BACKGROUND Disparities in health status among ethnic groups favor the Caucasian population in the United States on almost all major indicators. Disparities in exposure to health-related mass media messages may be among the environmental factors contributing to the racial and ethnic imbalance in health outcomes. This study evaluated whether variations exist in health-related advertisements and h...

Psychological tests are intended to measure individual differences. One of the first things most people associate with psychology is testing. You can find some kind of "psychological test" in popular magazines, which claim to measure everything from your intelligence or your personality to how good a lover you are. Such tests can be described as "pop tests.” Most people have also heard of and m...

Publications such as consumer magazines rely heavily on image libraries as sources for the images they publish in their issues. Traditionally, magazine staff discuss their image requirements over the telephone with library staff and the library conducts the search. Many libraries have now developed Web sites allowing their customers to search for images themselves. However this survey found tha...

The Springer-Praxis Popular Astronomy programme covers the latest observations, techniques and discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology, selecting key topics designed to fire the imagination of keen astronomers everywhere. Many of the topics selected for titles in this programme are refreshingly new, and away from the accepted mainstream of titles published in this area. Topics inc...

morbidity and mortality rates to aged morbidity and mortality and from the infectious illness regime to the chronic degenerative one, from illness as setback to illness as career, a generation earlier than among the lower classes. And as the Black Report and its recent supplements have shown, that gap persists. Riley's work, with its strong actuarial foundation, is an important aid to probing t...

From Hollywood blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and The Butterfly Effect to popular books such as Chaos by Gleick (1988) and Complexity by Waldrop (1992), the new science of complexity has made its way into the American discourse. By now thoughtful educators cannot have failed to at least glance at the headlines in popular science magazines proclaiming new scientific advances. They are aware ...

Information graphics (bar charts, line graphs, grouped bar charts, etc.) often appear in popular media such as newspapers and magazines. In most cases, the information graphic is intended to convey a high-level message; this message plays a role in understanding the document but is seldom repeated in the document’s text. This paper presents our methodology for recognizing the intended message o...

Information graphics, such as bar charts, grouped bar charts, and line graphs, are an important component of multimodal documents and cannot be ignored. When such graphics appear in popular media, such as magazines and newspapers, they generally have an intended message. We argue that this message represents a brief summary of the graphic’s high-level content, and thus can serve as the basis fo...

This study examined the fear control/danger control responses that are predicted by the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM). In a campaign designed to inform college students about the symptoms and dangers of meningitis, participants were given either a high-threat/no-efficacy or high-efficacy/no-threat health risk message, thus testing the extreme assumptions of the EPPM. Although the study...