Comprehensibility

Purpose-This paper aims to look into the significance of architectural design in psychiatric care facilities. There is a strong correlation between perceptual dysfunction and psychiatric illness, and also between the patient and his environment. As such, even minor design choices can be of great consequence in a psychiatric facility. It is of critical importance, therefore, that a psychiatric milieu is sympathetic and does not exacerbate the psychosis. Design/methodology/approach-This paper analyses the architectural elements that may influence mental health, using an architectural extrapolation of Antonovsky's salutogenic theory, which states that better health results from a state of mind which has a fortified sense of coherence. According to the theory, a sense of coherence is fostered by a patient's ability to comprehend the environment (comprehensibility), to be effective in his actions (manageability) and to find meaning (meaningfullness). Findings-Salutogenic theory can be extrapolated in an architectural context to inform design choices when designing for a stress-sensitive client base. Research limitations/implications-In the paper an architectural extrapolation of salutogenic theory is presented as a practical method for making design decisions (in praxis) when evidence is not available. As demonstrated, the results appear to reflect what evidence is available, but real evidence is always desirable over rationalist speculation. The method suggested here cannot prove the efficacy or appropriateness of design decisions and is not intended to do so. Practical implications-The design of mental health facilities has long been dominated by unsubstantiated policy and normative opinions that do not always serve the client population. This method establishes a practical theoretical model for generating architectural design guidelines for mental health facilities. Originality/value-The paper will prove to be helpful in several ways. First, salutogenic theory is a useful framework for improving health outcomes, but in the past the theory has never been applied in a methodological way. Second, there have been few insights into how the architecture itself can improve the functionality of a mental health facility other than improve the secondary functions of hospital services.

Öz: Okunabilirlik tek başına anlaşılabilirliği garanti etmese de bir mesajın iletişiminde önemli bir faktördür. Mesajın hedef kitlenin okuma düzeyine uygun olup olmadığı iletişimde dikkate alınması gereken bir unsurdur. Özellikle İngilizcede eğitim ve psikoloji alanıyla başlayan okunabilirlik çalışmaları zaman içinde gazete haberlerine ve dijital teknolojiyle birlikte de web sitelerine taşınmıştır. Bu çalışmada Türkiye’de popüler teknoloji web sitelerinin okunabilirlik analizi yapılmıştır. Konu hem web sitelerinin kullanılabilirliği hem de toplumdaki teknoloji okuryazarlığı açısından önem taşımaktadır. 90 günlük trafik ve angajman performansına göre ilk 5 teknoloji sitesinin toplam 100 haberi okunabilirlik açısından incelenmiştir. İncelemede Türkçe için geliştirilen Ateşman ve Çetinkaya-Uzun formülleri kullanılmıştır. Önceki çeşitli araştırmalarla paralel bir şekilde orta ve zor seviyede okunabilirlik tespit edilmiştir. İki formül de metinlerle ilgili büyük ölçüde örtüşen sonuçlar çıkarmıştır. /// Abstract: Readability cannot guarantee comprehensibility, but it is a key factor for communicating a message. Whether the message is available for reading level of target audience is an important issue to be considered in communication. At the beginning, readability analyzes were applied in educational and psychological studies, and then the method was applied to journalistic texts and websites with developing digital technology in time. The research conducted readability analysis of popular technology websites in Turkey. It is an important issue for web usability and technology literacy. Totally a hundred news retrieved from 5 top technology websites which were determined according to their internet traffic and engagement performance, and texts of the news were analyzed for their readability by using Ateşman and Çetinkaya-Uzun formulas which were developed for Turkish language. Mostly, mid and low readability levels were found in the research. The results showed correlation with the previous researches. Both readability formulas put values that match on a large scale.

"Purpose: Perhaps nowhere is the significance of architectural design greater than for psychiatric care facilities. There’s a strong correlation between perceptual dysfunction and psychiatric illness, and also between the patient and his environment. As such, even minor design choices can be highly consequent in a psychiatric facility. It’s of critical importance, therefore, that a psychiatric milieu is sympathetic and doesn’t exacerbate the psychosis.

Design methodology: To analyse architectural elements that may influence mental health using an architectural extrapolation of Antonovsky’s salutogenic theory, which states that better health results from a state of mind which has a fortified sense of coherence. According to the theory, a sense of coherence is fostered by a patient’s ability to find meaning, to comprehend the environment (comprehensibility) and to be effective in his actions (manageability).

Findings: Saltogenic theory can be extrapolated in an architectural context to inform design choices when designing for a stress sensitive client base.

Practical implications: The design of mental health facilities has long been dominated by unsubstantiated policy and normative opinions that don’t always serve the client population. This method establishes a practical theoretical model for generating architectural design guidelines for health mental health facilities.

Originality/value: Firstly, salutogenic theory is a useful framework for improving health outcomes, but in the past the theory has never been applied in a methodological way. Secondly there have been few insights into how the architecture itself can improve the functionality of a mental health facility other than improve the secondary functions of hospital services."

The term ‘salutogenic’ is widely used in healthcare architecture, even though very few healthcare architects have much of a handle on what the term means. Here, we clarify the key concepts of salutogenesis, demonstrate how they work and show how they have been designed into healthcare facilities to yield exemplary results. The central idea is that there are three resources that combine to provide a Sense of Coherence—a forward thrust that resists the entropic forces of illness and infirmity. The sense of coherence is made up of resources that improve manageability—the capacity to maintain homeostasis and physical function; resources that improve comprehensibility—an ability to negotiate circumstances in order to maximise their benefit; and resources that enrich a sense of meaningfulness—the desires, causes and concerns that give us the need to resist illness in the first place.

This study presents a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of how 108 high school students in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classrooms enhanced the comprehensibility of their second language (L2) speech according to different motivation, emotion and experience profiles. Overall, the students’ learning patterns were primarily associated with their emotional states (anxiety vs. enjoyment), and secondarily with their motivational dispositions (clear vision of ideal future selves). The students’ anxiety (together with weaker Ideal L2 Self) negatively related to their performance at the beginning of the project which they had achieved after several years of EFL instruction. Their enjoyment (together with greater Ideal L2 Self) predicted the extent to
which they practiced and developed their L2 speech within the time framework of the project—three months. The results suggest that more regular/frequent L2 use with positive emotions directly impacts acquisition, which may in turn lead to the lessening of negative emotions and better L2 proficiency in the long run.

The flourishing movement for plain language in the international scene pushes for a pressing global ideological pursuit that legal documents directed at ordinary citizens, particularly known as consumer contracts, must be in a form that is understood by them. Several studies relate to the complexity of legal documents (Bhatia, 2010; Gibbons, 2004; Schuck, 1992, Tiersma, 1999) and call for the promotion of a clearer language that still preserves the legal meaning (Eagleson, 2004; Felsenfeld & Siegel, 1981; Gibbons, 2004; Kimble, 2000; Tiersma, 1999). Hence, this paper seeks to validate in the local setting such studies done and therefore, examine how a consumer-finance contract is understood by certain consumers. Specifically, this study attempts to determine the comprehensibility of this particular material in the Philippine setting- a credit card terms and conditions document by answering the question: how comprehensible to consumers is the existing credit card terms and conditions document?
Using two reader-based (cloze and paraphrase) tests in analyzing how respondents understand the contract, findings of the study reveal the low comprehensibility of the document validated using the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient statistical test. Moreover, the respondents’ perceived lack of understanding and familiarity of the document present
27
statistically significant relationship with their low paraphrase scores. Results of this endeavor will serve as basis for possible simplification or redrafting works of the said consumer-finance contract- a prospective groundbreaking project in the area of Forensic Linguistics in the Philippines.

"The prevailing model of psychiatric design (the world over) does not fulfil its potential in supporting the healing process. In order to design for future usability, design teams must have a vision beyond current paradigms and understand the direction healthcare is going.  More importantly still, models of care that will actually improve mental health outcomes instead of just managing patient behaviour must be considered. 

To create this vision, a methodological salutogenic approach can be employed for the project development and management phases – from design of the buildings through to the design of the models of care. This approach advocates taking an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to actively improve a sense of coherence for all users including patients and staff. This can be done at every decision point by choosing to foster manageability, comprehensibility and most importantly meaning.
"

For the data mining domain, the lack of explanation facilities seems to be a serious drawback for techniques based on Artificial Neural Networks, or, for that matter, any technique producing opaque models In particular, the ability to generate even limited explanations is absolutely crucial for user acceptance of such systems. Since the purpose of most data mining systems is to support decision making, the need for explanation facilities in these systems is apparent. The task for the data miner is thus to identify the complex but general relationships that are likely to carry over to production data and the explanation facility makes this easier. Also focused the quality of the extracted rules; i.e. how well the required explanation is performed. In this research some important rule extraction algorithms are discussed and identified the algorithmic complexity; i.e. how efficient the underlying rule extraction algorithm is.

Purpose -This paper aims to look into the significance of architectural design in psychiatric care facilities. There is a strong correlation between perceptual dysfunction and psychiatric illness, and also between the patient and his environment. As such, even minor design choices can be of great consequence in a psychiatric facility. It is of critical importance, therefore, that a psychiatric milieu is sympathetic and does not exacerbate the psychosis. Design/methodology/approach -This paper analyses the architectural elements that may influence mental health, using an architectural extrapolation of Antonovsky's salutogenic theory, which states that better health results from a state of mind which has a fortified sense of coherence. According to the theory, a sense of coherence is fostered by a patient's ability to comprehend the environment (comprehensibility), to be effective in his actions (manageability) and to find meaning (meaningfullness). Findings -Salutogenic theory can be extrapolated in an architectural context to inform design choices when designing for a stress-sensitive client base. Research limitations/implications -In the paper an architectural extrapolation of salutogenic theory is presented as a practical method for making design decisions (in praxis) when evidence is not available. As demonstrated, the results appear to reflect what evidence is available, but real evidence is always desirable over rationalist speculation. The method suggested here cannot prove the efficacy or appropriateness of design decisions and is not intended to do so. Practical implications -The design of mental health facilities has long been dominated by unsubstantiated policy and normative opinions that do not always serve the client population. This method establishes a practical theoretical model for generating architectural design guidelines for mental health facilities. Originality/value -The paper will prove to be helpful in several ways. First, salutogenic theory is a useful framework for improving health outcomes, but in the past the theory has never been applied in a methodological way. Second, there have been few insights into how the architecture itself can improve the functionality of a mental health facility other than improve the secondary functions of hospital services.

The idea of God is one from which contemporary philosophy, to say nothing of Western society at large, seems to have turned away from or replaced by other quests. There is however no greater and more vital subject than the idea of God. It is essential because it is difficult to see how life can have an overriding meaning if there is no God. Or, as Ivan Karamazov puts it in Dostoyevsky’s novel, if there is no God, all hell breaks loose. For philosophers and inquiring minds, God also happens to be one of the most cogent answers to the question as to why there is Being and not nothing. There is little to be gained by looking down on such an answer, which was revered as the highest Good in all cultures and epochs.

In today’s business scenario, we percept major changes in how managers use computerized support in making decisions. As more number of decision-makers use computerized support in decision making, decision support systems (DSS) is developing from its starting as a personal support tool and is becoming the common resource in an organization. DSS serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance. Data mining has a vital role to extract important information to help in decision making of a decision support system. It has been the active field of research in the last two-three decades. Integration of data mining and decision support systems (DSS) can lead to the improved performance and can enable the tackling of new types of problems. Artificial Intelligence methods are improving the quality of decision support, and have become embedded in many applications ranges from ant locking automobile brakes to these days interactive search engines. It provides various machine learning techniques to support data mining. The classification is one of the main and valuable tasks of data mining. Several types of classification algorithms have been suggested, tested and compared to determine the future trends based on unseen data. There has been no single algorithm found to be superior over all others for all data sets. Various issues such as predictive accuracy, training time to build the model, robustness and scalability must be considered and can have tradeoffs, further complex the quest for an overall superior method. The objective of this paper is to compare various classification algorithms that have been frequently used in data mining for decision support systems. Three decision trees based algorithms, one artificial neural network, one statistical, one support vector machines with and without adaboost and one clustering algorithm are tested and compared on four datasets from different domains in terms of predictive accuracy, error rate, classification index, comprehensibility and training time. Experimental results demonstrate that Genetic Algorithm (GA) and support vector machines based algorithms are better in terms of predictive accuracy. Former shows highest comprehensibility but is slower than later. From the decision tree based algorithms, QUEST produces trees with lesser breadth and depth showing more comprehensibility. This research work shows that GA based algorithm is more powerful algorithm and shall be the first choice of organizations for their decision support systems. SVM without adaboost shall be the first choice in context of speed and predictive accuracy. Adaboost improves the accuracy of SVM but on the cost of large training time.

Although the development of second language (L2) oral fluency has been widely investigated over the past several decades, there remains a paucity of research examining language instruction specifically aimed at improving this cognitive skill. In this study, the researchers investigate how instructional techniques adapted from drama can positively impact L2 fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness— three frequently discussed dimensions of L2 speech. Following a pretest–posttest design, the researchers obtained speech samples from 24 adolescent Brazilian EFL learners before and after their participation in a 4-month drama-based English language program. The development of oral skills by this group was compared with that of a parallel group of learners who received 4 months of instruction in a traditional communicative EFL classroom. Thirty untrained Canadian native English speaker raters evaluated randomized recorded L2 speech samples and provided impressionistic scalar judgments of fluency , comprehensibility, and accentedness. Results indicate that drama-based instruction can lead to significantly larger gains in L2 English oral fluency relative to more traditional communicative EFL instruction; comprehensibility scores also appear to be impacted, but with a much smaller effect; accentedness scores do not seem to benefit from one type of instruction over the other. The authors discuss implications for teaching practice.

The prevailing model of psychiatric facility design does not fulfil its potential in supporting the healing process. A salutogenic approach can improve coherence and foster meaning, will actually improve mental health outcomes, not only manage patient behaviour.

¿Cómo se puede alcanzar un conocimiento del pasado de los pueblos que vivían en América del Sur antes de la llegada de los europeos? ¿Existen nociones de conciencia histórica pese a la ausencia de escritura o se trata de una mitificación basada en las memorias actuales o en invenciones de pasados guiados por intereses políticos? En el siguiente artículo se trata de buscar respuestas a estas preguntas al discutir enfoques poco conocidos del inicio de los estudios respectivos (Uhle) y modernos en áreas tradicionalmente poco consideradas como espacios históricos (Amazonía). Estos enfoques postulan una aceptación de historicidad que se puede obtener por medio de trabajos interdisciplinarios, internacionales y comparativos dentro de conceptos más científicos que políticos. Como ejemplo se presenta las experiencias obtenidas por la realización y publicación de dos simposios internacionales organizados por el autor en la Pontificia Universidad Católica. Estas experiencias apuntan hacia la necesidad de discusiones sostenidas sobre aportes empíricos y teóricos en foros que permitan el intercambio libre con el fin de avanzar hacia una aceptación del pasado pre-europeo dentro de la complejidad y dinámica que le caracteriza en vez de aceptar nacionalismos que enfatizan lo «exótico» y esencialmente inalterado de pasados que legitiman la presencia de los estados nacionales modernos.

The current study examines how second language (L2) users differentially assess the comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding) of foreign-accented speech according to a range of background variables, including first language (L1) profiles, L2 proficiency, age, experience, familiarity and metacognition. A total of 110 L2 listeners first evaluated the global comprehensibility of 50 spontaneous speech samples produced by low, mid and high-proficiency Japanese speakers of English. The listeners were categorized into two subgroups according to a cluster analysis of their rating scores: lenient and strict. Results showed that while lenient appeared to rely equally on many linguistic areas of speech during their judgements, the strict listeners were strongly attuned to phonological accuracy. Analysis of the background questionnaire data revealed that the more lenient listeners likely had higher levels of awareness of the importance of comprehensibility for communication (metacognition); regularly used L2 English in professional settings (experience); and had L1s more linguistically close to the target speech samples, Japanese-accented English (L1-L2 distance).

Bu çalışmanın amacı, okunabilirliğin anlaşılabilirlik üzerindeki etkisini farklı metin türlerine göre incelemektir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda okunabilirlikleri hesaplanan iki bilgi verici, iki de hikâye edici metin, cümle uzunlukları yönünden bağlam esaslarına dikkat edilerek kısaltılmıştır. Bu işlem metinlerin okunabilirlik puanlarını doğrudan etkilemiş ve orijinal hallerinden okunabilirlik puanı olarak daha kolay metinler elde edilmiştir. Araştırma bağımsız değişkendeki sistemli değişmelerin bağımlı değişkeni nasıl etkilediğini görmeyi amaçlayan deneysel bir çalışmadır. Araştırmada seçkisiz atamanın mümkün olmaması sebebiyle ön test-son test eşitlenmemiş kontrol gruplu yarı deneysel desen tercih edilmiştir. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunun seçileceği okula kolay ulaşılabilir örnekleme yöntemine göre karar verilmiştir. Bu doğrultuda Düzce İli Merkeze bağlı bir ilkokul ulaşımının kolay ve araştırmacıya yakın olması sebebiyle tercih edilmiştir. Çalışmanın yapılacağı okula karar verilmesinin ardından anlama yönünden birbirinden farklılaşmayan 4 şube amaçsal örnekleme yöntemine göre seçilmiştir. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunu 121 dördüncü sınıf öğrencisi oluşturmaktadır. Araştırmanın verilerini toplamak adına iki hikâye edici, iki bilgi verici metin; bu metinlerin anlaşılabilirliğini ölçmek adına da Yanlış Analiz Envanteri kullanılmıştır. Metinlerin okunabilirlikleri ise Ateşman formülü yardımıyla hesaplanmıştır. Araştırmanın verileri SPSS 24 paket programı kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Verilerin normalliğini ölçmede Lilliefors düzeltmeli Kolmogorov-Smirnov Testi, parametrik olmayan ilişkili grupları karşılaştırmak için Wilcoxon İşaretli Sıralar Testi ve parametrik olan grupları karşılaştırmak için ilişkili Örneklemler T-Testi kullanılmıştır. Araştırma verilerinin analizi sonucu, metinlerin orijinal hallerinin araştırmacı tarafından kolaylaştırılan hallerine oranla daha iyi anlaşıldığı görülmüştür. Elde edilen bu bulgular doğrultusunda metinlerin okunabilirlik puanının değişmesinin, anlaşılabilirliğini de etkilediği yorumu yapılabilir. Bir diğer ifadeyle, metinlerin okunabilirlik puanının yükselmesinin okuyucuların metinden anlam kurma sürecine olumsuz etki ettiği ileri sürülebilir.