The INFO Project Blog

We were glad to see an in-depth interview with Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) founder Moshe Pritsker on New England Cable News (NECN), the largest 24-hour regional news network in the country. I met Moshe at this year’s Science Blogging conference in North Carolina and pretended to know what filming “benchwork” entailed. It’s much easier to watch and find out how this innovative video magazine is breaking down language barriers and speeding science along.

The odds that you’ve ever performed an emergency search on cat scratch fever are probably very slim. But that’s exactly how a research librarian from Texas helped to save a young boy’s life. Elizabeth Cohen, “Empowered Patient” columnist from CNN Medical News, cites this example in her excellent review of consumer health information retrieval, Tips for Savvy Medical Web Surfing. Read the rest of this entry »

The connection between family planning and reducing environmental degradation, like the impact of global warming, is becoming more emphasized, for example in the meeting series by the Environmental Change and Security Program (we blogged about a recent talk).

Rachel Nugent, Senior Health Program Associate at the Center for Global Development, writes in a recent blog post about an Op-Ed in the New York Times on consumption differences between rich and poor countries as a factor responsible for “our global sustainability crisis.”

Nugent wisely points out on the CGD blog that,

we won’t come close to solving global warming, or broader issues of resource sustainability, if we don’t address both numbers of people and consumption levels. The number of people in the world (and their distribution and ages) affect overall consumption directly; and through a variety of indirect channels, affect other economic outcomes that have a bearing on sustainability. This includes GDP (with links to population through labor supply, savings, and human capital investment) and its distribution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Which important research findings have not yet had an effect on family planning practice? Vote now!

We’ve gotten in 80% of our target votes on this important question. Have your say today!

Update: Poll has closed. Thanks for your feedback! Read the rest of this entry »

In his editorial in the latest issue of The Pop Reporter, Arvind Singhal, the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor at the University of Texas El Paso, challenges behavior change scholars and practitioners to change their way of thinking about how behavior change actually occurs.

The purpose of this editorial is to provoke scholars and practitioners engaged in social change, including those involved in health promotion and education, to think differently about how (behavior) change happens… This problematic prevailing mind-set of behavior change stated as “if we do this to individuals, they will behave in this way”–is a result of the overwhelming dominance of cause-effect Newtonian thinking that spilled over to social science and was reified over decades without much questioning.

He suggests that many of us are wedded to thinking about complex health problems and behavior change goals in linear, individualistic, cognitive-processing frameworks rather than in ways in which outcomes can be thought of as dynamic and emergent, and where serendipity, self organizing and surprise is valued.

What do you think? If his arguments are true, what changes would need to be made to Behavior Change Communication programming based on them?