Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing in this space a year ago, I was expressing pretty pessimistic thoughts about the hearing industry. With the banking system on the verge of collapse, stock and home prices plummeting, and the economy in recession, I expected hearing aid sales to go down too. I tried to sugar coat the situation, entitling my editorial “Thinking positively about '09,” but I foresaw a possible double-digit drop in sales. Yes, I had heard from some industry old-timers that the hearing industry is recession-proof. But clearly this recession was worse than any other since 1990 when I started writing about hearing care, and I felt sure its effects on our industry would be bad. Well, as it turns, out I was wrong, and I'm glad of it. Granted, in the second half of 2008, sales did go down. But the industry quickly righted itself and, as you will read in this month's Cover Story, sales through the first three quarters of 2009 grew by over 6%. Outside the VA the increase was only a little over 2%, but in the third quarter even that sector rose by 4.3%. These numbers aren't great, but take a look at almost any other industry, and by comparison hearing care is booming. Why is this industry so different? Well, the theory put forth by the experts I consulted for my story is that, despite the conventional wisdom, hearing aids are in most cases not discretionary purchases. Typically, people with hearing loss put off getting hearing aids for as long as they can stand it. When their hearing get so bad they finally take the leap, they are so desperate to hear that not even a bleak economy will stand in their way. A COMFORT—AND A FRUSTRATION If indeed hearing aids are usually purchased out of necessity, not choice, that is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's reassuring for those who dispense or manufacture hearing aids that demand for their products and services can withstand economic adversity. On the other hand, it is frustrating to realize that when the economy turns around and people go out and buy new cars and houses, most of those who haven't been able to enjoy dinner out or church services for 5 years will still be saying, “My hearing isn't that bad. I don't need a hearing aid yet.” Wouldn't it be great if consumers started to seek hearing help because they believed it would make their lives more enjoyable, not because are afraid if they don't their wife will leave them or they may miss the cry of a grandchild in distress. Clearly we want both types of consumers to take action—those whose hearing has become so bad that amplification is a necessity and those whose hearing isn't that bad, but who have decided the time to hear better is while it is still a matter of choice. ATTITUDES ARE CHANGING To avoid underestimating the prospects for hearing aids again this year, let me point out some evidence that we are moving, slowly but surely, toward the point when acquiring hearing aids is often a thoughtful, informed decision to take control of one's hearing, not an act of last resort. One reason this seems likely to happen more and more is that today's hearing aids work so much better than those of the pre-digital era. That is improving how consumers view these devices. Another positive development is the changing look and image of hearing aids. As all of you know, today's devices often come in bright colors, lively patterns, and pleasing shapes not dreamt of a decade ago. And the industry's marketing often presents hearing aids as attractive devices that vital, youthful people who need help with their hearing shouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with. The rest of the world is beginning to pay attention. For example, as noted in HJ Report, mainstream institutions that a decade ago would not have had hearing aids on their radar screens, are honoring them for outstanding engineering and design. Change is seen in the latest MarkeTrak finding that the hearing aid penetration of the hearing-impaired population in the U.S. crept up to almost 25% in 2008, the highest ever measured and significantly above the 20% rate recorded in 1997. To be sure, progress is much slower than we would like. But little by little, I believe that hearing aids are becoming products that people get because they choose to, not because they feel they have no choice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".