Is There a Role for the Social Activist in the 21st Century: An examination of Social Activists in Waterford City

The objective of my research was to examine the role of the activist in Waterford city. In doing so I ask the question; Is there a role for the Activist in the Twenty First Century? To answer this I researched the actions of ten activists across a range of campaigns in Waterford since the late sixties. I found that there has been very little research into this aspect of activism in Ireland which was an incentive and an enticement to me as I have a background of political, trade union, community activism and I am also very much interested hearing the stories of the activists. This gave me creditability with the participants and also allowed me a great deal of trust. It is also a pilot project for me because I want to use my experience of this exercise in attempting to create a fuller study of activism in the area. Waterford is a declining industrial city with one of the highest unemployment rates in the State and this is the current background to which activists carry out their work. When I say work I mean it in the sense that they see it as their primary function even though there is no remuneration for it. I carried out my research by interview at prearranged settings in various locations and collected the data with a digital recorder and that data was the transcribed in the painstaking fashion of the mature student. The data consisted of the activist’s life history or maybe it is better to say their activist history which was then reviewed and developed in my research findings. I think the study illustrates and confirms for me that there is a rich vein of worker and activist out there waiting to be recorded

Building Web Sites that Attract Visitors

The article discusses the use of web sites for health care service marketing. The potential benefits of Internet services for users and care providers are mentioned, but challenges in implementation are also listed. A three generation model of web site design is offered, distinguishing various levels of interactivity, customization, and perceived value. Suggestions are offered applying this model to health care service web sites and their marketing potential

Hospitals and the Web: A Maturing Relationship

How are hospitals using the Internet in marketing today? Where are health care marketers focusing their online efforts?What returns are marketers seeing from their Internet initiatives and investments? These are some of the questions we have been tracking since 1995 when we conducted the first-ever study to examine the ways that hospital marketers around the country were using the Internet and other emerging technology to promote their organizations. In the most recent survey, we look at what health care marketers are doing online and take the pulse of an industry grappling with rapid change and as yet unproven Internet strategies

Hospital Marketing and the Internet: Revisited

In 1995 a study was conducted to explore the use of the Internet in hospital marketing. Use of the Internet has exploded since that study was published. This manuscript replicates the 1995 study and extends it by investigating several managerial and operational issues concerning the use of the Internet in hospital marketing

Health Care Marketing and the Internet

This article presents research on the growing number of health care providers using the Internet as a health care marketing tool in the U.S. The author notes that the Internet is changing the way consumers seek healthcare related information as well as the way it can be provided to them. The results of the study suggest that consumers will increasingly rely on sources like the Internet for information, that health information will be a commodity on the Internet, that the Internet will help build relationships between providers and consumers and that marketers will be expected to develop and manage Internet-related technologies in accompaniment to their organization

Measuring ROI: Is It Worth It? Interview by Richard K Thomas

Return on investment (ROI) for healthcare marketing is a hot topic among healthcare professionals. It has been discussed off and on in the past, but recent financial developments in healthcare have brought it to the forefront. Today, because of financial pressures, all operational efforts (including marketing) are under intense scrutiny, making the bottom line more important than ever

XDIVINSA: eXtended DIVersifying INStruction Agent to Mitigate Power Side-Channel Leakage

Side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks pose a major threat to embedded systems due to their ease of accessibility. Realising SCA resilient cryptographic algorithms on embedded systems under tight intrinsic constraints, such as low area cost, limited computational ability, etc., is extremely challenging and often not possible. We propose a seamless and effective approach to realise a generic countermeasure against SCA attacks. XDIVINSA, an extended diversifying instruction agent, is introduced to realise the countermeasure at the microarchitecture level based on the combining concept of diversified instruction set extension (ISE) and hardware diversification. XDIVINSA is developed as a lightweight co-processor that is tightly coupled with a RISC-V processor. The proposed method can be applied to various algorithms without the need for software developers to undertake substantial design efforts hardening their implementations against SCA. XDIVINSA has been implemented on the SASEBO G-III board which hosts a Kintex-7 XC7K160T FPGA device for SCA mitigation evaluation. Experimental results based on non-specific t-statistic tests show that our solution can achieve leakage mitigation on the power side channel of different cryptographic kernels, i.e., Speck, ChaCha20, AES, and RSA with an acceptable performance overhead compared to existing countermeasures.This work has been supported in part by EPSRC via grant EP/R012288/1, under the RISE (http://www.ukrise.org) programme.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Understanding the impact of carrier mobility and mobile ions on perovskite cell performance

The realization of very high efficiency, stable perovskite solar cells fabricated on a large scale at low cost, has the potential to further lower the cost of photovoltaics. This necessitates an understanding of the properties required of the perovskite material, including the carrier mobility. Perovskite cells also feature mobile ionic species, and the impact of these ions on cell performance- A nd in particular, to what extent and under what circumstances they may limit device performance-is not well understood. Here, we employ an advanced numerical model that allows for the presence of mobile ionic species to probe the relationship between carrier mobility, the presence of ionic species as well as different possible recombination mechanisms within the cell. We show that a high electron and hole conductivity throughout the device is key to avoiding transport losses. For devices operating significantly below their radiative limit, achieving a sufficiently high conductivity requires high carrier mobilities of at least 10cm2/V-s. It is shown that the presence of a single mobile ionic species can lead to effective doping of the perovskite bulk, which is detrimental to cell performance by lowering the conductivity of one type of carrier. The results also indicate that increasing cell VOC closer to its radiative limit is also beneficial for reducing transport losses and pushing cell performance closer to its theoretical limit

Dislocations in laser-doped silicon detected by micro-photoluminescence spectroscopy

We report the detection of laser-induced damage in laser-doped layers at the surface of crystalline silicon wafers, via micron-scale photoluminescence spectroscopy. The properties of the sub-band-gap emission from the induced defects are found to match the emission characteristics of dislocations. Courtesy of the high spatial resolution of the micro-photoluminescence spectroscopy technique, micron-scale variations in the extent of damage at the edge of the laser-doped region can be detected, providing a powerful tool to study and optimize laser-doping processes for silicon photovoltaics.This work has been supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) through Research Grant No. RND009