Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Quantitative Easing On Liquidity Creation, Supriya Kapoor, Supriya Kapoor, Oana Peia

Articles

We study the effects of the US Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase programs during 2008–2014 on bank liquidity creation. Banks create liquidity when they transform the liquid reserves resulted from quantitative easing (QE) into illiquid assets. As the composition of banks’ loan portfolio affects the amount of liquidity it creates, the impact of quantitative easing on liquidity creation is not a priori clear. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy, we find that banks more affected by the policy increased lending relative to those less affected, mainly during the first and third round of QE. However, we only find a strong effect …

Multinationality Of Uk Firms – A Longitudinal Study Based On Sales And Subsidiaries Data, Pearlean Chadha, Jenny Berrill

Articles

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the regionalisation–globalisation debate in international business (IB) by providing a longitudinal analysis of firm-level multinationality. The analysis uses a unique hand-collected data set of both accounting (sales) and non-accounting (subsidiaries) data. The percentage of foreign sales is also used as an additional measure of multinationality.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper categorises constituent firms of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 350 index over an 18-year time period from 1998 to 2015. Firms are categorised using the multinationality classification system developed by Aggarwal et al. (2011). The paper also conducts an industrial analysis across ten …

Groundhog Law, Richard Delgado

Articles

An unexpected question from a conference participant sends Rodrigo in search of the professor's counsel. A young stranger from another discipline had asked him why law seems never to advance and posited that the reason may be that, lone among disciplines, law is uninterested in advancing human knowledge. The questioner even raised the possibility that law may not belong on a university campus along with departments such as Physics, English, and History, and might well consider relocating to community colleges where it would find a disciplinary home along with courses on welding, automobile mechanics, and high-speed cooking.

Rodrigo, who at …

Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Arti K. Rai

Articles

Artificial intelligence and machine learning represent powerful tools in many fields, ranging from criminal justice to human biology to climate change. Part of the power of these tools arises from their ability to make predictions and glean useful information about complex real-world systems without the need to understand the workings of those systems.

Addressing Health Literacy For Improved Outcomes: A Focus On Pregnancy, S.L. Killeen, I. Brown, A.A. Geraghty, F.M. Mcauliffe

Articles

Health literacy influences how messages are received and understood by patient or population groups. In Europe, incomprehension of health information is common, affecting the ability of many individuals to make informed decisions about their health. In addition, incomprehension of health information may impact the effectiveness of interventions and subsequently, health outcomes. In this article, we illustrate the importance of health literacy in the context of maternity services, a time during which, health interventions affect both maternal and child health. Through this, we suggest that health literacy should be recognised in healthcare settings as a tool to facilitate behaviour change. To …

Associations Between Home Environment, Children’S And Parents’ Characteristics And Children’S Tv Screen Time Behavior, Carolina Bassu, Clare Corish, John Kearney

Articles

In Ireland, television (TV) screen time is a highly prevalent sedentary behavior among children aged less than five years. Little is known about the influence of parental rules and policies or screen time availability and accessibility within the home on children's TV screen time behaviors. This cross-sectional study aimed to examine the extent to which parents' sociodemographic and sedentary behaviors are associated with children's TV screen time; and to determine the associations between parents' rules and practices, home physical environment and children's daily TV viewing. Three hundred and thirty-two children aged 3-5 years and their parents participated in the study. …

Inactivation Efficacy Of Atmospheric Air Plasma And Airborne Acoustic Ultrasound Against Bacterial Bioflms, Apurva Patange, Jeremy Simpson, James Curtin, Catherine Burgess, P.J. Cullen, Brijesh Tiwari

Articles

Bioflms are complex microbial communities that present serious contamination risks to our environment and health. In this study, atmospheric air plasma and airborne acoustic ultrasound technology were applied to inactivate Escherichia coli and Listeria innocua bioflms. Both technologies were efcient in controlling, or completely inactivating, the target bacterial bioflms. Viability and metabolic assays, along with microscopy analysis, revealed that atmospheric air plasma and airborne acoustic ultrasound damaged both the bacterial bioflm cells and its structural integrity. Scanning electron microscopy images highlighted the disruption of the bioflms and pore formation in bacterial cells exposed to both the plasma and acoustic treatments. …

Distinct Chemistries Define The Diverse Biological Effects Of Plasma Activated Water Generated With Spark And Glow Plasma Discharges, Evanthia Tsoukou, Maxime Delit, Louise Treint, Paula Bourke, Daniela Boehm

Articles

The spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria poses a significant threat to human health. Plasma activated liquids (PAL) could be a promising alternative for microbial decontamination, where different PAL can possess diverse antimicrobial efficacies and cytotoxic profiles, depending on the range and concentration of their reactive chemical species. In this research, the biological activity of plasma activated water (PAW) on different biological targets including both microbiological and mammalian cells was investigated in vitro. The aim was to further an understanding of the specific role of distinct plasma reactive species, which is required to tailor plasma activated liquids for use in applications where …

Influence Of Molecular Weight Fractionation On The Antimicrobial And Anticancer Properties Of A Fucoidan Rich-Extract From The Macroalgae Fucus Vesiculosus, Eduarda M. Cabral, Julie Mondala, Márcia Oliveira, Joanna Przyborska, Stephen Fitzpatrick, Dilip K. Rai, Saravana Periaswamy Sivagnanam, Marco Garcia-Vaquero, Denis O'Shea, Michael Devereux, Brijesh K. Tiwari, James Curtin

Articles

The objective of this study was to investigate the antimicrobial and anticancer properties of a fucoidan extract and subsequent fractions isolated from the macroalgae Fucus vesiculosus. The fractions obtained (>300 kDa,kDa,kDa,kDa) could inhibit the growth of B. subtilis, E. coli, L. innocua and P. fluorescens when assayed at concentrations between 12,500 and 25,000 ppm. The bacterial growth was monitored by optical density (OD) measurements (600 nm, 24 h) at 30 °C or 37 °C, depending upon on the strain used. The extracted fractions were also tested for cytotoxicity against brain glioblastoma cancer cells using the Alamar Blue assay for …

The Energy Transition And Mining: Reconciling The Growth Of Renewable Energy With The Need For New Mineral Development, Alexandra B. Klass, Allison J. Mitchell

Articles

Under the Paris Agreement, the global governmental signatories embraced the goal to hold global average temperature increase to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Almost every country in the world signed on to the Paris Agreement, adopting the prevailing science that anthropocentric greenhouse gas emissions would result in rising global temperatures and catastrophic damages from climate change in the absence of immediate action. In pursuit of this goal, the signatories agreed that all member countries would work together to bring greenhouse gas emissions to zero within the …

"Constructing Countervailing Power: Law And Organizing In An Era Of Political Inequality", Kate Andrias, Benjamin I. Sachs

Articles

This Article proposes an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. The piece draws on the social-movements literature, and the successes and failures of labor law, to show how law can supplement the deficient regimes of campaign finance and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy. As such, the Article offers a new direction forward for the public-law literature on political power and …

Memoriam: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Margo Schlanger

Articles

It’s simultaneously hard and easy for me to write an appreciation like this one for Justice Ginsburg, because my admiration for her and my debt to her are so deep. Little in my life would have been the same if I had not been her law clerk from 1993 to 1995, during her first two years on the Supreme Court. She helped me get my first job as a civil rights lawyer and was instrumental in my meeting my now-husband. She was the smartest lawyer I ever worked for or with, and the most profound thinker about equality and the …

The Worst Tax Law Ever Enacted?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Some tax laws are worse than others. The 1986 Tax Reform Act is generally considered one of the best. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is generally considered one of the worst, although I would say it is too early to tell what its long-term impact might be, and some of its worst features (like the Code Sec. 199A deduction) might be repealed in the future.

Another example of a generally condemned tax law is the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. This law was a must-pass piece of legislation because Congress needed to react to the sanctions imposed …

Assessing A National Nanotechnology Infrastructure For Enforcing Nanosafety In Consumer Food - Funding The Infrastructure, Gordon Chambers, E. Mccarron

Articles

. Crucial to assessing any national risk assessment infrastructure is the development of keen insights into the funding landscape, the base skill set and expertise levels, risk prioritisation, and stakeholder determination. This paper presents an overview of the first of these criteria with respect to the Irish funding landscape for nanotechnology and nano-agri-food. It examines difficulties with policy enforcement due to a lack of clarity and varying interpretations of the EU definition of nanomaterials and how the funding landscape could potentially facilitate the necessary infrastructure, to underpin regulatory enforcement and risk assessment for nanotechnology in food. In 2008 an assessment …

Rees/Aaee Special Focus On Ethics: Introduction By Guest Editor, Shannon Chance, Shannon Chance

Articles

Today, more than ever, we see the significance of ethics in developing and sustaining the built, social, and natural environments around us. We also recognise the need to develop engineering students’ knowledge, skills, and values regarding engineering, innovation, design, production, and the like. Engineers’ actions can have intended as well as unintended consequences, and we as a community need to become more aware of the outcomes and implications of our work. In response to the many topics presented at the REES 2019, the REEN Board selected ethics as the focus for this special issue and joined with AAEE to publish …

Here You Have To Be Mixing: Collaborative Learning On An Engineering Program In Ireland As Experienced By A Group Of Young Middle Eastern Women, Shannon Chance, Bill Williams

Articles

This research project uses grounded theory to analyze interviews conducted with eight women from Oman and Kuwait. Members of the sample group were studying together at an institute of technology in Dublin, Ireland. The paper reports patterns in 15 interviews collected in the years 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 to provide a longitudinal overview of the experience of the learners. During the coding process, three major themes emerged having to do with the experience of learning with others and/or learning in groups. The first theme involved communication within the group and the group's approaches to working together. The second identified …

Virfim: An Ai And Internet Of Medical Things-Driven Framework For Healthcare Using Smart Sensors, Sunder Ali Khowaja

Articles

No abstract provided.

Triage Of Potential Covid-19 Patients From Chest X-Ray Images Using Hierarchical Convolutional Networks, Sunder Ali Khowaja

Articles

No abstract provided.

Cascaded And Recursive Convnets (Crcnn): An Effective And Flexible Approach For Image Denoising, Sunder Ali Khowaja

Articles

No abstract provided.

Abelian P-Groups With Minimal Full Inertia, Brendan Goldsmith, Luigi Salce

Articles

The class of abelian p-groups with minimal full inertia, that is, satisfying the property that fully inert subgroups are commensurable with fully invariant subgroups is investigated, as well as the class of groups not satisfying this property; it is known that both the class of direct sums of cyclic groups and that of torsion-complete groups are of the first type. It is proved that groups with “small" endomorphism ring do not satisfy the property and concrete examples of them are provided via Corner’s realization theorems. Closure properties with respect to direct sums of the two classes of groups are also …

On The Bassian Property For Abelian Groups, Andrey R. Chekhlov, Peter V. Danchev, Brendan Goldsmith

Articles

We define an object (group, ring, module, algebra, etc.) to be Bassian if it is not possible to embed it in a proper homomorphic image of itself. Here we study this concept for Abelian groups and achieve a complete characterization of all such groups in terms of their associated torsion-free and p-primary ranks.

Near-Field Propagation Analysis For Vivaldi Antenna Design: Insight Into The Propagation Process For Optimizing The Directivity, Integrity Of Signal Transmission, And Efficiency, Ha Hoang, Matthias John, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Articles

Refined optimization of complex curve–linear-shaped radiators, such as traveling-wave Vivaldi antennas, can be achieved by considering simulated near fields to interpret in detail the structural influences of a design. The relationships between the space and time distributions of electromagnetic (EM) energy clusters and the geometric features are revealed with appropriate use of impulse response analysis combined with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. This article reports a deeper approach when applied to the adjustment of the geometric features of a traveling-wave antenna based on an analysis of near-field propagation features.

Five-Wave Resonances In Deep Water Gravity Waves: Integrability, Numerical Simulations And Experiments, Dan Lucas, Marc Perlin, Dian-Yong Liu, Shane Walsh, Rossen Ivanov, Miguel D. Bustamante

Articles

In this work we consider the problem of finding the simplest arrangement of resonant deep water gravity waves in one-dimensional propagation, from three perspectives: Theoretical, numerical and experimental. Theoretically this requires using a normal-form Hamiltonian that focuses on 5-wave resonances. The simplest arrangement is based on a triad of wave vectors K₁ + K₂ = K₃ (satisfying specific ratios) along with their negatives, corresponding to a scenario of encountering wave packets, amenable to experiments and numerical simulations. The normal-form equations for these encountering waves in resonance are shown to be non-integrable, but they admit an integrable reduction …

A Method For Locating The Real Roots Of The Symbolic Quintic Equation Using Quadratic Equations, Emil Prodanov

Articles

A method is proposed with which the locations of the roots of the monic symbolic quintic polynomial $x^5 + a_4 x^4 + a_3 x^3 + a_2 x^2 + a_1 x + a_0$ can be determined using the roots of two {\it resolvent} quadratic polynomials: $q_1(x) = x^2 + a_4 x + a_3$ and $q_2(x) = a_2 x^2 + a_1 x + a_0$, whose coefficients are exactly those of the quintic polynomial. The different cases depend on the coefficients of $q_1(x)$ and $q_2(x)$ and on some specific relationships between them. The method is illustrated with the full analysis of one of …

Collaborations In Environmental Initiatives For An Effective Gover- Nance Of Social-Ecological Systems: What The Scientific Literature Suggests., Elena Andriollo, Alberto Caimo, Laura Secco, Elena Pisani

Articles

Moving from the scientific literature on evaluation of environmental projects and programs, this study identifies how and under which conditions collaborations are considered effective for adaptive gover- nance of SES. The method adopted is a systematic literature review based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 56 articles selected through specific queries on the SCOPUS database and published from 2004 to 2020. Results of the quantitative analysis underline conditions able to make collaborations effective for adaptive governance of SES: the importance of transdisciplinary research tackling both environmental and social sciences, the perceived urgency of stakeholders to tackle environmental challenges and …

Bayesian Dynamic Network Actor Models With Application To South Korean Covid-19 Patient Movement Data, Antonio Arrizza, Alberto Caimo

Articles

Motivated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this article intro- duces Bayesian dynamic network actor models for the analysis of infected individuals’ movements in South Korea during the first three months of 2020. The relational event data modelling framework makes use of network statistics capturing the structure of movement events from and to several country’s municipalities. The fully probabilistic Bayesian approach allows to quantify the uncertainty associated to the relational tendencies explaining where and when movement events are established and where they are directed. The observed patient movements’ patterns at an early stage of the pandemic can provide interesting insights about …

Climate Change Impacts On Wind Energy Generation In Ireland, Eadaoin Doddy Clarke, Conor Sweeney, Frank Mcdermott, Seánie Griffin, Joao Monteiro Correia, Paul Nolan, Laura Cooke

Articles

An ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulation data is used to examine the impacts of climate change on offshore and onshore wind energy genera- tion in Ireland. Two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5) are analysed for the mid-term (2041–2060) and the long-term (2081–2100) future. Wind energy is projected to decrease (≤2%) overall in future climate scenarios. Changes are evident by mid-century and are more pronounced by late 21st century, particularly for RCP 8.5 offshore. Seasonally, wind energy is projected to decrease by less than 6% in summer and to increase slightly in winter (up to …

From Overt Threat To Invisible Presence: Discursive Shifts In Representations Of Gender In Menstrual Product Advertising, Valerie Gannon, Olivia Freeman, Rachel Campbell

Articles

The menstrual product brand ‘Always’ and its #LikeAGirl campaign has made headlines for being at the forefront of a menstrual liberation, championing female empowerment and gender equality. This paper utilises a visual discourse analysis approach (Rose, 2016) to explore the discursive shifts in ‘Always’ advertisements over the past four decades. Specifically, the question as to how the construction of menstruation has changed over time in the advertising discourse of the ‘Always’ brand is addressed. Three dominant discourses of menstruation are identified: overt threat, uncontrollable and invisible. These discourses function as strong claims to truth as they reach the everyday life …

Financing Early Stage Cleantech Firms, Sean O'Reilly, Ciarán Mac An Bhaird, Damien Cassells

Articles

T HE report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [47] highlighted the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strive for decarbonization in order to restrict global warming. The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, has a vision of accelerating technology development and transfer [92] in order to reduce harmful carbon emissions. The development of new and innovative disruptive technologies to ameliorate and reverse the harmful effects of carbon emissions is emphasized by governments and international agencies [6], [53], [59], [102]. Large incumbent firms are well resourced to conduct this research and development (R&D), although …

Green Fractionation Of 2g And 3g Feedstocks For Ethanol Production: Advances, Incentives And Barriers, Behzad Satari, Amit Jaiswal

Articles

Efficient release of fermentable sugars from the complex biomass structure such as second-generation or third-generation feedstocks by an appropriate enzymatic hydrolysis needs a prior biomass fractionation. This process facilitates the exposure of more cellulose and hemicelluloses for enzymatic hydrolysis. This review focused on ‘green fractionation’ of biomass by applying the principles of green chemistry for bioethanol production. Besides, the recent technological achievements in applying these principles for the fractionation have been discussed. For green fractionation, energy delivery systems are referred to as microwave and ultrasound. Besides, green cellulose solvents, biomass-derived solvents, and supercritical carbon dioxide play an important role in …