Postponing Maternity in Ireland

As in many other developed countries, Ireland in recent decades has experienced a postponement of maternity. In this paper we consider the main trends in this phenomenon, considering changes in first and later births separately. We adapt the theoretical model due to Walker (1995) to incorporate a declining marginal return to experience to provide a human capital/career planning explanation for this postponement. We estimate a hazard model based upon the 1994 Living in Ireland Survey to empirically test this model. The career-planning hypothesis was found to hold. However an assumption about perfect capital markets failed indicating the impact of an income effect on the timing of maternity. The model also identified the importance of cohort differences in the timing of marriage in explaining much of the inter-cohort specific differences in the timing of maternity.labour markets, fertility

Generating a Topically Focused Virtual-Reality Internet

Surveys highlight that Internet users are frequently frustrated by failing to locate useful information, and by difficulty in browsing anarchically linked web-structures. We present a new Internet browsing application (called VR-net) that addresses these problems. It first identifies semantic domains consisting of tightly interconnected web-page groupings. The second part populates a 3D virtual world with these information sources, representing all relevant pages plus appropriate structural relations. Users can then easily browse through around a semantically focused virtual library

Searching for the Semantic Internet

Search engines, directories and web browsers all deal with the Internet at the level of individual web-pages. We argue that this is too low a level of resolution for many, including the non-casual surfer, who has detailed knowledge of his/her topic of interest. We present the shopping-mall metaphor that is based on identifying tightly integrated communities of web pages, where pages procure information from each other via hyperlinks. A search operation identifies these web-page communities, rather that individual web-pages, and the communities are visualised as a Virtual Reality shopping mall - for presentation on a VRML enabled web browser. Each information outlet (shop) can contain multiple information “products” (pages) gathered around a common theme. The metaphor serves to integrate both search and visualisation phases, presenting a coherent information collection to the user - regardless of the search domain

Hitler's Irish voices. The story of German radio's propaganda service, 1939-1945.

This thesis examines the origins, direction and control of German Radio's Irish propaganda unit in World War II. Known as the Irland- Redaktion, this unit was founded by a small group of Germans, some of whom had studied Irish folklore and language in the Gaeltacht regions in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing widely on archival sources in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Ireland and the United States - as well as incorporating interviews with key survivors of the Irland-Redaktion - the thesis attempts to define the structures, modus operandi and raison d'être of the radio service. A detailed analysis, quoting numerous published and unpublished sources, seeks to place the output of the Irland-Redaktion in context by evaluating its structures and content, personnel and target audiences, in addition to its guiding themes and ascertainable effects. The work endeavours to explore those features of the Irland-Redaktion which, it can be argued, set it apart from other propaganda services of Germany's wartime Europasender. These include the fact that overall control of the service from November 1941 to May 1945 rested with a member of the Irish civil service who had left Dublin for Berlin shortly before the outbreak of war. The thesis also examines the special position of Ireland as a target for both English-language and Irish-language radio propaganda from Nazi Germany. While German Radio beamed programmes in 3 0 languages to other states and regions in Europe, Ireland's case was unusual. The newly independent state straddled the Atlantic shipping lanes and shared a disputed land frontier with the United Kingdom which was at war with Germany. The thesis seeks to place these and other factors in their proper context in relation to the radio service. Finally, having dealt with the pre-war and war periods, the thesis describes the subsequent circumstances of those most directly involved in the operation of the Irland-Redaktion, through the immediate post-war years to the present day

GeneRepair - A Repair Operator for Genetic Algorithms

In this paper we present the outcome of two recent sets of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of a new adjunct genetic operator GeneRepair. This operator was developed to correct invlaid tours which may be generated following crossover or mutation of our particular implementation of the genetic algorithm. Following implementation and testing of our genetic algotihm with GeneRepair we found a significant positive side in our results. Using GeneRepair along side traditional corsover and mutation operators we have been able to travers the search space of a problem and generate very good results in an extremely efficent manner, in both time and number of evaluations required

GeneRepair - A Repair Operator for Genetic Algorithms

In this paper we present the outcome of two recent sets of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of a new adjunct genetic operator GeneRepair. This operator was developed to correct invlaid tours which may be generated following crossover or mutation of our particular implementation of the genetic algorithm. Following implementation and testing of our genetic algotihm with GeneRepair we found a significant positive side in our results. Using GeneRepair along side traditional corsover and mutation operators we have been able to travers the search space of a problem and generate very good results in an extremely efficent manner, in both time and number of evaluations required

Near-Bed Turbulent Kinetic Energy Budget Under a Large-Scale Plunging Breaking Wave Over a Fixed Bar

Hydrodynamics under regular plunging breaking waves over a fixed breaker bar were studied in a large-scale wave flume. A previous paper reported on the outer flow hydrodynamics; the present paper focuses on the turbulence dynamics near the bed (up to 0.10 m from the bed). Velocities were measured with high spatial and temporal resolution using a two component laser Doppler anemometer. The results show that even at close distance from the bed (1 mm), the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) increases by a factor five between the shoaling, and breaking regions because of invasion of wave breaking turbulence. The sign and phase behavior of the time-dependent Reynolds shear stresses at elevations up to approximately 0.02 m from the bed (roughly twice the elevation of the boundary layer overshoot) are mainly controlled by local bed-shear-generated turbulence, but at higher elevations Reynolds stresses are controlled by wave breaking turbulence. The measurements are subsequently analyzed to investigate the TKE budget at wave-averaged and intrawave time scales. Horizontal and vertical turbulence advection, production, and dissipation are the major terms. A two-dimensional wave-averaged circulation drives advection of wave breaking turbulence through the near-bed layer, resulting in a net downward influx in the bar trough region, followed by seaward advection along the bar's shoreward slope, and an upward outflux above the bar crest. The strongly nonuniform flow across the bar combined with the presence of anisotropic turbulence enhances turbulent production rates near the bed

Two new pulsating hot subdwarf stars from the Edinburgh-Cape survey

We report the discovery of very rapid pulsations in two hot subdwarf stars from the Edinburgh- Cape blue object survey. The short periods, small amplitudes and multiperiodicity establish these stars as members of the class of rapidly-pulsating sdB stars. The spectrograms of both stars, however, show relatively strong He II 4686 and they are therefore more properly classified as sdOB. The light curve of EC 01541?1409 is dominated by two strong (?1 per cent) variations with frequencies near 7114 and 7870 ?Hz (periods near 140.6 and 127.1 s), though at least five frequencies are present with amplitudes above about 0.002 mag. The light curve of EC 22221?3152 appears to be generated by at least 10 frequencies in the range 5670-11850 ?Hz (about 175-85 s) with amplitudes between about 0.01 and 0.001 mag, including the first overtone of the strongest variation. Somewhat surprisingly, this number of frequencies is detectable in observing runs as short as 3 h, probably due to the fact that the detected frequencies are well-separated.IS

Continuous patient state attention models

Irregular time-series (ITS) are prevalent in the electronic health records (EHR) as the data is recorded in EHR system as per the clinical guidelines/requirements but not for research and also depends on the patient health status. ITS present challenges in training of machine learning algorithms, which are mostly built on assumption of coherent fixed dimensional feature space. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient variant of the transformer based on the idea of cross-attention, called Perceiver, for time-series in healthcare. We further develop continuous patient state attention models, using the Perceiver and the transformer to deal with ITS in EHR. The continuous patient state models utilise neural ordinary differential equations to learn the patient health dynamics, i.e., patient health trajectory from the observed irregular time-steps, which enables them to sample any number of time-steps at any time. The performance of the proposed models is evaluated on in-hospital-mortality prediction task on Physionet-2012 challenge and MIMIC-III datasets. The Perceiver model significantly outperforms the baselines and reduces the computational complexity, as compared with the transformer model, without significant loss of performance. The carefully designed experiments to study irregularity in healthcare also show that the continuous patient state models outperform the baselines. The code is publicly released and verified at https://codeocean.com/capsule/4587224