"And Fostered Me and Sent Me Out":Muldoon Reading Heaney

A short essay on Paul Muldoon's reading aloud of his own and Seamus Heaney's poems during the Seamus Heaney commemorative conference at QUB in April 2014.

Inside/out:for tape

commissioned by ORF (Austrian Radio) Wien (Heidi Grundmann) for project 'Entree/Sortie' Broadcast 10 January 1991

Control Patterns in Contracting-Out Relationships: It Matters What You Do, Not Who You Are

The contracting-out of public services has often been accompanied by a strong academic focus on the emergence of new governance forms, and a general neglect of the processes and practices through which contracted-out services are controlled and monitored. To fill this gap, we draw on contracting-out and inter-organizational control literatures to explore the adoption of control mechanisms for public service provision at the municipal level and the variables that can explain their choice. Our results, based on a survey of Italian municipalities, show that in the presence of contracting-out, market-, hierarchy- and trust-based controls display different intensities, can co-exist and are explained by different variables. Service characteristics are more effective in explaining market- and hierarchy-based controls than relationship characteristics. Trust-based controls are the most widespread, but cannot be explained by the variables traditionally identified in contracting-out and inter-organizational control studies.

Thermal transport in out-of-equilibrium quantum harmonic chains

We address the problem of heat transport in a chain of coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, exposed to the influences of local environments of various nature, stressing the effects that the specific nature of the environment has on the phenomenology of the transport process. We study in detail the behavior of thermodynamically relevant quantities such as heat currents and mean energies of the oscillators, establishing rigorous analytical conditions for the existence of a steady state, whose features we analyze carefully. In particular, we assess the conditions that should be faced to recover trends reminiscent of the classical Fourier law of heat conduction and highlight how such a possibility depends on the environment linked to our system.

Reaching out: medical students leading in local communities

Background: Queen's University Red Cross is a medical student-led volunteer group with a key aim of promoting social change within local communities and empowering young people to aspire to higher education. We describe ‘The Personal Development Certificate’, a 12–week community development programme devised by third-year medical students at Queen's University Belfast to target young people who are lacking educational motivation, are disengaged at home or are marginalised through social circumstances.

Context: Community-based education is of increasing importance within undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the UK, and further afield. We evaluated the perceived improvements in key skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication, and problem solving in students following participation in this programme, and the extent to which their attitude and appreciation of community-based medicine changed.

Innovation: Following facilitation of this community-based initiative, all students reported a perceived improvement in the acquired skill sets. Students made strong links from this programme to previous clinical experiences and appreciated the opportunity to translate a series of classroom-learned skills to real-life environments and interactions. The students’ appreciation and understanding of community-based medicine was the single most improved area of our evaluation.

Implications: We have demonstrated that medical students possess the skills to develop and facilitate their own educational projects. Non-clinical, student-led community projects have the potential to be reproduced using recognised frameworks and guidelines to complement the current undergraduate medical curriculum

Immune modulation in advanced radiotherapies: Targeting out-of-field effects

By virtue of being a localized treatment modality, radiotherapy is unable to deliver a tumoricidal radiation dose to tissues outside of the irradiated field. Nevertheless, ionizing radiation may result in radiation damage mediated by a bystander like effect away from the irradiated field, but this response is likely to be modest when radiotherapy is the sole treatment modality. Over the last decade there has been a re-emergence of immune modulating therapies as anti-cancer treatment modalities. Clinical trials on vaccines have on the whole been largely disappointing, but greater response rates have been observed from the immune checkpoint modulators. A clinical benefit of using such agents has been shown in disease sites such as melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. There is growing pre-clinical data and a number of case reports which suggest the presence of abscopal effects when radiotherapy is co-administered with immune checkpoint inhibitors, suggesting that this combination may lead to an enhanced tumour response outside of the primary treatment field. In this review, the mechanisms of such an enhanced out-of-field tumour response, the potential clinical utilities, the optimal radiotherapy delivery and considerations for clinical follow-up following treatment are discussed.

Moving on, not out: when young people remain homeless

This article explores the contours of continued housing instability among a group of young people who are participants in a qualitative longitudinal study of youth homelessness in Dublin, Ireland, and considers the limitations of the ‘acculturation’ thesis in explaining long-term homelessness amongst the young. Baseline interviews were conducted with 40 young people, aged 14–23 years, in 2004, and follow-up interviews were conducted with 30 research participants successfully ‘tracked’ in 2005–06. By the time of follow-up, 17 of those interviewed had exited homelessness and 13 remained homeless. The article focuses on the latter group with the aim of exploring the processes and experiences associated with their continued homelessness. The findings presented demonstrate the adverse impact of their ongoing movement through emergency services targeting the under-18s, including their greater immersion in drug and criminal lifestyles. A majority had experienced one or more period of incarceration by the time of follow-up, and many were users of adult homeless services. Whilst some dimensions of young people's accounts are suggestive of a process of acculturation to street and hostel life, we argue that their continued homelessness is better explained as a consequence of their ongoing and unresolved transience and, in particular, their continued dependence on emergency hostel accommodation. The implications of the findings for policy and service provision for homeless young people are discussed.

UV dosimetry for solar water disinfection (SODIS) carried out in different plastic bottles and bags

Solar water disinfection (SODIS) is a well-established inexpensive means of water disinfection in developing countries, but lacks an indicator to illustrate its end-point. A study of the solar UV dosage required for SODIS, in order to achieve a bacteria concentration below the detection limit for: Escherichia coli, Enterococcus spp. and Clostridium perfringens, in water in PET bottles, PE and PE/EVA bags showed disinfection to be most efficient in PE bags, with a solar UV (290–385 nm) dose of 389 kJ m−2 required. In parallel to the disinfection experiments, a range of polyoxometalate, semiconductor photocatalysis and photodegradable dye-based solar UV dosimeter indicators were tested under the same solar UV irradiation conditions. All three types of dosimeter produced indicators that largely and significantly change colour upon exposure to 389 kJ m−2 solar UV; further indicators are reported which change colour at higher doses and hence would be suitable for the less efficient SODIS containers tested. All indicators tested were robust, easy to use and inexpensive so as not to add significantly to the attractive low cost of SODIS. Furthermore, whilst semiconductor photocatalyst and photodegradable dye based indicators are disposable, one-use systems, the polyoxometalate based indicators recover colour in the dark overnight, allowing them to be reused, and hence further decreasing the cost of using indicators during the implementation of the SODIS method.

Protein deregulation associated with breast cancer metastasis

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide. It consists of a group of tumor cells that have the ability to grow uncontrollably, overcome replicative senescence (tumor progression) and metastasize within the body. Metastases are processes that consist of an array of complex gene dysregulation events. Although these processes are still not fully understood, the dysregulation of a number of key proteins must take place if the tumor cells are to disseminate and metastasize. It is now widely accepted that future effective and innovative treatments of cancer metastasis will have to encompass all the major components of malignant transformation. For this reason, much research is now being carried out into the mechanisms that govern the malignant transformation processes. Recent research has identified key genes involved in the development of metastases, as well as their mechanisms of action. A detailed understanding of the encoded proteins and their interrelationship generates the possibility of developing novel therapeutic approaches. This review will focus on a select group of proteins, often deregulated in breast cancer metastasis, which have shown therapeutic promise, notably, EMT, E-cadherin, Osteopontin, PEA3, Transforming Growth Factor Beta (TGF-β) and Ran.