Hospital outpatients' responses to taking medications with driving warnings

OBJECTIVE The study investigates the knowledge, intentions, and driving behavior of persons prescribed medications that display a warning about driving. It also examines their confidence that they can self-assess possible impairment, as is required by the Australian labeling system. METHOD We surveyed 358 outpatients in an Australian public hospital pharmacy, representing a well-advised group taking a range of medications including those displaying a warning label about driving. A brief telephone follow-up survey was conducted with a subgroup of the participants. RESULTS The sample had a median age of 53.2 years and was 53 percent male. Nearly three quarters (73.2%) had taken a potentially impairing class of medication and more than half (56.1%) had taken more than one such medication in the past 12 months. Knowledge of the potentially impairing effects of medication was relatively high for most items; however, participants underestimated the possibility of increased impairment from exceeding the prescribed dose and at commencing treatment. Participants' responses to the safety implications of taking drugs with the highest level of warning varied. Around two thirds (62.8%) indicated that they would consult a health practitioner for advice and around half would modify their driving in some way. However, one fifth (20.9%) would drive when the traffic was thought to be less heavy and over a third (37.7%) would modify their medication regime so that they could drive. The findings from the follow-up survey of a subsample taking target drugs at the time of the first interview were also of concern. Only just over half (51%) recalled seeing the warning label on their medications and, of this group, three quarters (78%) reported following the warning label advice. These findings indicated that there remains a large proportion of people who either did not notice or did not consider the warning when deciding whether to drive. There was a very high level of confidence in this group that they could determine whether they were personally affected by the medication, which may be a problem from a safety perspective. CONCLUSION This study involved persons who should have had a very high level of knowledge and awareness of medication warning labeling. Even in this group there was a lack of informed response to potential impairment. A review of the Australian warning system and wider dissemination of information on medication treatment effects would be useful. Clarifying the importance of potential risk in the general community context is recommended for consideration and further research.

Perceptions of climate change and trust in information providers in rural Australia

Disagreement within the global science community about the certainty and causes of climate change has led the general public to question what to believe and who to trust on matters related to this issue. This paper reports on qualitative research undertaken with Australian residents from two rural areas to explore their perceptions of climate change and trust in information providers. While overall, residents tended to agree that climate change is a reality, perceptions varied in terms of its causes and how best to address it. Politicians, government, and the media were described as untrustworthy sources of information about climate change, with independent scientists being the most trusted. The vested interests of information providers appeared to be a key reason for their distrust. The findings highlight the importance of improved transparency and consultation with the public when communicating information about climate change and related policies.

The impact of the built environment on health across the life course : design of a cross-sectional data linkage study

Introduction: The built environment is increasingly recognised as being associated with health outcomes. Relationships between the built environment and health differ among age groups, especially between children and adults, but also between younger, mid-age and older adults. Yet few address differences across life stage groups within a single population study. Moreover, existing research mostly focuses on physical activity behaviours, with few studying objective clinical and mental health outcomes. The Life Course Built Environment and Health (LCBEH) project explores the impact of the built environment on self-reported and objectively measured health outcomes in a random sample of people across the life course. Methods and analysis: This cross-sectional data linkage study involves 15 954 children (0–15 years), young adults (16–24 years), adults (25–64 years) and older adults (65+years) from the Perth metropolitan region who completed the Health and Wellbeing Surveillance System survey administered by the Department of Health of Western Australia from 2003 to 2009. Survey data were linked to Western Australia's (WA) Hospital Morbidity Database System (hospital admission) and Mental Health Information System (mental health system outpatient) data. Participants’ residential address was geocoded and features of their ‘neighbourhood’ were measured using Geographic Information Systems software. Associations between the built environment and self-reported and clinical health outcomes will be explored across varying geographic scales and life stages. Ethics and dissemination: The University of Western Australia's Human Research Ethics Committee and the Department of Health of Western Australia approved the study protocol (#2010/1). Findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at local, national and international conferences, thus contributing to the evidence base informing the design of healthy neighbourhoods for all residents.

Strategies and solutions for housing sustainability : building information files and performance certificates

The overall aim of this research project was to provide a broader range of value propositions (beyond upfront traditional construction costs) that could transform both the demand side and supply side of the housing industry. The project involved gathering information about how building information is created, used and communicated and classifying building information, leading to the formation of an Information Flow Chart and Stakeholder Relationship Map. These were then tested via broad housing industry focus groups and surveys. The project revealed four key relationships that appear to operate in isolation to the whole housing sector and may have significant impact on the sustainability outcomes and life cycle costs of dwellings over their life cycle. It also found that although a lot of information about individual dwellings does already exist, this information is not coordinated or inventoried in any systematic manner and that national building information files of building passports would present value to a wide range of stakeholders.

Pattern-based topics for document modelling in information filtering

Many mature term-based or pattern-based approaches have been used in the field of information filtering to generate users’ information needs from a collection of documents. A fundamental assumption for these approaches is that the documents in the collection are all about one topic. However, in reality users’ interests can be diverse and the documents in the collection often involve multiple topics. Topic modelling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), was proposed to generate statistical models to represent multiple topics in a collection of documents, and this has been widely utilized in the fields of machine learning and information retrieval, etc. But its effectiveness in information filtering has not been so well explored. Patterns are always thought to be more discriminative than single terms for describing documents. However, the enormous amount of discovered patterns hinder them from being effectively and efficiently used in real applications, therefore, selection of the most discriminative and representative patterns from the huge amount of discovered patterns becomes crucial. To deal with the above mentioned limitations and problems, in this paper, a novel information filtering model, Maximum matched Pattern-based Topic Model (MPBTM), is proposed. The main distinctive features of the proposed model include: (1) user information needs are generated in terms of multiple topics; (2) each topic is represented by patterns; (3) patterns are generated from topic models and are organized in terms of their statistical and taxonomic features, and; (4) the most discriminative and representative patterns, called Maximum Matched Patterns, are proposed to estimate the document relevance to the user’s information needs in order to filter out irrelevant documents. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model by using the TREC data collection Reuters Corpus Volume 1. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art term-based models and pattern-based models

Did you see that? Dissociating advanced visual information and ball flight constrains perception and action processes during one-handed catching

The integration of separate, yet complimentary, cortical pathways appears to play a role in visual perception and action when intercepting objects. The ventral system is responsible for object recognition and identification, while the dorsal system facilitates continuous regulation of action. This dual-system model implies that empirically manipulating different visual information sources during performance of an interceptive action might lead to the emergence of distinct gaze and movement pattern profiles. To test this idea, we recorded hand kinematics and eye movements of participants as they attempted to catch balls projected from a novel apparatus that synchronised or de-synchronised accompanying video images of a throwing action and ball trajectory. Results revealed that ball catching performance was less successful when patterns of hand movements and gaze behaviours were constrained by the absence of advanced perceptual information from the thrower's actions. Under these task constraints, participants began tracking the ball later, followed less of its trajectory, and adapted their actions by initiating movements later and moving the hand faster. There were no performance differences when the throwing action image and ball speed were synchronised or de-synchronised since hand movements were closely linked to information from ball trajectory. Results are interpreted relative to the two-visual system hypothesis, demonstrating that accurate interception requires integration of advanced visual information from kinematics of the throwing action and from ball flight trajectory.

The effect of varying diagnostic terminology within patient discharge information on expected mild traumatic brain injury outcome

This study aimed to determine if systematic variation of the diagnostic terminology embedded within written discharge information (i.e., concussion or mild traumatic brain injury, mTBI) would produce different expected symptoms and illness perceptions. We hypothesized that compared to concussion advice, mTBI advice would be associated with worse outcomes. Sixty-two volunteers with no history of brain injury or neurological disease were randomly allocated to one of two conditions in which they read a mTBI vignette followed by information that varied only by use of the embedded terms concussion (n = 28) or mTBI (n = 34). Both groups reported illness perceptions (timeline and consequences subscale of the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised) and expected Postconcussion Syndrome (PCS) symptoms 6 months post injury (Neurobehavioral Symptom Inventory, NSI). Statistically significant group differences due to terminology were found on selected NSI scores (i.e., total, cognitive and sensory symptom cluster scores (concussion > mTBI)), but there was no effect of terminology on illness perception. When embedded in discharge advice, diagnostic terminology affects some but not all expected outcomes. Given that such expectations are a known contributor to poor mTBI outcome, clinicians should consider the potential impact of varied terminology on their patients.

Supplementary information : weighted tree kernels for sequence analysis

Genomic sequences are fundamentally text documents, admitting various representations according to need and tokenization. Gene expression depends crucially on binding of enzymes to the DNA sequence at small, poorly conserved binding sites, limiting the utility of standard pattern search. However, one may exploit the regular syntactic structure of the enzyme's component proteins and the corresponding binding sites, framing the problem as one of detecting grammatically correct genomic phrases. In this paper we propose new kernels based on weighted tree structures, traversing the paths within them to capture the features which underpin the task. Experimentally, we and that these kernels provide performance comparable with state of the art approaches for this problem, while offering significant computational advantages over earlier methods. The methods proposed may be applied to a broad range of sequence or tree-structured data in molecular biology and other domains.

Media and information literacy : policy and strategy guidelines

In the evolving knowledge societies of today, some people are overloaded with information, others are starved for information. Everywhere, people are yearning to freely express themselves,to actively participate in governance processes and cultural exchanges. Universally, there is a deep thirst to understand the complex world around us. Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is a basis for enhancing access to information and knowledge, freedom of expression, and quality education. It describes skills, and attitudes that are needed to value the functions of media and other information providers, including those on the Internet, in societies and to find, evaluate and produce information and media content; in other words, it covers the competencies that are vital for people to be effectively engaged in all aspects of development.

Tourism TV commercials : a delicate balance between aural and visual information load

This article content analyzes music in tourism TV commercials from 95 regions and countries to identify their general acoustic characteristics. The objective is to offer a general guideline in the postproduction of tourism TV commercials. It is found that tourism TV commercials tend to be produced in a faster tempo with beats per minute close to 120, which is rare to be found in general TV commercials. To compensate for the faster tempo (increased aural information load), less scenes (longer duration per scene) were edited into the footage. Production recommendations and future research are presented.

Learning information literacy

Introduction This paper reports on university students' experiences of learning information literacy. Method Phenomenography was selected as the research approach as it describes the experience from the perspective of the study participants, which in this case is a mixture of undergraduate and postgraduate students studying education at an Australian university. Semi-structured, one-on-one interviews were conducted with fifteen students. Analysis The interview transcripts were iteratively reviewed for similarities and differences in students' experiences of learning information literacy. Categories were constructed from an analysis of the distinct features of the experiences that students reported. The categories were grouped into a hierarchical structure that represents students' increasingly sophisticated experiences of learning information literacy. Results The study reveals that students experience learning information literacy in six ways: learning to find information; learning a process to use information; learning to use information to create a product; learning to use information to build a personal knowledge base; learning to use information to advance disciplinary knowledge; and learning to use information to grow as a person and to contribute to others. Conclusions Understanding the complexity of the concept of information literacy, and the collective and diverse range of ways students experience learning information literacy, enables academics and librarians to draw on the range of experiences reported by students to design academic curricula and information literacy education that targets more powerful ways of learning to find and use information.

Creating and sharing : teens' information practices in digital communities

Introduction In a connected world youth are participating in digital content creating communities. This paper introduces a description of teens' information practices in digital content creating and sharing communities. Method The research design was a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Seventeen interviews with eleven teens were collected and observation of their digital communities occurred over a two-year period. Analysis The data were analysed iteratively to describe teens' interactions with information through open and then focused coding. Emergent categories were shared with participants to confirm conceptual categories. Focused coding provided connections between conceptual categories resulting in the theory, which was also shared with participants for feedback. Results The paper posits a substantive theory of teens' information practices as they create and share content. It highlights that teens engage in the information actions of accessing, evaluating, and using information. They experienced information in five ways: participation, information, collaboration, process, and artefact. The intersection of enacting information actions and experiences of information resulted in five information practices: learning community, negotiating aesthetic, negotiating control, negotiating capacity, and representing knowledge. Conclusion This study contributes to our understanding of youth information actions, experiences, and practices. Further research into these communities might indicate what information practices are foundational to digital communities.

Mining specific features for acquiring user information needs

Term-based approaches can extract many features in text documents, but most include noise. Many popular text-mining strategies have been adapted to reduce noisy information from extracted features; however, text-mining techniques suffer from low frequency. The key issue is how to discover relevance features in text documents to fulfil user information needs. To address this issue, we propose a new method to extract specific features from user relevance feedback. The proposed approach includes two stages. The first stage extracts topics (or patterns) from text documents to focus on interesting topics. In the second stage, topics are deployed to lower level terms to address the low-frequency problem and find specific terms. The specific terms are determined based on their appearances in relevance feedback and their distribution in topics or high-level patterns. We test our proposed method with extensive experiments in the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 dataset and TREC topics. Results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

A sequential Monte Carlo framework for adaptive Bayesian model discrimination designs using mutual information

In this paper we present a unified sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework for performing sequential experimental design for discriminating between a set of models. The model discrimination utility that we advocate is fully Bayesian and based upon the mutual information. SMC provides a convenient way to estimate the mutual information. Our experience suggests that the approach works well on either a set of discrete or continuous models and outperforms other model discrimination approaches.

Transitioning from vocational education and training to university : strengthening information literacy through collaboration

"Students transitioning from vocational education and training (VET) to university can experience a number of challenges. This small research project explored the information literacy needs of VET and university students and how they differ. Students studying early childhood related VET and university courses reported differences in how and where they searched for information in their studies. These differences reflect the more practical focus of VET compared with the more academic and theoretical approach of university. The author proposes a framework of support that could be provided to transitioning students to enable them to develop the necessary information literacy skills for university study."--publisher website