Reducing the use of complex words and reducing sentence length to < 15 words improves readability of patient education materials regarding sports medicine knee injuries

"Sports-related knee injuries such as anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or meniscus tears are very common. Approximately 50% of internet users have reported using the internet to learn more information about a specific medical treatment or procedure. The internet’s usefulness is dependent not only on the content available to patients, but also the health literacy of the patient consuming the information. Poor health literacy is associated with poor outcomes. The NIH and AMA recommend that online patient resources be written at or below the sixth-grade reading level. Online PEMs in Orthopaedics have consistently been shown to be written above the NIH-recommended sixth-grade reading level to the detriment of patient health literacy. “A 2018 analysis of the readability of 39 AAOS Sports Med PEMs found that all PEMs were written above the 6th-grade reading level with 36% written above a 12th-grade reading level.” (PMID: 30480008) While many studies have suggested strategies to improve the readability of PEMs, literature describing the benefit of these proposed changes is scarce. The purpose of this study is to develop a standardized method to improve readability of Orthopaedic PEMs without diluting their critical content by reducing the use of complex words (> 3 syllables) and shortening sentence length to [less than] 15 words."--Introduction

EARTH SCIENCE MARKUP LANGUAGE

The Earth Science community is the processing and analyzing large amount and variety of data from space and ground-based observations and from models. These data are generally stored in physical media with different data formats. This large variety of data formats forces the scientists to spend significant amount of time in writing specialized data format specific, readers before their analysis can even begin. Formats for Earth Science data can be as simple as ASCII and binary formats or be as complex as Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) and HDF Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS) formats. In this paper, we introduce the Earth Science Markup Language (ESML), being currently developed at the Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. ESML would make applications independent of data formats and facilitate easier searches for data via internet search engine. Primary purpose of this paper is to bring ESML to the attention of data consumers and producers, and invite comments and suggestions

EARTH SCIENCE MARKUP LANGUAGE

The Earth Science community is the processing and analyzing large amount and variety of data from space and ground-based observations and from models. These data are generally stored in physical media with different data formats. This large variety of data formats forces the scientists to spend significant amount of time in writing specialized data format specific, readers before their analysis can even begin. Formats for Earth Science data can be as simple as ASCII and binary formats or be as complex as Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) and HDF Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS) formats. In this paper, we introduce the Earth Science Markup Language (ESML), being currently developed at the Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. ESML would make applications independent of data formats and facilitate easier searches for data via internet search engine. Primary purpose of this paper is to bring ESML to the attention of data consumers and producers, and invite comments and suggestions

Hardware Support for Profiling Java Programs

Assuming the Java version of a program provides good performance, many programmers are interested in using Java as a replacement for many traditional programming languages because of the portability of Java and the extensive runtime libraries. However, in many cases the performance of the Java code requires improvement before it is acceptable. Profiling provides an effective means of identifying the sections of code that consume the most processing time and are the best candidates for optimization. A prototype low-overhead, time-based profiling system has been developed for the Kaffe Java Virtual Machine&apos;s (JVM) Just-In-Time (JIT) i386 translator using the high-resolution timestamp register of the Intel Pentium processor. Experience with this approach suggests that a &quot;virtual time&quot; register would be a useful addition to the processor to simplify measuring the performance of multithreaded programs. Direct user control of the performance monitoring hardware would reduce the cost of measu..