Situational Judgement Tests among Palestinian community members and Red Crescent volunteers to inform humanitarian action: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Informing humanitarian action directly from community members is recognized as critical. However, collecting community insights is also a challenge in practice. This paper reports data collected among community members and Red Crescent volunteers in the occupied Palestinian territory. The aim was to test a data collection tool, situational judgment tests (SJTs), to collect insights in the community around three themes. METHODS: The SJTs covered violence prevention, road safety, and environmental pollution (waste), and were constituted of hypothetical scenarios to which respondents indicated how they would react. For each theme, the answers' pattern provides insights for humanitarian action regarding which beliefs to address. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in January and February 2023 with 656 community members, and 239 Red Crescent volunteers. RESULTS: Data showed that violence is the theme for which the need is the highest among community members. Some responses varied according to the public (age, governorate, or disability level), suggesting actions could be tailored accordingly. CONCLUSIONS: Despite many difficulties during data collection, this study show that the tool allowed to collect community insights, a crucial task to ensure adequate response to the challenges faced by community members and Red Crescent volunteers in occupied Palestine.

"Save lives" arguments might not be as effective as you think: A randomized field experiment on blood donation.

OBJECTIVES: Many communication campaigns to encourage people to give blood rely on "save lives" messages, even though there is no experimental evidence as to the effectiveness of this kind of argument with respect to blood donation. The objective of this study is to test experimentally if it is indeed an effective way to prompt people to give blood, in order for communication campaigns to be evidenced-based. METHODS: One thousand and twenty-two lapsed blood donors were sent, at random, either a standard letter or the same letter containing an additional "save lives" message. The blood donation center measured intention to donate and actual donor return rate (3%) after 10months. RESULTS: Although fewer people in the "save lives" condition said they had no intention to give blood again, the "save lives" letter did not lead to more donor returns than the standard letter. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that contrary to intuition, campaigns to promote blood donation should not rely blindly on "save lives" arguments.

[Connectionist models of social learning: a case of learning by observing a simple task]. / Modélisation connexioniste de l'apprentissage social: le cas de l'apprentissage par observation d'une tâtche simple.

This article proposes a connectionist model of the social learning theory developed by Bandura (1977). The theory posits that an individual in an interactive situation is capable of learning new behaviours merely by observing them in others. Such learning is acquired through an initial phase in which the individual memorizes what he has observed (observation phase), followed by a second phase where he puts the recorded observations to use as a guide for adjusting his own behaviour (reproduction phase). We shall refer to the two above-mentioned phases to demonstrate that it is conceivable to simulate learning by observation otherwise than through the recording of perceived information using symbolic representation. To this end we shall rely on the formalism of ecological neuron networks (Parisi, Cecconi, & Nolfi, 1990) to implement an agent provided with the major processes identified as essential to learning through observation. The connectionist model so designed shall implement an agent capable of recording perceptive information and producing motor behaviours. The learning situation we selected associates an agent demonstrating goal-achievement behaviour and an observer agent learning the same behaviour by observation. Throughout the acquisition phase, the demonstrator supervises the observer's learning process based on association between spatial information (input) and behavioural information (output). Representation thus constructed then serves as an adjustment guide during the production phase, involving production by the observer of a sequence of actions which he compares to the representation stored in distributed form as constructed through observation. An initial simulation validates model architecture by confirming the requirement for both phases identified in the literature (Bandura, 1977) to simulate learning through observation. The representation constructed over the observation phase evidences acquisition of observed behaviours, although this phase alone is not sufficient to ensure accurate reproduction and must be made functional through the production phase (Deakin & Proteau, 2000). Results obtained through a second simulation replicate those produced by Bandura & Jeffery (1973), who observed that the individual tested following the retention phase recalled recorded information better than he realized in the production phase. The outcome of a third simulation shows that, when performing the transfer task, agents performed the task all the more effectively when they were required to learn a simple path which facilitated knowledge transfer to an adjacent situation. New explanatory assumptions of the mechanics of learning through observation may be produced through OLEANNet. Thus, observed deterioration between memorization and production is caused by successive approximations which occur in the acquisition phase then in the production phase. Further, depending on the type of learning undergone by agents, use of representation as a production guide induces a more or less stringent constraint in the approximation of actual behaviour. This results, during the transfer task, in the ability to effectively generalize acquired knowledge where such knowledge is not specifically related to the task at hand. In conclusion, connectionist model architecture appears valid for modeling learning through observation as defined by Bandura (1977). However, certain limitations appear during implementation, especially in terms of the observed behaviour's availability and the planning of produced behaviours that future developments are liable to counter.

[Strategies for early diagnosis and prevention of prostate cancer]. / Stratégies de diagnostic précoce et de prévention du cancer de la prostate.

Prostate cancer (CaP) has become the most frequent cancer in France and represents the 4th cause of mortality by cancer. Main risk factors include age, family history, black ethnic origin and carcinogenesis results from interaction between environmental and endogen factors. This work aimed to review main data and strategic trends about evolution of prevention and early diagnosis of CaP. Research topics considered as priorities results from the main objective including definition of most efficient medico-economic strategies according to epidemiology, diagnostic and therapeutic modalities and ethno-sociologic particularities, including in the schema presently used (PSA/biopsies): 1) new markers (genetic, serum and urinary), measurable environmental risk factors and potential prevention actions; 2) functional imaging (new techniques including contrast echography, dynamic MRI, spectro-MRI) in order to avoid unnecessary biopsies (60-70% biopsies are negative); 3) optimization of biopsies technique in identifying tumor zones in order to decrease false negative biopsies (about 15% of CaP < 0,5 cm3 but of high grade are missed in the first set of biopsies) and in improving the representativity of the tumor sample biopsied (discordance of about 40% between biopsy data and complete pathological analysis of prostatectomy specimen); 4) development of predictive models in order to perform individual prediction taking into account several risk factors (clinical and molecular) and genes/environment interactions in order to offer rational help in diagnostic and primary prevention procedures.