Readability Of Content Research Articles

Functional requirements for bibliographic description in digital environments

Nowadays in digital information environments, various types of resources coexist with heterogeneous metadata formats and standards and efforts have been made to achieve interoperability in order to use multiple metadata standards and reuse metadata records by developing strategies, which range from simple mappings among metadata elements to complex structural modeling. Dealing with information resources requires a description of form and machine readable content with results that are understandable to humans and can meet the interoperability requirements between information environments. Considering this, this research proposes a reflection and suggests the development of an architecture for semantic bibliographic descriptions that ensures interoperability in digital information environments. By using exploratory and descriptive analysis, we found that Descriptive Cataloguing methodologies and a bibliographic ontology description, explained in the rules and codes of cataloguing and in metadata standards, redesign the development of better structured new digital information environments to retrieve information and effectively establish interoperability.

Assessment of the Accuracy of Online Information Regarding Trigger Finger.

Review of the recent literature suggests substantial use of the Internet by patients seeking health care information despite questionable accuracy and readability of information presented on some websites. The purpose of our study was to assess the accuracy, quality, and readability of online information regarding trigger finger. Three terms ("trigger finger", "stenosing tenosynovitis", and "finger locking") were used to query three Internet search engines to evaluate websites regarding information about trigger finger. Three hand surgery fellows independently assessed website accuracy and quality using standardized scoring criteria. The Fleisch-Kincaid reading grade level score was used to assess website readability. Website authorship and commercial association were also noted. Sixty-nine unique websites were assessed. Internet information obtained using the search term "stenosing tenosynovitis" was written at a significantly higher reading level than information found using "finger locking" or "trigger finger". Website quality and accuracy were both significantly better in websites authored by physicians compared to websites authored by non-physicians. However, website accuracy was significantly poorer in websites featuring commercial association. Additionally, websites presenting information written below the 8(th) grade reading level demonstrated poorer accuracy. Search term has a significant effect on the readability of online information regarding trigger finger. Despite the terminology used in searches, most websites are largely inaccurate and may not be easily understandable by the general population. This demonstrates a substantial barrier to accessing accurate health care information and may impact patient outcomes. Hand surgeons should direct patients towards websites presenting accurate information with easily readable content.

Renovating Contaminative Image Archives Based on Patch Propagation and Adaptive Confidence Collation

The preservation of classical archives is an essential task in the digitization of culture. So far, there remain two crucial challenges in archiving treasurable but aged image records. The first one is to eliminate a large-scale smudge located in a smooth ground, while the second one is to improve the readability of text content. Undoubtedly, the quality of an aged image is always degraded by antiquated smears, and the same situation occurs to obscure the content of a text image. In this paper, the authors apply the concept of patch propagation to help renovating contaminative images and introduce an adaptive confidence collation strategy to avoid the phenomenon of error diffusion, which often results in serious distortion in repairing. Furthermore, the techniques of Canny detection and center-weighted median filter are adopted in the proposed mechanism to refine the blurry target. In particular, the obscured text of aged images can be improved in the new mechanism, while it is seldom concerned in related works.

Finding Aliases using Noun Detection Algorithm

Increased amount of internet users leads to collision in the names on the web forums and in many scenarios, which in turn leads to maximum number of users who are using their aliases in the web. This creates a difficulty in detecting the proper user. So, systems are suggested to identify their aliases using the entity graphs. But most of them are experimenting on the datasets; on the other hand very few systems exist to be worked on real entity. So implemented system put forward an idea of finding aliases on the real web data by using an enhanced web crawler which collects all sub URL’s of the given seed URL, which is analyzed by the another baby crawler to fetch and parse the web data as human readable content using random walk relational theory. Alias graph is identified to be more efficient with the help of real relation entity graph on the collected web data. General Terms Pattern Recognition, Algorithms

Patient information materials in general practices and promotion of health literacy: an observational study of their effectiveness.

Government policy in the UK emphasises providing patients with good health information to encourage participation in their health care. Patient information leaflets (PILs) form part of this policy and have been shown to affect patient health outcomes; however, many are poorly written. To describe the PILs in general practice surgeries in Stoke-on-Trent in terms of readability and variety of content. An observational study of randomly selected GP practices (n = 17) across Stoke-on-Trent. PILs were assessed for readability (Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and compared with national skills level data and with the recommended level for medical information. The PILs were also categorised for content using the Rudd (2007) health material classification framework. A total of 345 PILs were collected and assessed. Only 24.3% meet recommended reading-level criteria. Compared with national skills levels, over 75% of the PILs collected were too complex for at least 15% of the English population. Of the PILs, 47.8% were classified as 'systems navigation' (information regarding services); 22.9% were disease prevention (screening and immunisations); 14.2% personal and public safety; and less than 10% were for managing illness or health promotion. Current PILs in general practices do not all promote health literacy. Information only accessible to a proportion of higher skilled patients may increase inequalities in health. Less than 10% of PILs promote managing illness or healthy lifestyles. Processes must be put in place to improve the readability and variety of content of PILs in GP practices.

Usability evaluation of collaborative PPGIS-GeoCWMI for supporting public participation during municipal planning and management services

This paper focuses on evaluating usability of a Geospatial-enabled Collaborative Web Mapsharing Infrastructure (GeoCWMI), which is developed for real-time mapsharing system application as part of a municipality planning and management services. This study aims to evaluate the usability of two major GIS-enabled Public Participation System (PPS) as prototypes to determine: (i) the extent to which the proposed platform of real-time mapsharing will enable and increase public participation, and (ii) how any municipality and/or planner interacts with the prototype. In other words, how can decision-making and municipal planning processes be enhanced via a synchronized and collaborative public participation GIS (Co-PPGIS)? A mock case study scenario discussed the use of Co-PPGIS prototype components (GeoCWMI and Web Online Participatory GIS) followed by the discussion of public participation concepts, existing practice of participation, evaluation of existing PPGIS application, and proposed infrastructure. The mock case is tested during planning and development scenario where the users are asked to provide the real-time collaborative feedback in terms of rich multimedia and mapsharing. In addition, the users are asked to provide collaborative feedback with suggestions for future urban expansion regarding potential sites in the York Region, Canada. The datasets on GeoCWMI usability have been collected using a Web-enabled feedback/questionnaire system, Team Viewer, Google Analytics, Session Cam, and Hit Sniffer software. The study shows that there are significant differences in the GeoCWMI usability among the different groups of participants in relation to their education, Web experience, and participatory practices and are more usable for users with GIS/Web experience. The study contributes awareness for researchers on how to improve PPGIS applications, e.g., it is noticed that readability of Web contents may influence the results. It is important to test the usability of GeoCWMI so that future researchers may need to avoid the similar kind of problems while designing new PPGIS applications. The results of this work may contribute to existing public participation practices, to municipal planning, to decision-making or to geographic information science.

Blind QR Code Steganographic Approach Based upon Error Correction Capability

A novel steganographic QR code algorithm, which not only coveys the secret into the widely-used QR barcode but also preserves the readability of QR content and the capability of error correction, is presented in this article. Different from the conventional applications for QR barcode, the designed algorithm conceals the secret into the QR modules directly by exploiting the error correction capability. General browsers can read the QR content from the QR code via barcode readers; however, only the authorized receiver can further reveal the secret from the QR code directly. The new mechanism can convey a larger secret payload along with adjustment of the QR version and error correction level. Moreover, the blind property allows the receiver to reveal the secret without the knowledge of the embedded position of modules. Experimental results demonstrate that the new algorithm is secure, efficient and feasible for the low-power QR readers and mobile devices.

Grand challenge: ELSI in a changing global environment

Grand challenge: ELSI in a changing global environment

Evaluación de la legibilidad de webs de universidades

Readability refers to the ease of reading and understanding a text. The need to ensure the readability of Web pages is related to universal access to products and services in the information society, which aims to provide an Internet for all. This article describes a study conducted to assess the readability of textual contents of Web portals of 40 universities at the top positions in international university rankings to determine whether the best universities have readable web pages. Mathematical formulas that evaluate syntactic difficulty of text oriented to texts written in English or in Spanish were applied.

The Development Process of the Semantic Web and Web Ontology

This paper deals with the semantic web and web ontology. The existing ontology development processes are not catered towards casual web ontology development, a notion analogous to standard web page development. Ontologies have become common on the World-Wide Web[2]. Key features of this process include easy and rapid creation of ontological skeletons, searching and linking to existing ontologies and a natural language-based technique to improve presentation of ontologies[6]. Ontologies, however, vary greatly in size, scope and semantics. They can range from generic upper-level ontologies to domain-specific schemas. The success of the Semantic Web is based on the existance of numerous distributed ontologies, using which users can annotate their data, thereby enabling shared machine readable content. This paper elaborates the stages in a casual ontology development process.

Case-based Anesthesia: Clinical Learning Guides

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois. n-nathan@northwestern.eduCase-based Anesthesia: Clinical Learning Guides. Edited by George Shorten, Stephen F. Dierdorf, M.D., Gabriella Iohom, M.D., Ph.D., Christopher J. O'Connor, M.D., and Charles W. Hogue, Jr., M.D. Philadelphia, Wolters Kluwer-Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009. Pages: 237. Price: $99.00.The authors of Cased-based Anesthesia: Clinical Learning Guides have aimed to produce a text that is unique among the voluminous and diverse selection of clinically oriented books now available. Case-based Anesthesia is most singular in its structure and format, amalgamating some of the most effective elements of question-answer based texts, such as Anesthesiology: Problem Oriented Patient Management (Yao, FS, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), while incorporating the brevity and readability of review books, as exemplified by Anesthesiology Review (Faust, RJ, Churchill Livingstone). Case-based Anesthesia does not intend to have comprehensive scope, nor does it brand itself as an exhaustive review book for board certification. Each of its 60 chapters is approximately four pages long and begins with a case presentation, succeeded by open-ended questions and their attendant discussion, often thoughtfully using graphs, tables, and images. Each case-based chapter follows one of two formats: “step-by-step” chapters lead the reader through a clinical scenario prospectively, whereas subjects configured into a “reflection” framework observe the topic retrospectively. The chapters conclude with a Key Messages list of bullet points summarizing the salient themes of the subject followed by three self-study questions with answers.Several elements of Case-based Anesthesia are noteworthy. Most importantly, it is a genuinely readable text because of the concise and cogent discussions of each topic. Although the succinct treatment of the subject matter prohibits the discussion from achieving its conceivable depths to some degree, this is largely compensated for by a robust chapter reference section composed of citations germane to the topic at hand. The majority of cited references in each chapter are from within 5 yr of the publication date, but the authors did not exclude “classic” articles essential to the bibliography. The book itself encompasses admirable latitudes of clinical practice, recognizing important issues within every subspecialty of clinical anesthesiology while also keeping the reader abreast of several “hot topics.” Examples of the latter include “Emergency Reversal of Rocuronium-induced Meeting Abstracts Using Sugammadex” and “Levosimendan and Acute Heart Failure.”Three elements of Case-based Anesthesia potentially detract from its utility. The methodology employed by the editors in selecting the various discussion topics is not readily apparent. Indeed, core topics such as perioperative hypertension and anaphylaxis share as much equivalent literary real estate as mitochondrial disease and occupational exposure to anesthetics. In addition, the chapters are not organized in a sequence relating to their subspecialty or temporal placement in the perianesthetic care of patients. This makes locating subject matter cumbersome. Finally, although the writing and editing of the primary content are superb, the concluding self-test questions are inconsistent with respect to degree of difficulty. Some require little to no critical thinking for the junior trainee, others are written with a fastidious attention to detail that may at times fail to underscore the key concepts.Cased-based Anesthesia: Clinical Learning Guides is altogether a welcoming text that should play an adjunctive role in one's library. It does not discriminate among its audience with respect to experience and training. It may, therefore, be useful to the junior-most trainee and to the seasoned authority alike. A most productive use of its contents will entail a focused attempt to answer the open-ended questions before reading the discussion. This may be particularly useful for clinicians preparing for oral board examination. Lastly, the young physician-educator may find himself/herself in need of a basic construct and content for intraoperative teaching. They should expect a thoroughly functional gain from having this text handy for “on the spot” didactics. In summary, Cased-based Anesthesia: Clinical Learning Guides may not yet deserve cardinal shelf space in one's bibliographic arsenal, but those who seek a departure from the density of conventional clinically oriented textbooks in favor of invitingly readable content should expect to be thoroughly satisfied.Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois. n-nathan@northwestern.edu

The Readability of Information Literacy Content on Academic Library Web Sites

This article reports on a study addressing the readability of content on academic libraries' Web sites, specifically content intended to improve users' information literacy skills. Results call for recognition of readability as an evaluative component of text in order to better meet the needs of diverse user populations.

Text Extraction in Complex Color Document Images for Enhanced Readability

Often we encounter documents with text printed on complex color background. Readability of textual contents in such documents is very poor due to complexity of the background and mix up of color(s) of foreground text with colors of background. Automatic segmentation of foreground text in such document images is very much essential for smooth reading of the document contents either by human or by machine. In this paper we propose a novel approach to extract the foreground text in color document images having complex background. The proposed approach is a hybrid approach which combines connected component and texture feature analysis of potential text regions. The proposed approach utilizes Canny edge detector to detect all possible text edge pixels. Connected component analysis is performed on these edge pixels to identify candidate text regions. Because of background complexity it is also possible that a non-text region may be identified as a text region. This problem is overcome by analyzing the texture features of potential text region corresponding to each connected component. An unsupervised local thresholding is devised to perform foreground segmentation in detected text regions. Finally the text regions which are noisy are identified and reprocessed to further enhance the quality of retrieved foreground. The proposed approach can handle document images with varying background of multiple colors and texture; and foreground text in any color, font, size and orientation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm detects on an average 97.12% of text regions in the source document. Readability of the extracted foreground text is illustrated through Optical character recognition (OCR) in case the text is in English. The proposed approach is compared with some existing methods of foreground separation in document images. Experimental results show that our approach performs better.

A health literacy assessment of the epilepsy.com website

Current healthcare guidelines identify low health literacy as a major barrier to optimal health communication. Health literacy is defined as the degree to which individuals can obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. An estimated 90 million people in the U.S. have marginal health literacy. The Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Education recommend that health related information be written at the 6th–8th grade level to address low health literacy. Epidemiological studies demonstrate that persons with epilepsy have significantly lower educational attainment and lower incomes placing them at risk for low health literacy and limited Internet access. While Internet users tend to have higher educational attainment, previous research indicates even good readers prefer simpler rather than more complex medical information. Health educational content that could be printed and given to patients addresses an important need in clinical epilepsy care. Previous reviews of health websites found they exceed recommended readability levels. Two online programs were used to assess the reading level of 1327 web pages on the www.epilepsy.com website using established readability formulas. Based on the Flesch Reading Ease assessment, only 3% of epilepsy.com web pages are written for a 6th grade reading level or below. If 8th grade level or below is used as the standard, only 15% are adequate. Recommendations and examples are provided for improving the readability of epilepsy-specific health education content.

Tools for Assessing Readability and Quality of Health‐Related Web Sites

With the Internet becoming a growing source of information on genetics, genetic counselors and other health-care providers may be called upon to guide their patients to appropriate material, which is written at a suitable reading level for the individual and contains quality information. Given that many health-related Web sites are written at a high school or higher reading level, without direction from a genetic counselor or health-care provider, many Internet users may currently be turning to health-related Web sites that they do not understand. Additionally, Internet users may not know how to evaluate the quality of information they find, which could lead to them access inaccurate or irrelevant information. To aid in the process of finding and designing Web sites that are appropriate for patients, the current article provides guidelines for assessing readability and quality of health-related content. Additionally, a demonstration of an assessment is provided. Finally, limitations of these assessments are discussed.

Readability, Grammar, and Vocabulary-Profiling of Content for a Sound Production Course Taught with Free Courseware

Busbee, Everette. (2007). Readability, grammar, and vocabulary-profiling of content for a sound production course taught with free courseware. English Teaching, 63(4), 3-29. Content course English should be comprehensible but challenging. Textbooks using such English are rare for lower language levels, so content courses often require teacher-generated materials. A quick Internet search may locate authentic materials that seem simple enough, but an analysis can validate this while assuring materials are challenging enough to offset the content teacher’s tendency to rely on language students already know. This paper describes matching the materials and student levels for a sound production course. A student project was broken into tasks, and sections of online files covering those tasks were graded by readability software. Promising material was then run through concordance software to determine the frequency of target forms and highlight repetitive grammar. Finally, vocabulary software provided lists of basic, academic, and off-list words. Each student required a package of software, but commercial wares would have been prohibitively expensive. The solution, which the author has never seen in print, was lesser-known but high-quality freeware. A course syllabus was produced by simply listing software and associated tasks in logical teaching order. Teaching is described and software and materials sources are provided, so an English teacher with computer skills could teach this class without demanding preparation. Principles of course design and software acquisition described here can be applied to other subjects.

A web-based patient education system and self-help group in Persian language for inflammatory bowel disease patients

Background and aims To study the use patterns of a Persian web-based patient education system for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients in Iran. Methods A web-based patient education system was developed with Persian content in three sections: general, ulcerative colitis (UC), and Crohn's disease (CD). The website included a forum for patients to communicate as a self-help group. A customized web tracking system recorded web use statistics. Polls at the bottom of each page collected the visitors’ opinion on the extent of helpfulness and readability of page contents. Web use data were analyzed for an 18-month period from October 2004 to April 2006. Results Having excluded page visits from search engine robots, the website's homepage was visited 4452 times (mean of monthly visits: 234, range: 102–330). The web pages titled Anatomy of gastrointestinal system, Nutrition in IBD, Diagnostic tests, How to cope with IBD, and IBD in women were the most favorite in general section. The web page titled IBD treatment was the most visited in both CD and UC sections followed by the web pages on cause of disease, diagnostic procedures and complications in CD section; and those titled symptoms, cause of disease and risk factors in the UC section. Overall, the content evaluation polls received 294 hits (from 186 unique visitors) of which, 196 (67%) were from patients, 30 (10%) from patients’ relatives/friends, 21 (7%) from doctors, and 47 (16%) from other groups. During the 18-month period, 47 patients registered in the self-help forum, 24 threads were opened, and 97 posts (33 in CD and 64 in UC section) were sent. Conclusions Considering the increasing trend of Internet use in developing countries like Iran, and the consequent increase in the proportion of Internet-using patients, and finally the time constraints gastroenterologists face answering patients’ questions; similar websites seem to be effective ways of patient education in close future.

Informed Consent for Clinical Evaluations of Investigational Implantable Medical Devices

A basic element in the protection of human subjects in clinical trials is the requirement for informed consent. Informed consent, and the particular minimum information that must be provided to subjects, is regulated in the United States by the FDA and by regulatory authorities in other countries. The informed consent document (ICD) provides a basis for assuring that appropriate information is provided to potential subjects. This paper discusses problems that may be encountered in two specific aspects of the ICD, namely, readability and adequacy of content to comply with regulations. Specific issues related to trials involving long-term implantable medical devices are considered. Suggestions for improving informed consent in such trials are provided.

Social Support Web-Based Resources for Patients with Chronic Pain

The authors performed an electronic search of websites that address psychosocial issues in pain management identified over 5 million sites. A search limited to pychosocial issue sin pain produced nearly 400,000. Nine scientific, professional and consumer-oriented websites were selected for review of social support information and opportunities using criteria focusing on patient information, referrals for counseling services and community-based assistance programs, self-help groups, specific pain syndromes, and readability and interpretability of consumer-oriented content. The internet can empower patients to self-manage their pain and seek out effective social support venues for improving their lives.

Development of a skilled midwifery training course for Bangladeshi nurses

The experience of different programmes of the global ‘Safe Motherhood’ initiative since 1987 have identified that the presence of a skilled attendant at the time of delivery is essential in order to detect and manage obstetric emergencies and save lives. Maternal mortality is high in Bangladesh and the coverage of skilled birth attendants is inadequate. The objective was to develop and implement a task-based curriculum on skilled midwifery for nurses. The curriculum, consisting of eleven modules, was developed in the context of adopting standard procedures of curriculum development in Bangladesh and was implemented by conducting one year of training for ten diploma nurses. Evaluation was undertaken through regular assessment of trainees, eliciting the opinion of trainees regarding the readability of curriculum contents, relevance and methods and fulfillment of expectations. The curriculum contents, teaching methods and assessment procedures were found appropriate for the training of skilled nurse midwives in Bangladesh.