From residential drug treatment to employment: an interim report.

In January 1998 the Merchant's Quay Project began the Integra Programme 'From Residential Drug Treatment to Employment' as a response to a gap in service provision which highlighted the difficulty of former drug users in accessing employment, training and educational opportunities once they have acquired a drug free status. This interim report presents an account of the first operational year of the Integra Programme. Chapter One provides the rationale for the Integra Programme and firmly locates the need for such an intervention within the current social and economic climate. International research has repeatedly linked drug use with poverty and unemployment. Chapter Two provides a detailed description of the origins and development of the Programme, and identifies the target groups of the intervention; former drug users, trainers and employers. Chapter Three describes the research methodology employed in evaluating the Integra Programme, and is largely concerned with the quantitative research methodology and it details the four designed research instruments. In Chapter Four the quantitative data collected over the first year of the Integra Programme is presented. This data provides a brief client profile in terms of socio-demographic characteristics and examines the success of the Integra Programme in reaching its client target population. Chapter Five details some of the issues encountered during the initial year of the Programme, and the follow-up measures undertaken by the staff and management of Integra. The Report concludes with Chapter Six providing a brief but concise overview of the Integra Programme. The report concludes that the Integra Programme has the ability to provide the clients with the support, training and job placement opportunities necessary to ease their insertion into the labour market. This in turn, has the potential to provide former drug users with the chance- in many cases for the first time- to participate, through employment, in mainstream society

Needle exchange provision in Ireland: The context, current levels of service provision and recommendations. A joint report by the National Drugs Strategy Team and the National Advisory Committee on Drugs.

This document emerged out of concerns from the Voluntary Drug Sector about the need for additional needle exchange services to match the increases in injecting drug use nationally. A working group was established to review the current position in relation to needle exchange provision in Ireland and assess how the relevant National Drug Strategy recommendations should be progressed as we enter the last year of the National Drug Strategy

ROSIE Findings 2: summary of 1-year outcomes: detoxification modality.

The Research Outcome Study in Ireland (ROSIE) is the first national, prospective, longitudinal, multi-site drug treatment outcome study in the country. The National Advisory Committee on Drugs (NACD) commissioned this research in 2002 as required by the National Drugs Strategy Action 99. The aim of the Study is to recruit and follow opiate users entering treatment over a period of time documenting the changes observed. Detoxification cohort: follow-up rates: Of the 81 people recruited within the detoxification modality, 93% (n=75) were located, and 77% (n=62) successfully completed a 1-year interview. One individual died within the follow-up period, four people withdrew from the study, eight people were located but not successfully interviewed, and an additional six participants were not located. These 19 people ‘lost’ to follow-up were excluded from the comparative analysis to allow for valid assessment across the two time periods.This is the second paper in the ROSIE Findings series and it provides a snapshot of the outcomes for people in the detoxification modality one year after treatment intake

A long and winding road: The hard graft of scaling social change in complex systems

Advice abounds on how to implement large-scale social change, much of which emphasizes a simplistic linear process, led by a heroic central actor. Rigorous case studies have shown that social change is far more complex: it is a reciprocal, iterative, and adaptive process, with multiple stakeholders who work backstage in networked, committed teams. Despite this, the myth of the social entrepreneur as a transformative change maker capable of scaling innovations to a societal level, still holds sway over social innovation support programmes and business school curricula. Using illustrative examples of successful efforts of large-scale social change across three of the most pressing international social challenges: access to medicines, the integration of migrant populations, and reorganizing social care models, we illustrate how conceptualizing social change as driven by iconic individuals is often counter-productive in terms of achieving impact at a societal level. Based on these analyses, we present five insights which illustrate how the mythology of social entrepreneurship and simplistic scaling concepts are often contrary to the practices employed within successful efforts to bring about social impact. Three counteracting principles for those leading, evaluating and funding innovative change efforts within complex systems are discussed and contrasted with the pervasive mythology of social entrepreneurship and linear scaling processes

Variability in prey field structure drives inter-annual differences in prey encounter by a marine predator, the little penguin

This study was funded by Australian Research Council Linkage Grants (grant nos. LP110200603 and LP160100162), with contributions from the Taronga Conservation Society Australia.Understanding how marine predators encounter prey across patchy landscapes remains challenging due to difficulties in measuring the three-dimensional structure of pelagic prey fields at scales relevant to animal movement. We measured at-sea behaviour of a central-place forager, the little penguin (Eudyptula minor), over 5 years (2015–2019) using GPS and dive loggers. We made contemporaneous measurements of the prey field within the penguins' foraging range via boat-based acoustic surveys. We developed a prey encounter index by comparing estimates of acoustic prey density encountered along actual penguin tracks to those encountered along simulated penguin tracks with the same characteristics as real tracks but that moved randomly through the prey field. In most years, penguin tracks encountered prey better than simulated random movements greater than 99% of the time, and penguin dive depths matched peaks in the vertical distribution of prey. However, when prey was unusually sparse and/or deep, penguins had worse than random prey encounter indices, exhibited dives that mismatched depth of maximum prey density, and females had abnormally low body mass (5.3% lower than average). Reductions in prey encounters owing to decreases in the density or accessibility of prey may ultimately lead to reduced fitness and population declines in central-place foraging marine predators.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Development of flux-tuneable inductive nanobridge SQUIDs for quantum technology applications

Niobium nanobridge SQUIDs have shown exceptional noise performance with potential applications in quantum information processing, weak signal detection and single spin detection where the nanobridge geometry should enable efficient electromagnetic coupling to implanted spins. Combining such devices with dispersive microwave readout circuitry allows the spin sensitivity to be further improved by overcoming the standard thermal limit. Here we report on the fabrication and dispersive microwave readout of an array of niobium nanobridge rf SQUIDs incorporated into a superconducting resonator, including the optimization of the nanobridge fabrication process by electron beam lithography. We show the measured flux-tuneability of the resonance is in good agreement with theory, and we also discuss how the nonlinearity of the weak-link in the resonator structure allows for the mediation of parametric effects to enhance performance

Distinct abnormalities of small bowel and regional colonic volumes in subtypes of irritable bowel syndrome revealed by MRI

OBJECTIVES: Non-invasive biomarkers which identify different mechanisms of disease in subgroups of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) could be valuable. Our aim was to seek useful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) parameters that could distinguish each IBS subtypes. METHODS: 34 healthy volunteers (HV), 30 IBS with diarrhea (IBS-D), 16 IBS with constipation (IBS-C), and 11 IBS with mixed bowel habit (IBS-M) underwent whole-gut transit and small and large bowel volumes assessment with MRI scans from t=0 to t=360 min. Since the bowel frequency for IBS-M were similar to IBS-D, IBS-M and IBS-D were grouped together and labeled as IBS non-constipation group (IBS-nonC). RESULTS: Median (interquartile range): fasting small bowel water content in IBS-nonC was 21 (10–42), significantly less than HV at 44 ml (15–70), P<0.01 as was the postprandial area under the curve (AUC) P<0.01. The fasting transverse colon volumes in IBS-C were significantly larger at 253 (200–329) compared with HV, IBS-nonC whose values were 165 (117–255) and 198 (106–270) ml, respectively, P=0.02. Whole-gut transit time for IBS-C was prolonged at 69 (51–111), compared with HV at 34 (4–63) and IBS-D at 34 (17–78) h, P=0.03. Bloating score (VAS 0–10 cm) correlated with transverse colon volume at t=405 min, Spearman r=0.21, P=0.04. CONCLUSIONS: The constricted small bowel in IBS-nonC and the dilated transverse colon in IBS-C point to significant differences in underlying mechanisms of disease