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Exploring the perceptions of undergraduate pharmacy students’ communication skills to facilitate better professional decision-making in the UK
Get PDFBackground: Pharmacy professionals have an important role in delivering patient-centred care, with effective communication skills forming the foundation of interactions with patients. This study aimed to explore how pharmacy students perceived their own communication skills; along with the communication skills education and training experiences in their undergraduate pharmacy degree in the UK.
Methods: A 22-item questionnaire was designed and piloted before being distributed online. Snowball sampling was employed to recruit participants undertaking an undergraduate pharmacy degree. Quantitative statistical and qualitative thematic analysis was conducted.
Results: A range of pharmacy schools were represented in the data set (n = 10) with 217 responses collected. Participants rated their communication skills highly (53.03%, n = 114), but stated they still required improvement (79.72%, n = 173). A proportion of participants stated that they could appropriately make professional decisions (52.08%, n = 100) and that their communication skills had facilitated their professional decision-making skills (57.89%, n = 110). Effective teaching methods reported included role play with peers (80%, n = 156) and small-group teaching sessions (64.10%, n = 125). Participants felt that interprofessional education and simulated patients could help improve their communication skills further. Conclusions: Communication education is a crucial element in developing future healthcare professionals. Thus, investment in resources is required to facilitate communication skills in the earlier stages of the undergraduate pharmacy degree
Stacked Ensemble Learning for Classification of Parkinson's Disease Using Telemonitoring Vocal Features
Get PDFBackground: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that impairs motor and non-motor functions. Early and accurate diagnosis is critical for effective management and care. Leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques, this study aimed to develop a robust prediction system for PD using a stacked ensemble learning approach, addressing challenges such as imbalanced datasets and feature optimization. Methods: An open-access PD dataset comprising 22 vocal attributes and 195 instances from 31 subjects was utilized. To prevent data leakage, subjects were divided into training (22 subjects) and testing (9 subjects) groups, ensuring no subject appeared in both sets. Preprocessing included data cleaning and normalization via min-max scaling. The synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) was applied exclusively to the training set to address class imbalance. Feature selection techniques-forward search, gain ratio, and Kruskal-Wallis test-were employed using subject-wise cross-validation to identify significant attributes. The developed system combined support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and decision tree (DT) as base classifiers, with logistic regression (LR) as the meta-classifier in a stacked ensemble learning framework. Performance was evaluated using both recording-wise and subject-wise metrics to ensure clinical relevance. Results: The stacked ensemble learning model achieved realistic performance with a recording-wise accuracy of 84.7% and subject-wise accuracy of 77.8% on completely unseen subjects, outperforming individual classifiers including KNN (81.4%), RF (79.7%), and SVM (76.3%). Cross-validation within the training set showed 89.2% accuracy, with the performance difference highlighting the importance of proper validation methodology. Feature selection results showed that using the top 10 features ranked by gain ratio provided optimal balance between performance and clinical interpretability. The system's methodological robustness was validated through rigorous subject-wise evaluation, demonstrating the critical impact of validation methodology on reported performance. Conclusions: By implementing subject-wise validation and preventing data leakage, this study demonstrates that proper validation yields substantially different (and more realistic) results compared to flawed recording-wise approaches. The findings underscore the critical importance of validation methodology in healthcare ML applications and provide a template for methodologically sound PD classification research. Future research should focus on validating the model with larger, multi-center datasets and implementing standardized validation protocols to enhance clinical applicability
Thirty years of arboreal wildlife trends in an African rainforest under evolving threats and researchers' presence
Get PDFLong-term wildlife monitoring is necessary to inform adaptive management and assess conservation measures. The long-term presence of researchers may also indirectly induce positive effects for wildlife conservation by deterring harmful activities, such as hunting and resource extraction. However, long-term research is challenging and thus rare. Here, we assess long-term trends of wildlife near a research station that was established, abandoned, and reestablished. We conducted monthly surveys of arboreal wildlife from 1995 to 1999 and 2017 to 2024 in a protected Cameroonian rainforest where illegal hunting is common. Coinciding with the initial establishment of the research station, the relative abundance of 10 out of 12 arboreal species (hornbills, primates, and parrots) increased from 1995 to 1999. However, the station closed in 1999, and by 2017, the relative abundance of many species had decreased compared to levels in 1999. Finally, no species increased in relative abundance after the station reopened in 2017; instead, many declined between 2017 and 2024. Although we lack control sites, these results suggest that researchers' presence can sometimes have a protective effect, but also that this effect can be variable and limited depending on circumstances. The declining trends from 1999 to 2024 align with the evolving state of hunting in Central Africa, which is shifting toward increased commercial hunting and the use of guns that are more effective than snares for harvesting arboreal species. We recommend providing sustained support for research stations, collaborating with local communities to reduce bushmeat hunting, and enhancing enforcement against the international trade of hornbill casques and pet parrots
UK Car Finance Mis-selling: Reassessing Legal and Regulatory Challenges within Consumer Credit Markets
No full textThis article examines the regulatory dimensions of the UK’s car finance mis-selling scandal, focusing on the structural features of PCP agreements. While current legal interventions emphasise transparency and informed choice regarding commissions, I argue that such measures are poorly equipped to address the embedded inequalities characteristic of intermediated consumer credit markets. PCPs, though marketed as affordable and flexible, routinely give rise to extended credit dependency without securing vehicle ownership for many borrowers. Drawing on Ramsay’s work on credit and distributive justice, the analysis situates PCP finance within broader shifts in welfare provision, income insecurity, and the financialisation of everyday life. It further places recent developments within the longer history of UK financial mis-selling, where commission-based sales models have systematically externalised complexity and risk onto consumers. Rather than treating mis-selling as a failure of commission disclosure, the article invites a more substantive inquiry into how consumer law legitimise forms of market participation that disproportionately burden the financially vulnerable
Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Quantum Materials: Quantifying Entanglement
No full textArtificial intelligence has gained much interest over the last years - broadly, but also in the field of physics specifically. Here we present a numerical study of machine learning (ML) methods applied to data analysis for strongly correlated quantum systems. The main goal of this work is to establish a framework for entanglement learning: an application of neural networks (NNs) - a supervised ML technique - to detect the entanglement of many-body magnetic systems at finite temperatures. As a preliminary result, we applied an unsupervised ML technique called principal component analysis (PCA) to detect superconducting phase transitions in exotic magnetic materials from real-life muon spectroscopy data. We find that the PCA can identify phase transition points correctly, even when the data vary in a subtle manner, which proves to be difficult for more traditional methods. Moreover, the joint PCA of data from materials with vastly different magnetic properties and different kinds of phase transitions enhances rather than diminishes the performance of the method. In order to demonstrate that the entanglement can in principle be learned, we first examine to which extent the two-point correlators constrain entanglement measures. To this end, we conduct a study of the fitness landscape of neutron-scattering functions obtained from Heisenberg-like Hamiltonians. We discover that the fitness landscape shows a linear correlation as a function of distances between quantum states at zero temperature, and a sub-linear correlation for finite temperatures. This makes the scattering functions - or closely related two-point correlators and structure factors - perfect candidates as input for entanglement learning. We find that entanglement entropy can be correctly predicted by NNs from previously mentioned observables, even when trained on a fraction of the full data set, or when trained on data from a different system than the one for which the prediction is made. Specifically, when trained on observables from an anisotropic transverse-field XY model, in order to obtain an accurate prediction, we only require 3% (6%) of the data to train the network if using the dynamic two-point correlators (structure factors) for learning
Forest Degradation, Animal Extinction and Nature Conservation in Contemporary Literature
No full textDrawing upon the concepts of “externality” (Clark, 2008) and “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), this thesis writes back to the western imagining of the forest as an outside space that, located outside of and away from civilisation and culture, legitimises the abuse of nonhuman nature. It is the discourse of outsiderness that, operating through a humannonhuman dichotomy, reduces forest inhabitants to mere resources and licenses the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of human labour and nonhuman life. Nonhuman nature and colonized, Indigenous human communities are translated as exploitable and ungrievable lives, thus illuminating the twinned social and ecological injustices produced within a capitalist and imperialist context. In interrogating the western discourse of outsiderness that imagines nature as “‘out there’, never ‘in here’” (Adams, 2003, pp. 42 - 43) and extinction “as something that happens ‘over there’ or out in ‘nature’” (van Dooren, 2014, p. 5), this thesis posits that forests, made up of vibrant multispecies communities, are not interchangeable and replaceable habitats. They are unique ecological spaces that support the flourishing of particular human communities and animal and arboreal species that are tied to distinctive lifeways whilst being situated within interspecies assemblages and heritages. Since ‘habitat’ is a relatively understudied subject in literary animal studies (Menely, 2023, p. 186), my thesis contributes to the existing scholarship by positing that an understanding of forest degradation and animal extinction cannot be divorced from a concomitant examination of their political and spatiotemporal contexts. It does so by analysing three contemporary works of literature that not only foreground the forest as habitat but also illuminate how the unique material conditions that make forests inhabitable to human and nonhuman inhabitants are being slowly suspended by the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of nature. These are: Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s Alma (2017), Dalene Matthee’s Circles in a Forest (1984) and Tania James’s The Tusk that Did the Damage (2015). Alma (2017) examines the life and extinction of the dodos as they coexist with the maroons in the forest on the Dutch colonial island of Mauritius; Circles in a Forest (1984), unfolding in British colonial South Africa, explores the quotidian orientation, lifeway and vanishing of the Knysna elephants who coexist with the impoverished woodcutters in the Knysna forest; and The Tusk that Did the Damage (2015) centres on the inherited and ongoing human-wildlife conflict between the elephants and rural poor living on the fringes of the fictional Kavanar wildlife park forest in post-colonial India. In transporting the reader to their specific forest habitats and enabling the reader to affectively draw close to the forest inhabitants, these novels disrupt the discourse of outsiderness by rendering proximal, intimate and perceptible the “slow violence” of forest degradation and animal extinction
Advanced Fertility Diagnostics in Livestock Improvement
No full textIn the constantly growing livestock breeding industry, optimisation of animal fertility parameters is key to economic success for animal breeders and livestock producers. Male fertility in particular in key because the use of artificial insemination (AI) means that production is highly dependent on the reproductive output of selected stud males.Achieving optimal reproductive efficiency requires understanding both the overall genetic merit of the animals to be used in the stud programme, and also the genetic and environmental factors that specifically affect semen quality and quantity. As yet, however, the technologies used to assess each of these areas are relatively simplistic and do not optimally leverage more recent advances in assay techniques.This thesis seeks to address this deficiency at multiple levels. Firstly, although FISH-based screening for chromosome structural rearrangements is gaining traction in the pig industry, it is not yet deployed in cattle. Here, I provide novel economic model analysis to demonstrate the likely positive impact of this technology. Secondly, I examine the effects of semen sexing methods on dairy cattle semen and show that at least one such technology has adverse effects on sperm DNA fragmentation that should be taken into consideration when using sexed semen. Thirdly, building on a computerised semen analysis (CASA) dataset (a routine analysis in the pig breeding industry), I provide estimates of individual animal, breed, stud environment and seasonal effects on semen quality. Finally, I have helped develop novel laboratory methods to separate sperm cells at different stages of capacitation, which in turn will enable numerous follow-up projects to understand the factors affecting this process and how these could be modulated to optimise breeding efficiency. Collectively therefore, my work showcases how different types of advanced fertility diagnostic protocol (whether examining cell biology or genetics) can be utilised to derive actionable information that can be put to use to improve fertility in livestock breeding
Can transformative experiences bridge the gap between receiving communities and formerly incarcerated persons?
Get PDFThe stigma of incarceration contributes to the global reoffending crisis and remains a barrier to reintegration into receiving communities. Recent research suggests that the key to solving this problem may lie in shared transformative experiences. We tested whether the salience of such experiences can overcome stigma among members of receiving communities when they act as gatekeepers for formerly incarcerated persons seeking employment. Across four experimental studies with seven samples of US and UK nationals (N = 2091), we examined the conditions under which transformative experiences can lead to identity fusion, a powerful form of social bonding and contribute to hiring and optimism about reintegration among prospective employers. In six of seven samples, those who reported stronger transformative experiences of their own were more fused to a job applicant, which was linked to positive attitudes towards them and willingness to hire them. Effects of formerly incarcerated persons' experiences varied between national samples and experience contexts: American citizens were more receptive to experiences in prison, while British citizens were more influenced by sports experiences. These findings highlight the potency of transformative experiences to forge connective bridges to stigmatized groups, despite cultural differences in perceptions of relevant social cues about formerly incarcerated people
Do the biological characteristics of trout (Salmo trutta) smolts influence their spring migration timing and maiden marine sojourn duration?
Get PDFAnadromous salmonids migrate seaward to exploit feeding and growth opportunities in marine habitats, yet how smolt biological characteristics influence their marine migratory behavior remains poorly understood. This study used 9 years of trout (Salmo trutta) population monitoring data from 15,595 tagged age-0+ parr, 1033 smolts detected migrating downstream in spring, and 99 adults detected returning from their first marine migration to the River Frome (Dorset, UK) to investigate the influence of smolt biological characteristics on their migration timing and maiden marine sojourn duration. Age-specific differences in the influence of smolt length on migration timing were found, with longer 1-year-old smolts emigrating later than their shorter counterparts within the same age class, but the opposite association existed for 2-year-old smolts. A bespoke integrated statistical model quantified the effects of smolt emigration day of year, age, sex, and length on the probability of first-time migrants returning to the river after one or more sea winters. Younger, later migrating smolts had a longer marine sojourn duration than their older, earlier migrating counterparts, and females remained at sea for longer periods than males. Although the statistical model was designed to maximize the use of information available in the data, it revealed only weak effects of smolt biological characteristics on the maiden marine sojourn duration. A complementary simulation study suggested that detecting more spring migrating smolts and analyzing longer time series of trout population monitoring data would increase the ability to detect statistically significant effects. Therefore, a strategic review of the trout population monitoring program, including more long-term biological data collection, is recommended. The modelling work presented here can provide guidance on the size of the required dataset and how to maximize the power of imperfect data
Rediscovering the Canary Islands: Maritime Notes Towards a New Historical Geography of Genocide
No full textWhen, and where, was the first genocide? Drawing on Robert Meister’s dialectics of race and place, I argue that the European encounter with the Canary Islands provides a cogent answer to this politically fraught question. Moreover, framing violence against the indigenous peoples of the Canaries as such creates new avenues for theorising genocidal violence in relation to insular and oceanic spaces. Through this framing, I construct a ‘prehistory’ of the European encounter with the Islands that centres a resurrection of the Roman Empire’s Mediterranean maritime unity as an ideological preoccupation within European Christendom that informed its eventual Atlantic expansion. From here, I show how these logics of war, conquest, and non-Christian status were both maintained and challenged by the encounter with the Canaries in a manner that provides new explanations for Europe’s violent expansion across the globe – and the violence that ensued when this expansion reached its spatial limits
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