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Ireland’s paradoxical status within the British empire has been thoroughly researched and theorised. Ireland can now be imagined as both a subject nation and a recruiting ground for imperial profiteers. The thin red line emerges as disproportionately green while research into the slave trade reveals heavy Irish investment. Meanwhile eighteenth-century European imperialism flourishes alongside the earliest theorisations of “World Peace”, whether figured spatially as “universally peace” or temporally as “perpetual peace”. The Abbé Saint-Pierre’s influential work Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) attracted the appreciative attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Scholars debate the credibility of such projects, but their influence was considerable. Saint-Pierre’s notion of a European union which can arbitrate to prevent war fascinates, but it ignores conflicts arising from competitive global colonisation and by freezing pre-existing frontiers it may crush nationalist aspirations. What is Ireland’s place in the imagining of a world without war in the eighteenth century? To what extent is Ireland complicit in the entrenched injustices of a Pax Britannica and to what extent does a projected demilitarised world offer prospects for genuine self-determination? Looking at verse which celebrates the conclusion of various eighteenth-century conflicts, this article considers celebrations of the idea of “Peace” from Irish literary (and sub-literary) sources and attempts to consider the mixture of hopes and fears that animate understandings of how particular conflicts are concluded. The ways and means whereby “peaces” are extended in the literary imagination give a clue to versions of “enlightened” Irish futurity.

Study Region: Europe Study Focus: The semi-distributed Hydrological Predictions for the Environment (HYPE) model for the European domain, E-HYPE4, was calibrated for discharge and sediments within a framework allowing for evaluation of the factors limiting model performance. Calibration was conducted using a multi-phase approach during which an initial multi-objective discharge/sediment calibration was followed by an exhaustive sediment calibration in which combinations of sediment routines were assessed. During each calibration phase, ensembles of parameter sets and model routines were simultaneously evaluated against discharge, evapotranspiration, and sediment observations. In total, 20,000 parameter sets were evaluated during the discharge calibration, and a further 20,000 model setups were assessed during the sediment calibration. New Hydrological Insights for the Region: Model performance was best with a highly regionalized model, and the largest drop in achievable performance occurred when transitioning from an ensemble of candidates to a single model setup. Much of the performance gains from a highly regionalized model could, however, be achieved with a much less regionalized model. Inclusion of sediments as a calibration objective provided more value than that of evapotranspiration in regards to reducing equifinality in the calibration for discharge. Evaluation of the erosion routines indicated that an index-based routine performed equally well as a more complex, process-based routine. Finally, analysis of model performance by subbasin attributes revealed the dominant factors — such as landuse, glaciers, abstractions/regulations, groundwater, and lakes/wetlands — affecting model biases for various regions.

Abstract The present increase in life span has been accompanied by an even higher increase in the burden of comorbidity. The challenges to healthcare systems are enormous and performance measures have been introduced to make the provision of healthcare more cost-efficient. Performance of hospitalisation is basically defined by the relationship between hospital stay, use of hospital resources, and main diagnosis/diagnoses and complication(s), adjusted for case mix. These factors, combined in different indexes, are compared with the performance of similar hospitals in the same and other countries. The reasons why an approach like this is being employed are clear. Cutting costs cannot be the only criteria, in particular in elderly, high-comorbidity patients: in this population, although social issues are important determinants of hospital stay, they are rarely taken into account or quantified in evaluations. Quantifying the impact of the “social barriers” to care can serve as a marker of the overall quality of treatment a network provides, and point to specific out-of-hospital needs, necessary to improve in-hospital performance. We therefore propose a simple, empiric medico-social checklist that can be used in nephrology wards to assess the presence of social barriers to hospital discharge and quantify their weight. Using the checklist should allow: identifying patients with social frailty that could complicate hospitalisation and/or discharge; evaluating the social needs of patient and entourage at the beginning of hospitalisation, adopting timely procedures, within the partnership with out-of-hospital teams; facilitating prioritization of interventions by social workers. The following ten items were empirically identified: reason for hospitalisation; hospitalisation in relation to the caregiver’s problems; recurrent unplanned hospitalisations or early re-hospitalisation; social/family isolation; presence of a dependent relative in the patient’s household; lack of housing or unsuitable housing/accommodation; loss of autonomy; lack of economic resources; lack of a safe environment; evidence of physical or psychological abuse. The simple tool here described needs validation; the present proposal is aimed at raising attention on the importance of non-medical issues in medical organisation in our specialty, and is open to discussion, to allow its refinement.

Desert ungulates live in adverse ecosystems that are particularly sensitive to degradation and global climate change. Here, we asked how two ungulate species with contrasting feeding habits, grazing gemsbok (Oryx g. gazella) and browsing springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), respond to an increase in food availability during a pronounced rain period. We used a stable isotope approach to delineate the feeding habits of these two ungulates in the arid Kunene Region of Namibia. Our nineteen months field investigation included two time periods of drought when food availability for ungulates was lowest and an intermediate period with extreme, unusual rainfalls. We documented thirteen isotopically distinct food sources in the isotopic space of the study area. Our results indicated a relatively high dietary plasticity of gemsbok, which fed on a mixture of plants, including more than 30% of C3 plants during drought periods, but almost exclusively on C4 and CAM plant types when food was plentiful. During drought periods, the inferred gemsbok diets also consisted of up to 25% of Euphorbia damarana; an endemic CAM plant that is rich in toxic secondary plant compounds. In contrast, springbok were generalists, feeding on a higher proportion of C3 than C4/CAM plants, irrespective of environmental conditions. Our results illustrate two dietary strategies in gemsbok and springbok which enable them to survive and coexist in the hostile Kunene arid ecosystem.

Abstract Introduction Obesity rates continue to rise and more total hip arthroplasty procedures are being performed in progressively younger, obese patients. Hence, maintenance of long term physical function will become very important for quality of life, functional independence and hip prosthesis survival. Presently, there are no reviews of the long term efficacy of total hip arthroplasty on physical function. This review: 1) synopsized available data regarding obesity effects on long term functional outcomes after total hip arthroplasty, and 2) suggested future directions for research. Methods A literature search was conducted from 1965 to January of 2011 for studies that evaluated long term functional outcomes at one year or longer after THA in obese (body mass index values ≥30 kg/m2) and non-obese patients (body mass index 2). Results Five retrospective studies and 18 prospective studies were identified as those that assessed physical function before surgery out to ≥ one year after total hip arthroplasty. Study sample sizes ranged from 108–18,968 and followed patients from one to twenty years. Total hip arthroplasty confers significant pain reduction and improvement in quality of life irrespective of body mass index. Functional improvement occurred after total hip arthroplasty among all studies, but obese patients generally did not attain the same level of physical function by the follow-up time point. Discussion Uncontrolled obesity after total hip arthroplasty is related to worsening of comorbidities and excessive health care costs over the long term. Aggressive and sustainable rehabilitation strategies that include physical exercise, psychosocial components and behavior modification may be highly useful in maximizing and maintaining weight loss after total hip arthroplasty.

A scanning tunneling microscopy study of anthraquinone (AQ) on the Au(111) surface shows that the molecules self-assemble into several structures depending on the local surface coverage. At high coverages, a close-packed saturated monolayer is observed, while at low coverages, mobile surface molecules coexist with stable chiral hexamer clusters. At intermediate coverages, a disordered 2D porous network interlinking close-packed islands is observed in contrast to the giant honeycomb networks observed for the same molecule on Cu(111). This difference verifies the predicted extreme sensitivity [J. Wyrick et al., Nano Lett. 11, 2944 (2011)] of the pore network to small changes in the surface electronic structure. Quantitative analysis of the 2D pore network reveals that the areas of the vacancy islands are distributed log-normally. Log-normal distributions are typically associated with the product of random variables (multiplicative noise), and we propose that the distribution of pore sizes for AQ on Au(111) originates from random linear rate constants for molecules to either desorb from the surface or detach from the region of a nucleated pore.

Spatial variations in surface potential are measured with Kelvin probe force microscopy for thin films of 2,8-difluoro-5,11-bis(triethylsilylethynyl)anthradithiophenes (diF-TES-ADT) grown on SiO2 and silane-treated SiO2 substrates by organic molecular beam deposition. The variations are observed both between and within grains of the polycrystalline organic film and are quantitatively different than electrostatic variations on the substrate surfaces. The skewness of surface potential distributions is larger on SiO2 than on HMDS-treated substrates. This observation is attributed to the impact of substrate functionalization on minimizing intrinsic crystallographic defects in the organic film that can trap charge.

The elastic moduli of polythiophenes, regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and poly-(2,5-bis(3-alkylthiophene-2-yl)thieno[3,2-b]thiophene) (pBTTT), are compared to their field effect mobility showing a proportional trend. The elastic moduli of the films are measured using a buckling-based metrology, and the mobility is determined from the electrical characteristics of bottom contact thin film transistors. Moreover, the crack onset strain of pBTTT films is shown to be less than 2.5%, whereas that of P3HT is greater than 150%. These results show that increased long-range order in polythiophene semiconductors, which is generally thought to be essential for improved charge mobility, can also stiffen and enbrittle the film. This work highlights the critical role of quantitative mechanical property measurements in guiding the development of flexible organic semiconductors.

Spatial step edge fluctuations on a multicomponent surface of Al/Si(111)-(square root 3 x square root 3) were measured via scanning tunneling microscopy over a temperature range of 720-1070 K, for step lengths of L=65-160 nm. Even though the time scale of fluctuations of steps on this surface varies by orders of magnitude over the indicated temperature range, measured first-passage spatial persistence and survival probabilities are temperature independent. The power law functional form for spatial persistence probabilities is confirmed and the symmetric spatial persistence exponent is measured to be theta=0.498+/-0.062 in agreement with the theoretical prediction theta=1/2. The survival probability is found to scale directly with y/L, where y is the distance along the step edge. The form of the survival probabilities agrees quantitatively with the theoretical prediction, which yields exponential decay in the limit of small y/L. The decay constant is found experimentally to be y(s)/L=0.076+/-0.033 for y/L