On the Role of Visuals in Multimodal Answers to Medical Questions

This paper describes two experiments carried out in order to investigate the role of visuals in multimodal answer presentations for a medical question answering system. First, a production experiment was carried out to determine which modalities people choose to answer different types of questions. In this experiment, participants had to create (multimodal) presentations of answers to general medical questions. The collected answer presentations were coded on the presence of visual media (i.e., photos, graphics, and animations) and their function. The results indicated that participants presented the information in a multimodal way. Moreover, significant differences were found in the presentation of different answer and question types. Next, an evaluation experiment was conducted to investigate how users evaluate different types of multimodal answer presentations. In this second experiment, participants had\ud to assess the informativity and attractiveness of answer presentations for different types of medical questions. These answer presentations, originating from the production experiment, were manipulated in their answer length (brief vs. extended) and their type of picture (illustrative vs. informative). After the participants had assessed the answer presentations, they received a post-\ud test in which they had to indicate how much they had recalled from the presented answer presentations. The results showed that answer presentations with an informative picture were evaluated as more informative and more attractive than answer presentations with an illustrative picture. The results for the post-test tentatively indicated that learning from answer presentations with an informative picture leads to a better learning performance than learning from purely textual answer presentations

Tailoring climate change communication to female target groups – an experimental analysis of voting and consumer behavior in Switzerland

Climate change is a reality. Despite increasing materialization of this phenomenon and calls for immediate action to limit its underlying causes, only a limited uptake of pro-environmental behavior has been registered so far. One of its main reasons has been concluded to be the faulty pro-environmental communication, that is in most cases built ineffectively on erroneous assumptions about the nature of human behavior. The goal of the here presented research was thus to find out, what aspects communication strategy should be built on to motivate pro-environmental behavior, individual as well as collective. Considering the need to specialize communication strategies for higher impact and their potential swing voter role in Switzerland, a female target group was selected. To answer the research question, an experiment was conducted, exposing the participants to three variations of a communication strategy, preceded and followed by an online questionnaire. The results showed that shorter and, namely, peer effects-based strategies are the most effective to motivate pro-environmental action in general and among women in particular. The conclusions of this experiment thus importantly contribute to the on-going discussion on how to effectively communicate to motivate pro-environmental action, with insightful findings for both practice and further research

Economics for the Masses : The Visual Display of Economic Knoledge in the United Staes (1921-1945)

The rise of visual representation in economics textbooks after WWII is one of the main features of contemporary economics. In this paper, we argue that this development has been preceded by a no less significant rise of visual representation in the larger literature devoted to social and scientific issues, including economic textbooks for non-economists as well as newspapers and magazines. During the interwar era, editors, propagandists and social scientists altogether encouraged the use of visual language as the main vehicle to spread information and opinions about the economy to a larger audience. These new ways of visualizing social facts, which most notably helped shape the understanding of economic issues by various audiences during the years of the Great Depression, were also conceived by their inventors as alternative ways of practicing economics: in opposition to the abstraction of “neoclassical” economics, these authors wanted to use visual representation as a way to emphasize the human character of the discipline and did not accept the strict distinction between the creation and the diffusion of economic knowledge. We explore different yet related aspects of these developments by studying the use of visual language in economics textbooks intended for non-specialists, in periodicals such as the Survey, a monthly magazine intended for an audience of social workers, the Americanization of Otto Neurath's pictorial statistics and finally the use of those visual representations by various state departments and administrations under Roosevelt's legislature (including the much-commented Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration). We show how visualizations that have been created in opposition to neoclassical economics have lost most of their theoretical content when used widely for policy purposes while being simultaneously integrated into the larger American culture. It is our claim that those issues, which are familiar to those involved in cultural and visual studies, are also of crucial importance to apprehend the later developments of modern economics.Visualization, economocs, American Economy, Otto Neurath, Rexford Tugwell, Roosevelt, Roy Stryker, Photographs, Pictorial Statistics

Water - Planning for the Future

OVERVIEW: The student will understand that water resources include both surface water and ground water. The student will investigate the increases (or decreases) for water user groups - irrigation, municipal, manufacturing, steam electric power generation cooling, livestock, and mining. The student will use percentage change during the investigation. Graphs will be used by the student to relate the data as part of a written report.Environmental Science Institut

Your Life is Waiting! : Symbolic Meanings in Direct-to-Consumer Antidepressant Advertising

This semiotic analysis demonstrates how pharmaceutical companies strategically frame depression within the hotly contested terrain of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. The study tracks regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, relative to DTC advertising, including recent industry codes of conduct. Focusing on the antidepressant category, and its three major brands—Paxil (GlaxoSmithKline), Prozac (Eli Lilly), and Zoloft (Pfizer)—this comparative study analyzes 7 years of print advertising following deregulation in 1997. The authors glean themes from within the advertising texts, across the drug category and within individual-brand campaigns. The findings indicate that DTC advertising of antidepressants frames depression within the biochemical model of causation, privileges benefits over risks, fails to adequately educate consumers, and frames depression as a female condition. The authors close with commentary on the potential implications, with particular focus on the new codes of conduct, and offer suggestions for future research

A Wireless Future: performance art, interaction and the brain-computer interfaces

Although the use of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) in the arts originates in the 1960s, there is a limited number of known applications in the context of real-time audio-visual and mixed-media performances and accordingly the knowledge base of this area has not been developed sufficiently. Among the reasons are the difficulties and the unknown parameters involved in the design and implementation of the BCIs. However today, with the dissemination of the new wireless devices, the field is rapidly growing and changing. In this frame, we examine a selection of representative works and artists, in comparison to the current scientific evidence. We identify important performative and neuroscientific aspects, issues and challenges. A model of possible interactions between the performers and the audience is discussed and future trends regarding liveness and interconnectivity are suggested

An Innovative, Multidisciplinary Educational Program in Interactive Information Storage and Retrieval

There exists a large number of large-scale bibliographic Information Storage and Retrieval Systems containing large amounts of valuable data of interest in a wide variety of research applications. These systems are not used to capacity because the end users, i.e., the researchers, have not been trained in the techniques of accessing such systems. This thesis describes the development of a transportable, university-level course in methods of querying on-line interactive Information Storage and Retrieval systems as a solution to this problem. This course was designed to instruct upper division science and engineering students to enable these end users to directly access such systems. The course is designed to be taught by instructors who are not specialists in either computer science or research skills. It is independent of any particular IS and R system or computer hardware. The project is sponsored by NASA and conducted by the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Southern University

The promised territories: the production of branded housing projects in contemporary Turkey

Cities in Turkey, following the neoliberal restructuring of the country, have undergone a process of transformation in the last decade at a greater pace than experienced in previous periods. Through these processes, while new territories have been constructed, previous formations have been dismantled. While some of these constructed territories are abstract (e.g. Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics [NUTS] regions), some are tangible and physically defined such as branded housing enclaves. Branded housing projects produce territories in the form of housing enclaves, which provide key services and facilities within their confines exclusively for project residents. By 2013, the number of branded housing projects located in Istanbul alone numbered 852 with the number of units provided by these projects amounting to 7.7% of the total housing stock the city (Sarıçayır 01/21/2014). This paper argues that these territories are co-produced by political society and civil society (in Gramscian terms): while political society regulates and directly contributes to the production of these territories through public actors involved in the branded housing projects, civil society contributes through the production of social consent for such developments. The article discusses the role of political society and civil society in the production of branded housing projects by focusing on the case of Emlak Konut GYO (Real Estate Partnership) projects developed in Istanbul between 2003 and 2014. Firstly, the role of political society is discussed through the roles of TOKI (Housing Development Administration of Turkey) and Emlak Konut GYO as major public actors in the development of these territories; and secondly, the role of civil society is discussed through excavating the traces of production of social consent for branded housing projects in news articles published on Emlak Konut GYO projects between 2003 and 2014. The paper concludes that branded housing projects are emerging as spatial territories in contemporary Turkey as a result of hegemonic struggle through political society and civil society