We apply insights from the political economy of secession to analyse the early years of the Irish Free State (IFS). The IFS was fortuitous in a debt settlement that enabled it to begin its existence debt free while also receiving financial assistance to quell civil unrest. Yet the IFS was unable to continue to provide the welfare spending inherited from the old regime thereby exacerbating inequali

Background: Clinical Impression of Severity Index for Parkinson's Disease (CISI-PD) is a simple tool that can easily be used in clinical practice. Few studies have investigated the relationship between health-related quality of life and the CISI-PD. Objective: To analyze the association of CISI-PD scores with those of generic (EQ-5D-5L) and Parkinson's disease (PD) disease-specific (Parkinson's Di

The design of an adaptive controller with bounded L2-gain from disturbances to errors for linear time-invariant systems with uncertain parameters restricted to a finite set is investigated. The synthesis of the controller requires finding matrices satisfying non-convex matrix inequalities. We propose an approach for finding these matrices based on repeatedly linearizing the terms that cause the no

The manuscript is devoted to optimal control for a class of linear positive systems with linear objective function and linear constraints. The solution to the corresponding Bellman equation is a linear value function, which can be found by linear programming.

In this paper, we linear quadratic team decision problems, where a team of agents minimizes a convex quadratic cost function over T time steps subject to possibly distinct linear measurements of the state of nature. We assume that the state of nature is a Gaussian random variable and that the agents do not know the cost function nor the linear functions mapping the state of nature to their measure

We study network SIR (Susceptible - Infected - Recovered) epidemic models in the case of two interacting populations. We analyze the dynamics behavior of the fractions of infected individuals in the two populations. In contrast to the classical scalar SIR epidemic model, where the fraction of infected individuals is known to have an unimodal behavior (either decreasing throughout time or initially

Within the Action Plan for Humanitarian Adaptation to Climate Change initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office a new and innovative framework to humanitarian action is developed, the forecast-based financing mechanism. This scientifically based funding system shall enable practitioners and donors to react faster to oncoming natural extreme events, while supporting local communities in adaptin

Faults and errors are common in the execution of digital controllers on top of embedded hardware. Researchers from the embedded system domain devised models to understand and bound the occurrence of these faults. Using these models, control researchers have demonstrated robustness properties of control systems, and of their corresponding digital implementations. In this paper, we build a framework

Based on resource dependence theory we argue for an influence of business groups (BGs) on the board composition of constituent offshore financial multinational enterprises (FMNEs). Using a unique sample of 171 Caribbean FMNEs in an inter-island BG setting, we find BGs’ control in constituent firms to be indicative of the importance of the internal financing and intermediation within the group netw

System level synthesis is a promising approach that formulates structured optimal controller synthesis problems as convex problems. This work solves the distributed linear-quadratic regulator problem under communication constraints directly in infinite-dimensional space, without the finite-impulse response relaxation common in related work. Our method can also be used to construct optimal distribu

Recently, the application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support the base stations in cellular telecommunication networks attracts attentions. UAV-assisted base stations can provide the extra users' demand in extreme and/ or unpredictable situations such as Olympic Games to avoid extra cost of installing ground base stations. In this paper, a PV-battery power system is presented to supply U

Social influence is largely recognized as a key factor in opinion formation processes. Recently, the role of external forces in inducing opinion displacement and polarization in social networks has attracted significant attention. This is in particular motivated by the necessity to understand and possibly prevent interference phenomena during political campaigns and elections. In this paper, we fo

Peak to average power (PAPR) reduction of OFDM signals is critical in order to improve power amplifier (PA) efficiency in base stations. For massive MIMO, the complexity of these methods can become a real bottleneck in implementing low power digital signal processing chains. In this work, we consider an antenna reservation technique, which uses a low complexity clipping method to reduce signal pea

Decisions to admit or refuse admission to intensive care for acute exacerbations of COPD (AECOPD) can be difficult, due to an uncertainty about prognosis. Few studies have evaluated outcomes after intensive care for AECOPD in patients with chronic respiratory failure requiring long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT). In this nationwide observational cohort study, we investigated survival after first-time

We present a new, scalable alternative to the structured singular value, which we call v, provide a convex upper bound, study their properties and compare them to l1 robust control. The analysis relies on a novel result on the relationship between robust control of dynamical systems and non-negative constant matrices.