Northampton Community College

About: Northampton Community College is a education organization based out in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 3410 authors who have published 4582 publications receiving 130398 citations. The organization is also known as: Northampton County Area Community College.

Evaluating the effectiveness of visual user interfaces for information retrieval

Abstract: An integrated visual thesaurus and results browser to support information retrieval was designed using a task model of information searching. The system provided a hierarchical thesaurus with a results cluster display representing similarity between retrieved documents and relevance ranking using a bullseye metaphor. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) was used as the retrieval engine and to calculate the similarity between documents. The design was tested with two information retrieval tasks. User behaviour, performance and attitude were recorded as well as usability problems. The system had few usability problems and users liked the visualizations, but recall performance was poor. The reasons for poor/good performance were investigated by examining user behaviour and search strategies. Better searchers used the visualizations more effectively and spent longer on the task, whereas poorer performances were attributable to poor motivation, difficulty in assessing article relevance and poor use of system visualizations. The bullseye browser display appeared to encourage limited evaluation of article relevance on titles, leading to poor performance. The bullseye display metaphor for article relevance was understood by users; however, they were confused by the concept of similarity searching expressed as visual clusters. The conclusions from the study are that while visual user interfaces for information searching might seem to be usable, they may not actually improve performance. Training and advisor facilities for effective search strategies need to be incorporated to enhance the effectiveness of visual user interfaces for information retrieval.

Ethnic and social inequalities in women's experience of maternity care in England: results of a national survey:

Abstract: SummaryObjectiveTo examine ethnic and social inequalities in women's experience of maternity care in England.DesignA 2007 national survey of women (16 years or over) about their experience of mater...

A Brief Mindfulness Intervention for Healthy College Students and Its Effects on Psychological Distress, Self-Control, Meta-Mood, and Subjective Vitality

Abstract: This study investigated the effects of a 6-week adapted mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) intervention on the psychological health and well-being of college students The experimental group participants were students and faculty (N = 19) who signed up for the mindfulness-based class, and the control group participants (N = 25) were interested in the class but were unable to sign up in time to enroll Participants were surveyed three times on a range of self-report psychological variables including symptoms of psychological distress, emotional awareness, self-control, day-to-day mindfulness, and subjective vitality A control group took the same surveys but did not receive any treatment The adapted-MBSR intervention significantly reduced psychological distress in the experimental group participants as compared to the control group (p = 027, η 2 = 161) and significantly increased self reported mindful awareness (p = 028, η 2 = 160), self-control (p = 007, η 2 = 216), and subjective vitality (p = 001, η 2 = 293), while meta-mood was not affected (p = 314, η 2 = 055) We concluded that MBSR has wide-ranging positive effects on college students, and would be beneficial as a campus stress reduction and preventative mental health intervention

The Modelling of Recent Mortality Trends in United Kingdom Male Assured Lives

Abstract: Deaths and exposures by individual calendar year and individual years of age for the U.K. male assured lives experience over the recent past are comprehensively modelled using generalised linear modelling techniques. Our principal objective is to develop a model which incorporates both the age variation in mortality and the underlying time trends in the mortality rates. The approach has considerable advantages over ad hoc methods of fitting parametric models to represent the age variation in mortality and then separately attempting to represent the time trends in the parameters of these models. The approach advocated can be seen as an extension to the conventional parametric graduation techniques used by the CMI Bureau to represent trends in mortality.