Lindsay Crawford's 'Impossible Demand'? The Southern Irish Dimension of the Independent Orange Project

The Magheramorne Manifesto of the Independent Orange Order has been hailed as a bold attempt from an unlikely quarter to positively address the sectarian divisions and regional polarisation of early 20th century Ireland. But the Order's leading light, Lindsay Crawford, has also been indicted for formulating an 'empty radicalism' which demanded changes in the field of education that it was impossible for the Catholic community to accept. This working paper reassesses Crawford's ideological project in the light of hitherto underused sources of evidence. It highlights convergence between Crawford's thinking and that of 'Irish Ireland' activists in movements such as the Gaelic League and Sinn Fein. It argues that heterodox educational views were prevalent to a significant extent among the Irish Irelanders to whom Crawford looked for a positive response to his national regeneration project. The case is also made that, in the absence of unanimous acceptance of their desirability among lay Catholics, the support of Protestants - and particularly that of Crawford's fellow Irish Anglicans - provided existing school management arrangements with a vital source of sustenance.

How Obstacles Perturb Population Fronts and Alter Their Genetic Structure

This is the final version of the article. Available from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record.As populations spread into new territory, environmental heterogeneities can shape the population front and genetic composition. We focus here on the effects of an important building block of heterogeneous environments, isolated obstacles. With a combination of experiments, theory, and simulation, we show how isolated obstacles both create long-lived distortions of the front shape and amplify the effect of genetic drift. A system of bacteriophage T7 spreading on a spatially heterogeneous Escherichia coli lawn serves as an experimental model system to study population expansions. Using an inkjet printer, we create well-defined replicates of the lawn and quantitatively study the population expansion of phage T7. The transient perturbations of the population front found in the experiments are well described by a model in which the front moves with constant speed. Independent of the precise details of the expansion, we show that obstacles create a kink in the front that persists over large distances and is insensitive to the details of the obstacle’s shape. The small deviations between experimental findings and the predictions of the constant speed model can be understood with a more general reaction-diffusion model, which reduces to the constant speed model when the obstacle size is large compared to the front width. Using this framework, we demonstrate that frontier genotypes just grazing the side of an isolated obstacle increase in abundance, a phenomenon we call ‘geometry-enhanced genetic drift’, complementary to the founder effect associated with spatial bottlenecks. Bacterial range expansions around nutrient-poor barriers and stochastic simulations confirm this prediction. The effect of the obstacle on the genealogy of individuals at the front is characterized by simulations and rationalized using the constant speed model. Lastly, we consider the effect of two obstacles on front shape and genetic composition of the population illuminating the effects expected from complex environments with many obstacles.Support for this work was provided by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences Grant P50GM068763 of the National Centers for Systems Biology (www.nih.gov, awarded to AWM), by the National Science Foundation through grant DMR1306367 and through the Harvard Materials Research and Engineering Center through Grant DMR-1420570 (www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=DMR, awarded to DRN). WM was supported by the Leopoldina Postdoc Scholarship LPDS 2009-51 (www.leopoldina.org) and by grants from the National Philanthropic Trust Grant RFP-12-15 (www.templeton.org, awarded to AWM), and from the Human Frontiers Science Program Grant RGP0041/2014 (www.hfsp.org, awarded to AWM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Helical frontier orbitals of conjugated linear molecules

Compounds containing allenes, cumulenes and oligoynes (polyalkynes) have attracted attention for both their conformation and reactivity. Whilst the textbook molecular orbital description explains the general electronic and molecular structure of the cumulenes, there are anomalies in both the crystal structures and cycloaddition products involving oligoynes and allenes; the understanding of these molecules is incomplete. Through a computational study we elucidate that the frontier orbitals of the allene and oligoyne families are extended helices. These orbitals are the linear analogue to the Möbius aromatic systems, which also display non-linear π interactions. The axial chirality found in allenes and oligoynes is intimately related to the topology of the frontier orbitals, and has implications for predictions of cycloaddition pathways, structure stability and spectroscopy

Innovation and venture capital exit performance

Venture capital is a potent source of R&D financing which contributes significantly to technological innovation output in the form of patented inventions. Scholars have argued that tighter protection of intellectual property rights reduces expropriation risks and encourages venture capitalists to invest in technology firms. Prior studies have showed that early stage technology investors give much weight to investment selection criteria related to innovation e.g. protection of intellectual property, platform and uniqueness. However, VC investors generally receive little on their investments until a liquidation event occurs – IPO and M&A (trade sale) exits define venture capital performance. A review of the literature indicates that few empirical studies have examined the influence of patented innovation on the exit performance of VC-backed technology firms. This paper seeks to address this specific knowledge gap in venture capital research and practice. It builds on resource-based view (RBV) theory which argues that technological innovation is an important strategic resource of the entrepreneurial firm that can attract VC investment, provide competitive advantage and produce superior performance. This study is based on matched data compiled from VentureXpertTM, DelphionTM and NBER/USPTO databases. The resulting unique and proprietary dataset consists of 1504 U.S. VC-backed exits across 7 technology sectors in the 20 years from 1980-2000, 961 IPOs and 543 M&As. The influence of technological innovation on the exit performance of VC-backed technology firms is examined. As predicted by RBV theory, technology firms engaged in patenting activity were found more likely to be associated with the more profitable IPO exit route, higher VC investment and exit value

Continuous relaxation of MINLP problems by penalty functions: a practical comparison

A practical comparison of penalty functions for globally solving mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems is presented. The penalty approach relies on the continuous relaxation of the MINLP problem by adding a specific penalty term to the objective function. A new penalty algorithm that addresses simultaneously the reduction of the error tolerances for optimality and feasibility, as well as the reduction of the penalty parameter, is designed. Several penalty terms are tested and different penalty parameter update schemes are analyzed. The continuous nonlinear optimization problem is solved by the deterministic DIRECT optimizer. The numerical experiments show that the quality of the produced solutions are satisfactory and that the selected penalties have different performances in terms of efficiency and robustness.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and UID/MAT/00013/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Accuracy of Malaria Rapid Diagnostic Tests in Community Studies and their Impact on Treatment of Malaria in an Area with Declining Malaria Burden in North-Eastern Tanzania.

Despite some problems related to accuracy and applicability of malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs), they are currently the best option in areas with limited laboratory services for improving case management through parasitological diagnosis and reducing over-treatment. This study was conducted in areas with declining malaria burden to assess; 1) the accuracy of RDTs when used at different community settings, 2) the impact of using RDTs on anti-malarial dispensing by community-owned resource persons (CORPs) and 3) adherence of CORPs to treatment guidelines by providing treatment based on RDT results. Data were obtained from: 1) a longitudinal study of passive case detection of fevers using CORPs in six villages in Korogwe; and 2) cross-sectional surveys (CSS) in six villages of Korogwe and Muheza districts, north-eastern, Tanzania. Performance of RDTs was compared with microscopy as a gold standard, and factors affecting their accuracy were explored using a multivariate logistic regression model. Overall sensitivity and specificity of RDTs in the longitudinal study (of 23,793 febrile cases; 18,154 with microscopy and RDTs results) were 88.6% and 88.2%, respectively. In the CSS, the sensitivity was significantly lower (63.4%; χ2=367.7, p<0.001), while the specificity was significantly higher (94.3%; χ2=143.1, p<0.001) when compared to the longitudinal study. As determinants of sensitivity of RDTs in both studies, parasite density of<200 asexual parasites/μl was significantly associated with high risk of false negative RDTs (OR≥16.60, p<0.001), while the risk of false negative test was significantly lower among cases with fever (axillary temperature ≥37.5 °C) (OR≤0.63, p≤0.027). The risk of false positive RDT (as a determinant of specificity) was significantly higher in cases with fever compared to afebrile cases (OR≥2.40, p<0.001). Using RDTs reduced anti-malarials dispensing from 98.9% to 32.1% in cases aged ≥5 years. Although RDTs had low sensitivity and specificity, which varied widely depending on fever and parasite density, using RDTs reduced over-treatment with anti-malarials significantly. Thus, with declining malaria prevalence, RDTs will potentially identify majority of febrile cases with parasites and lead to improved management of malaria and non-malaria fevers

PainDroid: An android-based virtual reality application for pain assessment

Earlier studies in the field of pain research suggest that little efficient intervention currently exists in response to the exponential increase in the prevalence of pain. In this paper, we present an Android application (PainDroid) with multimodal functionality that could be enhanced with Virtual Reality (VR) technology, which has been designed for the purpose of improving the assessment of this notoriously difficult medical concern. Pain- Droid has been evaluated for its usability and acceptability with a pilot group of potential users and clinicians, with initial results suggesting that it can be an effective and usable tool for improving the assessment of pain. Participant experiences indicated that the application was easy to use and the potential of the application was similarly appreciated by the clinicians involved in the evaluation. Our findings may be of considerable interest to healthcare providers, policy makers, and other parties that might be actively involved in the area of pain and VR research

Effect of preoperative thoracic duct drainage on canine kidney transplantation

Chronic drainage of the thoracic duct to the esophagus was developed in dogs, and its efficacy in immunomodulation was tested using kidney transplantation. Compared to 9.7 days in the control, the mean animal survival was prolonged to 9.9 days, 17.8 days, and 18.5 days when TDD was applied preoperatively for 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and 9 weeks, respectively. Prolongation was significant after 6 weeks. Patency of the fistula was 93.5, 80.4, and 76.1% at respective weeks. Number of peripheral T-lymphocytes determined by a new monoclonal antibody diminished after 3 weeks. All animals were in normal health, requiring no special care for fluid, electrolyte, or protein replacement