10.31.06

FTC’s Game Teaches Social Networking Skills

Posted in Education, Social Science, Technology at 4:10 pm by AAL

“Your tax dollars at work. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched an online quiz-show style game called Buddy Builder to test young users’ abilities to spot potential threats on social networking Web sites. Naturally, the teen audience this is intended to reach is not going to go near the game except as a joke.”

http://onguardonline.gov/quiz/index.html

10.30.06

The “Reality” of Health: Reality Television and the Public Health

Posted in Health, Social Science at 3:39 pm by AAL

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
“A number of reality shows deal directly with aspects of health and medicine, portraying ‘real people’ and ‘real health professionals’ involved in plastic surgery, weight loss, urgent care, smoking cessation, and so on. The purpose of this paper is to describe the nature of these shows, provide an overview of the messages they convey about health and medicine, and explore some possible implications of these shows for audience awareness and knowledge. In addition to the shows where health is the primary focus, many other reality shows are tangentially related to health issues, or have an occasional focus on a health topic. The implications of these shows are also discussed.” http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7567.pdf

10.02.06

Migration and health: fact, fiction, art, politics

Posted in Health at 2:06 pm by AAL

Source: Emerging Themes in Epidemiology
“The recent Immigration Bill debate in the United States Congress has again re-ignited the polemic regarding immigration policy. In this essay, I argue that disputes surrounding the legality of migrant workers highlight chronic, underlying problems related to factors that drive migration. The public health field, although concerned primarily with addressing the health needs of migrant populations, cannot remain disengaged from the wider debates about migration. The health needs of migrants, although in themselves important, are merely symptoms of deeper structural process that are intrinsically linked to equity and human rights, and simply focusing on health issues will be insufficient to address these societal pathologies.”

 http://www.ete-online.com/content/3/1/15