M. Douglas

Icon arrays are graphical displays in which a subset of shapes are filled to represent the probability of an outcome (e.g., the probability of side‐effects from a medical treatment). Prior work has shown that the perceptions of probabilities can be more accurate with icon arrays compared to other formats. As a result, they are now widely used to communicate information about risk and uncertainty to the general public. However, little is known about how the design of icon arrays—in particular, the perceptual characteristics of icons and their spatial arrangement—affect perceptions of risk. The present study builds on research on visual perception which suggests that variation in icon shape may affect their perceived numerosity. Three experiments were conducted using a proportion judgment task with icon arrays that varied in (a) whether icons were organized in grouped or random configurations, and (b) whether there was variability in the icon shapes used to represent the target and nontarget proportions. The results show that proportion judgments are highly accurate for grouped arrays, with no effect of shape variability regardless of the distribution of shapes across the target and nontarget categories. For random spatial arrangements, however, irrelevant shape variability in one (but not both) of the categories leads to biased proportion judgments, increasing the perceived quantity of whichever category has elements with the same shape. These findings show that perceptual variation in shape—while irrelevant to the proportion judgment task—can alter how people perceive quantities depicted by icon arrays, providing new insight into how these visualizations should be designed to communicate information about risk.

Public policies contribute to structural racism and health inequities. To dismantle structural racism and advance health equity, methods aligning scientific evidence, community priorities, and political will are needed to implement equity-focused interventions. This study combined community-based participatory research and legal epidemiology methods to inform local policy in East Point, Georgia. The community informed a comprehensive policy approach to address social determinants of health (SDOH) and advance health equity and identified East Point’s Comprehensive Plan Update as an opportunity to advance health equity through policy. Key findings informed a legal epidemiology study to assess variation in including equity and health equity in comprehensive plans across 32 jurisdictions. Limited adoption of equity and health equity provisions were found, revealing opportunities to inform the East Point policymaking process. Research findings were summarized and disseminated to the community and policymakers. In 2023, East Point adopted equity, health, and health equity into its comprehensive plan for the first time. This case study demonstrates that collaborative, multi-sector, community-centered approaches can support policy interventions that address historical race-based, health-harming policies, and thereby dismantle structural racism. Inclusion of health equity in East Point’s comprehensive plan provides a foundation for future implementation of policies that address SDOH and health inequities.

This paper deals with the relationships between the “judgment of God” and the “last judgment” and between transcendence and immanence, from two perspectives of the Apocalypse, the first one contained in the last biblical book, written by John of Patmos, and the second one its counterpoint, D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse. The first presents a scenario of judgment and condemnation of the wicked;It feeds from the fear and hope of the faithful who yearn for a life of fullness and eternal peace, after the triumph of those who are supposed to be acquitted before the “divine court”. The second perspective shows that John of Patmos presented a judgment of the persecutors of Christians, which was configured as a moral court, of “good” against “evil”, and prefigured the hope of a life in an after-world, which has consequences in this world through the “judgment of God”, practiced by those who need and want to judge. The paper discusses these implications, recognizes that the results of judgment cross bodies, thoughts, discourses and practices; build and destroy existences; establish moral standards and determine ways of living. This paper insists on questioning whether there are, in immanence, possibilities of living free from the system of judgment and finds, in Lawrence, indexes for an affirmative answer.