The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called ChatGPT is a powerful way for Black women to educate themselves about HIV prevention, as it provides reliable and culturally sensitive information, according to a study in The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (JANAC), the official journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care. JANAC is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

New research involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that countries’ current plans to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere will not be enough to comply with the 1.5 ºC warming limit set out under the Paris Agreement.

In experiments in isolated villages in Honduras, researchers evaluated a new strategy for identifying individuals that could be targeted for effective information spreading. Their approach – more effective than random targeting, and also less time-requisite than approaches that require a complete understanding of the relevant social network – could have far-reaching policy implications in lower and middle-income countries. Understanding the structure and function of human social networks has yielded insights for exploiting social contagion – the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and practices through the members of a group. Such an approach could be used to disseminate important information, including public health interventions. However, deliberately fostering social contagion in face-to-face social networks requires identifying the structurally influential individuals, or “seeds,” to maximize information spillover. Although previous research has suggested several ways to identify these individuals, all existing methods have generally required mapping the entire social network’s structure, which is often expensive, time-consuming, and infeasible in real-world face-to-face situations. Through various field experiments, Edoardo Airoldi and Nicholas Christakis evaluated whether it’s possible to identify the best “seeds” within a group without having to map the entire network. Airoldi and Christakis performed a large, randomized controlled trial of network targeting among 24,702 people in 176 isolated villages in Honduras. The authors randomly assigned villages to friendship targeting methods, varying the fractions of households receiving a 22-month health education package and the method by which these households were chosen. According to the authors, a friendship targeting strategy leveraging the so-called “friendship paradox” of human social networks, which states that, on average, the friends of randomly selected individuals are more central to the social network than those who identify them, was able to substantially reduce the number of households that needed to be targeted to attain a specified level of village-wide uptake. “Deploying interventions through network targeting, without increasing the number of people targeted or the expense incurred, may enhance the adoption and spread of the interventions and thereby improve human welfare,” write Airoldi and Christakis.

 

For news outlets interested in building their own data visualizations, data usable to draw network pictures for 11 of the involved villages is available here: https://yale.app.box.com/s/9q1r2grrugtlr5yqtsm9wdhjdx9wgflk. The authors will be happy to provide guidance regarding what subset of the data to use.

Early care and education (ECE) programs – like Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) and Head Start – are widely regarded as effective public investments for reducing income- and race-based achievement gaps and helping children succeed in school with impacts extending well into adulthood. However, in a Policy Forum, Margaret Burchinal and colleagues present recent evidence suggesting that preschool impacts are not unequivocally positive and the science on the overall outcomes of these programs remains unsettled. According to Burchinal et al., more rigorous research is needed to understand how to design early education programs that produce long-term positive outcomes, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We urge both the policy and research communities to take seriously the most rigorous evidence, regardless of the valence of the findings, to advance our models of development and intervention,” write the authors. Here, Burchinal et al. provide a review of recent, rigorous randomized controlled studies that evaluated Head Start and local public Pre-K programs. One study, which assessed the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K program (TNVPK) – a large state-funded pre-k program that enrolls roughly 25% of the state’s 4-year-olds – revealed negative impacts on academic and behavioral outcomes during elementary and middle school. Another, the Head Start Impact Study, provided discouraging long-term results, finding almost no evidence of above-chance advantages for student attendees. Although the authors note that there is evidence of the potential for today’s ECE programs to accomplish their goals, the review indicates that some of today’s publicly funded ECE programs do not showing lasting positive effects for the students who participate in them, a conclusion that contrasts with the assumption that these programs always provide positive and beneficial outcomes. Burchinal et al. provide insight into why earlier ECE programs appeared to be more successful than today’s and highlight critical gaps in our understanding that must be addressed in order to develop programs and interventions that produce long-term positive outcomes for today’s children.