Words Matter: An Analysis of the Content and Readability of COVID-19 Information on Clinic Websites

Objective: To examine content and readability of COVID-19 information on outpatient clinic websites in South Carolina.Participants: Thirty-three outpatient clinic websites.Methods: Using a multi-step search strategy, we located three COVID-19 information content sections from each website. Descriptive statistics were calculated for content section characteristics (focus, information source, target population/race, presence of graphics, mobilizing information). Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) were used to calculate reading levels. Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests were performed to examine readability levels by clinic type (primary care vs. specialty) and content section characteristics.Results: Twenty-six clinics offered COVID-19 information; 70 content sections across all 26 clinics were analyzed. Sections focused on COVID-19 clinic policies (48.4%), prevention (22.6%), testing (19.4%), and symptoms (9.7%). 93.5% lacked target population, 41.9% provided no information source, 38.7% had no graphics, and none mentioned racial/ethnic groups. MFRE = 54.3, MFKGL = 9.9, MSMOG = 9.5.Conclusion: COVID-19 information focused mainly on clinic policy and was written at a ninth-grade skill level. Findings suggest there is opportunity for clinics to update their online content to convey more plain language and sourced information, especially for high-risk groups.

Persepsi Dokter Hewan Praktisi Hewan Kecil terhadap Telemedicine di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

Telemedicine is defined as remote diagnose and patient care using telecommunications technology. Recently telemedicine technology was introduced to the field of veterinary medicine. Due to the nature of telecommunications, a veterinarian will utilize telemedicine technology as a means of assessing patient severity and providing medical advice. The perception of veterinarians, especially small animal practitioners, to telemedicine is influenced by many factors, for example: age, desire (expectation), attention (focus), information obtained, and other factors. This study aims to determine the factors that influence veterinarians' perceptions of telemedicine. This research is expected to be an input in implementing telemedicine in practice. The design of this study is descriptive method, where the sampling method uses a questionnaire filled out by small animal practitioners online. The results showed that the pandemic had no impact on veterinary services. But there is an adaptation of practice procedure. Respondents are neutral towards the application of telemedicine, but the majority of respondents who have implemented telemedicine think that the application of telemedicine has a good impact on health services. There are many obstacles felt by respondents in implementing telemedicine.

Not Too Much and Not Too Little: Information Processing for a Good Purchase Decision

When deciding on an online purchase, consumers often face a plethora of information. Yet, individuals consumers differ greatly in the amount of information they are willing and able to acquire and process before making purchasing decisions. Extensively processing all available information does not necessarily promote good decisions. Instead, the empirical evidence suggests that reviewing too much information or too many choice alternatives can impair decision quality. Using simulated contract conclusion scenarios, we identify distinctive types of information processing styles and find that certain search and selection strategies predict the quality of the final choice. Participants (N = 363) chose a cellular service contract in a web-based environment that closely resembled actual online settings in the country of study. Using information processing data obtained with tracking software, we identify three consumer segments differing along two dimensions – the extent dimension, referring to the overall effort invested in information processing, and the focus dimension, referring to the degree to which someone focuses on the best available options. The three subgroups of respondents can be characterized as follows: (1) consumers with a low-effort and low-focus information processing strategy (n = 137); (2) consumers with a moderate-effort and high-focus information processing strategy (n = 124); and (3) consumers with high-effort and low-focus information processing strategy (n = 102). The three groups differed not only in their information processing but also in the quality of their decisions. In line with the assumption of ecological rationality, most successful search strategies were not exhaustive, but instead involved the focused selection and processing of a medium amount of information. Implications for effective consumer information are provided.

Computational optical sectioning by phase-space imaging with an incoherent multiscale scattering model

Optical sectioning is essential for fluorescence imaging in thick tissue to extract in-focus information from noisy background. Traditional methods achieve optical sectioning by rejecting the out-of-focus photons at a cost of photon efficiency, resulting in a tradeoff between sectioning capability and detection parallelization. Here, we show phase-space imaging with an incoherent multiscale scattering model can achieve computational optical sectioning with ~20 dB improvement for signal-to-background ratio in scattering medium, while maximizing the detection parallelization by imaging the entire volume simultaneously. We validated the superior performance by imaging various biological dynamics in Drosophila embryos, zebrafish larvae, and mice.

On the relationship between competitive intelligence and innovation

Innovation research suggests customer, competitor and market knowledge areimportant requirements for innovation. Researchers in competitive intelligence (CI) haveproposed that there should be a relationship between CI and innovation. Yet despite both fieldsrecognising the need for CI and related areas for innovation in their theories, there have notbeen many empirical studies that look at CI and innovation and those few studies that do existhave limited focus and have only looked at a small subset of CI variables (for example collectionsources). The aim of this study is to examine if there is a relationship between CI andinnovation. This was done by surveying Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professional(SCIP) members and those attending SCIP events, and asking them about their intelligencepractices and how innovative their company was. Ninety-five questions were asked about CIstructure and organization, intelligence focus, information sources used, analytical techniquesused, communication methods, and the management of the intelligence efforts. Of the 95competitive intelligence measures used in this study, 56 (59%) were significantly correlated withthe study’s measure of innovation. The measures within the CI organizational elements and CImanagement categories had the highest percentage of measures significantly correlated withinnovation (90% and 89%). Four of the CI measures had statistically significant correlationsabove .300. These included the extent to which business decisions in the organization werebetter facilitated/supported as a result of intelligence efforts (.355), the number of performancemeasures used in assessing CI’s performance (.322) and decision depth (.313), which is ameasure of the number of decisions that utilized CI. As a study of this nature measuring therelationship between CI and innovation has not been conducted previously, the findings can bebeneficial to organisations using innovation to succeed in the competitive environment.

Be close or stay away: the interactive effect of loneliness and information frameworks on consumer's anthropomorphic product preference

PurposeThis article investigated the relationship between loneliness and anthropomorphic products.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted three studies to examine their hypotheses.FindingsThe authors confirmed that highly lonely people would like to seek for social relationship. What's more, they may try to compensate by creating a sense of connection with nonhuman products so they will prefer anthropomorphic products. Further, the authors demonstrated that information framework can moderate this effect. Highly lonely consumers would increase their preference to anthropomorphic product under promotion-focus information, whereas they would decrease their preference to anthropomorphic product under prevention-focus information. These effects do not exist in lowly lonely consumers. At the same time, the authors demonstrate that the effect is mediated by perceived social connection.Originality/valueThis article contributes to loneliness literature in the consumer behavior field and proves the moderation effect of the information framework, which can deepen our understanding of the relationship between loneliness and anthropomorphic products.

Learning how to exploit sources of information

How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e. unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which control processes specialize the conversion of available information into memory representations. We hypothesize that such control is refined by repeated experience with a task, and as a result, memory representations will specialize as task experience accrues, such that report accuracy for an unexpected question will progressively worsen as the number of preceding trials increases. To test this, subjects were asked to report the location of a letter among three digits. The ability to respond correctly to a surprise question about the identity of that letter became worse as the experiment progressed. A followup study evaluated whether this incremental worsening of report accuracy could be explained as a buildup of proactive interference by varying the set of letters for the surprise test. The results were unchanged relative to the original experiment, which argues against a primary contribution of proactive interference in the worsening performance. The effect was replicated in a similar paradigm using color disks. These findings illustrate that repeated performance of a prescriptive task engages an adaptive modification of control processes that focus information processing on specific attributes of a stimulus that are expected to be necessary in the future, regardless of their immediate task relevance.

Decomposing cornering effects

Alternative Questions with “or not” (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is notfound with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts(Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followupquestions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of corneringlinked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? Weexplore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions(CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlikeNAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts ofcornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles,which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.Keywords: Alternative Questions, cornering, discourse, focus, information structure.

Value-creation through spin-offs: Australian evidence

We examine announcement effects and the long-run stock performance associated with spin-offs for companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The 3-day announcement effect is a significantly positive 2.93%. Contrary to previous studies, we find no differences between ex post completed and non-completed spin-off announcements. The abnormal returns do not seem to be related to factors found significant in previous studies, such as an increase in industrial or geographical focus, information asymmetry, and the amount of bank debt of the parent company. There is some evidence that Australian spin-offs are associated with a positive long-run excess stock performance for up to 24 months after the spin-off. This effect is mostly driven by focus-increasing spin-offs.