance and after a major challenge, is developed through our sporting challenges. In the face of a trauma, it is likely that resilience is the default rather than the exception. As an athlete, you have the ability to respond in an optimistic way to major stressors and engage in post-traumatic growth. Further, you have successful experiences from memory to call upon on which By doing this, you build a firm foundation on which to build your beliefs that you have sufficient resources to cope with COVID-19. 3. Individual Responses: It is important to acknowledge that athletes in different sports and at different levels of competition have developed diverse sets of abilities and competencies. Dual-career athletes (e.g. student-athletes) may have invested much of their effort in their sport despite study or work commitments, and injured athletes may be over-identifying with their sport as a predictable response to injury, in both cases making these athletes very vulnerable to major stressors. 4. Perception of Control: Loss of control is a major source of anxiety in a pandemic (see Mansell, 2020). Developing autonomy and a sense of control is a key part to feeling safe and secure. With COVID-19, the new habits that could help protect you such as physical isolation, hand hygiene, and avoiding touching your face can help you gain control in an uncertain world. And finding new ways to exercise, to work and to interact can open up a world of exciting possibilities. Athletes have shown an ability to develop positive habits and maintain self-control, skills transferable to meeting the present challenging circumstances
Hepatitis B virus infection in children
No full textRecent increases in Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection prompted us to characterize HBV-infected children in Ireland and to audit management, by reviewing prospectively gathered data. Of 46 children (29 [63%] male), median age at presentation was 8.1 years (range 0.6â 17.6), monitoring duration was 22.5 months (range 1-101), 23/46 (50%) were
European (including 9 [19.6%] Irish), 15 (32.6%) African and 9 (19.6%) Asian. Acquisition was vertical (25/46 [54.3%]), horizontal (5/46 [10.9%]), unknown (16/46 [34.8%]). HBV-DNA was >100,000,000 cpm in 20/32 (62.5%) with chronic infection. Hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) was detected in 32/44 (72.7%). We estimate that universal neonatal
vaccination (UNV-HBV) could have prevented 22% of cases, and could limit further horizontal HBV spread. This supports the recent introduction of UNV-HBV
Investigating the ‘empire of secrecy’ — three decades of reporting on the secret state
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonIt has often been argued that journalism has been the most effective means of holding the intelligence services to account in western democracies. This thesis examines whether that proposition holds true in the United Kingdom and if so, whether such oversight has been consistent. Accountability by the news media is compared with the expanding range of UK official oversight mechanisms. The author utilises a body or work from over three decades of reporting on the intelligence services and further research on accountability to examine these questions. The author suggests this work is timely, given the controversy prompted by the former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, who leaked a substantial archive of secret intelligence documents. This thesis concludes that the news media were often effective, if not consistent, in bringing intelligence to account in the second half of the 20th century. Since the start of the 21st century monitoring the secret state has become more challenging as a result of a changing economic, global and national political environment. Government legislation and technology makes it increasingly difficult for journalists to obtain confidential sources and then undertake their Fourth Estate role. Finding new methodologies is an urgent task for journalists, as history reveals that if intelligence agencies operate without scrutiny from outside government, abuses take place. Never before has government and its intelligence services had such powers and techniques of invasive mass surveillance available, and thus the potential to control the population and particularly those who dissent
Development of natural language processing techniques and resources for Old Irish; with an application for the detection of authors in the Würzburg Glosses
No full textOld Irish is lacking in digital resources compared to even other historical European languages, and relatively few attempts have been made to apply well-established natural language processing techniques to the language. Where attempts have been made, either to create resources or apply modern computational techniques, it has become apparent that certain roadblocks exist in relation to Old Irish which do not obstruct similar efforts in other languages. These roadblocks are not clearly identified in the literature, however, this research suggests that issues relating to tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and associated grammatical implications are among the most significant. Little focus has been given to these factors until now, and a conclusive review detailing their impact on attempts to create digital resources for Old Irish has never been carried out. Moreover, no attempt has been made to demonstrate that removing these roadblocks can enable the successful application of established natural language processing techniques to Old Irish text.
This research addresses major factors limiting success in the digitisation of Old Irish text and the application of established natural language processing techniques to it. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these factors can be overcome. This necessitates an assessment of common practice in text digitisation and natural language processing techniques as applied to other languages, and an assessment of both the manuscript orthography and the grammatical tradition which has been built up around Old Irish. Where other languages have seen success in digitisation and natural language processing projects, the linguistic features which distinguish these languages from Old Irish are examined in an attempt to mitigate their effect on success rates when attempting such projects for Old Irish text. It is demonstrated that many of the factors limiting success rates can be alleviated by moving away from the conventions of Old Irish grammar which were formalised at the turn of the last century, at least, on a sub-surface, computational level. That is to say that it is possible to process the text in a manner which deviates from the traditional grammar of Old Irish, but still represent it to an end user in a more conventional manner.
Certain assumptions regarding the nature of written language are inherent in the formats of many of the most common frameworks for the collection of annotated digital text, and hence, are inherent in natural language processing techniques which depend upon this type of text data. Many of these assumptions, though fundamental enough to have been overlooked in some cases, are shown to be mismatched with either the orthographic reality of Old Irish text, or with the grammatical tradition of the language. A tokenisation and part-of-speech tagging standard was developed for Old Irish in an attempt to overcome these mismatched expectations of the language. In this thesis it is demonstrated that this new standard for word separation is more suitable for the digital representation of Old Irish text than any which has come before it. It is shown to enable the successful application of certain natural language processing techniques to the language for the first time, as well as enabling the creation of a machine-readable lexicon of Old Irish tokens, which has not been possible until now as a result of disagreement between scholars regarding word boundaries and subsequent inconsistencies between resources created. A case study in the suitability of this standard is detailed in which it is shown that the application of well documented author recognition techniques, with a proven track record in other languages, to the text of the Würzburg glosses enables the successful separation of the work of the three scribal hands. The results of this experiment not only demonstrate the suitability of the tokenisation and part-of-speech tagging standard applied, but also add evidence to the debate on the authorship and composition of Old Irish gloss material.University of Galway (Digital Arts and Humanities Scholarship, 2017-2019) and the Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship, GOIPG/2019/3694)
The grand challenge of achieving decent work in digital platforms: an ecosystems informed systematic review
No full textDe-mystifying the Muslimah: Exploring Different Perceptions of Selected Young Muslim Women in Britain
No full textIn this research I argue that although Islam as a faith is inherently emancipatory, Muslim
women are doubly marginalised: by patriarchal interpretations of their faith within Muslim
communities and by pluralist society that often does not understand the faith-based values
and practices of Muslim women. The empowerment of Muslim women is crucial not just for
the women themselves but also for socio-political dynamics within the Muslim community
and its relationships in pluralist society. It is from this context, and acknowledging the paucity
of academic literature written by Muslim women, that I set out to give voice to them, so that
their opinions may be heard in discourses that they think are relevant to their lives. By
encouraging Muslim women to take voice and by facilitating mechanisms for these voices to
be heard, this research presents alternate narratives of Muslim women that challenge
dominant media imagery of the oppressed and subjugated Muslim woman. These narratives,
which are by and for Muslim women, portray instead the inherent diversity in the category
'Muslim woman' and thus add more facets to the category 'woman'.
I used an ethnographic methodology that involved participants as contributors in the creation
of new knowledge. Semi-structured interviews with 45 young university-educated Muslim
women and 7 group discussions were used as initial data-gathering tools. The penultimate
ethnographic stage involved Muslim women creating 3-minute long self-representational
digital stories (DSTs), which consist of an autobiographical narrative accompanied by still
pictures. This was a process of self-reflection for the women and an opportunity to take voice
and to be heard. The subsequent screening of these DSTs to audiences who were not
Muslim resulted in discussion and active debate about the reasons for prevalent
(mis)understandings of Muslim women and stereotypes were challenged. In its initiation of
more balanced representations of Muslim women this research empowers Muslim women,
and by contributing to dialogue and cohesion it also empowers pluralist society as a whole.
This research clarifies the overlapping priorities and identities of young British Muslim
women and initiates new discourses, as narrated by the women, on subjects including
religious interpretation and practice, feminism, media representation and social cohesion. In
the research findings I propose an evolving British-Muslim identity among Muslim youth (in
this case young women) which is distinct from that of their parents; a theological articulation
of a 'feminist' struggle for women's rights; and the need to engage with the media and others
to create positive representations of Muslim women. Experiences with DSTs indicate the
potential of personal narratives and interaction for the purposes of inter-community dialogue
Psychosocial interventions to reduce alcohol consumption in concurrent problem alcohol and illicit drug users
No full textBackground: Problem alcohol use is common among illicit drug users and is associated with adverse health outcomes. It is also an important factor in poor prognosis among drug users with hepatitis C virus (HCV) as it impacts on progression to hepatic cirrhosis or opiate overdose in opioid users.Objectives: To assess the effects of psychosocial interventions for problem alcohol use in illicit drug users (principally problem drug users of opiates and stimulants).Search methods: We searched the Cochrane Drugs and Alcohol Group trials register (November 2011), the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library, Issue 11, November 2011), PUBMED (1966 to 2011); EMBASE (1974 to 2011); CINAHL (1982 to 2011); PsycINFO (1872 to 2011) and reference list of articles. We also searched: 1) conference proceedings (online archives only) of the Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA), International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA), International Conference on Alcohol Harm Reduction (ICAHR), and American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (AATOD); 2) online registers of clinical trials, Current Controlled Trials (CCT), Clinical Trials.org, Center Watch and International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).Selection criteria: Randomised controlled trials comparing psychosocial interventions with another therapy (other psychosocial treatment, including non-pharmacological therapies or placebo) in adult (over the age of 18 years) illicit drug users with concurrent problem alcohol use.Data collection and analysis: Two review authors independently assessed risk of bias and extracted data from included trials.Main results: Four studies, 594 participants, were included. Half of the trials were rated as having high or unclear risk of bias. They considered six different psychosocial interventions grouped into four comparisons: (1) cognitive-behavioural coping skills training versus 12-step facilitation (N = 41), (2) brief intervention versus treatment as usual (N = 110), (3) hepatitis health promotion versus motivational interviewing (N = 256), and (4) brief motivational intervention versus assessment-only group (N = 187). Differences between studies precluded any pooling of data. Findings are described for each trial individually:comparison 1: no significant difference; comparison 2: higher rates of decreased alcohol use at three months (risk ratio (RR) 0.32; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.19 to 0.54) and nine months (RR 0.16; 95% CI 0.08 to 0.33) in the treatment as usual group; comparison 3 (group and individual format): no significant difference; comparison 4: more people reduced alcohol use (by seven or more days in the past 30 days at 6 months) in the brief motivational intervention compared to controls (RR 1.67; 95% CI 1.08 to 2.60).Authors' conclusions: Very little evidence exists that there is no difference in the effectiveness between different types of interventions and that brief interventions are not superior to assessment only or treatment as usual. No conclusion can be made because of the paucity of the data and the low quality of the retrieved studies.Cochrane Training Fellowship awarded to the lead author by Health Research Board of Ireland (Grant No. CTF-2010-9)19/11/1
