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Graduates’ responses to student loan debt in England: “sort of like an acceptance, but with anxiety attached”
Get PDFIn 2020-21, 94% of undergraduates in England took out government-backed loans to fund their higher education. The growing and widespread use of student loans in England, mounting student debt, and governments' increasing dependence on tuition
fees underwritten by loans to finance public higher education, raise important questions which this paper seeks to address. Specifically, the paper asks how do graduates respond to student loan debt and what does this tells us about the nature of the relationship between the graduate debtor and the state lender? We also
question the usefulness of symbolic violence as a sociological lens to better understand graduates’ different patterns of responses and reactions to student loan debt and their relationship with the state lender. Our analysis draws on 98 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with English graduates between 2020 and 2021. We conclude that a more comprehensive explanation requires an exploration of both symbolic violence and structural violence, and a re-appraisal of the word ‘violence’ to better represent the wide range of graduates’ responses
The effect of numeric information about the likelihood of receiving a false negative or false positive result on people’s attitudes towards colorectal cancer screening using faecal immunochemical test (FIT).
No full textObjective: To examine the impact of numeric risk information about false negative (FN) and false positive (FP) rates in fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) on attitudes towards screening.
Methods: 102 people aged 45 to 55, living in the UK, read 6 hypothetical vignettes presented online about the use of FIT kits to detect bowel cancer, in which information about FN and FP rates was systematically varied.
Results: Numeric FN risk information reduced people’s interest in screening, perception of screening effectiveness and lowered trust in screening compared to verbal FN information. Verbal FN information reduced perceptions of screening effectiveness and trust compared to no FN information. People with high subjective numeracy reported lower trust in screening following the provision of numeric FN information but numeracy did not moderate any other associations. FP information did not affect attitudes towards FIT testing.
Conclusion: Numeric FN risk information decreased people’s perceptions of screening effectiveness and trust in the results of screening. While it influenced people’s interest in screening, the effect was small.
Practice Implications. Numeric FN information has a small effect on interest in screening and should be added to patient information in the interests of promoting informed decision making
Lukács’ red revolution
No full textMoving between autobiographical and biographical
reflections on Lukács and the embeddedness of lives, his and
briefly mine, in historical time, the persistent influence of his readings
of culture and questions of form, science and a philosophy of
praxis is to be reflected on. There is, in some quarters, a dominant
Lukácsian reading of modernism, which he apparently dismisses
as fragmentary and debilitating. However, there is much to be said
about the ways his writings, especially the ones from the 1920s,
leave traces and recurrently propel inquiry lines in less discussed
areas: namely, thermal analyses of alienation and reification as
picked up in Frankfurt School and Situationist thinking; synthetic
color production, and communist self-activity. To observe this persistent generativity in the name of self-organization and dialectics
is to value something under attack in the revival of anti-Semitism
and anti-Communism in Hungary today
Landscapes and environments of the Middle Ages
No full textBook synopsis: This book is a comprehensive introduction to the landscapes of the Middle Ages within and beyond Europe, paying close attention to the relationship between ‘real’ and imagined landscapes and the ways that medieval people made and inhabited their world.
Rather than studying nature in the Middle Ages, the book instead examines the spaces that people constructed through soil, stone, and song; water and wasteland; plants and animals; and timber, textiles, and texts, which in turn made up the medieval world. Likewise, the text emphasizes a definition of environment that focuses on ‘living with,’ inviting readers to think about the more-than-human worlds that medieval people depended on, cared for, constructed, and damaged. Bringing together a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, the book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of this period and considers the role that these medieval worlds have played in shaping the modern, both physically and culturally.
Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in medieval studies and history, offering interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational insights into this period of immense change and innovation
The impact of fast-food density on obesity during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK: a multi-timepoint study on British cohort data
Get PDFPoor food environments are considered to trigger obesity and related health complications by restricting the local food options to predominantly low quality, energy-dense foods. This study investigated the impact of the food environment on obesity with a focus on any changes that might have occurred around the COVID lockdown period in the UK when majority of the population relied on food delivery and the local food environments. The proportion of fast-food retailers in the area and the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) were calculated for participants of the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) at three timepoints: pre-COVID (2016), the first UK nation-wide lockdown (April–May 2020) and post lockdown (September–October 2020). The association of the food environment and the odds of obesity was estimated through multivariable logistic regression, with adjustments being made for selected socioeconomic variables. A model using the fast-food proportion as the sole predictor estimated that higher fast-food proportion increased the odds of obesity by 2.41 in 2016, 2.89 during the lockdown and 1.34 post lockdown, compared with 1.87, 2.23, and 0.73, respectively, for the same three periods with adjustments being made for select socioeconomic variables. On the other hand, RFEI increased the odds of obesity only slightly at 1.01, 1.02 and 1.03, respectively, with the model with adjustments yielding respective similar values. The fast-food proportion model indicates that proximity to a poor food environment is linked to obesity, especially during the COVID lockdown period, but the impact of a poor-food environment is limited if the RFEI is used as its indicator. The findings will add much needed insights on the UK data and will inform public health planning and policy
Do cultural differences affect the quality of financial reporting in the EU? An analysis of Western EU countries vis a vis Eastern EU countries.
Get PDFPurpose: This study examines the impact of national culture on classification shifting in Eastern European Member States of EU (EEU) vis a vis the Western Member States of EU (WEU). The EEU provides a unique sample to study the quality of financial reporting that we measure with classification shifting given that for more than five decades they were following the model of a centrally planned economy, where market-based financial reporting was absent. Yet, the EEU transitioned to a market-based economy and completed its accession to the EU.
Design/methodology/approach: We employ a panel data set of firm year observations from 1996 and 2020 that covers the full transition of EEU. Our empirical analysis is based on fixed effects panel regression analysis where we report a plethora of identifications.
Findings: Our study finds classification shifting in the EEU countries since their transition to the market-based economy, though they have no long record of market-based financial reporting. Our study also notices that cultural factors are associated with classification shifting across all Member States of the EU. We further examine the impact of interactions between cultural characteristics and special items and reveal variability between WEU and EEU. As part of the robustness analysis, we also test the impact of culture on real earnings management measures for both WEU vs EEU confirming the variability of the impact of culture on earnings management.
Originality: This is the first study, to the best of our knowledge, that sheds light on the impact of national culture on classification shifting in EEU of EU vis a vis the “old” WEU of EU.
Research limitations/implications: Future research could explore the role of religion differences in WEU vis a vis EEU states as they are also subject to cultural differences.
Practical implications: The findings are important for regulators, external monitors, and investors, as they show that cultural factors affect earnings management with some variability across countries in the EU, and they should be acknowledged in policy making
Self-prior guided pixel adversarial networks for blind image inpainting
Get PDFBlind image inpainting involves two critical aspects, i.e. "where to inpaint" and "how to inpaint". Knowing "where to inpaint" can eliminate the interference arising from corrupted pixel values; a good "how to inpaint" strategy yields high-quality inpainted results robust to various corruptions. In existing methods, these two aspects usually lack explicit and separate consideration. This paper fully explores these two aspects and proposes a self-prior guided inpainting network (SIN). The self-priors are obtained by detecting semantic-discontinuous regions and by predicting global semantic structures of the input image. On the one hand, the self-priors are incorporated into the SIN, which enables the SIN to perceive valid context information from uncorrupted regions and to synthesize semantic-aware textures for corrupted regions. On the other hand, the self-priors are reformulated to provide a pixel-wise adversarial feedback and a high-level semantic structure feedback, which can promote the semantic continuity of inpainted images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art perfomance in metric scores and in visual quality. It has an advantage over many existing methods that assume "where to inpaint" is known in advance. Extensive experiments on a series of related image restoration tasks validate the effectiveness of our method in obtaining high-quality inpainting
Cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences, experience, and naturalistic second language speech learning: a longitudinal study
Get PDFThis study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end of their first 4 months of study abroad. Then we linked the participants’ gains in comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) to their individual difference and experience profiles. The participants’ gains in comprehensibility were associated mainly with the amount of their interaction with fluent English speakers during immersion and secondarily with certain cognitive (grammatical inferencing) and sociopsychological (extraversion) individual differences. Furthermore, the amount of interactive L2 use mediated the effect of sociopsychological individual differences (extraversion and potentially ideal L2 self). In contrast, gains in accentedness tended to be less subject to experience effects but could be affected by certain pronunciation-related cognitive individual differences (phonemic coding)
Do pre-schoolers with high touchscreen use show executive function differences?
Get PDFThe recent increase in children's use of digital media, both TV and touchscreen devices (e.g., tablets and smartphones), has been associated with developmental differences in Executive Functions (EF). It has been hypothesised that early exposure to attention-commanding and contingent stimulation provided by touchscreens may increase reliance on bottom-up perceptual processes and limit the opportunity for practice of voluntary (i.e., top-down) attention leading to differences in EF. This study tests the concurrent and longitudinal associations between touchscreen use (high use, HU ≥ 15 min/day; low use, LU < 15 min/day), and two components of EF (working-memory/cognitive-flexibility, and impulse/self-control), building explicitly on recent developmental models that point to a bidimensional structure of EF during toddlerhood and pre-school years. A longitudinal sample of 46 3.5-year-olds (23 girls) was tested on a battery of lab-based measures and matched at 12 months on a range of background variables including temperament. Touchscreen HU showed significantly reduced performance in lab-based Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility, although this became non-significant when controlling for background TV. Impulse/Self-control was not significantly associated with touchscreen use but was negatively associated with non-child-directed television. Our results provide partial support for the hypothesis that using touchscreen devices might reduce capacity for top-down behaviour control, and indicate that broader media environment may be implicated in early executive function development. However, it may also be the case that individuals who are predisposed towards exogenous stimulation are more drawn to screen use. Future studies are needed to replicate findings, demonstrate causality, and investigate bidirectionality
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