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Experiences of adults with an acquired hearing loss and cochlear implant users and their families
No full textHearing loss, particularly acquired hearing loss, is affecting larger numbers of people each year as the population grows and ages. Those who have previously had good hearing but are now experiencing a noticeable loss will be forced to navigate the life they had become accustomed to in a way that was previously unknown them. The purpose of this review is to explore the experiences of adults coping with an acquired hearing loss, to develop an understanding of what they are working to overcome and how best they can be supported. A systematic review of the literature was conducted and subsequently analysed using thematic synthesis. Following database searches, 1280 papers were identified and screened. After data screening had been completed and checked, 13 studies were included in the review. Using the Thomas and Harden (2008) method for thematic synthesis, four analytic themes were developed which were: Strengthening Internal Resources to Accept Hearing Loss, Experiencing Emotional Challenges Associated with Hearing Loss, Distancing the Self from Hearing Loss Related Distress and Making Effort to Improve Their Situation.The findings from this review highlight the efforts that are made to control or improve the situation, and experiences of isolation, both as a response to distress and as a result of communication difficulties following hearing loss. Clinical recommendations include screening for psychological distress and developing rehabilitation strategies that can be delivered in a group format. <br/
Monolithic highly-efficient 272 W nested-ring structured-core thulium fibre laser at 1940 nm
No full textA novel, to the best of our knowledge, thulium-doped silica fiber with a non-uniform core doping profile has been utilized to demonstrate a high-power monolithic laser oscillator system. The fiber laser achieved a continuous-wave (CW) output power of 272W at 1940nm with slope efficiencies of 68% and 71% with respect to launched and absorbed pump power, respectively. This novel Tm fiber design enabled the generation of the highest reported output power from a single-mode, small core (<15µm diameter) non-pedestal fiber. Moreover, the slope efficiency achieved is the maximum reported to date for a single-mode thulium fiber laser operating at >100 W output power level.</p
University of Southampton co-ordinated response to: The NDA group Draft Strategy 2025 for public consultation
No full textThe University of Southampton's co-ordinated response to The NDA group Draft Strategy 2025 for public consultation
Childhood predictors of adults’ belief in god, gods, and spiritual forces across 22 countries
No full textReligion is an integral part of everyday life for billions of people, yet little is known about the developmental antecedents of religious belief outside of Western cultures. Using data from over 200,000 individuals across 22 countries, we evaluate several childhood predictors of belief in God, gods, and spiritual forces (Belief in God) in adulthood. We hypothesized that these childhood experiences, personal attributes, and familial or social circumstances would have meaningful and varied associations with Belief in God as adults, with the strength of these associations differing by country, reflecting diverse cultural influences. Most candidate predictors (e.g., parental marital status, childhood socioeconomic status, abuse, being an outsider, and immigration) were associated with Belief in God in some countries but with substantial variation. However, when pooled across countries, only childhood religious service attendance, birth cohort, and gender were significant predictors. Yet there was important variation even for these predictors, and no predictor had a consistent association across all countries. Though this cross-sectional design is limited in allowing causal inference, results provide insights into early-life experiences that might contribute to adults’ Belief in God. The heterogeneity of results highlights the importance of considering any childhood predictor within its social and cultural context.</p
Money talks, but do workers listen? Working hour preferences in a Post-Covid world
No full textWorking-time reduction has been gaining traction in research and mainstream media. Existing research demonstrates that a purposeful move to reduce work hours can yield social, economic, wellbeing and environmental benefits, contributing to more ecologically and socially sustainable employment (Autonomy, 2023; Burchell et al., 2024; Coote and Franklin, 2013; Schor, 2005). Exploring work hour preferences, and the individual, societal and organisational factors that shape them, is a practical approach to assessing the feasibility of working-time reduction policies. Existing work in this area has established certain patterns, such as women, older people, people with health conditions, higher earners and long-hour workers being more likely to prefer reduced hours (Antal et al., 2024). There is considerable focus on the structural barriers that can be very influential on work hour preference patterns, such as having a low income, or the ‘part-time’ constraint that many women face (Fagan, 2001). This study goes beyond the well-established structural barriers by exploring what influences the work hour preferences of more economically secure, full-time workers, within the context of a “post-Covid” world.Labour Force Survey data were analysed using multinomial logistic regression analysis, to identify key demographic and work-related predictors of a preference for shorter hours and a willingness to accept reduced income among above-average earnings full-time workers in the years prior to (2018-19), and “post-” (2022-23) Covid-19. This work comes from a broader mixed methods project that explores work hour experiences alongside preferences. This includes interviews with employers and employees from case study companies that explore the benefits and challenges of different work week lengths, and how work and life context shapes preferences.The quantitative findings contribute to the debates on the potential of working-time reduction by providing an updated overview of the factors influencing the work hour preferences of more financially secure, full-time UK workers. Consistent with the existing literature, older age, female gender, higher education, higher incomes, working longer hours, and health conditions, are found to correlate with a greater preference in working shorter hours (Antal et al., 2024), as well as a willingness to trade income for them. Lesser studied factors such as being white, British, a manager, a homeowner, or hourly paid, also emerged as predictors. Our findings also show a significant “post-” Covid decline in the preference for shorter hours and the willingness to accept income reductions, while remote working had no significant influence. Ongoing interviews are exploring these patterns, with emerging findings highlighting the role of structural and cultural barriers, including financial concerns and workplace culture, in shaping work hour preferences (Fagan, 2001). While this study aimed to examine the preferences of workers with fewer structural barriers, the quantitative and emerging qualitative findings indicate that such barriers remain influential even among this group.<br/
QNM orthogonality relations for AdS black holes
No full textWe present orthogonality relations for quasinormal modes of a wide class of asymptotically AdS black holes. The definition is obtained from a standard product, modified by a CPT operator and placed on a complex radial contour which avoids branch points of the modes. They are inspired by existing constructions for de Sitter and Kerr spacetimes. The CPT operator is needed to map right eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian into left eigenfunctions. The radial contour connects two copies of the dual QFT on a thermal Schwinger-Keldysh contour, making contact with real-time holography and the double cone wormhole.</p
Iron deficiency and fatigue in inflammatory bowel disease: a systematic review
No full textBackground: it is unclear what impact iron deficiency has on fatigue in people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This systematic review examined the evidence of whether iron deficiency, with or without anaemia, was associated with fatigue in IBD. Fatigue is a common symptom in patients with IBD that can be difficult to manage and treat. A greater understanding of the role and contribution of iron deficiency to fatigue may help improve the management of this condition.Methods: the databases searched were MEDLINE, OVID, CINAHL and Web of Science. Inclusion criteria were studies measuring iron status for iron deficiency (ID) and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for fatigue in patients with IBD of any level of disease activity. Assessment of bias was conducted using the Newcastle Ottawa Scale. Studies were grouped for syntheses according to whether exposure was iron deficiency without anaemia (IDWA) or ID regardless of haemoglobin level.Results: two hundred and eighty-five individual database results were identified and screened; 32 complete records were reviewed, from which seven studies with 1425 individuals were deemed eligible for inclusion in the results synthesis. Considerable variation in the methods and statistical analysis used to investigate the relationship between ID and fatigue prevented any quantitative synthesis. Studies varied by population disease activity levels, approaches used to define ID and PROMs used to measure fatigue. Three studies directly compared fatigue scores in IDWA to those not iron deficient, two of which showed patients with IDWA had significantly lower fatigue scores. Four studies used ID irrespective of anaemia as the exposure and reported mixed results on fatigue, with only one study reporting a higher prevalence of fatigue in the ID group.Conclusions: there was marked heterogeneity between studies in this review. Two studies found evidence of a slight increase in fatigue levels in patients with IDWA. Though this does not explain all fatigue in patients with IBD, iron replacement should be considered to improve fatigue in iron-deficient patients
Modelling the effect of early-life interventions on the risk of multiple long-term conditions with role limitation in midlife: findings from the 1970 British cohort study (BCS70)
No full textBackground: the prevalence of multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) is increasing and having a bigger impact on people’s lives and care systems. There is little evidence on early-life interventions to prevent this problem. Therefore, we explored the association between five early-life domains and the outcome of having MLTCs with role-limitation, and modelled early-life prevention scenarios using evidence of effectiveness from real-life interventions.Methods: we analysed data from 6201 participants in the 1970 British Cohort Study, which follows individuals born in 1970. The outcome was self-reported two or more MLTCs with role-limitation (i.e. impacting everyday life functioning) due to a physical or mental health condition at age 46. The exposures were adversity scores within early-life domains including: prenatal to birth, developmental attributes, education, socioeconomic factors, and family environment. Multivariable logistic regression was used, adjusting for sex, ethnicity, and adult factors including exercise, education, income, smoking, partnership status, financial difficulty, alcohol consumption, and media usage. Adjusted population attribution fractions (PAFs) modelled the reduction in outcome risk if cohort members reduced their adversity scores. Effect estimates on early-life exposures from evaluations of real-life interventions including Family Hubs, the Family Nurse Partnership, and the teenage pregnancy prevention framework (that targets sex and relationship education and access to contraception and support), calculated the absolute reduction in the outcome risk had cohort members been exposed to the combined effect of these interventions.Results: 11.8% of cohort members reported MLTCs with role limitations. Adjusted PAFs demonstrated that reducing adversity scores from 3+ to 1 (19.5% 95%CI 6.1%-29.7%), from 3+ to 0 (25.8% 95%CI 13.0%-37.9%), from 2 to 0 (16.6% 95%CI 0.8%-27.6%) in the developmental attributes domain, and from 3+ to 2 (20.0% 95%CI 2.4%-34.4%), from 3+ to 0 (24.0% 95%CI 8.0%-37.2%), from 1 to 0 (13.0% 95%CI 0.1%-24.3%) in the prenatal to birth domain, significantly lowered the outcome risk. For the developmental attributes domain, modelling the combined exposure to interventions and applying corresponding PAFs led to 0.5% absolute reduction in outcome risk amongst those with a domain adversity score of 3+. For the prenatal to birth domain, modelling the combined exposure to interventions and applying corresponding PAFs led to a 11.5% and 2.5% absolute reduction in outcome risk amongst those with a domain adversity score of 3+ and 1, respectively.Conclusion: real life interventions relevant to the pregnancy or postnatal period and/or developmental adversity in childhood may have a long-term impact on the risk of MLTCs in midlife
Combined lexical and phonotactic data resolve uncertainties in the evolutionary diversification of the Japonic language family
No full textThe use of phylogenetic methods in linguistics has provided new insights into the structure, age, and spread of language families. Despite increasing recognition of Japonic as one of the world’s primary language families, research on the family’s phylogeny remains limited. This study presents a new reconstruction of Japonic language history based on NichiRyuuLex, a new lexical dataset comprising data from 48 Japanese and 33 Ryukyuan lects for 256 concepts. The study combines lexical and phonotactic data to increase precision in the phylogenetic parameter estimates, providing a more informative reconstruction. The analyses presented here confirm previous findings on the age of the family as a whole, estimating a Japanese-Ryukyuan split at around 400–500 Bce, supporting that the time of diversification coincides with the influx of Bronze Age rice agriculturists during the Yayoi Period. The topology of the mainland Japanese clade uncovered in the analyses unifies two divisions recognized in traditional Japanese dialectology: the East-West division, and the center-periphery division. The topology of the Ryukyuan clade largely followed geographical segmentation—Northern Ryukyuan (Amami; Okinawa) vs. Southern Ryukyuan (Miyako; Macro-Yaeyama). The ancestor of Ryukyuan was dated to around the ninth century, coinciding with the first traces of cereal farming in the Northern Ryukyu Islands. In sum, the study provides greater certainty about the linguistic history and internal structure of mainland Japanese, as well as a more detailed perspective on the history of the Ryukyuan languages
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