Literature and the Notion of Intellectual Disability

Produced by Hawai'i University Affiliated Program on Disabilities, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai'i, Frank Sawyer School of Management, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, and School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas for The Society for Disability Studies

Governance and Institutional Innovation: The need for strategic management

Within a comparatively short time there has emerged in Ireland an ad hoc ensemble of initiatives, funds and organisations pursuing aspects of rural development. As a result development policy is faced with a series of institutional and organisational questions (NESC, 1994: 115). These questions concern central-local relationships, possible overlap between agencies, the appropriate spatial units for different programmes, the choice between territorially-based organisations versus sectoral agencies, and accountability in regard to the use of public funds. This paper presents some results from a prospective model designed to facilitate analysis of the policy and institutional environment pertaining to rural development in Ireland. It identifies weaknesses in the institutional fabric: the high degree of centralisation of power and responsibility within agencies; related to this, the sharp compartmentalisation among agencies which act independently of each other, in singularly focusing on separately defined areas of administration; the proliferation of agencies and programmes, this partly reflects the influence of EU funded programmes which have promoted ?bottom up? approaches; the lack of an adequate sub-national spatial focus in policy implementation, and a ?democratic deficit? to the extent that emerging new partnerships are not inclusive of local representative democratic structures. Policy instruments are evaluated and issues for future policy emphasis explored. The paper concludes that organisational structures are vitally important to successful policy intervention in lagging regions. Within the Irish system institutional change is urgently needed.

Synthetic Data Generation using Benerator Tool

Datasets of different characteristics are needed by the research community for experimental purposes. However, real data may be difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Moreover, real data may not meet specific characteristics which are needed to verify new approaches under certain conditions. Given these limitations, the use of synthetic data is a viable alternative to complement the real data. In this report, we describe the process followed to generate synthetic data using Benerator, a publicly available tool. The results show that the synthetic data preserves a high level of accuracy compared to the original data. The generated datasets correspond to microdata containing records with social, economic and demographic data which mimics the distribution of aggregated statistics from the 2011 Irish Census data.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 10 reference

Ontology-Based Quality Evaluation of Value Generalization Hierarchies for Data Anonymization

In privacy-preserving data publishing, approaches using Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) form an important class of anonymization algorithms. VGHs play a key role in the utility of published datasets as they dictate how the anonymization of the data occurs. For categorical attributes, it is imperative to preserve the semantics of the original data in order to achieve a higher utility. Despite this, semantics have not being formally considered in the specification of VGHs. Moreover, there are no methods that allow the users to assess the quality of their VGH. In this paper, we propose a measurement scheme, based on ontologies, to quantitatively evaluate the quality of VGHs, in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization, with the aim of producing higher-quality anonymizations. We demonstrate, through a case study, how our evaluation scheme can be used to compare the quality of multiple VGHs and can help to identify faulty VGHs.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, presented in the Privacy in Statistical Databases Conference 2014 (Ibiza, Spain

The Promotion and Marketing of Qulaity Products from Disadvantaged Rual Areas.

End of Project ReportThis report is based on work undertaken as part of a collaborative research project involving a number of European centres, under the EU’s FAIR programme (FAIR 3-CT96-1827), and directed by Professor Brian Ilbery at the Department of Geography, University of Coventry, UK.The present study was part of a project co-funded under the EU’s Fifth Framework Programme. The project was concerned with 12 ‘lagging rural regions’ in six countries of the EU and, specifically, with the strategies, structure and policies used to support the successful marketing and promotion of quality products and services in these regions. Its aims were: – to identify current marketing strategies and promotional activities among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with special reference to the use of regional imagery in marketing quality products and services; – to explore consumer perceptions in relation to the purchase of quality products and services from specific lagging regions; – to identify the strategies and practices of the main institutional structures (e.g., local authorities, development agencies, marketing organisations) in supporting the marketing of quality products and services; – to bring forward ideas for the future development of regional quality products and services.European Unio

Development Programmes and Policy Measures in the Western Countries

End of Project ReportThis report compares the 11 western counties (Connacht, Ulster, and counties Longford, Clare and Kerry) with the 15 other counties, in aggregate, as regards the effectiveness of various policies and programme measures in reaching their target populations

The image of idiocy in nineteenth-century England : a history of cultural representations of intellectual disability

Over the nineteenth century, the popular and the scientific understanding of idiocy changed in conjunction with shifts in social concerns and the emergence of new discourses. An examination of representations of idiocy over the century foregrounds the manner in which the condition was given shape and meaning. The dissertation traces the history of the idea of intellectual disability in England from the start of the nineteenth century up to the initial articulation of eugenics, and argues that the idea of intellectual disability acquired new significance in the Victorian era, eventually stabilizing somewhat with the notion of the idiot as degenerate. Political, gender, economic, religious, literary and scientific discourses interact to weave a notion of what intellectual disability means and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation examines the ways that idiocy is constructed by these discourses, and to what ideological purpose, by reading critically texts involved in the construction of the notion. These texts include Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy," Dickens' Barnaby Rudge , Scoff's Waverley, and Gaskell's "Half a Life-time Ago," among other literary works, as well as medical, scientific and sociological writings. The dissertation is organized thematically and, for the most part, chronologically to sketch out a cultural history of the idea of idiocy, with an emphasis on delineating the factors that shaped perceptions (the idiot as holy fool, as innocent, or as degenerate), as well as on the ideological significance of the notion of idiocy. Throughout the dissertation, special emphasis is placed on the relation of intellectual disability to gender notions, and the varying interpretations of the significance of intellectual disability when associated with men or women

The Image of Idiocy in Nineteenth Century England: A history of cultural representations of intellectual disability

Over the nineteenth century, the popular and the scientific understanding of idiocy changed in conjunction with shifts in social concerns and the emergence of new discourses. An examination of representations of idiocy over the century foregrounds the manner in which the condition was given shape and meaning. The dissertation traces the history of the idea of intellectual disability in England from the start of the nineteenth century up to the initial articulation of eugenics, and argues that the idea of intellectual disability acquired new significance in the Victorian era, eventually stabilizing somewhat with the notion of the idiot as degenerate. Political, gender, economic, religious, literary and scientific discourses interact to weave a notion of what intellectual disability means and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation examines the ways that idiocy is constructed by these discourses, and to what ideological purpose, by reading critically texts involved in the construction of the notion. These texts include Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy,” Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, Scott’s Waverley, and Gaskell’s “Half a Life-time Ago,” among other literary works, as well as medical, scientific and sociological writings. The dissertation is organized thematically and, for the most part, chronologically to sketch out a cultural history of the idea of idiocy, with an emphasis on delineating the factors that shaped perceptions (the idiot as holy fool, as innocent, or as degenerate), as well as on the ideological significance of the notion of idiocy. Throughout the dissertation, special emphasis is placed on the relation of intellectual disability to gender notions, and the varying interpretations of the significance of intellectual disability when associated with men or women

Integrated Rural Tourism

End of Project ReportThe overall aim of the SPRITE project was to analyse and develop the potential for better integrated tourism (IT) in the lagging rural regions of Europe. “Integrated rural tourism” is tourism, which is directly and positively linked to the economic, social, cultural and natural resources in the rural region in which it takes place. It seeks to make optimal use of these resources. It is basically a perspective or an approach to tourism development, which is sensitive to the nature of local resources and traditions and to the opportunities for sharing in the benefits of tourism development. In Ireland work on the project was shared between Rural Economy Research Centre of Teagasc, who held responsibility for the study of one selected region referred to as the North Midland Counties, and the Department of Geography at NUIG, who analysed the Western Region. This report is predominantly concerned with the work done by staff of Rural Economy Research Centre in the North Midland region.European Unio