How to Write Low Literacy Materials

This article is a tool for professionals and paraprofessionals who write educational materials for low literacy audiences. The article includes quick tips and a test that measure the reading level of printed materials. The author also points the reader to examples that are easily accessible and can be used when writing for low literacy audiences

How does stress induce headache? An experimental study

Psychological stress triggers headaches, but how this happens is unclear. To explore this, 38 episodic migraine sufferers, 28 with tension-type headache (T-TH) and 20 controls rated nausea, negative affect, task-expectancies and headache at 5-minute intervals during an unpredictable and uncontrollable 25-minute mental arithmetic task with a non-contingent failure rate. Blood pressure and pulse rate were measured every 3 minutes and salivary cortisol was sampled before and after the task. Trigeminal activation was measured by nociceptive blink reflex measures during each of the three experimental phases. Multiple regression analyses indicated that negative affect (NA) was the strongest predictor of headache intensity during the task. Increases in stress-headache were unrelated to consistent changes in cardiovascular activity but were related to declines in cortisol and increased post-task trigeminal activity. In repeated measures ANOVAs, participants who developed headache had higher nausea, NA and self-efficacy expectancies than those with no-or-low headache (p <.05 to p <.001). In further multiple regression analyses to identify which aspects of the stress process contributed to the high NA preceding headache, discouragement, anxiety, irritation and tension mediated the relationship between headache intensity during the stressful task and primary and secondary appraisal processes (stressor exposure and stressor reactivity). Avoidant coping, perceived inability to decrease pain, and outcome expectancy independently predicted headache intensity during the stressful task. Anxiety mediated the relationship between headache intensity and the coping tactics of wishful thinking, self-criticism, pain catastrophizing and praying/hoping. Attachment anxiety and the personality traits of openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness moderated the relationship between stress appraisals and headache. Results were discussed using the model of stress-headache as allostatic load. Findings suggest that headache developed when participants overextended themselves during a stressful task, adopting an information processing style which impeded emotional adjustment to changing situational demands. Learning to modify perceptions of threat and adopting a more flexible, less outcome-dependent processing style which avoids response conflict might help to prevent headache from spiralling upward

The Health Attitudes Of Twenty Five Prairie View A&M College College Graduate Students In Health Education

The health attitudes of individuals have always been an intriguing subject in Health Education yet very little research is reported partly because of this, the writer has chosen to synthesize the opinions based on the study and experiences of students now in Health Education Class at Prairie View A & M College. Purpose of this Study The purpose of this study is to analyze the health attitudes of twenty-five Prairie View graduate students in Health Education. For example, one group of the workers agree on the following: The most stubborn obstacle to success has been the difficulty of arousing vigorous convictions about the importance of health. In any subject a feeling of sympathy or even aversion on the part of the learners creates a difficulty problem of instruction; in health education, the question of attitude is crucial, since the ultimate test of success lies in the voluntary health behavior of the students. The distinctive element of an attitude is its emotional color, a feeling of attraction or aversion toward an idea or an action. This inclination may be the result of a single vivid and emotionally charged experience that fixes strongly over feeling toward subsequent experiences of similar nature. An attitude is more likely to be developed gradually through a rather extended series of experiences characterized by satisfaction, which becomes automatically associated with whatever seems to be the cause. There is a tendency for admiration or dislike of another person to be attached also to the thing he personifies, including his enthusiasm, beliefs, and practices. Parental attitudes are likely to be adopted among the students. The task of the teacher in attempting to promote desirable attitudes is often complicated by the number and character of those which students already hold. During the administration of this test, the author made it known to persons cooperating in this test that there was no penalty for wrong answers as the scale was not used for grading purposes. This was done because it was the desire of the writer that the students be honest in giving their reactions to the questions found on the test. Scone of the Study Female students of Health Education were contacted in various dormitories of Prairie View A & M College, summer, 1952. Of this group, twenty-five students were administered the test. The writer explained the test to the students in groups of five and each reread the test. This was repeated five times. This study is limited to twenty-five students majoring in Health Education at Prairie View A & M College, summer, 1952

Defining new knowledge produced by collaborative art-science research

This thesis takes a theoretical framework constructed for transdisciplinary research within different natural science disciplines and investigates what kind of new knowledge is produced when this framework is applied to projects at the interface of art and natural science. The main case study is “Sauti ya Wakulima – The Voice of the Farmers”, which involves collaboration with another intervention artist, and with natural scientists and farmers. This is a collaborative knowledge project with small-scale urban as well as rural farmers in Tanzania who have created an online community archive of their farming practices by using mobile phones to upload images and sounds onto a website. The research uses an open-ended participatory methodology that gives the participants as much creative agency as possible within the given power structures and practical and technical parameters. A second work examined is the Climate Hope Garden, an installation by the author in collaboration with ecologists and climate scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ). The installation consisted of a garden grown in climate-controlled chambers based on the climatic conditions proposed by IPCC climate scenarios. The project aimed to enact these scenarios on a spatial and temporal scale to which visitors could relate. Transdisciplinary research has become a key reference point in funding proposals. Despite many references in the literature, and calls for research involving both the natural sciences and humanities to solve complex world problems such as adaptation to climate change, there seems to be little consensus about exactly what kind of knowledge might be produced from such projects, and how transdisciplinary research proposals might be evaluated, especially those at the interface of art and the natural sciences. Several theoretical frameworks have been suggested for designing transdisciplinary research between and within scientific disciplines, or between the natural and social sciences and humanities. The present study applies the framework proposed by Christian Pohl and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn (2007) to a real-world transdisciplinary art-science project in a development context in order to examine the balance between the collective, locally embodied experience and the nomothetic knowledge that arises from it. This thesis found that transdisciplinarity is a different question from that of types of knowledge on the nomothetic-idiographic scale. Transdisciplinarity is a pragmatic question of definitions and inherited boundaries of disciplines. The framework categories do not differentiate between nomothetic and idiographic, just to which part of the problem-solving puzzle they fit. This is perfectly valid for goal-oriented, problem-solving research and can be applied to art-science research, but there are other ways of describing this work, such as using a philosophical description of the knowing process which comes closer to encompassing the richness of the knowledge produced. It is in this sense that the new type of knowledge generated by the transdisciplinary projects required an expansion of the given theoretical framework

The Gallery

Images related to the Eco-Techno theme from nine artists

Mapping geographical inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation facilities in low-income and middle-income countries, 2000-17

Background Universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities is an essential human right, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals as crucial for preventing disease and improving human wellbeing. Comprehensive, high-resolution estimates are important to inform progress towards achieving this goal. We aimed to produce highresolution geospatial estimates of access to drinking water and sanitation facilities. Methods We used a Bayesian geostatistical model and data from 600 sources across more than 88 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) to estimate access to drinking water and sanitation facilities on continuous continent-wide surfaces from 2000 to 2017, and aggregated results to policy-relevant administrative units. We estimated mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subcategories of facilities for drinking water (piped water on or off premises, other improved facilities, unimproved, and surface water) and sanitation facilities (septic or sewer sanitation, other improved, unimproved, and open defecation) with use of ordinal regression. We also estimated the number of diarrhoeal deaths in children younger than 5 years attributed to unsafe facilities and estimated deaths that were averted by increased access to safe facilities in 2017, and analysed geographical inequality in access within LMICs. Findings Across LMICs, access to both piped water and improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017, with progress varying spatially. For piped water, the safest wat

The global burden of falls: Global, regional and national estimates of morbidity and mortality from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: Falls can lead to severe health loss including death. Past research has shown that falls are an important cause of death and disability worldwide. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 (GBD 2017) provides a comprehensive assessment of morbidity and mortality from falls. Methods: Estimates for mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), incidence, prevalence, years lived with disability (YLDs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) were produced for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017 for all ages using the GBD 2017 framework. Distributions of the bodily injury (eg, hip fracture) were estimated using hospital records. Results: Globally, the age-standardised incidence of falls was 2238 (1990-2532) per 100 000 in 2017, representing a decline of 3.7% (7.4 to 0.3) from 1990 to 2017. Age-standardised prevalence w

Global trends of hand and wrist trauma: a systematic analysis of fracture and digit amputation using the Global Burden of Disease 2017 Study

Background: As global rates of mortality decrease, rates of non-fatal injury have increased, particularly in low Socio-demographic Index (SDI) nations. We hypothesised this global pattern of non-fatal injury would be demonstrated in regard to bony hand and wrist trauma over the 27-year study period. Methods: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 was used to estimate prevalence, age-standardised incidence and years lived with disability for hand trauma in 195 countries from 1990 to 2017. Individual injuries included hand and wrist fractures, thumb amputations and non-thumb digit amputations. Results: The global incidence of hand trauma has only modestly decreased since 1990. In 2017, the age- standardised incidence of hand and wrist fractures was 179 per 100 000 (95% uncertainty interval (UI) 146 to 217), whereas the less common injuries of thumb and non-thumb digit amputation were 24 (95% UI 17 to 34) and 56 (95% UI 43 to 74) per 100 000, respectively. Rates of injury vary greatly by region, and improvements have not been equally distributed. The highest burden of hand trauma is currently reported in high SDI countries. However, low-middle and middle SDI countries have increasing rates of hand trauma by as much at 25%. Conclusions: Certain regions are noted to have high rates of hand trauma over the study period. Low-middle and middle SDI countries, however, have demonstrated increasing rates of fracture and amputation over the last 27 years. This trend is concerning as access to quality and subspecialised surgical hand care is often limiting in these resource-limited regions.publishedVersio