Difference, Diversity and Difficulty: Problems in Adult Peace Education in Northern Ireland

The peace process in Northern Ireland has been hailed, variously, as the successful resolution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts, and as a failed attempt to reconcile the conflciting claims of the two main ethnonationalist communities. At both these points, and at every other point along the continuum, recognition is given to the centrality of education. This article looks at the role played by adult learning, and contrasts two fundamentally different apporaoches. In one, Enlightenment assumptions about the power of knowledge to dispel prejudice have run alongside attempts to create a world of shared values; in the other, a postmodern acceptance of different cultures has accompnaied a peace process that builds upon ethnic diistinctions. As with the Dayton Accord and with other peace agreements brokered with international assistance, the consociational model of governance has been chosen for Northern Ireland in order to create a political equilibrium between the unionists and nationalists. Such a political framework reverses the direction of previous integrationist educational policies in favour of a celebration of difference, an approach that is fraught with difficulties.

Variability in thermal and UV-B energy fluxes through time and their influence on plant diversity and speciation

Throughout Earth's history there have been temporal and spatial variations in the amount of visible and ultraviolet radiation received by ecosystems. This paper examines if temporal changes in these forms of energy receipt could have influenced the tempo and mode of plant diversity and speciation, focusing in particular upon Cenozoic time-scales. Evidence for changing patterns of plant diversity and speciation apparent in various fossil records and molecular phylogenies are considered alongside calculated changes in thermal and solar ultraviolet energy (specifically UV-B) over the past 50 Myr. We suggest that changes in thermal energy influx (amount and variability) affected the tempo of evolution through its influence upon community dynamics (e.g. population size, diversity, turnover, extinctions). It was not only the amount of thermal energy but also variability in its flux that may have influenced these processes, and ultimately the rate of diversification. We suggest that variations in UV-B would have influenced the mode and tempo of speciation through changes to genome stability during intervals of elevated UV-B. We argue, therefore, that although variability in thermal energy and UV-B fluxes through time may lead to the same end-point (changing the rate of diversification), the processes responsible are very different and both need to be considered when linking evolutionary processes to energy flux.

Cooperative transmission protocol with full diversity and iterative detection

The authors propose a three-node full diversity cooperative protocol, which allows the retransmission of all symbols. By allowing multiple nodes to transmit simultaneously, relaying transmission only consumes limited bandwidth resource. To facilitate the performance analysis of the proposed cooperative protocol, the lower and upper bounds of the outage probability are first developed, and then the high signal-to-noise ratio behaviour is studied. Our analytical results show that the proposed strategy can achieve full diversity. To achieve the performance gain promised by the cooperative diversity, at the relays decode-and-forward strategy is adopted and an iterative soft-interference-cancellation minimum mean-squared error equaliser is developed. The simulation results compare the bit-error-rate performance of the proposed protocol with the non-cooperative scheme and the scheme presented by Azarian et al. ( 2005).

The Skills Agenda and the Competencies for Managing Diversity and Space

This paper evaluates skills for managing ethno-religious diversity in the context of regeneration, spatial planning and the pursuit of sustainable communities. It draws on experiences in Northern Ireland to explore the type and range of skills required in a society emerging from prolonged conflict and residential segregation. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for a more direct political engagement with agnostic practice that challenges the technical reductionism implied in generic skills frameworks. Here, the implications for practice outside the region are identified.

Use of culture and molecular analysis to determine the effect of antibiotic treatment on microbial community diversity and abundance during exacerbation in patients with cystic fibrosis

Background: Anaerobic bacteria are increasingly regarded as important in cystic fibrosis (CF) pulmonary infection. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of antibiotic treatment on aerobic and anaerobic microbial community diversity and abundance during exacerbations in patients with CF.

Methods: Sputum was collected at the start and completion of antibiotic treatment of exacerbations and when clinically stable. Bacteria were quantified and identified following culture, and community composition was also examined using culture-independent methods.

Results: Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Burkholderia cepacia complex were detected by culture in 24/26 samples at the start of treatment, 22/26 samples at completion of treatment and 11/13 stable samples. Anaerobic bacteria were detected in all start of treatment and stable samples and in 23/26 completion of treatment samples. Molecular analysis showed greater bacterial diversity within sputum samples than was detected by culture; there was reasonably good agreement between the methods for the presence or absence of aerobic bacteria such as P aeruginosa (kappa=0.74) and B cepacia complex (kappa=0.92), but agreement was poorer for anaerobes. Both methods showed that the composition of the bacterial community varied between patients but remained relatively stable in most individuals despite treatment. Bacterial abundance decreased transiently following treatment, with this effect more evident for aerobes (median decrease in total viable count 2.3 x 10(7) cfu/g, p=0.005) than for anaerobes (median decrease in total viable count 3 x 10(6) cfu/g, p=0.046).

Conclusion: Antibiotic treatment targeted against aerobes had a minimal effect on abundance of anaerobes and community composition, with both culture and molecular detection methods required for comprehensive characterisation of the microbial community in the CF lung. Further studies are required to determine the clinical significance of and optimal treatment for these newly identified bacteria.

Scaling of Food-Web Properties with Diversity and Complexity Across Ecosystems

Trophic scaling models describe how topological food-web properties such as the number of predator prey links scale with species richness of the community. Early models predicted that either the link density (i.e. the number of links per species) or the connectance (i.e. the linkage probability between any pair of species) is constant across communities. More recent analyses, however, suggest that both these scaling models have to be rejected, and we discuss several hypotheses that aim to explain the scale dependence of these complexity parameters. Based on a recent, highly resolved food-web compilation, we analysed the scaling behaviour of 16 topological parameters and found significant power law scaling relationships with diversity (i.e. species richness) and complexity (i.e. connectance) for most of them. These results illustrate the lack of universal constants in food-web ecology as a function of diversity or complexity. Nonetheless, our power law scaling relationships suggest that fundamental processes determine food-web topology, and subsequent analyses demonstrated that ecosystem-specific differences in these relationships were of minor importance. As such, these newly described scaling relationships provide robust and testable cornerstones for future structural food-web models.