A team that included writers, designers, scientists and educators worked together to put together the package of images the public saw, and the alt text was not an afterthought, Rhue said. He said the team had a relatively short period of time to produce those descriptions. He only saw the photos a week before the public did. But they had spent the previous two years discussing accessibility and working with a consulting agency to create an alt text stylebook. During that process, they practiced writing descriptions and learned what didn’t work. “I had thought that brevity was a really important thing. That’s a common misconception,” Rhue said. He pointed to the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and said the recent images required more words than that to fully capture them. “There were more than 1,000 words written about each of those pictures, and we could keep going.”

In many cases, “don’t worry” is just being used as shorthand for “there’s good reason to think monkeypox won’t cause a global pandemic” — which, to be clear, is a true claim. But I think it’s worth spelling out the longer claim, rather than treating worry as the key consideration. People shouldn’t be encouraged to view outbreaks through the lens of “should I be scared?” but rather through the lens of “will this be contained, what will it take to contain it, and if it’s not contained, what effects will it have on the world?” Once you have the accurate facts about monkeypox — and about the risk of pandemics generally — whether you’re worried by those facts isn’t really a question for the CDC.

If you’re looking for inspiration, it’s worth exploring “5 Levels,” a web series produced by the publication WIRED. In each episode, an expert in a subject breaks it down five ways – by talking with a young child, a teen, a college student, a graduate student studying the same topic, and a fellow expert.

Taking your offering to market requires a clear message that resonates with the audience. Your message is meaningful or meaningless: either your message aligns with the dominant cultural narrative and is accepted relatively easy, or your message must alter the cultural narrative before it gains widespread acceptance. Progressive ideas shift the dominant narrative, often at great cost to the messenger. Martin Luther King, like Moses, did not live to enter into the Promised Land. What makes a message convincing? What is a narrative? What makes it dominant? How does a message gain cultural acceptance? How does one shift or disrupt a cultural narrative? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on a number of diverse ideas and integrating them into a practical model.

Having a standardized unit of measure for risk would be helpful for our personal calculations, but it could also become a core part of the way the media or public health authorities talk about threats like epidemic disease, or even seasonal flu. Post-COVID—if we ever get there—I suspect I will still be interested to know if the flu risk starts to climb in New York, even by a few micromorts—I wouldn’t radically change my plans, but I might put on a mask in the subway for a few weeks. For the past seventy years, every single local news broadcast has been telling you what the temperature is going to be tomorrow, and the chance of precipitation. Why shouldn’t they also include genuinely life-or-death odds?

A difficulty for investigating the accuracy of everyday risks perception has been the lack of an obvious objective framework on which to compare subjective responses. This difficulty stands in contrast to other fields of risk research. For example, risk perception in health contexts, uses the probability of death or ill health (e.g. as compiled by disease data registries) as the objective comparator [2, 3, 27]; and in financial fields, losses and gains in gambling tasks can be used as an objective comparator [28, 29]. In the current study the concept of MicroMorts is introduced as an objective risk framework to investigate the accuracy of everyday risk perception. We have around a one in a million chance of dying from an accident or incident every day, and this acute risk is quantified as one MicroMort [30, 31]. That is, MicroMorts are units that index acute risk (i.e. sudden death): one MicroMort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. We increase our risk through our choices of activities, for example, skydiving has a MicroMort value of 10, walking 27 miles has a MicroMort value of one, and giving birth has a MicroMort value of 120 (i.e. 10, 1 or 120 chance in a million chance of dying respectively) [31]. MicroMorts enable us to compare the acute risk of death from various activities, for example, a general anaesthetic and a sky-dive both carry the same acute risk of death, 10 MicroMorts (10 in one million people will die as a result of doing either). This MicroMort framework is being increasingly being used to index health risks and provide a framework for risk communication, including patient consent [31–33]

Syndromic surveillance systems monitor disease indicators to detect emergence of diseases and track their progression. Here, we report on a rapidly deployed active syndromic surveillance system for tracking COVID‑19 in Israel. The system was a novel combination of active and passive components: Ads were shown to people searching for COVID‑19 symptoms on the Google search engine. Those who clicked on the ads were referred to a chat bot which helped them decide whether they needed urgent medical care. Through its conversion optimization mechanism, the ad system was guided to focus on those people who required such care. Over 6 months, the ads were shown approximately 214,000 times and clicked on 12,000 times, and 722 people were informed they needed urgent care. Click rates on ads and the fraction of people deemed to require urgent care were correlated with the hospitalization rate ( R2=0.54 and R2=0.50 , respectively) with a lead time of 9 days. Males and younger people were more likely to use the system, and younger people were more likely to be determined to require urgent care (slope: −0.009 , P=0.01 ). Thus, the system can assist in predicting case numbers and hospital load at a significant lead time and, simultaneously, help people determine if they need medical care.

Which theory of behavior change can help you plan a health communication intervention for a large audience? There is no single right answer, but some theories will fit your needs better than others. The purpose of this tool is to rank-order some commonly used theories by their degree of fit with your behavior change challenge.

So Limaye and Johns Hopkins have created a free two-hour course on the online platform Coursera that's open to anyone. It's called COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents. Their goal is to prepare everyone, from principals to PTA presidents, to counter misinformation with empathy and, ultimately, to move more people to seek out the lifesaving vaccine.

Tested is an award-winning comic book that features diverse characters affected by a broad range of health conditions and related social issues. With a touch of heart and humor, 'Tested' depicts a diverse cast of characters affected by stigma, HIV, STIs, substance use, LGBTQ+ issues, and much more.

Less is more As we look for ways to build memories and cement pre-disposition in consumers’ minds, coherence and clarity remain significant enablers across touchpoints and over time. Using Kantar’s Link database, we investigated the percentage of people who play back each of the key messages in ads that have 1, 2 or 3+ messages. One message in an ad has much more impact than multiple One message in an ad has much more impact than multiple Source: Kantar Link database, US TV ads The findings were a clear plea for simplicity. Too many messages can dilute communication as our brains can only really think about 3-4 things at once. So, in essence, the more messages an ad attempts to communicate, the lower the likelihood any single message will be communicated strongly. And although the results are somewhat varied by type of ad - TV or static - and by market, there was consensus that to successfully communicate a product benefit, we need to keep it simple and avoid too many messages. This is advertising 101 really, but with the rise of digital, it got lost in some places.

Why are “click here” and “by this link” poor choices? And is it acceptable to use “read more”? In this article, I’ll explain popular wording and formatting mistakes and will show more accessible and informative alternatives.

There are surely many ways in which our beliefs can be quite nuanced. We examined the different ‘styles’ of belief we come up against in a variety of the work we do and observed a number of ways these styles appear: Suspension of disbelief: We know not to look too closely at something – we think that overall it is a good thing (e.g. recycling) but aware of possible discrepancies (e.g. being poorly disposed of) that may or may not lead us to question our positive beliefs. We are aware of the possible conflicts but this does not make our belief in the value of recycling any less valid. There are a great many beliefs that we have that could be challenged yet they serve us sufficiently well that we do not need to interrogate them too closely (political representation, eating meat) Inconsistent beliefs: Linked to this, we may hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. We may know that wild fires are a natural phenomenon that predates climate change; but also that the fires we see in many areas today are of a much greater intensity and frequency. Exactly which is responsible cannot really be picked out, we can only really see the patterns emerging at a more macro-level, so it is not unreasonably to either hold both as true for even consider that the fire you have experience is a normal wild fire. Off-loading beliefs to others: Much of the time our beliefs about how things work is not something that we each individually work out, but we rely on a community of knowledge to work on our behalf. How many of us can be sure that our beliefs are correct about how vaccines work or indeed even how a zipper work. If we are questioned, then we recognise that our belief about how something works is tenuous but we have a good enough sense of it that allows us to function. Unformed beliefs: Sometimes we have not quite worked out what our beliefs are about something, which means that we may well move about in those beliefs or in the strength to which we hold onto them. The vaccination example outlined earlier is a good case in point. Not sure fully believe it but ‘there is something in it’ beliefs: Recent work we have been doing on Conspiracy Theories suggests that people may consider something is believable (e.g. Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental) but at the same time, in a different question then say they ‘do not fully believe it but there is something in it’. So what might seem like a belief is actually something much more akin to a questioning stance.

CONCLUSIONS Debunking strategies that repeat vaccination myths do not appear to be inferior to strategies that do not repeat myths.

we propose an integrative approach that combines three complementary paths: (1) putting the “social” back into health organizations’ culture by inserting more “social” content into the internal organizational discourse through consultation with experts from different fields, including those who diverge from the scientific consensus. (2) Using strategies to enable health organizations to respond to the public on social networks, based on health communications research and studies on emerging infectious disease (EID) communication. (3) Engaging the public on social media based on the participatory approach, which considers the public as a partner that understands science and can work with the organizations to develop an open and innovative pandemic realm by using crowdsourcing to solve complex global health problems.

Objective: In this work, we aimed to develop a practical, structured approach to identify narratives in public online conversations on social media platforms where concerns or confusion exist or where narratives are gaining traction, thus providing actionable data to help the WHO prioritize its response efforts to address the COVID-19 infodemic. Methods: We developed a taxonomy to filter global public conversations in English and French related to COVID-19 on social media into 5 categories with 35 subcategories. The taxonomy and its implementation were validated for retrieval precision and recall, and they were reviewed and adapted as language about the pandemic in online conversations changed over time. The aggregated data for each subcategory were analyzed on a weekly basis by volume, velocity, and presence of questions to detect signals of information voids with potential for confusion or where mis- or disinformation may thrive. A human analyst reviewed and identified potential information voids and sources of confusion, and quantitative data were used to provide insights on emerging narratives, influencers, and public reactions to COVID-19–related topics. Results: A COVID-19 public health social listening taxonomy was developed, validated, and applied to filter relevant content for more focused analysis. A weekly analysis of public online conversations since March 23, 2020, enabled quantification of shifting interests in public health–related topics concerning the pandemic, and the analysis demonstrated recurring voids of verified health information. This approach therefore focuses on the detection of infodemic signals to generate actionable insights to rapidly inform decision-making for a more targeted and adaptive response, including risk communication.

chatbot conversational “game“

In 2005, he asked participants to read samples of text including graduate school applications, sociology dissertation abstracts and translations of a work of Descartes. Some participants read the original versions, written in a verbose, jargon-filled style, while others were given edited versions, with unnecessarily complex words switched for simpler alternatives. Finally, the psychologist asked the participants to rate the intelligence of the authors. Those who read the simplified versions rated the author as +10% more intelligent than those who read the more complex, original text.

“I understand how you feel.“

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Amy Jo Kim interviews Casey Means, cofounder of Levels

Our project tracks behavioural science evidence and advice about COVID-19 vaccine uptake. The handbook is for journalists, doctors, nurses, policy makers, researchers, teachers, students, parents – in short, it’s for everyone who wants to know more: about the COVID-19 vaccines, how to talk to others about them, how to challenge misinformation about the vaccines. The handbook is self-contained but additionally provides access to a Wiki of more detailed information, found here: https://sks.to/c19vax.