Impact of the EuroPsy: A European Benchmark for Psychology Education and Training

The EuroPsy is a set of standards for education and training in psychology, overseen by the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA) since 2010 and currently implemented in 28 countries across Europe. This paper examines how the EuroPsy certification process has impacted psychology in Europe. Methods: We reviewed data from individual countries, including annual reports, approval and reapproval applications, and minutes of annual meetings over the 13-year period from 2010 to 2023. We conducted a small number of interviews online where clarification was needed. Results: Three key areas have been impacted by the EuroPsy process: University psychology programmes across Europe have been revised in line with the EuroPsy curriculum; supervised practice has now been accepted as a core component of training; and many countries have revised their legislation on licensing in psychology to be consistent with the minimum standards outlined in the EuroPsy regulations. Conclusion: Contrary to expectations, the impact of the EuroPsy is reflected less in the number of certificates issued and more in the recognition of the certificate as a hallmark of quality, representing a benchmark that has influenced education, training, and legislation at a systemic level in European countries

‘Don’t do anything special for us coming’: the mental health impact of Ofsted inspections on teacher educators in England

Ofsted inspections of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers aim to enhance training quality for pre-service teachers in England. However, research rarely examines the impact of these inspections on the wellbeing of Teacher Educators (TEs) based in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This study, part of a broader investigation into burnout among HEI-based TEs in Ireland and the UK, focuses on the English context, where the inspection practices of Ofsted have been identified as significant stressors. Drawing on data from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI), open-ended survey questions and interviews, this study provides preliminary insights into the mental health effects of Ofsted inspections on TEs. It reveals that inspection processes contribute to anticipatory stress, increased workload, and performative pressures, negatively impacting TEs’ professional morale and wellbeing. The paper recommends reforms such as predictable inspection schedules, streamlined documentation, and dedicated mental health support for TEs during the inspection period

Housing Challenges and Needs of Migrants in Ireland

Access to adequate housing is a fundamental human right. Yet, several vulnerable groups, including people with a migrant background, often face significant barriers in finding a home. They experience exclusion through discrimination in the access to housing, the consumption of poorer quality housing and the high cost of housing relative to income. This study investigates the relationship between access to housing for migrants, their specific housing needs, and the barriers to access to decent and affordable housing in the Private Rented Sector (PRS) in Ireland. Drawing on applied social science research methods, this research applies a qualitative research approach and policy document analysis to explore access to housing among migrant communities in Ireland, at this critical juncture of the post- global pandemic and the widespread housing affordability crisis. This research highlights that the migrant housing experience is significantly impacted by a complex blend of discrimination, practical challenges, and aspirational goals. The analysis of the data identifies three main elements shaping this experience: housing discrimination, strategies for overcoming challenges, and housing future aspirations. Firstly, housing discrimination poses a major barrier for migrants, making it difficult for them to secure accommodation. Secondly, migrants face multiple challenges in obtaining housing, such as navigating intricate processes, dealing with financial limitations, and securing mortgages, but they utilize various strategies to manage these difficulties. Lastly, despite these obstacles, migrants have clear aspirations for their housing future, including a strong desire for homeownership and specific housing preferences often associated with their sociocultural backgrounds. Ultimately, the research results provide a foundation to inform future research and policy, offering evidence-based recommendations and insights for overcoming disadvantages in migrant housing and supporting more equitable housing outcomes

Herding unmasked: Insights into cryptocurrencies, stocks and US ETFs

Herding behavior has become a familiar phenomenon to investors, with potential dangers of both undervaluing and overvaluing assets, while also threatening market stability. This study contributes to the literature on herding behavior by using a recent dataset, covering the most impactful events of recent years. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining herding behavior across three different types of investment vehicle and also the first study observing herding at a community (subset) level. Specifically, we first explore this phenomenon in each separate type of investment vehicle, namely stocks, US ETFs and cryptocurrencies, using the Cross-Sectional Absolute Deviation model. We find mostly similar herding patterns for stocks and US ETFs. Subsequently, the same experiment is implemented on a combination of all three investment vehicles. For a deeper investigation, we adopt graph-based techniques including the Minimum Spanning Tree and Louvain community detection to partition the combination into smaller subsets to detect herding behavior for each subset. We find that herding behavior exists at all times across all types of investment vehicle at a subset level, although perhaps not at the superset level, and that this herding behavior tends to stem from specific events that solely impact that subset of assets. Lastly, we explore herding by examining the financial contagion effects between these types of investment vehicle. Results show that US ETFs not only have a tendency to propagate similar trading behaviors in stocks and especially cryptocurrencies but also show self-reinforcing herding behavior, acting as drivers of their own trends

Investigating perspectives on the role of visual arts education in children’s inventive development

The very evolution of art is not driven by creativity alone. It is also shaped by groundbreaking inventions that have transformed the way artists express, create and curate their work. This research was motivated by personal professional observations and experiences as a primary school teacher regarding the varying quality of children’s art-making experiences from an inventive perspective. Consequently, the primary purpose of this research is to examine perspectives regarding the potential role visual arts education plays in terms of developing children’s inventiveness at a time of significant change in the Irish primary school curriculum. Following a review of relevant literature concerning what is known about visual arts, inventive development and how perspectives shape teaching practice, two key research methods were employed. This includes a deductive thematic analysis of visual arts curriculum documents from 1999, 2023, and 2024, and semi-structured interviews with primary school teachers. Findings reveal a striking difference between the 1999, 2023 and 2024 curriculum documents regarding the role of inventiveness in visual arts education. While the 2024 curriculum promotes creativity, it lacks explicit reference to "invention," unlike the 1999 curriculum, which often linked visual arts to inventive development. This omission raises concerns about how effectively the new curriculum supports inventiveness. The teacher interviews reveal that teachers value the link between visual arts and inventiveness. They believe creating a supportive, playful environment that encourages creative freedom is key to fostering inventive development. However, challenges such as time constraints, lack of student confidence, and inconsistent teaching practices, along with insufficient resources and technology, hinder this process. The study concludes by recommending a re-evaluation of how inventiveness is recognised in visual arts education. It stresses the need for clearer guidance in the curriculum and increased support for teachers to cultivate artistic inventiveness, ensuring that visual arts can nurture inventive play and development effectively

#SeAcabó: how a mass-mediated “social drama” made visible and confronted (subjective and objective) violence in women’s football in Spain

The victory of the Spanish national women’s football team at the 2023 FIFA World Cup was marred by the mass-mediated non-consensual kiss on midfielder, Jennifer Hermoso, by Luis Rubiales, then President of the Royal Spanish Football National Federation. The kiss sparked general outrage worldwide and led to the prosecution of Rubiales for sexual assault and coercion. Drawing on the concepts of “moral shock” and “social drama,” this article explores how this widely disseminated episode of “subjective violence” resulted in a shock capable of mobilising and politicising different agents. It does so through qualitative analysis of official statements and vernacular online discussions. The article makes the case that the unfolding of this social drama enabled more subtle (objective) violence, long endured by female athletes, to be brought into public discourse debate. In so doing, it boosted demands for social change. But such demands were also contested, in that the structured social drama resulted in an online “reactionary moral shock” characterised by anti-feminist and misogynistic discourses. Significantly, our analysis of these discourses reveals a shift in male victimisation narratives and strategies to disempower women and maintain sexual inequality. These include the denial of gender-based violence and the banalisation of sexual abuse

L-shell Photoionisation Cross Sections in the S +, S 2+, S 3+ Isonuclear Sequence

We present absolute L-shell photoionisation cross sections for the S+, S2+, S3+ ions. The cross sections were obtained using the monochromatised photon beam delivered by the SOLEIL syn- chrotron source coupled with an ion beam extracted from an electron cyclotron resonance source (ECRIS) in the merged dual-beam configuration. The cross sections for single, double and triple ionisation were measured and combined to generate total photoionisation cross sections. For each of the S+, S2+ and S3+ ions, the photon energy regions corresponding to the excitation and ionisation of a 2p or a 2s electron (∼175-230 eV) were investigated. The experimental results are interpreted with the help of multiconfigurational Dirac-Fock (MCDF) and Breit-Pauli R-Matrix (BPRM) or Dirac R-Matrix (DARC) theoretical calculations. The former generates photoabsorption cross sec- tions from eigenenergies and eigenfunctions obtained by solving variationally the multiconfiguration Dirac Hamiltonian while the latter calculate cross sections for photon scattering by atoms. The cross sectional spectra feature rich resonance structures with narrow natural widths (typically ≤100 meV) due to 2p →nd excitations below and up to the 2p thresholds. This behaviour is consistent with the large number of inner-shell states based on correlation and spin-orbit mixed configurations having three open subshells. Strong and wide (typically∼1 eV) Rydberg series of resonances due to 2s →np excitations dominate above the 2p threshold

Family-driven innovation: A multilevel investigation of contingency factors for innovation strategy

This paper explores the drivers of innovation in family firms. Using contingency theory as our theoretical lens, we investigate how contingency factors (‘where’, ‘how’, and ‘what’) relate to the development of innovation strategies, and how family firm idiosyncrasies affect the development of these innovation strategies. Using four multi-generational family firm case studies, the data collection consisted of 21 interviews and 1,496 items of archival data. We identify five specific elements of family firm innovation strategies (vision and culture alignment, generational approaches, change strategy, future orientation, and shared decision-making). We show how innovation strategy in family firms is contingent on three factors: ‘Where’: willingness to innovate; ‘How’: structures and processes needed to innovate; and ‘What’: capabilities and resources needed to innovate, and that these are influenced by idiosyncratic characteristics of family firms (familiness, founder influence, and succession)

An exploration of domain generalisation through vision benchmarking, masking, and pruning

There are many computer vision applications including object segmentation, classification, object detection, and reconstruction for which Machine Learning (ML) shows state-of-the-art performance. Nowadays, we can build ML tools for such applications with real-world accuracy. However, each tool works well within the domain in which it has been trained and developed. Often, when we train a model on a dataset in one specific domain and test on another unseen domain known as an Out-of-Distribution (OOD) dataset, models or ML tools show a decrease in performance. Previously, in the literature different solutions have been proposed to tackle with Domain Shifting problem which occurs during the inference of models, like adversarial training, feature alignment, learning distribution invariant features, meta learn- ing and many more. Similarly, to understand the behaviour of ML models for serious challenges of Domain Generalisation (DG), Domain Adaptation (DA), and Domain Shifting, in summary, this thesis presents novel work at the intersection of vision-based technologies for domain-specific and domain-generalised methods, vision transformers for DG, synthetic data generation for OOD data with detailed analysis, and the effects of pruning on DG. The underlying hypothesis is that to solve complex challenges like DG and DA, “it is possible to say that domain-generalised learning which can refer to dynamic learning could be better than domain-specific learning which can refer to static learning”. It means that under domain shifting, dynamic learning can also have better, reliable, and faster adaptation than static learning. Some initial experiments are conducted on two popular vision-based benchmarks, PACS and Office Home and we introduce an implementation pipeline for domain generalisation methods and conventional deep learning models. The results illustrates that domain generalised models have better accuracy than domain specific methods for these chosen benchmarks. Since domain generalisation involves pooling knowledge from source domain(s) into a single model that can generalise to unseen target domain(s), recent trends motivate us to conduct an investigation into the factors which could affect the DG ability of a model and this inspired us to explore vision transformers. Initially, we examined four vision transformer architectures namely ViT, LeViT, DeiT, and BEIT on out-of-distribution data. Due to advantages like self-attention, self-supervised fine-tuning, and mask image modeling, we use the BEIT architecture for further experiments on three benchmarks PACS, Home Office, and DomainNet. In summary, under few conditions and selected measurement metrics, our experiments demonstrate that it is true to say domain generalised learning provides better solutions than domain specific learning

Multi-omic biomarker panel in pancreatic cyst fluid and serum predicts patients at a high risk of pancreatic cancer development

Integration of multi-omic data for the purposes of biomarker discovery can provide novel and robust panels across multiple biological compartments. Appropriate analytical methods are key to ensuring accurate and meaningful outputs in the multi-omic setting. Here, we extensively profile the proteome and transcriptome of patient pancreatic cyst fluid (PCF) (n=32) and serum (n=68), before integrating matched omic and biofluid data, to identify biomarkers of pancreatic cancer risk. Differential expression analysis, feature reduction, multi-omic data integration, unsupervised hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis, spearman correlations and leave-one-out cross-validation were performed using RStudio and CombiROC software. An 11-feature multi-omic panel in PCF [PIGR, S100A8, REG1A, LGALS3, TCN1, LCN2, PRSS8, MUC6, SNORA66, miR-216a-5p, miR-216b-5p] generated an AUC=0.806. A 13-feature multi-omic panel in serum [SHROOM3, IGHV3-72, IGJ, IGHA1, PPBP, APOD, SFN, IGHG1, miR-197-5p, miR-6741-5p, miR-3180, miR-3180-3p, miR-6782-5p] produced an AUC=0.824. Integration of the strongest performing biomarkers generated a 10-feature crossbiofluid multi-omic panel [S100A8, LGALS3, SNORA66, miR-216b-5p, IGHV3-72, IGJ, IGHA1, PPBP, miR-3180, miR-3180-3p] with an AUC=0.970. Multi-omic profiling provides an abundance of potential biomarkers. Integration of data from different omic compartments, and across biofluids, produced a biomarker panel that performs with high accuracy, showing promise for the risk stratification of patients with pancreatic cystic lesions