Economic Aspects of the Irish Exchange Control Regime. Quarterly Economic Commentary Special Article, April 1980

From the foundation of the State until March 1979, the Irish currency was maintained in a fixed one-to-one parity with the pound sterling. Aside from the 50% deposit requirement on capital inflows through the banking system imposed by the Central Bank in recent years, there were no significant restrictions on the movement of funds between Ireland and the sterling area. Capital movements between Ireland and non-sterling countries were subject to exchange control regulations broadly similar to the UK's own, although in practice they were administered in a somewhat more liberal fashion. The Irish controls could be seen as, in effect, part of the price of our membership of the sterling zone, since the UK's own controls would have been circumvented very readily if Ireland had presented an uncontrolled "window" to the rest of the world. So purchases of financial assets in non-sterling countries had to be financed through the dollar premium pool or through foreign currency loans

Processing and Transmission of Information

Contains reports on three research projects

Balding Goes Trolling? Cross-Media Amplification of Controversy at the 2012 Olympics

Article published with author as Billur Aslan not Billur Ozgul

Twitter and Global Political Crises

© 2017 Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. This study examines social media responses to the 13 November 2015 Paris attacks by the Islamic State. First impressions of over 2,000,000 tweets containing hashtags #PrayforParis and #PrayforSyria suggested a conflation of three issues: (1) Migration: were the attackers homegrown or carrying overseas passports? (2) Violence: why was Paris attacked and why is France bombing the Islamic State? (3) Media: what role should mainstream and social media play during events that are local and global, unique and yet part of a series? However, instead of conflating media, migration and terrorism, we found users of both hashtags discussing Syria, foreign policy, and justice and fairness. Building on previous research exploring how social media affordances encourage certain communication behaviors, we test whether Twitter's reply function is more conducive to antagonistic comments than retweets, which we hypothesise allow for an expression of solidarity and universalism. Conversations about Syria contain greater antagonism, explained by aspects of the tweet, user and network effects. The #PrayforParis and #PrayforSyria conversations exhibit neither the contestation of global attention nor a media-driven cycle of insecurity. The high frequency of agonistic and non-visual tweets, particularly about Syria, suggests a robust exchange of claims, refuting pessimistic depictions of Twitter as a space for superficiality and hate

A prognostic tool to identify adolescents at high risk of becoming daily smokers

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The American Academy of Pediatrics advocates that pediatricians should be involved in tobacco counseling and has developed guidelines for counseling. We present a prognostic tool for use by health care practitioners in both clinical and non-clinical settings, to identify adolescents at risk of becoming daily smokers.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data were drawn from the Nicotine Dependence in Teens (NDIT) Study, a prospective investigation of 1293 adolescents, initially aged 12-13 years, recruited in 10 secondary schools in Montreal, Canada in 1999. Questionnaires were administered every three months for five years. The prognostic tool was developed using estimated coefficients from multivariable logistic models. Model overfitting was corrected using bootstrap cross-validation. Goodness-of-fit and predictive ability of the models were assessed by R², the c-statistic, and the Hosmer-Lemeshow test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The 1-year and 2-year probability of initiating daily smoking was a joint function of seven individual characteristics: age; ever smoked; ever felt like you needed a cigarette; parent(s) smoke; sibling(s) smoke; friend(s) smoke; and ever drank alcohol. The models were characterized by reasonably good fit and predictive ability. They were transformed into user-friendly tables such that the risk of daily smoking can be easily computed by summing points for responses to each item. The prognostic tool is also available on-line at <url>http://episerve.chumontreal.qc.ca/calculation_risk/daily-risk/daily_smokingadd.php</url>.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The prognostic tool to identify youth at high risk of daily smoking may eventually be an important component of a comprehensive tobacco control system.</p

New interpretation of variational principles for gauge theories. I. Cyclic coordinate alternative to ADM split

I show how there is an ambiguity in how one treats auxiliary variables in gauge theories including general relativity cast as 3 + 1 geometrodynamics. Auxiliary variables may be treated pre-variationally as multiplier coordinates or as the velocities corresponding to cyclic coordinates. The latter treatment works through the physical meaninglessness of auxiliary variables' values applying also to the end points (or end spatial hypersurfaces) of the variation, so that these are free rather than fixed. [This is also known as variation with natural boundary conditions.] Further principles of dynamics workings such as Routhian reduction and the Dirac procedure are shown to have parallel counterparts for this new formalism. One advantage of the new scheme is that the corresponding actions are more manifestly relational. While the electric potential is usually regarded as a multiplier coordinate and Arnowitt, Deser and Misner have regarded the lapse and shift likewise, this paper's scheme considers new {\it flux}, {\it instant} and {\it grid} variables whose corresponding velocities are, respectively, the abovementioned previously used variables. This paper's way of thinking about gauge theory furthermore admits interesting generalizations, which shall be provided in a second paper.Comment: 11 page

Black Hole Remnants and the Information Puzzle

Magnetically charged dilatonic black holes have a perturbatively infinite ground state degeneracy associated with an infinite volume throat region of the geometry. A simple argument based on causality is given that these states do not have a description as ordinary massive particles in a low-energy effective field theory. Pair production of magnetic black holes in a weak magnetic field is estimated in a weakly-coupled semiclassical expansion about an instanton and found to be finite, despite the infinite degeneracy of states. This suggests that these states may store the information apparently lost in black hole scattering processes.Comment: 16 pages, revision has 5 figures uuencode

Sulfur-mediated electron shuttling during bacterial iron reduction

Microbial reduction of ferric iron [Fe(III)] is an important biogeochemical process in anoxic aquifers. Depending on groundwater pH, dissimilatory metal-reducing bacteria can also respire alternative electron acceptors to survive, including elemental sulfur (S0). To understand the interplay of Fe/S cycling under alkaline conditions, we combined thermodynamic geochemical modeling with bioreactor experiments using Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. Under these conditions, S. oneidensis can enzymatically reduce S0 but not goethite (α-FeOOH). The HS– produced subsequently reduces goethite abiotically. Because of the prevalence of alkaline conditions in many aquifers, Fe(III) reduction may thus proceed via S0-mediated electron-shuttling pathways

Triangleland. I. Classical dynamics with exchange of relative angular momentum

In Euclidean relational particle mechanics, only relative times, relative angles and relative separations are meaningful. Barbour--Bertotti (1982) theory is of this form and can be viewed as a recovery of (a portion of) Newtonian mechanics from relational premises. This is of interest in the absolute versus relative motion debate and also shares a number of features with the geometrodynamical formulation of general relativity, making it suitable for some modelling of the problem of time in quantum gravity. I also study similarity relational particle mechanics (`dynamics of pure shape'), in which only relative times, relative angles and {\sl ratios of} relative separations are meaningful. This I consider firstly as it is simpler, particularly in 1 and 2 d, for which the configuration space geometry turns out to be well-known, e.g. S^2 for the `triangleland' (3-particle) case that I consider in detail. Secondly, the similarity model occurs as a sub-model within the Euclidean model: that admits a shape--scale split. For harmonic oscillator like potentials, similarity triangleland model turns out to have the same mathematics as a family of rigid rotor problems, while the Euclidean case turns out to have parallels with the Kepler--Coulomb problem in spherical and parabolic coordinates. Previous work on relational mechanics covered cases where the constituent subsystems do not exchange relative angular momentum, which is a simplifying (but in some ways undesirable) feature paralleling centrality in ordinary mechanics. In this paper I lift this restriction. In each case I reduce the relational problem to a standard one, thus obtain various exact, asymptotic and numerical solutions, and then recast these into the original mechanical variables for physical interpretation.Comment: Journal Reference added, minor updates to References and Figure