When an outbreak occurs, the affected population needs timely information in order to make informed decisions on how best to deal with the situation. Most target populations rely on the media for their information and the authorities use the media to disseminate outbreak information. The media, particularly locally based media, is as a result, crucial to public health outcomes. Reports on outbr...

BACKGROUND Social media have the potential to offer important benefits for patient education, support, and shared decision making. Despite the proliferation of social media use during the past decade, little is known about the scope and quality of available information, or the purposes that social media sites serve for patient decisional and support needs. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a m...

Analyses of survey results from a random sample of women bloggers (N = 298) show three motivations drive women to use social media – information, engagement, and recreation. The recreation motivation outweighs the other two motivations in predicting frequency of social media use. However, when differences between Facebook, Twitter, and other social media were considered, results show women blog...

Perpetrators of Factitious Disorder by proxy are usually driven by motives such as garnering attention, mobilizing sympathy, acting out anger or controlling others. Widespread media coverage provides an opportunity for fulfilling all these needs. We describe a case of Factitious Disorder by proxy with a rather unusual ocular complaint. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the presentation may...

Contemporary scientific media production requires a complex socio-technical infrastructure we call the "Media Production Pipeline" (MPP). Media professionals engage with researchers along the MPP to disseminate science news to the lay public. However, differing incentive structures and professional contexts frequently set researchers’ values and needs at odds with those of media professionals, ...

The current investigation sought to examine the learning and target needs of mechanical engineering (ME) students based on the learners and instructors’ attitudes though an explanatory mixed-method design. To elicit learners’ perceptions of English for Science and Technology (EST), 114 ME undergraduate students and 13 EST instructors from four Iranian state universities took part in a large qua...

Social media is increasingly important in daily life and is an especially important social interaction mechanism for young people. Although research has been conducted evaluating user types based on motives for using social media, no such framework has been extended to social media websites. We extend previous research by evaluating the underlying structure of social media website usage motivat...