Processing of Thin Film Photovoltaics from Chalcogenide Nanoparticles

Over the last few decades, it has become evident that current energy production for humanity since the industrial revolution has incurred the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in rampant pollution, global warming, ocean acidification and other disastrous environmental effects. The continued emission GHGs is a direct result of the predominant use of fossil fuels to meet an exponentially increasing global energy demand. Development of sustainable energy technologies is a global imperative to avoid future catastrophe. Photovoltaics (PV) are an ideal resource that allows us to convert our greatest supply of energy, sunlight, directly into our greatest source of energy consumption, electricity

Flight Risk

'Flight Risk' is a radio play exploring the thoughts and fears of Elizabeth, a woman seeking asylum in Ireland, adrift and asleep on a flight bound for Dublin. Elizabeth seeks protection in the Ireland celebrated for its 'one hundred thousand welcomes'. But this bounty of welcomes is limited by immigration law. Elizabeth dreams that the pilot speaks to her directly over the tannoy, quizzing her about travel documents and tormenting her with his predictions of a swift deportation. This dramatic scenario is intercut with documentary material to describe the experience of those seeking protection in Ireland. Ellie Kisyombe drew on her personal experiences to play the role of Elizabeth. The text includes her improvisations in the role. Her words merge with testimonies at protest rallies and from RTÉ Radio 1's phone-in programme, 'Liveline', presented by Joe Duffy. Felix Dzamara from Zimbabwe describes what people in his home country are running from - the violence of that country's Central Intelligence Organisation. Others describe the dehumanising conditions of the Irish Direct Provision system, where people are accommodated as they await the outcome of their asylum applications. Direct Provision was established in 2000. Since then, thousands of people have lived in this system, in some cases for periods in excess of five years, without the right to work, without the means to cook for themselves, and on a small weekly allowance. The play was produced by RTÉ Drama On One, and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on 29 January 2017. This coincided with President Trump's first travel ban, by chance echoing the concerns of a multitude of people taking their own 'flight risk'. 'Flight Risk' was a Gold Radio Winner in the Entertainment Best Drama Special category at the New York Festival Radio Awards in 2017

Measuring the Returns to Agricultural and Food Research and Development in Ireland: An Ex Ante Case Study

End of Project ReportResearch provides many of the innovations that are essential to Irish agriculture’s ability to sustain and expand economic growth and maintain competitiveness. The agricultural and food research agenda in Ireland and internationally has broadened beyond seeking to just augment conventional productivity and now seeks to provide the means of enhancing the agri-food sector’s competitiveness by improving the quality of inputs and outputs, the efficiency of production systems and the development of new products. Recently there has been an increased emphasis on developing Ireland as a ‘knowledge based society’ and most recently Ireland and more specifically the Irish agri-food sector’s development as a “knowledge base bio-economy” has been advocated (Teagasc, 2008). With science, technology and innovation now a major focus of Irish public policy, Ireland is committed to increasing research spending to 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per annum by 2011. Accompanying this greater emphasis on the importance of research there has been significant injections of public funds into the public research systems. With increased funding arise questions of accountability, i.e. how to prioritise expenditure and measure and evaluate the outcomes of research projects. This project sets out to address what we identified as a key gap in the Irish literature - the evaluation of returns to agriculture and food research that improves the quality of a product, what we have termed demand lifting research. The project sought to address this by evaluating, as a case study, the impact of agricultural research that improves the quality of Irish lamb. If consumers are willing to pay higher prices for what they believe to be a better quality or healthier product then an evaluation of the returns to demand lifting research should be incorporated into the general assessment of the benefits that flow from investment in agricultural and food research. To date the focus of the evaluation of research benefits in Ireland has been on the returns to supply shifting research (that is to cost reducing research). In general agricultural economists have to date avoided jointly modelling technological improvement and associated changes in product quality. The key features of the comparative static partial equilibrium model developed in this project are linear supply and demand function specifications, parallel shifts of supply and demand schedules, and the use of the economic surplus methodology to evaluate the costs and benefits of innovations. With the model developed, and using the economic surplus methodology, we can allocate costs and benefits of demand lifting research between producers and consumers. We use the comparative static partial equilibrium model developed in this project to provide an assessment of the gains to Irish producers and Irish consumers of research that leads to a quality improvement in lamb. This evaluation has been based on a set of assumptions regarding, functional form, elasticity of demand and supply, and the nature of the demand and supply shift related to the demand lifting research innovation. A series of scenarios were analysed and the results used to assess the impact of demand shifting sheep research. In the first scenario the research based improvement in the quality of Irish lamb was assumed not to be associated with associated any change in the costs of production; in the second scenario the assumed increase in production cost equalled the per kilo premium associated with the improved quality of the lamb produced product. In the third scenario the increase in costs of production were assumed to equal 50% of the premium resulting from the improvement in product quality. For the purpose of this study the first two scenarios analysed set the upper and lower bounds for the change in economic surplus in the Irish lamb market, we consider the third scenario to be a conservative estimate of the returns to research. In this third scenario the innovations leading to higher quality lamb leads to a gain in economic surplus of €6.405 million per annum. Given that a large proportion of the improvements in quality will flow from improved genetics it is sensible to consider the surplus as a permanent addition and thus to consider the discounted present value of the additional economic surplus that is attributable to the research induced improvement in lamb quality. The present value of the total sum of benefits over a period of 20 years was estimated to be €79.8205 million.It was, not possible to estimate the costs involved in research that can be specifically linked to improving the quality of lamb, as this research is not a stand alone project and would have evolved over many years from work at the research centre in Athenry (and earlier work at Belclare). The values for the gains in total economic surplus and the present value of the future stream of benefits from such research can be interpreted as the maximum amount that should be spent in order to achieve the quality improvement

In-memory Realization of In-situ Few-shot Continual Learning with a Dynamically Evolving Explicit Memory

Continually learning new classes from a few training examples without forgetting previous old classes demands a flexible architecture with an inevitably growing portion of storage, in which new examples and classes can be incrementally stored and efficiently retrieved. One viable architectural solution is to tightly couple a stationary deep neural network to a dynamically evolving explicit memory (EM). As the centerpiece of this architecture, we propose an EM unit that leverages energy-efficient in-memory compute (IMC) cores during the course of continual learning operations. We demonstrate for the first time how the EM unit can physically superpose multiple training examples, expand to accommodate unseen classes, and perform similarity search during inference, using operations on an IMC core based on phase-change memory (PCM). Specifically, the physical superposition of a few encoded training examples is realized via in-situ progressive crystallization of PCM devices. The classification accuracy achieved on the IMC core remains within a range of 1.28%--2.5% compared to that of the state-of-the-art full-precision baseline software model on both the CIFAR-100 and miniImageNet datasets when continually learning 40 novel classes (from only five examples per class) on top of 60 old classes.Comment: Accepted at the European Solid-state Devices and Circuits Conference (ESSDERC), September 202

APOE ε4 moderates abnormal CSF-abeta-42 levels, while neurocognitive impairment is associated with abnormal CSF tau levels in HIV+ individuals – a cross-sectional observational study

Background: Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers Aβ1-42, t-tau and p-tau have a characteristic pattern in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Their roles in HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) remains unclear. Methods: Adults with chronic treated HIV disease were recruited (n = 43, aged 56.7 ± 7.9; 32% aged 60+; median HIV duration 20 years, \u3e95% plasma and CSF HIV RNA \u3c50 cp/mL, on cART for a median 24 months). All underwent standard neuropsychological testing (61% had HAND), APOE genotyping (30.9% carried APOE ε4 and 7.1% were ε4 homozygotes) and a lumbar puncture. Concentrations of Aβ1-42, t-tau and p-tau were assessed in the CSF using commercial ELISAs. Current neurocognitive status was defined using the continuous Global Deficit Score, which grades impairment in clinically relevant categories. History of HAND was recorded. Univariate correlations informed multivariate models, which were corrected for nadir CD4-T cell counts and HIV duration. Results: Carriage of APOE ε4 predicted markedly lower levels of CSF Aβ1-42 in univariate (r = -.50; p = .001) and multivariate analyses (R2 = .25; p \u3c .0003). Greater levels of neurocognitive impairment were associated with higher CSF levels of p-tau in univariate analyses (r = .32; p = .03) and multivariate analyses (R2 = .10; p = .03). AD risk prediction cut-offs incorporating all three CSF biomarkers suggested that 12.5% of participants had a high risk for AD. Having a CSF-AD like profile was more frequent in those with current (p = .05) and past HIV-associated dementia (p = .03). Conclusions: Similarly to larger studies, APOE ε4 genotype was not directly associated with HAND, but moderated CSF levels of Aβ1-42 in a minority of participants. In the majority of participants, increased CSF p-tau levels were associated with current neurocognitive impairment. Combined CSF biomarker risk for AD in the current HIV+ sample is more than 10 times greater than in the Australian population of the same age. Larger prospective studies are warranted

Global NeuroAIDS Roundtable

In May 2012, the Division of AIDS Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) organized the “Global NeuroAIDS Roundtable” in conjunction with the 11th International Symposium on Neurovirology and the 2012 Conference on HIV in the Nervous System. The meeting was held in New York, NY, USA and brought together NIMH-funded investigators who are currently working on projects related to the neurological complications of AIDS (NeuroAIDS) in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America in order to provide an opportunity to share their recent findings and discuss the challenges encountered within each country. The major goals of the roundtable were to evaluate HIV-associated neurocognitive impairment and determine if it may be directly attributable to distinct HIV subtypes or clades and to discuss the future priorities for global NeuroAIDS research. At the “Global NeuroAIDS Roundtable”, presentations of preliminary research indicated that HIV-associated neurocognitive impairment is prevalent in all countries examined regardless of which HIV clade is present in the region. The only clear-cut difference between HIV-1 clades was in relation to subtypes A and D in Uganda. However, a key point that emerged from the discussions was that there is an urgent need to standardize neurocognitive assessment methodologies across the globe before definitive conclusions can be drawn regarding the relationship between HIV clade diversity and neuropathogenesis. Future research directions were also discussed at the roundtable with particular emphasis on the potential of viral and host factor molecular interactions to impact the pathophysiology of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) from a global perspective

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Macrophage entry mediated by HIV Envs from brain and lymphoid tissues is determined by the capacity to use low CD4 levels and overall efficiency of fusion

AbstractHIV infects macrophages and microglia in the central nervous system (CNS), which express lower levels of CD4 than CD4+ T cells in peripheral blood. To investigate mechanisms of HIV neurotropism, full-length env genes were cloned from autopsy brain and lymphoid tissues from 4 AIDS patients with HIV-associated dementia (HAD). Characterization of 55 functional Env clones demonstrated that Envs with reduced dependence on CD4 for fusion and viral entry are more frequent in brain compared to lymphoid tissue. Envs that mediated efficient entry into macrophages were frequent in brain but were also present in lymphoid tissue. For most Envs, entry into macrophages correlated with overall fusion activity at all levels of CD4 and CCR5. gp160 nucleotide sequences were compartmentalized in brain versus lymphoid tissue within each patient. Proline at position 308 in the V3 loop of gp120 was associated with brain compartmentalization in 3 patients, but mutagenesis studies suggested that P308 alone does not contribute to reduced CD4 dependence or macrophage-tropism. These results suggest that HIV adaptation to replicate in the CNS selects for Envs with reduced CD4 dependence and increased fusion activity. Macrophage-tropic Envs are frequent in brain but are also present in lymphoid tissues of AIDS patients with HAD, and entry into macrophages in the CNS and other tissues is dependent on the ability to use low receptor levels and overall efficiency of fusion