Romancing With Pain:A Survey Study of Young Adults With Chronic Pain

Background: Developing and maintaining romantic relationships is a hallmark of entry to adulthood. Studies suggest that young people with chronic pain often experience social challenges engaging in romantic intimacy, but these studies are limited as they (1) combined participants who were and were not in romantic relationships and (2) focused solely on heterosexual romantic relationships. It is unknown how young adults with chronic pain, inclusive of diverse genders and sexual orientations, perceive themselves on romantic relationship factors.Purpose: To determine how pain-related factors are associated with romantic relationship factors when young adults with chronic pain are actively in a romantic relationship.Design: An online cross-sectional survey using validated questionnaires assessed chronic pain characteristics, romantic relationship factors, social well-being, and demographics. A social media campaign recruited 72 young adults (18-25 years) who were in a romantic relationship regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.Results: Pain characteristics, not demographics, explained 23.6% of the variance in romantic relationship anxiety, suggesting that pain contributed to concerns about an individual needing their partner’s approval and distress when their partner is unresponsive to their needs. Pain characteristics did not impact participants’ present relationship satisfaction, but negatively impacted loneliness. Interestingly, loneliness was negatively associated with romantic relationship factors.Conclusions: Nurses and members of the interprofessional team should reassure young adults with chronic pain that pain is not necessarily a limiting factor in romantic relationship satisfaction. Additionally, clinical staff should also assess loneliness as romantic relationships alone are insufficient in decreasing loneliness within this population

Financial Market Internationalization of and Corporate Tax Avoidance:Evidence from the Inclusion of Chinese A-Shares in the MSCI-EMI

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature by investigating the impact of financial market internationalization, specifically the inclusion of Chinese A-shares in the MSCI Emerging Market Index (MSCI-EMI), on corporate tax avoidance behavior. The study focuses on a target population of 968 firms listed between 2014 and 2021 that are part of the Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect programs. A propensity score matching (PSM) combined with a difference-in-differences (DID) design was employed, with 236 firms included in the MSCI-EMI as the treatment group on June 1, 2018, and the remaining 732 firms forming the control group. The analysis examines any divergence in tax avoidance behavior between these two groups resulting from the inclusion in the MSCI-EMI. The findings reveal that the inclusion of A-shares in the MSCI-EMI significantly curbs corporate tax avoidance, particularly among firms characterized by low information transparency, minimal analyst attention, limited media coverage, or high financing costs. These results remain robust after conducting parallel trend tests, placebo tests for causal inference, single-stage analysis, and endogeneity tests. The findings underscore the importance of ongoing government efforts to enhance information transparency, expand financing channels, and further promote capital market reform to effectively reduce corporate tax avoidance behavior

You’ve Been Framed: Sketching Out the Contours of a Drag-Queer Interpretive Framework

The philosophical assumptions that guide research (ontology, epistemology, axiology) are folded into interpretive frameworks (Creswell, 2013). In a sense, then, interpretive frameworks serve as a bridge between theory and practice in social research. This chapter offers speculative ruminations on what a drag framework may look like, given that in research on drag, the practice often comes before the theory. This reversal of research design is paramount in understanding a creative and unbound practice such as drag. So,what can a drag theory bring?Early drag kings and queens are magpies in how they begin to formulate their performative personas. In the spirit of borrowing therefore, our first rumination concerns adoptions from kin-frameworks such as feminist and queer theories. The authors argue how a potential drag framework borrows but rejects elements of each of these existing frameworks. The values of experience and deep reflexivity that characterises feminist research is essential to practice-research and thus to drag theory. Yet, as feminist theories have splintered, including the minoritized yet venomously vocal pronouncements from gender criticalfeminists, feminism as an umbrella term is no longer a wholesale safe space for trans and queer people. A home for trans/queer people seems to naturally exist then in queer theory, yet the theory-twisting identity-rejecting principle of queer theory is to go beyond identity.A drag theory must embrace the solidity of multiple identities – quite simply because careers are built on identity formation, however temporal these may be.The chapter lays out the key foundations of a drag framework: intersectionality,polyvocality, political and activist agendas, alongside the disruptive and paradoxical nature of drag. A drag theory is a social justice theory then, that brings value to social and cultural research practices, bridging the gaps where existing frameworks do not quite fit

The hallucination of learning with generative artificial intelligence

We recognize that the use of GenAI for learning will continue to grow and we urge all to reinforce current recommendations for educators to support their students in developing the essential metacognitive processes of monitoring and regulating the outputs of GenAI since this has significant long-term benefits

Reducing Political Violence:Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm

Reducing Political Violence: Narrative, Critique, and Criminology demonstrates the significance of complex narrative representations to the criminological concern with the control, reduction, and prevention of ideologically motivated violence. Drawing on the philosophical tradition of aesthetic education, which began in the Romantic era and diversified into Marxist, pragmatic, analytic, and poststructural strands at the end of the 20th century, the author sets out a compelling theory of the relationships among the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political.Aesthetic education is then applied to a selection of literary and documentary narratives, which range from military memoirs to political polemics, late modern novels, journalistic exposés, and academic biographies, and include the notorious Devil’s Guard (1971), Islamic State propaganda, a Nobel laureate’s novel, and the most comprehensive account of literary theorist Paul De Man’s controversial life. The conclusion is that complex narratives can serve at least four criminological purposes: revealing techniques of neutralisation, performing their own fictionality, and providing both partial and complete solutions to contemporary social problems.Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book is for everyone interested in crimes against humanity, terrorism, insurgency, war, and the question of why healthy societies need good narratives

Toward a secure and scalable IoT: A survey of IOTA-based distributed ledger technologies

The increasing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) systems demands secure, energy-efficient, and scalable solutions capable of supporting mission-critical operations. Traditional blockchain-based Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), however, face limitations such as high energy consumption, poor scalability, and transaction fees, making them less ideal for IoT environments. This paper presents a structured review of IOTA’s Tangle, a lightweight, feeless, and scalable DLT designed specifically for decentralised IoT architectures. The study categorizes recent IOTA-based approaches into four key domains: security, privacy, scalability, and energy efficiency. The surveyed literature is systematically classified and analysed, highlighting the core challenges addressed by each approach. Comparative evaluation reveals the strengths and limitations of current methods in meeting IoT requirements. The findings suggest that while IOTA offers several advantages over traditional blockchains, integrating hybrid and comprehensive solutions remains a promising direction for future research. The paper concludes by outlining open challenges and opportunities for advancing IOTA-enabled IoT systems

Major trauma in the elderly: unique challenges and considerations

Challenges of managing trauma in the elderlyThe elderly patient presenting with major trauma poses several challenges to the trauma team involved in their care. Age-related changes in physiology and pharmacology, an increased prevalence of comorbidities, reduced physiological reserve and frailty make elderly patients especially vulnerable to the physiological stress of major trauma. Preexisting conditions and their pharmacological treatments may result in atypical presentations and mask adverse clinical signs, presenting an additionalPrognosticationAssessing and planning care following major trauma requires multidisciplinary input including specialists in care of the elderly and rehabilitation following trauma. This assessment should take place as soon as possible following the traumatic injury and adopt a holistic approach, addressing areas such as pain management, treatment of infections, resolution of delirium, psychological wellbeing and medication optimisation.23 Accurately predicting outcomes following trauma in the elderly isConclusionsThe demographic of the ‘typical’ major trauma patient is rapidly evolving from young and predominantly male to the older adult of either sex with increasing frailty, comorbidity and medical complexity. Providing a high standard of trauma care to this growing and important cohort of patients requires a fundamental understanding of ageing physiology and how this impacts management, from arrival at the door of the emergency department through to surgical intervention and beyond

Beyond the Eye: A Relational Model for Early Dementia Detection Using Retinal OCTA Images

Early detection of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment(MCI), is essential to enable timely intervention and potential treatment. Accuratedetection of AD/MCI is challenging due to the high complexity, cost, and ofteninvasive nature of current diagnostic techniques, which limit their suitability for largescalepopulation screening. Given the shared embryological origins and physiologicalcharacteristics of the retina and brain, retinal imaging is emerging as a potentially rapidand cost-effective alternative for the identification of individuals with or at high riskof AD. In this paper, we present a novel PolarNet+ that uses retinal optical coherencetomography angiography (OCTA) to discriminate early-onset AD (EOAD) and MCIsubjects from controls. Our method first maps OCTA images from Cartesian coordinatesto polar coordinates, allowing approximate sub-region calculation to implementthe clinician-friendly early treatment of diabetic retinopathy study (ETDRS) grid analysis.We then introduce a multi-view module to serialize and analyze the images alongthree dimensions for comprehensive, clinically useful information extraction. Finally,we abstract the sequence embedding into a graph, transforming the detection task intoa general graph classification problem. A regional relationship module is applied afterthe multi-view module to explore the relationship between the sub-regions. Suchregional relationship analyses validate known eye-brain links and reveal new discriminativepatterns. The proposed model is trained, tested, and validated on four retinalOCTA datasets, including 1,671 participants with AD, MCI, and healthy controls. Experimentalresults demonstrate the performance of our model in detecting AD and MCIwith an AUC of 88.69% and 88.02%, respectively. Our results provide evidence thatretinal OCTA imaging, coupled with artificial intelligence, may serve as a rapid andnon-invasive approach for large-scale screening of AD and MCI. The code is availableat https://github.com/iMED-Lab/PolarNet-Plus-PyTorch, and the dataset is also availableupon request

Adult Literacy as a catalyst for empowerment

Drawing upon sociological and philosophical lenses in this contribution to the volume, we will explore the context of adult literacy as a catalyst for empowerment, and the ways in which we both navigate, and construct, our relationship to the world through language. We argue that it is vital for literacy researchers and educators to understand how classroom practices and discourses shape meaning in ways that have historically tended to promote the social reproduction of inequality. Sociologists such as Bourdieu, and linguists such as Barton and Hamilton, argue that meanings are constructed through social languages or discourse. These socially constructed meanings are not neutral, and often privilege some, while marginalising or excluding others.However, it is not enough for researchers to adopt a critical approach, and thereby simply to probe the role of practices and discourse in social reproduction. As educational and literacy researchers, and in the face of increasing inequity in and out of the classroom, we feel compelled to take action and explore and expose oppressive discursive structures and practices and in turn offer more empowering and creative engagements with students both in and out of the classroom. Such action opens the possibilities for a radical re-thinking of our relationship as humans to language, for how we encounter others through it, and so for what it means to be literate. It is this kind of action that is an enacting of hope for the global community of language users. Through careful attention to the insights that engagement with empirical data, theory and philosophy in relation to language and literacy can offer, we provide a richly nuanced and compelling account which challenges both researchers and practitioners in the field