Immigration, Diversity and Political Parties: Northern Ireland 2004-2014

This thesis considers the impact of immigration on party politics in Northern Ireland between 2004 and 2014. It maps out key areas of consensus and conflict between the major political parties during a period of changing cultural demography. In order to do this, an in-depth, thematic analysis is carried out on party narratives that relate to immigration, cultural accommodation and racism during the period studied. The data is derived from original interviews, contributions to assembly debates and a range of other qualitative sources. The thesis highlights a tendency for issues related to immigration to become ‘swords and shields’ in the arena of inter-party conflict. It will be shown that ethnically defined parties utilise immigration in order to bolster long-standing ideological narratives related to historic divisions in the territory. It is argued that this process undermines the possibility for political leadership in offering cultural accommodation for new minorities, and joined-up action in tackling racism. It is suggested that this evidence highlights the need for some degree of explicit political separation between matters that pertain to immigration-generated diversity, and issues related to bi-national accommodation in the territory

Network approaches to understanding the functional effects of focal brain lesions

Complex network models of functional connectivity have emerged as a paradigm shift in brain mapping over the past decade. Despite significant attention within the neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience communities, these approaches have hitherto not been extensively explored in neurosurgery. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the field of connectomics can contribute to understanding the effects of focal brain lesions and to functional brain mapping in neurosurgery. This datasets for this thesis include a clinical population with focal brain tumours and a cohort focused on healthy adolescent brain development. Multiple network analyses of increasing complexity are performed based upon resting state functional MRI. In patients with focal brain tumours, the full complement of resting state networks were apparent, while also suggesting putative patterns of network plasticity. Connectome analysis was able to identify potential signatures of node robustness and connections at risk that could be used to individually plan surgery. Focal lesions induced the formation of new hubs while down regulating previously established hubs. Overall these data are consistent with a dynamic rather than a static response to the presence of focal lesions. Adolescent brain development demonstrated discrete dynamics with distinct gender specific and age-gender interactions. Network architecture also became more robust, particularly to random removal of nodes and edges. Overall these data provide evidence for the early vulnerability rather than enhanced plasticity of brain networks. In summary, this thesis presents a combined analysis of pathological and healthy development datasets focused on understanding the functional effects of focal brain lesions at a network level. The coda serves as an introduction to a forthcoming study, known as Connectomics and Electrical Stimulation for Augmenting Resection (CAESAR), which is an evolution of the results and methods herein.MGH is funded by the Wellcome Trust Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network with additional support from the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre

The State of the Sub-discipline : Mapping Parliamentary and Legislative Studies Using a Survey and Bibliometric Analysis of Three of Its Journals

We map the current state of parliamentary and legislative studies through a survey of 218 scholars and a bibliometric analysis of 25 years of publications in three prominent sub-field journals. We identify two groupings of researchers, a quantitative methods, rational choice-favouring grouping and a qualitative methods, interpretivism-favouring grouping with a UK focus. Upon closer examination, these groupings share similar views about the challenges and future of the sub-discipline. While the sub-discipline is becoming more diverse and international, US-focused literature remains dominant and distinct from UK-focused literature, although there are emerging sub-literatures which are well placed to link them together.Peer reviewe

Five Things We Need to Learn About Incel Extremism: Issues, Challenges and Avenues for Fresh Research

In recent years research on the involuntarily celibate or “Incel” community has contributed a small but significant stock of knowledge about toxic varieties of extreme misogyny being shared on lightly regulated online communication boards. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the potential for Incel ideas to find expression in disturbing outbursts of extremist violence. This paper uses existing research to consider what we know and what we need to find out about this milieu if we are to further our knowledge and understanding. Ultimately, we highlight five key questions that need to be investigated more thoroughly and call for a wider range of methodological approaches in this endeavor. In particular, we argue that there is a need to build stronger connections with members of the Incel community in order to pursue a better-crafted body of research. While this is challenging, it is necessary if we are to gain a sense of how much support there is in Incel communities for violence, the role of pornography within the community, the key dimensions of Femcel ideology, the connections between Incel ideology and extreme right-wing thinking, and the measures that might aid deradicalization once an individual has adopted ideas related to extremist misogyny. Ultimately, we argue that while certain pieces of research are leading the way in contributing fresh thinking and innovative methodological approaches, there is much work to be done to develop our understanding in these areas of enquiry

Predictors of an early death in patients diagnosed with colon cancer : A retrospective case-control study in the UK

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully appreciate the contribution of data abstractors: Donna Floyd, Rosemary Ward, Jacqui Napier, Kate Donnelly and Bríd Morris. The authors also thank Business Services Organisation, Health and Social Care NI for facilitating the note review. Finally, the authors would like to thank all patients whose data was used in this studyPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Identification of protein complexes from co-immunoprecipitation data

Motivation: Advanced technologies are producing large-scale protein–protein interaction data at an ever increasing pace. A fundamental challenge in analyzing these data is the inference of protein machineries. Previous methods for detecting protein complexes have been mainly based on analyzing binary protein–protein interaction data, ignoring the more involved co-complex relations obtained from co-immunoprecipitation experiments

Protocolised non-invasive compared with invasive weaning from mechanical ventilation for adults in intensive care : the Breathe RCT

Background: Invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) is a life-saving intervention. Following resolution of the condition that necessitated IMV, a spontaneous breathing trial (SBT) is used to determine patient readiness for IMV discontinuation. In patients who fail one or more SBTs, there is uncertainty as to the optimum management strategy. Objective: To evaluate the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of using non-invasive ventilation (NIV) as an intermediate step in the protocolised weaning of patients from IMV. Design: Pragmatic, open-label, parallel-group randomised controlled trial, with cost-effectiveness analysis. Setting: A total of 51 critical care units across the UK. Participants: Adult intensive care patients who had received IMV for at least 48 hours, who were categorised as ready to wean from ventilation, and who failed a SBT. Interventions: Control group (invasive weaning): patients continued to receive IMV with daily SBTs. A weaning protocol was used to wean pressure support based on the patient’s condition. Intervention group (non-invasive weaning): patients were extubated to NIV. A weaning protocol was used to wean inspiratory positive airway pressure, based on the patient’s condition. Main outcome measures: The primary outcome measure was time to liberation from ventilation. Secondary outcome measures included mortality, duration of IMV, proportion of patients receiving antibiotics for a presumed respiratory infection and health-related quality of life. Results: A total of 364 patients (invasive weaning, n = 182; non-invasive weaning, n = 182) were randomised. Groups were well matched at baseline. There was no difference between the invasive weaning and non-invasive weaning groups in median time to liberation from ventilation {invasive weaning 108 hours [interquartile range (IQR) 57–351 hours] vs. non-invasive weaning 104.3 hours [IQR 34.5–297 hours]; hazard ratio 1.1, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.89 to 1.39; p = 0.352}. There was also no difference in mortality between groups at any time point. Patients in the non-invasive weaning group had fewer IMV days [invasive weaning 4 days (IQR 2–11 days) vs. non-invasive weaning 1 day (IQR 0–7 days); adjusted mean difference –3.1 days, 95% CI –5.75 to –0.51 days]. In addition, fewer non-invasive weaning patients required antibiotics for a respiratory infection [odds ratio (OR) 0.60, 95% CI 0.41 to 1.00; p = 0.048]. A higher proportion of non-invasive weaning patients required reintubation than those in the invasive weaning group (OR 2.00, 95% CI 1.27 to 3.24). The within-trial economic evaluation showed that NIV was associated with a lower net cost and a higher net effect, and was dominant in health economic terms. The probability that NIV was cost-effective was estimated at 0.58 at a cost-effectiveness threshold of £20,000 per quality-adjusted life-year. Conclusions: A protocolised non-invasive weaning strategy did not reduce time to liberation from ventilation. However, patients who underwent non-invasive weaning had fewer days requiring IMV and required fewer antibiotics for respiratory infections. Future work: In patients who fail a SBT, which factors predict an adverse outcome (reintubation, tracheostomy, death) if extubated and weaned using NIV? Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN15635197. Funding: This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment; Vol. 23, No. 48. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information

MCL-CAw: A refinement of MCL for detecting yeast complexes from weighted PPI networks by incorporating core-attachment structure

Abstract Background The reconstruction of protein complexes from the physical interactome of organisms serves as a building block towards understanding the higher level organization of the cell. Over the past few years, several independent high-throughput experiments have helped to catalogue enormous amount of physical protein interaction data from organisms such as yeast. However, these individual datasets show lack of correlation with each other and also contain substantial number of false positives (noise). Over these years, several affinity scoring schemes have also been devised to improve the qualities of these datasets. Therefore, the challenge now is to detect meaningful as well as novel complexes from protein interaction (PPI) networks derived by combining datasets from multiple sources and by making use of these affinity scoring schemes. In the attempt towards tackling this challenge, the Markov Clustering algorithm (MCL) has proved to be a popular and reasonably successful method, mainly due to its scalability, robustness, and ability to work on scored (weighted) networks. However, MCL produces many noisy clusters, which either do not match known complexes or have additional proteins that reduce the accuracies of correctly predicted complexes. Results Inspired by recent experimental observations by Gavin and colleagues on the modularity structure in yeast complexes and the distinctive properties of "core" and "attachment" proteins, we develop a core-attachment based refinement method coupled to MCL for reconstruction of yeast complexes from scored (weighted) PPI networks. We combine physical interactions from two recent "pull-down" experiments to generate an unscored PPI network. We then score this network using available affinity scoring schemes to generate multiple scored PPI networks. The evaluation of our method (called MCL-CAw) on these networks shows that: (i) MCL-CAw derives larger number of yeast complexes and with better accuracies than MCL, particularly in the presence of natural noise; (ii) Affinity scoring can effectively reduce the impact of noise on MCL-CAw and thereby improve the quality (precision and recall) of its predicted complexes; (iii) MCL-CAw responds well to most available scoring schemes. We discuss several instances where MCL-CAw was successful in deriving meaningful complexes, and where it missed a few proteins or whole complexes due to affinity scoring of the networks. We compare MCL-CAw with several recent complex detection algorithms on unscored and scored networks, and assess the relative performance of the algorithms on these networks. Further, we study the impact of augmenting physical datasets with computationally inferred interactions for complex detection. Finally, we analyse the essentiality of proteins within predicted complexes to understand a possible correlation between protein essentiality and their ability to form complexes. Conclusions We demonstrate that core-attachment based refinement in MCL-CAw improves the predictions of MCL on yeast PPI networks. We show that affinity scoring improves the performance of MCL-CAw.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/1/1471-2105-11-504.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/2/1471-2105-11-504-S1.PDFhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/3/1471-2105-11-504-S2.ZIPhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/4/1471-2105-11-504.pdfPeer Reviewe