GROWING UP IN IRELAND. Cohort '08 (Infant Cohort). Design, Instrumentation and Procedures for Cohort ’08 of Growing Up in Ireland at 9 Years Old (Wave 5)

Growing Up in Ireland is the national longitudinal cohort study of children that commenced in 2006. The study has followed two groups of Irish children: Cohort ’98 (so-called because most of them were born in 1998; formerly called the ‘Child Cohort’); and Cohort ’08 (most of whom were born a decade later in 2008; formerly called the ‘Infant Cohort’). The primary aim of the study is to provide a strong evidence base to improve the understanding of children’s and young people’s health and development across a range of domains. This information is used to inform government policy in relation to children, yong people and their families

Neural network-based colonoscopic diagnosis using on-line learning and differential evolution

In this paper, on-line training of neural networks is investigated in the context of computer-assisted colonoscopic diagnosis. A memory-based adaptation of the learning rate for the on-line back-propagation (BP) is proposed and used to seed an on-line evolution process that applies a differential evolution (DE) strategy to (re-) adapt the neural network to modified environmental conditions. Our approach looks at on-line training from the perspective of tracking the changing location of an approximate solution of a pattern-based, and thus, dynamically changing, error function. The proposed hybrid strategy is compared with other standard training methods that have traditionally been used for training neural networks off-line. Results in interpreting colonoscopy images and frames of video sequences are promising and suggest that networks trained with this strategy detect malignant regions of interest with accuracy

Public Sector Decentralization: Measurement Concepts and Recent International Trends

This paper deals with the problems encountered in defining and measuring the degree of fiscal decentralization. Drawing on a recent analytical framework of the OECD, different measures of fiscal autonomy and revenue decentralization are presented which consider tax-raising powers of sub-central governments. Taking account of changes in the assignment of decision-making competencies in the course of time, new time series of annual data on the degree of fiscal decentralization are provided for 23 OECD countries in the time period between 1965 and 2001. It is shown that common measures usually employed tend to considerably overestimate the extent of fiscal decentralization. Evidence is also provided for increasing fiscal decentralization in a majority of OECD countries during the last three decades. --Fiscal Decentralization,Measurement of Decentralization,Sub-national Autonomy,Tax Autonomy

Very Red and Extremely Red Galaxies in the Fields of z ~ 1.5 Radio-Loud Quasars

We previously identified an excess of mostly red galaxies around 31 RLQs at z=1-2. These fields have an ERO (extremely red object, R-K>6) density 2.7 times higher than the field. Assuming the EROs are passively evolved galaxies at the quasar redshifts, they have characteristic luminosities of only ~L^*. We also present new observations of four z~1.54 RLQ fields: (1) Wide-field J & Ks data confirm an Abell richness ~2 excess within 140" of Q0835+580 but an excess only within 50" of Q1126+101. (2) In 3 fields we present deep narrow-band redshifted H-alpha observations. We detect five candidate galaxies at the quasar redshifts, a surface density 2.5x higher than the field. (3) SCUBA sub-mm observations of 3 fields detect 2 quasars and 2 galaxies with SEDs best fit as highly reddened galaxies at the quasar z. (4) H-band adaptive optics (AO) imaging is used to estimate redshifts for 2 red, bulge-dominated galaxies using the Kormendy relation. Both have structural redshifts foreground to the quasar, but these are not confirmed by photometric redshifts, possibly because their optical photometry is corrupted by scattered light from the AO guidestar. (5) We use quantitative SED fits to constrain the photometric redshifts z_ph for some galaxies. Most galaxies near Q0835+580 are consistent with being at its redshift, including a candidate very old passively evolving galaxy. Many very & extremely red objects have z_ph z_q, and dust reddening is required to fit most of them, including many objects whose fits also require relatively old stellar populations. Large reddenings of E(B-V)~0.6 are required to fit four J-K selected EROs, though all but one of them have best-fit z_ph>z_q. These objects may represent a population of dusty high-z galaxies underrepresented in optically selected samples. (Abridged)Comment: Missing object 1126.424 added to Table 4; title changed to save people the apparent trouble of reading the abstract. 38 pages, 16 figures, 2 in color; all-PostScript figure version available from http://astro.princeton.edu/~pathall/tp3.ps.g

Logie: an ecclesiastical place-name element in eastern Scotland

No abstract available