A History of Women in Ireland, 1500-1800

The first general survey of the history of women in early modern Ireland. Based on an impressive range of source material, it presents the results of original research into women’s lives and experiences in Ireland from 1500 to 1800. This was a time of considerable change in Ireland as English colonisation, religious reform and urbanisation transformed society on the island. Gaelic society based on dynastic lordships and Brehon Law gave way to an anglicised and centralised form of government and an English legal system.

'Dare the boist'rous main': the role of the Belfast Newsletter in the process of emigration from Ulster to North America 1760-1800

Before the mass migrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century, earlier waves of migration in the eighteenth century saw significant numbers of people leave Ireland, predominantly from Ulster, to settle in North America. This article, using as its principal data source the Belfast News Letter ( BNL), its letters, advertisements and reports, focuses firstly on reconstructing the late eighteenth-century migration process and voyage, highlighting the barriers represented by the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the challenges of the sea, there were problems with the ships, the ever-present danger of disease and also threats from other vessels, from privateers to press gangs. The voyage was recognized as a ‘universal dread’, and the risks taken to ‘dare the boist’rous main’ were perhaps not minimized in the pages of the BNL, whose editorial stance was antipathetic to the migration for the potential harm it caused to Ulster by removing so many of its industrious young. The second part of this article goes on to consider the newspaper’s and others’ vested interests in the emigration process, demonstrates how these were manifested in the press and sets the coverage of this very significant early emigration flow within the context of contemporary religious and colonial discourses at a period of very lively transatlantic interactions.

A Survey of Search Methodologies and Automated System Development for Examination Timetabling

Exam timetabling is one of the most important administrative activities that takes place in academic institutions. In this paper we present a critical discussion of the research on exam timetabling in the last decade or so. This last ten years has seen an increased level of attention on this important topic. There has been a range of significant contributions to the scientific literature both in terms of theoretical andpractical aspects. The main aim of this survey is to highlight the new trends and key research achievements that have been carried out in the last decade.We also aim to outline a range of relevant important research issues and challenges that have been generated by this body of work.

We first define the problem and review previous survey papers. Algorithmic approaches are then classified and discussed. These include early techniques (e.g. graph heuristics) and state-of-the-art approaches including meta-heuristics, constraint based methods, multi-criteria techniques, hybridisations, and recent new trends concerning neighbourhood structures, which are motivated by raising the generality of the approaches. Summarising tables are presented to provide an overall view of these techniques. We discuss some issues on decomposition techniques, system tools and languages, models and complexity. We also present and discuss some important issues which have come to light concerning the public benchmark exam timetabling data. Different versions of problem datasetswith the same name have been circulating in the scientific community in the last ten years which has generated a significant amount of confusion. We clarify the situation and present a re-naming of the widely studied datasets to avoid future confusion. We also highlight which research papershave dealt with which dataset. Finally, we draw upon our discussion of the literature to present a (non-exhaustive) range of potential future research directions and open issues in exam timetabling research.

Presbyterian Religion, Historiography and Ulster Scots Identity, c. 1800 to 1914

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

Measurements of the XUV mass absorption coefficient of an overdense liquid metal

The increase in the XUV mass absorption coefficient of liquid aluminium, produced by high-power-laser shock-compression, is measured using XUV laser radiography. At a photon energy of 63 eV a change in the mass absorption coefficient by up to a factor of similar to2.2 is determined at densities close to twice that of solid and electron temperatures of the order of 1 eV. Comparison with hydrodynamic simulations indicate that the absorption coefficient scales with density as rho (1.3 +/-0.2).

Self-potential signatures associated with an injection experiment at an in situ biological permeable reactive barrier

Strategies available to evaluate the performance of in situ permeable reactive barriers are currently not well developed and often rely on fluid and media sampling directly from the permeable reactive barrier (PRB). Here, we investigate the utility of the self-potential (SP) method as a technique to monitor in situ PRB performance. Our field study was conducted at in situ biological PRB in Portadown, Northern Ireland, UK, which was emplaced to assist in the remediation of groundwater contamination (e.g., hydrocarbons, ammonia) that resulted from the operations and waste disposal practices of a former gasworks. Borehole SP measurements were collected during the injection of contaminant groundwater slugs in an attempt to monitor/detect the response of the microbial activity associated with the breakdown of the added contaminants into the PRB. In addition, an uncontaminated groundwater slug was injected into a different portion of the PRB as a ‘control’ and SP measurements were collected for comparison to the SP response of the contaminant slugs. The results of the SP signals due to the contaminant injections show that the magnitude of the response was relatively small (<10 mV) yet showed a consistent decrease during both contaminant injections. The net decrease in SP recorded during the contaminant injections slowly rebounded to near background values through ~44 hours post-injection. The SP response during the uncontaminated injection showed a slight, albeit negligible (within the margin of error), 1 mV increase in the measured SP signals, in contrast to the contaminant injections. The results of the SP signals recorded from the uncontaminated groundwater injection also persisted through a period of ~47 hours after injection but show a net increase in SP relative to pre-injection values. Based on the difference in SP response between the contaminated and uncontaminated injections, we suggest that the responses are likely to be the result of differences in the chemistry of the injection types (contaminated versus uncontaminated) and in situ groundwater. We argue that the SP signals associated with the contaminated injections are dominated by diffusion (electrochemical) potential, possibly enhanced by a microbial effect. While the results of our investigation show a consistent SP response associated with the contaminant injections that is dominated by diffusional effects, further studies are required in order to better understand the effect of microbial activity on SP signals and the potential utility for the SP method to detect/monitor changes that may be indicative of biological PRB performance.

Women in Ulster, 1600-1800

Some have entertained the belief that early modern Gaelic society conferred substantial rights on women. This could hardly be farther from the truth. In aristocratic Gaelic circles women were used ruthlessly as pawns in political alliances and other manoeuvres. The status of women at the lower levels of society also seems to have been low relative to men. While patriarchal relationships persisted after the Plantation of Ulster, they took new forms. Some women actually benefited in terms of property rights relative to men. Economic change in the eighteenth century, in particular the development of proto-industry, opened up opportunities for poorer women but it is notable that women did not feature at all in the public political sphere before 1800