Did the Economic Crisis have Impacts on the Health and Well-being of Ireland’s Older People? ESRI Research Bulletin 2014/1/6

In a recent QEC Research Note, Gerlach (2013) showed that Ireland’s economic crisis had different impacts on younger and older households in Ireland. In particular, she showed that the incomes and expenditures of households headed by people under the age of 45 had fallen between 2004/5 and 2009/10. In contrast, the incomes and expenditures of households headed by those aged over 45 years increased over the same period. We also look at the impact of the recession, focusing on people over the age of 50, exploring what happened to their wealth and income. We also explore whether or not the recession was associated with changes in the health and well-being of the group in question. While people often seem to assume that recessions are bad for peoples’ health and well-being, international research on this point suggests that the links are weak

Functional Literacy, Educational Attainment and Earnings - A Multi-Country Comparison

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of functional literacy on earnings. We show that the estimated return to formal education is sensitive to the inclusion of literacy - excluding it biases the return to education in many countries by significant amounts. Literacy itself has a well-determined effect on earnings in all countries though with considerable variation in the size of the effect. The benefits of literacy do not only arise from increasing low levels of literacy: increases at already high levels generate substantial increases in earnings in some countries. In general we find little interaction between schooling and literacy though for a few countries they appear to complement each other.

Money, Mentoring and Making Friends : The Impact of a Multidimensional Access Program on Student Performance

There is a well established socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment, despite much effort in recent decades to address this inequality. This study evaluates a university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic status (SES) students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across schools. The program has parallels with US affirmative actions programs, although preferential treatment is based on SES rather than ethnicity. Evaluating the effectiveness of programs targeting disadvantaged students in Ireland is particularly salient given the high rate of return to education and the lack of intergenerational mobility in educational attainment. Overall, we identify positive treatment effects on first year exam performance, progression to second year and final year graduation rates, with the impact often stronger for higher ability students. We find similar patterns of results for students that entered through the regular system and the ‘affirmative action’ group i.e. the students that entered with lower high school grades. The program affects the performance of both male and female students, albeit in different ways. This study suggests that access programs can be an effective means of improving academic outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged students. JEL Codes: I21Education inequality ; Access programs ; Natural experiment ; Economics of education

The Long-Term Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Incomes and Labour Force Status. ESRI Research Bulletin 2014/3/1

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been the subject of increasing attention in recent years. Reports such as Ryan (2009) and Murphy (2009) looked at abuse by Catholic clergy. However, in an earlier report McGee et al. (2002) had shown that abusers were often family members. Recent news stories from the UK have served as a reminder that CSA is not just an Irish issue. Studies on the impact of CSA have tended to be undertaken by researchers in the fields of health and psychology. These studies have shown links between CSA and psychological disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. Very few studies have been undertaken to look at the economic impact on individuals who have experienced CSA. In this Research Bulletin, we report on a study in which we examined whether people who experienced CSA suffered long-term economic consequences in terms of lower attachment to the labour market and/or lower incomes. Given the paucity of research on this question, this study is important in both the Irish and international contexts

F-theory and Neutrinos: Kaluza-Klein Dilution of Flavor Hierarchy

We study minimal implementations of Majorana and Dirac neutrino scenarios in F-theory GUT models. In both cases the mass scale of the neutrinos m_nu ~ (M_weak)^2/M_UV arises from integrating out Kaluza-Klein modes, where M_UV is close to the GUT scale. The participation of non-holomorphic Kaluza-Klein mode wave functions dilutes the mass hierarchy in comparison to the quark and charged lepton sectors, in agreement with experimentally measured mass splittings. The neutrinos are predicted to exhibit a "normal" mass hierarchy, with masses m_3,m_2,m_1 ~ .05*(1,(alpha_GUT)^(1/2),alpha_GUT) eV. When the interactions of the neutrino and charged lepton sectors geometrically unify, the neutrino mixing matrix exhibits a mild hierarchical structure such that the mixing angles theta_23 and theta_12 are large and comparable, while theta_13 is expected to be smaller and close to the Cabibbo angle: theta_13 ~ theta_C ~ (alpha_GUT)^(1/2) ~ 0.2. This suggests that theta_13 should be near the current experimental upper bound.Comment: v2: 83 pages, 10 figures, references adde

Regional and seasonal partitioning of water and temperature controls on global land carbon uptake variability

Global fluctuations in annual land carbon uptake (NEEIAV) depend on water and temperature variability, yet debate remains about local and seasonal controls of the global dependences. Here, we quantify regional and seasonal contributions to the correlations of globally-averaged NEEIAV against terrestrial water storage (TWS) and temperature, and respective uncertainties, using three approaches: atmospheric inversions, process-based vegetation models, and data-driven models. The three approaches agree that the tropics contribute over 63% of the global correlations, but differ on the dominant driver of the global NEEIAV, because they disagree on seasonal temperature effects in the Northern Hemisphere (NH, >25°N). In the NH, inversions and process-based models show inter-seasonal compensation of temperature effects, inducing a global TWS dominance supported by observations. Data-driven models show weaker seasonal compensation, thereby estimating a global temperature dominance. We provide a roadmap to fully understand drivers of global NEEIAV and discuss their implications for future carbon–climate feedbacks

The Isl1/Ldb1 complex orchestrates heart-specific chromatin organization and transcriptional regulation

Cardiac stem/progenitor cells hold great potential for regenerative therapies however the mechanisms regulating their expansion and differentiation remain insufficiently defined. Here we show that the multi-adaptor protein Ldb1 is a central regulator of cardiac progenitor cell differentiation and second heart field (SHF) development. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that Ldb1 binds to the key regulator of SHF progenitors Isl1 and protects it from proteasomal degradation. Furthermore, the Isl1/Ldb1 complex promotes long-range promoter-enhancer interactions at the loci of the core cardiac transcription factors Mef2c and Hand2. Chromosome conformation capture followed by sequencing identified surprisingly specific, Ldb1-mediated interactions of the Isl1/Ldb1 responsive Mef2c anterior heart field enhancer with genes which play key roles in cardiac progenitor cell function and cardiovascular development. Importantly, the expression of these genes was downregulated upon Ldb1 depletion and Isl1/Ldb1 haplodeficiency. In conclusion, the Isl1/Ldb1 complex orchestrates a network for heart-specific transcriptional regulation and coordination in three-dimensional space during cardiogenesis

The Mid-infrared Instrument for JWST and Its In-flight Performance

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) extends the reach of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to 28.5 μm. It provides subarcsecond-resolution imaging, high sensitivity coronagraphy, and spectroscopy at resolutions of λ/Δλ ∼ 100-3500, with the high-resolution mode employing an integral field unit to provide spatial data cubes. The resulting broad suite of capabilities will enable huge advances in studies over this wavelength range. This overview describes the history of acquiring this capability for JWST. It discusses the basic attributes of the instrument optics, the detector arrays, and the cryocooler that keeps everything at approximately 7 K. It gives a short description of the data pipeline and of the instrument performance demonstrated during JWST commissioning. The bottom line is that the telescope and MIRI are both operating to the standards set by pre-launch predictions, and all of the MIRI capabilities are operating at, or even a bit better than, the level that had been expected. The paper is also designed to act as a roadmap to more detailed papers on different aspects of MIRI

Making home or making do : a critical look at homemaking without a home

This paper critically examines the concept of alternative forms of ‘homemaking’ among people without a settled home. The introductory section establishes the framework for the paper, providing an overview of homelessness and the homemaking literature. Strengths in the homemaking approach are identified, which reconceptualises homelessness as a human-centered phenomenon that can be understood as ‘resistance’ to societies that block accesses to mainstream housing for people who are (also) socially and economically marginalised. Homemaking moves beyond mainstream academic analyses which explore homelessness in terms of ‘sin’ (addiction and criminality), ‘sickness’ (poor health, especially poor mental health) and ‘systems’ (housing market failure and inadequate social protection and public health systems). The paper argues that, while important in refreshing our thinking about homelessness by offering a new, radical epistemology of housing, homemaking is limited by not contextualising the dwelling practices it seeks to explain, particularly in respect of how it defines ‘homelessness’ and also risks misinterpreting transitory behavioural adaptations as something deeper

Comprehensive Rare Variant Analysis via Whole-Genome Sequencing to Determine the Molecular Pathology of Inherited Retinal Disease

Inherited retinal disease is a common cause of visual impairment and represents a highly heterogeneous group of conditions. Here, we present findings from a cohort of 722 individuals with inherited retinal disease, who have had whole-genome sequencing (n = 605), whole-exome sequencing (n = 72), or both (n = 45) performed, as part of the NIHR-BioResource Rare Diseases research study. We identified pathogenic variants (single-nucleotide variants, indels, or structural variants) for 404/722 (56%) individuals. Whole-genome sequencing gives unprecedented power to detect three categories of pathogenic variants in particular: structural variants, variants in GC-rich regions, which have significantly improved coverage compared to whole-exome sequencing, and variants in non-coding regulatory regions. In addition to previously reported pathogenic regulatory variants, we have identified a previously unreported pathogenic intronic variant in $\textit{CHM}$ in two males with choroideremia. We have also identified 19 genes not previously known to be associated with inherited retinal disease, which harbor biallelic predicted protein-truncating variants in unsolved cases. Whole-genome sequencing is an increasingly important comprehensive method with which to investigate the genetic causes of inherited retinal disease.This work was supported by The National Institute for Health Research England (NIHR) for the NIHR BioResource – Rare Diseases project (grant number RG65966). The Moorfields Eye Hospital cohort of patients and clinical and imaging data were ascertained and collected with the support of grants from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital, National Health Service Foundation Trust, and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital Special Trustees, Moorfields Eye Charity, the Foundation Fighting Blindness (USA), and Retinitis Pigmentosa Fighting Blindness. M.M. is a recipient of an FFB Career Development Award. E.M. is supported by UCLH/UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. F.L.R. and D.G. are supported by Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre