The University Incubator: Insights in the Entrepreneurial Process from a Network Perspective

Research to date has identified incubator units as an effective mechanism for supporting the growth and development of small entrepreneurial firms. Advantages are gained not only from the provision of appropriate facilities and external managerial expertise on site, but also from the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial networks facilitated by the spatial proximity of incubator firms. Therefore, the research question upon which the paper is based investigates the impact of context, in other words the degree to which the networking opportunities provided by the university incubator support the small firm in its pursuit of sustainability and growth

Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind

The key question posed here is how listeners experience meaning when listening to electroacoustic music, especially how they experience it as art. This question is addressed by connecting electroacoustic listening with the ways that the mind constructs meaning in everyday life. Initially, the topic of the everyday mind provides a framework for discussing cognitive schemas, mental spaces, the Event schema and auditory gist. Then, specific idioms of electroacoustic music are examined that give rise to artistic meaning. These include the creative binding of circumstances with events and the conceptual blending that creates metaphorical meaning. Finally, the listener's experience of long-term events is discussed is relation to the location event-structure metaphor.

China’s New Approach to CSR in Congo: Is the leverage turning to China?

China has been the world’s fastest growing economy in the past 30 years with its enterprises rapidly emerging and becoming leading players globally. In particular, the progressive integration into the international system has been spurred by China’s entry into the global trading regime of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The 'go global' policy has been facilitating the rapidly growing engagement on the African continent of Chinese multinational companies (MNCs). As a promising tri-polar global economic entity, its growth of relations with Africa has been both unprecedented and impressive. As the Sino-Africa economic and business partnership surges forward, the matter of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly becoming an imperative ingredient for any successful business. It is noteworthy that responsible corporate citizens should take account of the impact of their investment on both economic and social arenas. However, it still remains uncertain what role Chinese MNCs have been playing in the continent’s sustainable development.
A Sino-Congo deal seems a positive way forward, accelerating the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (hereinafter referred to as Congo) regional economy, depressed due to years of war. Meanwhile, the escalating investment into Congo has raised controversies for its no-attachment policy, with increasing pressure imposed on China’s MNCs to take CSR more seriously. Particular concerns are focused on the multinationals’ inadequate environmental and human rights protection. The recent massive infrastructure investment is arguably perceived as a different interpretation of CSR, which has aroused a hot debate about whether China is heading for status as a responsible stakeholder in the international community. It is conducive to clarifying the paradoxical issue by addressing whether China’s recent approaches have the potential to facilitate CSR initiatives or hinder them in the long run.

(Un)settlement: Political Parody and the Northern Irish Peace Process

This essay examines Tim Loane’s political comedies, Caught Red-Handed and To Be Sure, and their critique of the Northern Irish peace process. As “parodies of esteem”, both plays challenge the ultimate electoral victors of the peace process (the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin) as well as critiquing the cant, chicanery and cynicism that have characterised their political rhetoric and the peace process as a whole. This essay argues that Loane’s transformation of these comedic pantomime horses into Trojan ones loaded with a ruthless polemical critique of our ruling political elites is all the more important in the context of a self-censoring media that has stifled dissent and debate by protecting the peace process from inconvenient truths. From these close and contextual readings of Loane’s plays, wider issues relating to the political efficacy of comedy and its canonical relegation below ‘higher forms’ in Irish theatre historiography will also be considered.

On the spectrum of frequently hypercyclic operators

A bounded linear operator $T$ on a Banach space $X$ is called frequently hypercyclic if there exists $x\in X$ such that the lower density of the set $\{n\in\N:T^nx\in U\}$ is positive for any non-empty open subset $U$ of $X$. Bayart and Grivaux have raised a question whether there is a frequently hypercyclic operator on any separable infinite dimensional Banach space. We prove that the spectrum of a frequently hypercyclic operator has no isolated points. It follows that there are no frequently hypercyclic operators on all complex and on some real hereditarily indecomposable Banach spaces, which provides a negative answer to the above question.

E-Participation and E-Participants: solving the patent ‘crisis’

One of the major planks of some visions for E-Gov is that there is a willing participatory group who are more than happy to be involved in new forms of democracy and will be active and useful suppliers of input to e-consultation or e-participation processes. This group is different from that which goes online to the government site web and signs a petition asking the prime minister to resign. It is becoming clear, though, that the commitment to e-participation may well be there in theory, but difficult to access in practice. Further, the participation which is most welcome can frequently require training and expertise which is not widely available or there may be differences in opinion as to the point of participation. In this paper I will look to the attempts to encourage participation in the patent system. The UK is about to initiate a trial system utilising New York Law School’s Peer To Patent project, but has also attempted to involve participants in previous consultation exercises. I will use these as demonstrations of the sorts of problems which e-participation has met, and consider whether this new form of E-Gov is perhaps being oversold. The interesting question is whether participation is a growing tool which can ensure better public services from the State. My conclusion is that consultation and participatory projects can demonstrate involvement and are certainly educative but e-participatory projects are most likely incapable of achieving the goals set by their more optimistic advocates. The paper emphasises the patents field, but the lessons from it can – I suggest – be viewed as indicators having wider governance relevance. The primary point being made is that the technocratic view is always over-optimistic.

Decreased respiratory system compliance on the sixth day of mechanical ventilation is a predictor of death in patients with established acute lung injury

Background: Multiple studies have identified single variables or composite scores that help risk stratify patients at the time of acute lung injury (ALI) diagnosis. However, few studies have addressed the important question of how changes in pulmonary physiologic variables might predict mortality in patients during the subacute or chronic phases of ALI. We studied pulmonary physiologic variables, including respiratory system compliance, P/F ratio and oxygenation index, in a cohort of patients with ALI who survived more than 6 days of mechanical ventilation to see if changes in these variables were predictive of death and whether they are informative about the pathophysiology of subacute ALI.

Translating policy into practice: A case study in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease

Background: This paper focuses on the relationships between health ‘policy’ as it is embodied in official documentation, and health ‘practice’ as reported and reflected on in the talk of policy makers, health professionals and patients. The specific context for the study involves a comparison of policies relating to the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the two jurisdictions of Ireland – involving as they do a predominantly state funded (National Health Service) system in the north and a mixed healthcare economy in the south. The key question is to determine how the rhetoric of health policy as contained in policy documents connects to, and gets translated into practice and action.

Methods: The data sources for the study include relevant healthcare policy documents (N=5) and progress reports (N=6) in the two Irish jurisdictions, and semi-structured interviews with a range of policy-makers (N=28), practice nurses (14), general practitioners (12) and patients (13) to explore their awareness of the documents’ contents and how they saw the impact of ‘policy’ on primary care practice.

Results: The findings suggest that although strategic policy documents can be useful for highlighting and channelling attention to health issues that require concerted action, they have little impact on what either professionals or lay people do.

Conclusion: To influence the latter and to encourage a systematic approach to the delivery of health care it seems likely that contractual arrangements – specifying tasks to be undertaken and methods for monitoring and reporting on activity - are required.

Improvising (Il)legality: Justice and the Irish Diaspora, NYC, 1930-32

The Seabury Commission, 1930-32, probed allegations of corruption made against, amongst others, the Irish-American Mayor of New York City, James J. ‘Jimmy’ Walker, and the Irish-dominated Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that had supported Walker. Taking the Seabury inquiry as its focus, this article explores these allegations from the perspective of Critical Studies in Improvisation (C.S.I.) fused with postcolonial critique. Improvisation, in accordance with C.S.I. principles, is not a lawless or extempore event; it is, instead, lawful, or full of law. The laws of improvisation may appear impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the practice. However, when read through a hibernocentric postcolonial perspective, their meaning and form become more understandable. As will be argued in this article, diasporic communities are inherently improvisatory; that is, they utilise improvisational techniques to help adapt and respond to new situations and social contexts. To be queried is whether the law and politics practiced by Tammany and Walker, taken together, constituted a markedly Irish approach to justice, one that entailed not scripted or planned illegality, as was alleged by Judge Seabury, but improvisations on Anglo-Protestant law as a response to the displacement of and discrimination against the Irish Diaspora in early twentieth century America.

Group Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy with Former Child Soldiers and other War-affected Boys in the DR Congo: A Randomised Controlled Trial.

Background: The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been home to the world’s deadliest con?ict since World War II and is reported to have the largest number of child soldiers in the world. Despite evidence of the debilitating impact of war, no group-based mental health or psychosocial intervention has been evaluated in a randomised controlled trial for psychologically distressed former child soldiers.

Method: A randomised controlled trial involving 50 boys, aged 13–17, including former child soldiers (n = 39) and other war-affected boys (n = 11). They were randomly assigned to an intervention group, or wait-list control group. The intervention group received a 15-session, group-based, culturally adapted Trauma-Focused Cognitive–Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT) intervention. Assessment interviews were completed at baseline, postintervention and 3-month follow-up (intervention group).

Results: Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) demonstrated that, in comparison to the wait-list control group, the TF-CBT intervention group had highly signi?cant reductions in posttraumatic stress symptoms, overall psychosocial distress, depression or anxiety-like symptoms, conduct problems and a signi?cant increase in prosocial behaviour (p < .001 for all). Effect sizes were higher when former child soldier scores were separated for sub-analysis. Three-month follow-up of the intervention group found that treatment gains were maintained.

Conclusions: A culturally modi?ed, group-based TF-CBT intervention was effective in reducing posttraumatic stress and psychosocial distress in former child soldiers and other war-affected boys.

'Translated Verse': Milton's Latin Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter assesses ways in which the emergence in the long eighteenth century of a cluster of verse translations of Milton’s Poemata engendered an intellectual discourse and debate on translation itself, not dissimilar to the magazine warfare of the day. It argues that poetical renderings of Milton’s Latin verse, and the biographical and literary contexts in which they appeared, facilitated the interrogation of key issues that are still being debated by modern translation theorists: the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a source text in a target language that is also in this instance a poetic language; the potential ‘fetters’ which, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the verbal copier’; or by contrast the quasi-liberating fluency, the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium; canonicity, amplification and omission; the much-debated issue of authorial equivalence, evinced here, it is suggested, by the editorial showcasing of the translator; and not least, the perennial question of translation as reading and critical interpretation. In short, verse renderings of Milton’s Latin poetry and the debates that they engendered assume a not inconsequential place in the history of translation theory, which, as Venuti notes, is forever concerned with ‘the changing relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text and two other categories: equivalence and function.’

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Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

Impact of different health systems on the burden of type 2 diabetes in two populations

Objectives: Health policy directs the management of patients with chronic disease in a country, but evaluating nationwide policies is difficult, not least because of the absence of suitable comparators. This paper examines the management of patients with type 2 diabetes in two demographically comparable populations with different health care systems to see if this represents a viable approach to evaluation.

Methods: A secondary analysis of centralized prescribing databases for 2010 was undertaken to compare the levels and costs of care of patients with type 2 diabetes in Northern Ireland’s National Health Service (NHS) (NI, n = 1.8 million) which has structured care, financial incentives related to diabetes care and an emphasis on generic prescribing, with that of the Republic of Ireland (ROI, n = 4.3 million) where management of diabetes care is guided solely by clinical and other guidelines.

Results: The prevalence of treated type 2 diabetes was 3.59% in NI and 3.09% in ROI, but there were similar and high levels of prescribing of secondary cardiovascular medications. Medication costs per person for anti-diabetic, anti-obesity and cardiovascular medication were 46% higher in ROI than NI, due to differences in levels of generic prescribing.

Conclusions: These different health care systems appear to be producing similar levels of care for patients with type 2 diabetes, although at different levels of cost. The findings question the need for financial incentives in NI and highlight the large cost savings potentially accruing from a greater shift to generic prescribing in ROI. Cross-country comparison, though not without difficulties, may prove a useful adjunct to within-country analysis of policy impact.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the ethnic density effect in psychotic disorders

A number of studies have found an ethnic density effect in psychotic disorders, where the incidence for ethnic minorities increases as the neighbourhood proportional ethnic composition decreases [Morgan and Hutchinson, Psychol Med 40:705-709, (2010); Singh, Psychol Med 39:1402-1403, (2009); Schofield et al., Psychol Med 41:1263-1269, (2010)]. However, there is a mixed picture with some studies reporting no effect [Schofield et al., Psychol Med 41:1263-1269, (2010)]. This review aimed to establish the existence of the effect by answering the review question: is there an ethnic density dose effect in the prevalence of psychotic disorders?

New and Alternative Social Movements in Spain: The Left, Identity and Globalizing Processes

This collection offers a diachronic analytical study of new and alternative social movements in Spain from the democratic transition to the first decade of the 21st century, paying attention to anti-war mobilizations and the use of new technologies as a mobilizing resource. New and alternative social movements are studied through the prism of identified linkages among the left, movement identities and global processes in the Spanish context. Weight is given to certain important historical aspects, like Spain’s relatively recent authoritarian past, and certain value-added factors, such as the weak associationalism and materialism exhibited by the Spanish public. These are complemented by exploring insights offered by key theoretical approaches on social movements (political opportunities structures, resource mobilization). The volume covers established social movement cases (gender, peace, environmental movements) as well as those with a more explicit connection to the current context of global contestation (squatters’ and anti-globalization movements).