Religious Geographies in Ireland: Pre-Famine, Post-Famine, Pre-Partition

This paper examines changes in religious geographies for Ireland from 1834 to 1911. It shows that in a period of dramatic social and economic change religious geographies remained remarkably stable. In this it challenges the accepted historiography. It makes use of new data in new ways with the full exploitation of the 1834 Enumeration of Religion and, in so doing, is able to examine the impact of the Great Irish Famine on geographies of religion. These data are visualised both using traditional choropleth maps and, more innovatively in this subject area, cartograms.

The spaces of knowledge: Contributions towards a historical geography of science

Reprinted in Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (eds), Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 27-48

The comparative solvatochromism of arylazo and heteroarylazo compounds based on N,N-diethyl-m-acetylaminoaniline and N,N-diethyl-m-toluidine

Azobenzene dyes derived from various anilines and aminothiaheterocycles ate-coupled with commercially important N,N-diethyl-m-toluidine (T series) and iv,N-diethyl-m-acetylaminoaniline (A series) are positively solvatochromic. The visible spectra of 16 pairs of derivatives have been measured in up to 22 solvents, and the transition energies related to Kamlet-Taft solvent polarity parameters. In general, A-series dyes are more bathochromic than their T-series counterparts in nonpolar solvents, consistent with colour chemistry tradition, However, in more dipolar solvents the more bathochromic T-series representatives unexpectedly become more bathochromic than their A-series partners. The relative solvatochromic shifts of the A and T series are related to their respective dipole moments, These in turn are distinguished by the effect of the anilide carbonyl group dipole moment, which is antiparallel to, and thus reduces, the dipole moment of the chromogen.

POPULATION BIOLOGY OF HELIGMOSOMOIDES-POLYGYRUS (NEMATODA) IN THE WOOD MOUSE

1. This paper examines the interaction between the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus L., and the intestinal nematode, Heligmosomoides polygyrus Dujardin, using data collected at Tollymore Park Forest, Co. Down, Northern Ireland, between November 1978 and July 1981.

Effect of radiotherapy after breast-conserving surgery on 10-year recurrence and 15-year breast cancer death: meta-analysis of individual patient data for 10,801 women in 17 randomised trials

Background: After breast-conserving surgery, radiotherapy reduces recurrence and breast cancer death, but it may do so more for some groups of women than for others. We describe the absolute magnitude of these reductions according to various prognostic and other patient characteristics, and relate the absolute reduction in 15-year risk of breast cancer death to the absolute reduction in 10-year recurrence risk.
Methods: We undertook a meta-analysis of individual patient data for 10?801 women in 17 randomised trials of radiotherapy versus no radiotherapy after breast-conserving surgery, 8337 of whom had pathologically confirmed node-negative (pN0) or node-positive (pN+) disease.
Findings: Overall, radiotherapy reduced the 10-year risk of any (ie, locoregional or distant) first recurrence from 35·0% to 19·3% (absolute reduction 15·7%, 95% CI 13·7–17·7, 2p<0·00001) and reduced the 15-year risk of breast cancer death from 25·2% to 21·4% (absolute reduction 3·8%, 1·6–6·0, 2p=0·00005). In women with pN0 disease (n=7287), radiotherapy reduced these risks from 31·0% to 15·6% (absolute recurrence reduction 15·4%, 13·2–17·6, 2p<0·00001) and from 20·5% to 17·2% (absolute mortality reduction 3·3%, 0·8–5·8, 2p=0·005), respectively. In these women with pN0 disease, the absolute recurrence reduction varied according to age, grade, oestrogen-receptor status, tamoxifen use, and extent of surgery, and these characteristics were used to predict large (=20%), intermediate (10–19%), or lower (<10%) absolute reductions in the 10-year recurrence risk. Absolute reductions in 15-year risk of breast cancer death in these three prediction categories were 7·8% (95% CI 3·1–12·5), 1·1% (–2·0 to 4·2), and 0·1% (–7·5 to 7·7) respectively (trend in absolute mortality reduction 2p=0·03). In the few women with pN+ disease (n=1050), radiotherapy reduced the 10-year recurrence risk from 63·7% to 42·5% (absolute reduction 21·2%, 95% CI 14·5–27·9, 2p<0·00001) and the 15-year risk of breast cancer death from 51·3% to 42·8% (absolute reduction 8·5%, 1·8–15·2, 2p=0·01). Overall, about one breast cancer death was avoided by year 15 for every four recurrences avoided by year 10, and the mortality reduction did not differ significantly from this overall relationship in any of the three prediction categories for pN0 disease or for pN+ disease.
Interpretation: After breast-conserving surgery, radiotherapy to the conserved breast halves the rate at which the disease recurs and reduces the breast cancer death rate by about a sixth. These proportional benefits vary little between different groups of women. By contrast, the absolute benefits from radiotherapy vary substantially according to the characteristics of the patient and they can be predicted at the time when treatment decisions need to be made.
Funding: Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation, and UK Medical Research Council.

Rao-blackwellized particle filter for human appearance and position tracking

In human motion analysis, the joint estimation of appearance, body pose and location parameters is not always tractable due to its huge computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter for addressing the problem of human pose estimation and tracking. The advantage of the proposed approach is that Rao-Blackwellization allows the state variables to be splitted into two sets, being one of them analytically calculated from the posterior probability of the remaining ones. This procedure reduces the dimensionality of the Particle Filter, thus requiring fewer particles to achieve a similar tracking performance. In this manner, location and size over the image are obtained stochastically using colour and motion clues, whereas body pose is solved analytically applying learned human Point Distribution Models.

Exploiting spatio-temporal constraints for robust 2D pose tracking

We present a Spatio-temporal 2D Models Framework (STMF) for 2D-Pose tracking. Space and time are discretized and a mixture of probabilistic "local models" is learnt associating 2D Shapes and 2D Stick Figures. Those spatio-temporal models generalize well for a particular viewpoint and state of the tracked action but some spatio-temporal discontinuities can appear along a sequence, as a direct consequence of the discretization. To overcome the problem, we propose to apply a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter (RBPF) in the 2D-Pose eigenspace, thus interpolating unseen data between view-based clusters. The fitness to the images of the predicted 2D-Poses is evaluated combining our STMF with spatio-temporal constraints. A robust, fast and smooth human motion tracker is obtained by tracking only the few most important dimensions of the state space and by refining deterministically with our STMF.