4,808 research outputs found

    The Registration Continuum in Personality Disorder Studies: Theory, Rationale, And Template

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    Registration is a tool to increase the rigor of personality disorder research and its ability to reduce human suffering through improving people\u27s lives. This article details the problems that exist without registrations, which revolve around a study\u27s outcomes\u27 dependence on the data rather than on the theory being tested. Registrations exist on a continuum underpinned by bipolar timing and unipolar disclosure dimensions, the latter of which poses myriad points of decisions for researchers to register. The registration process provides memory aids and guideposts for researchers through the course of a study, transparently maintains public trust in the scientific enterprise, and preserves the severity of the tests used in the study. This article provides a template for personality disorder researchers to consider and examples of how researchers can use registered flexibility to plan for contingencies that might arise during a study. It also addresses challenges in evaluating registrations and implementing registration in a research workflow

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Irish Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Status Report

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    Summary report for Irish Ocean Climate & Ecosystem Status Report also published here. This Irish Ocean Climate & Ecosystem Status Summary for Policymakers brings together the latest evidence of ocean change in Irish waters. The report is intended to summarise the current trends in atmospheric patterns, ocean warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, plankton and fish distributions and abundance, and seabird population trends. The report represents a collaboration between marine researchers within the Marine Institute and others based in Ireland’s higher education institutes and public bodies. It includes authors from Met Éireann, Maynooth University, the University of Galway, the Atlantic Technological University, National Parks and Wildlife, Birdwatch Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Inland Fisheries Ireland, The National Water Forum, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Dundalk Institute of Technology.This report is intended to summarise the current trends in Ireland’s ocean climate. Use has been made of archived marine data held by a range of organisations to elucidate some of the key trends observed in phenomena such as atmospheric changes, ocean warming, sea level rise, acidification, plankton and fish distributions and abundance, and seabirds. The report aims to summarise the key findings and recommendations in each of these areas as a guide to climate adaptation policy and for the public. It builds on the previous Ocean Climate & Ecosystem Status Report published in 2010. The report examines the recently published literature in each of the topic areas and combines this in many cases with analysis of new data sets including long-term time series to identify trends in essential ocean variables in Irish waters. In some cases, model projections of the likely future state of the atmosphere and ocean are presented under different climate emission scenarios.Marine Institut

    An empirical investigation of the relationship between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in supply chains

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    This research aimed to develop an empirical understanding of the relationships between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in the supply chain domain, based on which, two conceptual frameworks were constructed to advance the field. The core motivation for the research was that, at the stage of writing the thesis, the combined relationship between the three concepts had not yet been examined, although their interrelationships have been studied individually. To achieve this aim, deductive and inductive reasoning logics were utilised to guide the qualitative study, which was undertaken via multiple case studies to investigate lines of enquiry that would address the research questions formulated. This is consistent with the author’s philosophical adoption of the ontology of relativism and the epistemology of constructionism, which was considered appropriate to address the research questions. Empirical data and evidence were collected, and various triangulation techniques were employed to ensure their credibility. Some key features of grounded theory coding techniques were drawn upon for data coding and analysis, generating two levels of findings. These revealed that whilst integration and dynamic capabilities were crucial in improving performance, the performance also informed the former. This reflects a cyclical and iterative approach rather than one purely based on linearity. Adopting a holistic approach towards the relationship was key in producing complementary strategies that can deliver sustainable supply chain performance. The research makes theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the field of supply chain management. The theoretical contribution includes the development of two emerging conceptual frameworks at the micro and macro levels. The former provides greater specificity, as it allows meta-analytic evaluation of the three concepts and their dimensions, providing a detailed insight into their correlations. The latter gives a holistic view of their relationships and how they are connected, reflecting a middle-range theory that bridges theory and practice. The methodological contribution lies in presenting models that address gaps associated with the inconsistent use of terminologies in philosophical assumptions, and lack of rigor in deploying case study research methods. In terms of its practical contribution, this research offers insights that practitioners could adopt to enhance their performance. They can do so without necessarily having to forgo certain desired outcomes using targeted integrative strategies and drawing on their dynamic capabilities

    Resilience and food security in a food systems context

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    This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners

    Learning to express, learning as self-expression: a multimethod investigation of the L2 selves of distance adult Irish L2 learners

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    This multimethod study is an exploration of the validity and interpretive utility of Dörnyei’s (2009) ‘L2 motivational self-system’ (L2MSS), as it applies to adult, non-formal learners of Irish, who are learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It is grounded in the psychology of language learning motivation (LLM), assessing whether non-formal adult Irish L2 learners are motivated by future L2 guides, both Ideal, reflecting hopes and dreams, and Ought-to, representing obligations and responsibilities. Three research questions are addressed, i) exploring the theory’s validity at a general level and examining whether ii) the L2 learning experience and iii) learner heritage background, are meaningful in predicting, and understanding, the motivations of learners. Using distinct samples from an iterated quantitative survey instrument (final n=638) and narrative interviews (n=42), evidence demonstrates the theory’s utility in an underexplored context, while raising questions regarding adult Irish language learners and theories of self. Learners endorsed and articulated internalised reasons to learn, encompassing personal hopes and obligations, with social others less directly impactful on their motivation. The futures learners described often referenced non-L2 related aspirations of self, and were less-directly related to L2 proficiency, in many cases. Challenges in relation to the latter, due to contextual difficulties, low efficacy beliefs, and limited contact with L2 speakers and learners, are described. Recommendations to encourage sustained L2 learning and support adult learners in fostering and developing L2 selves are made, to aid them in realising their personal language learning goals

    Late-bound code generation

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    Each time a function or method is invoked during the execution of a program, a stream of instructions is issued to some underlying hardware platform. But exactly what underlying hardware, and which instructions, is usually left implicit. However in certain situations it becomes important to control these decisions. For example, particular problems can only be solved in real-time when scheduled on specialised accelerators, such as graphics coprocessors or computing clusters. We introduce a novel operator for hygienically reifying the behaviour of a runtime function instance as a syntactic fragment, in a language which may in general differ from the source function definition. Translation and optimisation are performed by recursively invoked, dynamically dispatched code generators. Side-effecting operations are permitted, and their ordering is preserved. We compare our operator with other techniques for pragmatic control, observing that: the use of our operator supports lifting arbitrary mutable objects, and neither requires rewriting sections of the source program in a multi-level language, nor interferes with the interface to individual software components. Due to its lack of interference at the abstraction level at which software is composed, we believe that our approach poses a significantly lower barrier to practical adoption than current methods. The practical efficacy of our operator is demonstrated by using it to offload the user interface rendering of a smartphone application to an FPGA coprocessor, including both statically and procedurally defined user interface components. The generated pipeline is an application-specific, statically scheduled processor-per-primitive rendering pipeline, suitable for place-and-route style optimisation. To demonstrate the compatibility of our operator with existing languages, we show how it may be defined within the Python programming language. We introduce a transformation for weakening mutable to immutable named bindings, termed let-weakening, to solve the problem of propagating information pertaining to named variables between modular code generating units.Open Acces

    Landscape ecology of microbes in peatlands under different management regimes

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    Peatlands are essential ecosystems that play a significant role in the sequestration of carbon, water provisioning and global biodiversity. However, human activities are threatening their ability to sustain important ecosystem services. Soil microbial activity supports ecosystem processes in peatlands, but little is known about the main drivers of microbial community dynamics and their association with ecosystem functioning. Therefore, to better forecast the response of the microbiome to management regimes, a deeper understanding is required. The overall goal of this thesis is to identify the environmental drivers of peatland soil microbial communities and to investigate the effects of land management on community composition, function and resistance to habitat change. The study was based on the analysis of a pre-existing data set on microbial communities regarding land reclamation in Canada and on original data collection and analysis regarding burning regimes at Moor House Nature Reserve, UK. The Canadian data were used to determine how microbial communities and function change along three natural fens and a constructed fen in the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta and assess the impact of this reclamation practice. The UK research focused on investigating how prescribed burning affects soil properties, microbial community structure and microbial N-cycling using a range of approaches including next-generation sequencing and qPCR. Overall, results show first, total substrate respiration was significantly higher in the constructed fen, yet, the diversity of fungi and prokaryotes was higher in the treed-rich fen and community composition was significantly different between fens. However, prokaryote community composition was similar in the constructed fen to the treed-rich fen showing a resilience of the community to soil transfer. Second, there were changes in archaeal, bacterial and fungal diversity and community composition between burn treatments and soil profiles. Fungal diversity showed a more drastic change across burn treatments throughout the soil profile and there was also a shift in the relative abundance of trophic modes. Co-occurrence network analysis revealed that the non-burn topsoil had a larger and more complex network structure with more positive links than those under rotational burns. Third, amoA-AOA, amoA-AOB and nifH were higher in the topsoil of the non-burn control while the abundance of nirK was higher in plots under short rotation and long rotation regimes. ChiA abundance was greater in plots under a short rotation burn regime and decreased with soil depth. This result suggests that microbial N turnover potential is affected by the practice of burning. The changes in microbial communities and function are anticipated to have an impact on important peatland ecosystem services

    Topological data analysis and geometry in quantum field dynamics

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    Many non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theories are driven or accompanied by non-local excitations, whose dynamical effects can be intricate but difficult to study. Amongst others, this includes diverse phases of matter, anomalous chiral behavior, and non-equilibrium phenomena such as non-thermal fixed points and thermalization. Topological data analysis can provide non-local order parameters sensitive to numerous such collective effects, giving access to the topology of a hierarchy of complexes constructed from given data. This dissertation contributes to the study of topological data analysis and geometry in quantum field dynamics. A first part is devoted to far-from-equilibrium time evolutions and the thermalization of quantum many-body systems. We discuss the observation of dynamical condensation and thermalization of an easy-plane ferromagnet in a spinor Bose gas, which goes along with the build-up of long-range order and superfluidity. In real-time simulations of an over-occupied gluonic plasma we show that observables based on persistent homology provide versatile probes for universal dynamics off equilibrium. Related mathematical effects such as a packing relation between the occurring persistent homology scaling exponents are proven in a probabilistic setting. In a second part, non-Abelian features of gauge theories are studied via topological data analysis and geometry. The structure of confining and deconfining phases in non-Abelian lattice gauge theory is investigated using persistent homology, which allows for a comprehensive picture of confinement. More fundamentally, four-dimensional space-time geometries are considered within real projective geometry, to which canonical quantum field theory constructions can be extended. This leads to a derivation of much of the particle content of the Standard Model. The works discussed in this dissertation provide a step towards a geometric understanding of non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theories, and showcase the promising versatility of topological data analysis for statistical and quantum physics studies
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