Policymakers and the public have been concerned about the effects of media violence on children for decades. Scientific psychological research can be an important source of information for policy, as the goal of science is to separate facts from opinions. This article reviews children’s exposure to media violence, describes theories that explain the effects media violence could have, summarizes...

This article assesses the question of media concentration in the European Union (EU) in the context of the regulatory approaches taken by the Member States and the EU. It argues, despite common perceptions that the EU’s approach to protecting media pluralism is governed by a purely market approach, it is also entrenched in a significant public interest basis. It argues that media concentration ...

Findings from scientific research largely remain inside the scientific community. Research scientists are being encouraged to use social media, and especially Twitter, for dissemination of evidence. The potential for Twitter to narrow the gap on evidence translated into policy presents new opportunities. We explored the innovative question of the feasibility of Twitter as a tool for the scienti...

BACKGROUND Timely notification is of great importance in health emergencies. So identifying the most important sources of information used by people in emergencies seems necessary. The objective of this study was to assess peoples' level of awareness concerning the symptoms, routes of transmission, prevention, and treatment of H1N1 at the time of the pandemic and also to identify their most imp...

The purpose of the EU FP6 funded coordination action HENVINET was to create a permanent network of environment and health professionals. The main outcome is a networking portal (http://www.henvinet.eu), based on the concepts of social media to support communication between professional stakeholders in the environment and health fields. Its aim is to enable sharing of relevant information in an ...

Many modalities of tobacco use prevention programming have been implemented including various policy regulations (tax increases, warning labels, limits on access, smoke-free policies, and restrictions on marketing), mass media programming, school-based classroom education, family involvement, and involvement of community agents (i.e., medical, social, political). The present manuscript provides...

We introduce the concept of social micro-contexts and their relation to modeling social situations and discuss the problem of detecting and modeling social micro-contexts. With respect to the validity of the problem, we argue that an interesting class of applications for such models exist and thus the problem is indeed a valid research problem. We introduce a novel data-set intended to allow fo...

BACKGROUND In most countries, one of the main reasons for developing more advanced roles for nurses is to improve access to care in the context of limited number of doctors. It is considered that the introduction of major policy initiatives, such as nurse prescribing, requires high-level discussion and policy development to ensure successful implementation. This study aimed to identify the barr...

Facebook is the most popular social media site among teens; it is important thatparentsunderstandrecentchangesto itsprivacyrules that affect teens.Manyparents knowFacebook allows users to create an online profile that includes personal information.Most social media allow users to choose how much information they want to share publicly with theWorldWideWeb through privacy settings. Privacysettin...

The role of the mass media in communicating health-related information to the wider population is the focus of this paper. Using the example of sun protection within the UK, we highlight some of the major challenges to raising awareness of steadily increasing melanoma rates and of effective sun protection strategies. The implications of potential barriers to official sun protection messages via...