The Limitations of Law in promoting synergy between environment and development policies in developing countries

Journal of Energy and Natural Resources Law, 24(4) pp.574-606 RAE2008

Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power

Bain, William, Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.viii+216 RAE2008

Na-23, Si-29, and C-13 MAS NMR investigation of glass-forming reactions between Na2CO3 and SiO2

Winter, Rudolf; Jones, A.R.; Greaves, G.N.; Smith, I.H., (2005) 'Na-23, Si-29, and C-13 MAS NMR investigation of glass-forming reactions between Na2CO3 and SiO2', Journal of Physical Chemistry B 109(49) pp.23154-23161 RAE2008

Base pairing interaction between 5′- and 3′-UTRs controls icaR mRNA translation in Staphylococcus aureus

UPNa. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología. Laboratorio de Biofilms Microbianos.

The War Between Mice and Elephants

Recent measurement based studies reveal that most of the Internet connections are short in terms of the amount of traffic they carry (mice), while a small fraction of the connections are carrying a large portion of the traffic (elephants). A careful study of the TCP protocol shows that without help from an Active Queue Management (AQM) policy, short connections tend to lose to long connections in their competition for bandwidth. This is because short connections do not gain detailed knowledge of the network state, and therefore they are doomed to be less competitive due to the conservative nature of the TCP congestion control algorithm. Inspired by the Differentiated Services (Diffserv) architecture, we propose to give preferential treatment to short connections inside the bottleneck queue, so that short connections experience less packet drop rate than long connections. This is done by employing the RIO (RED with In and Out) queue management policy which uses different drop functions for different classes of traffic. Our simulation results show that: (1) in a highly loaded network, preferential treatment is necessary to provide short TCP connections with better response time and fairness without hurting the performance of long TCP connections; (2) the proposed scheme still delivers packets in FIFO manner at each link, thus it maintains statistical multiplexing gain and does not misorder packets; (3) choosing a smaller default initial timeout value for TCP can help enhance the performance of short TCP flows, however not as effectively as our scheme and at the risk of congestion collapse; (4) in the worst case, our proposal works as well as a regular RED scheme, in terms of response time and goodput.

On the Interaction between TCP and the Wireless Channel in CDMA2000 Networks

In this work, we conducted extensive active measurements on a large nationwide CDMA2000 1xRTT network in order to characterize the impact of both the Radio Link Protocol and more importantly, the wireless scheduler, on TCP. Our measurements include standard TCP/UDP logs, as well as detailed RF layer statistics that allow observability into RF dynamics. With the help of a robust correlation measure, normalized mutual information, we were able to quantify the impact of these two RF factors on TCP performance metrics such as the round trip time, packet loss rate, instantaneous throughput etc. We show that the variable channel rate has the larger impact on TCP behavior when compared to the Radio Link Protocol. Furthermore, we expose and rank the factors that influence the assigned channel rate itself and in particular, demonstrate the sensitivity of the wireless scheduler to the data sending rate. Thus, TCP is adapting its rate to match the available network capacity, while the rate allocated by the wireless scheduler is influenced by the sender's behavior. Such a system is best described as a closed loop system with two feedback controllers, the TCP controller and the wireless scheduler, each one affecting the other's decisions. In this work, we take the first steps in characterizing such a system in a realistic environment.

Negotiating the boundaries between home and work practices: The case of home-workers

When people work from home, the domains of home and work are co-located, often under one roof. Home-workers have to cope with the meeting of two practices that have traditionally been physically separated. In light of this, we need to understand: how do people who work from home negotiate the boundaries between their home and work practices? What kinds of boundaries do people construct? How do boundaries affect the relationship between home and work as domains? What kinds of boundaries are available to home-workers? Are home-workers in charge of their boundaries or do they co-create them with others? How does this position home-workers in their domains? In order to address these questions, I analysed a variety of data, including newspaper columns, online forum discussions, interviews, and personal diary entries, using a discourse analytic approach that lends itself to issues of positioning. Current literature clashes over whether home-workers are in control of their boundaries, and over the relationship between home and work that arises out of boundary negotiations, i.e. whether home and work are dichotomous or layered. I seek to contribute to boundary theory by adopting a practice theory stance (Wenger, 1998) to guide my analysis. By viewing home and work as practices, I show that boundary negotiations depend on how home-workers are positioned, e.g. if they are positioned as peripheral in a domain, they lack influence over boundaries. I demonstrate that home and work constitute a number of different practices, rather than a rigid dichotomy, and that the way home and work are related are not the same for all home-workers. The application of practice concepts further shows how relationships between practices are created. The contribution of this work is a reconceptualisation of current boundary theory away from individual and cognitive notions (Nippert-Eng, 1996) into the realm of positioning.

Exploring the relationship between bacteria and tumours

Accepted Version

Language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom: Exploring the gaps between theory and practice

The central objective in this thesis is to explore the gaps between the normative justifications advanced for language rights and language legislative protection and the effective realisation of those rights and legislative provisions in practice. This objective is achieved by examining the scope and application of language rights and legislative provisions within language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Drawing on Canadian jurisprudence advocating for language rights to be recognised as “purposeful”, the thesis considers the extent to which Ireland and the United Kingdom have limited the acceptance of positive obligations as they relate to the provision of language services in the public sphere. In arguing that language rights are distinct in nature, the thesis suggests that in order for language rights to be effectively realised, an approach to language rights and language legislation more generally must be underpinned by a substantive vision of equality, otherwise language rights and legislative provisions merely amount to symbolic recognition and vacuous rhetoric as opposed to being substantive and enabling rights and provisions. Having said that, the thesis also recognises and elucidates the practical difficulties that arise in the realisation of language rights and language legislative provisions and in doing so seeks to stimulate further dialogue about the nature and limits of language rights and language legislation.

Between respectability and disgrace: schismogenesis and the regeneration of inequality, stigma and social exclusion in Limerick

The thesis examines cultural processes underpinning the emergence, institutionalisation and reproduction of class boundaries in Limerick city. The research aims to bring a new understanding to the contemporary context of the city’s urban regeneration programme. Acknowledging and recognising other contemporary studies of division and exclusion, the thesis creates a distinctive approach which focuses on uncovering the cultural roots of inequality, educational disadvantage, stigma and social exclusion and the dynamics of their social reproduction. Using Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis (1953), the thesis looks to the persistent, but fragmented culture of community and develops a heuristic ‘symbolic order of the city’. This is defined as “…a cultural structure, the meaning making aspect of hierarchy, the categorical structures of world understanding, the way Limerick people understand themselves, their local and larger world” (p. 37). This provides a very different departure point for exploring the basis for urban regeneration in Limerick (and everywhere). The central argument is that if we want to understand the present (multiple) crises in Limerick we need to understand the historical, anthropological and recursive processes underpinning ‘generalised patterns of rivalry and conflict’. In addition to exploring the historical roots of status and stigma in Limerick, the thesis explores the mythopoesis of persistent, recurrent narratives and labels that mark the boundaries of the city’s identities. The thesis examines the cultural and social function of ‘slagging’ as a vernacular and highly particularised form of ironic, ritualised and, often, ‘cruel’ medium of communication (often exclusion). This is combined with an etymology of the vocabulary of Limerick slang and its mythological base. By tracing the origins of many normalised patterns of Limerick speech ‘sayings’, which have long since forgotten their roots, the thesis demonstrates how they perform a significant contemporary function in maintaining and reinforcing symbolic mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. The thesis combines historical and archival data with biographical interviews, ethnographic data married to a deep historical hermeneutic analysis of this political community.

State building as strategy: An interrogation of NATO's comprehensive approach in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011

The core of this thesis is the study of NATO’s Comprehensive Approach strategy to state building in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011. It argues that this strategy sustained operational and tactical practices which were ineffective in responding to the evolved nature of the security problem. The thesis interrogates the Comprehensive Approach along ontological, empirical and epistemological lines and concludes that the failure of the Comprehensive Approach in the specific Afghan case is, in fact, indicative of underlying theoretical and pragmatic flaws which, therefore, generalize the dilemma. The research is pragmatic in nature, employing mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) concurrently. Qualitative methods include research into primary and secondary literature sources supplemented with the author’s personal experiences in Afghanistan in 2008 and various NATO HQ and Canadian settings. Quantitative research includes an empirical case study focussing on NATO’s Afghan experience and its attempt at state building between 2006 and 2011. This study incorporates a historical review of NATO’s evolutionary involvement in Afghanistan incorporating the subject timeframe; offers an analysis of human development and governance related data mapped to expected outcomes of the Afghan National Development Strategy and NATO’s comprehensive campaign design; and interrogates the Comprehensive Approach strategy by means of an analysis of conceptual, institutional and capability gaps in the context of an integrated investigational framework. The results of the case study leads to an investigation of a series of research questions related to the potential impact of the failure of the Comprehensive Approach for NATO in Afghanistan and the limits of state building as a means of attaining security for the Alliance.

On the functional relationship between tariffs and welfare

This paper uses a model of trade in two commodities between two countries to establish the following proposition. If the foreign offer curve has no points of inflection and if for each home rate of duty the equilibrium most favorable to the home country is selected (or else there is only one equilibrium), then as the rate of duty increases from zero, home welfare first rises then declines while foreign welfare steadily falls. © 1975.

Trade-offs between cancer and other diseases: do they exist and influence longevity?

Relationships between aging, disease risks, and longevity are not yet well understood. For example, joint increases in cancer risk and total survival observed in many human populations and some experimental aging studies may be linked to a trade-off between cancer and aging as well as to the trade-off(s) between cancer and other diseases, and their relative impact is not clear. While the former trade-off (between cancer and aging) received broad attention in aging research, the latter one lacks respective studies, although its understanding is important for developing optimal strategies of increasing both longevity and healthy life span. In this paper, we explore the possibility of trade-offs between risks of cancer and selected major disorders. First, we review current literature suggesting that the trade-offs between cancer and other diseases may exist and be linked to the differential intensity of apoptosis. Then we select relevant disorders for the analysis (acute coronary heart disease [ACHD], stroke, asthma, and Alzheimer disease [AD]) and calculate the risk of cancer among individuals with each of these disorders, and vice versa, using the Framingham Study (5209 individuals) and the National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) (38,214 individuals) data. We found a reduction in cancer risk among old (80+) men with stroke and in risk of ACHD among men (50+) with cancer in the Framingham Study. We also found an increase in ACHD and stroke among individuals with cancer, and a reduction in cancer risk among women with AD in the NLTCS. The manifestation of trade-offs between risks of cancer and other diseases thus depended on sex, age, and study population. We discuss factors modulating the potential trade-offs between major disorders in populations, e.g., disease treatments. Further study is needed to clarify possible impact of such trade-offs on longevity.

Bonds between fibronectin and fibronectin-binding proteins on Staphylococcus aureus and Lactococcus lactis.

Bacterial cell-wall-associated fibronectin binding proteins A and B (FnBPA and FnBPB) form bonds with host fibronectin. This binding reaction is often the initial step in prosthetic device infections. Atomic force microscopy was used to evaluate binding interactions between a fibronectin-coated probe and laboratory-derived Staphylococcus aureus that are (i) defective in both FnBPA and FnBPB (fnbA fnbB double mutant, DU5883), (ii) capable of expressing only FnBPA (fnbA fnbB double mutant complemented with pFNBA4), or (iii) capable of expressing only FnBPB (fnbA fnbB double mutant complemented with pFNBB4). These experiments were repeated using Lactococcus lactis constructs expressing fnbA and fnbB genes from S. aureus. A distinct force signature was observed for those bacteria that expressed FnBPA or FnBPB. Analysis of this force signature with the biomechanical wormlike chain model suggests that parallel bonds form between fibronectin and FnBPs on a bacterium. The strength and covalence of bonds were evaluated via nonlinear regression of force profiles. Binding events were more frequent (p < 0.01) for S. aureus expressing FnBPA or FnBPB than for the S. aureus double mutant. The binding force, frequency, and profile were similar between the FnBPA and FnBPB expressing strains of S. aureus. The absence of both FnBPs from the surface of S. aureus removed its ability to form a detectable bond with fibronectin. By contrast, ectopic expression of FnBPA or FnBPB on the surface of L. lactis conferred fibronectin binding characteristics similar to those of S. aureus. These measurements demonstrate that fibronectin-binding adhesins FnBPA and FnBPB are necessary and sufficient for the binding of S. aureus to prosthetic devices that are coated with host fibronectin.

Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment.

Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.