Health information retrieval (HIR) on the Internet has become an important practice for millions of people, many of whom have problems forming effective queries. We have developed and evaluated a tool to assist people in health-related query formation. Design: We developed the Health Information Query Assistant (HIQuA) system. The system suggests alternative/ additional query terms related to the user's initial query that can be used as building blocks to construct a better, more specific query. The recommended terms are selected according to their semantic distance from the original query, which is calculated on the basis of concept co-occurrences in medical literature and log data as well as semantic relations in medical vocabularies. Measurements: An evaluation of the HIQuA system was conducted and a total of 213 subjects participated in the study. The subjects were randomized into 2 groups. One group was given query recommendations and the other was not. Each subject performed HIR for both a predefined and a self-defined task. Results: The study showed that providing HIQuA recommendations resulted in statistically significantly higher rates of successful queries (odds ratio 5 1.66, 95% confidence interval 5 1.16-2.38), although no statistically significant impact on user satisfaction or the users' ability to accomplish the predefined retrieval task was found. Conclusion: Providing semantic-distance-based query recommendations can help consumers with query formation during HIR.

The Internet has become a commonly used venue for seeking healthcare information. Young adults search the Internet for health information more than any other group, yet little is known about use patterns among community college students. The authors surveyed a diverse community college to assess students' use of the Internet for health-related information. More than 80% had home Internet access, regardless of race or gender. Men and women searched for health information in almost equal numbers. Most students were interested in searching for diet/nutrition topics, and least interested in smoking information. Although the digital divide appears to be closing, varying levels of interest in a variety of important health topics remain. Understanding these differences could guide the design of more effective Web-based health interventions.

Sexual configurations theory (SCT; van Anders, 2015) provides theoretical and methodological tools for describing, understanding, and studying gender/sex and sexual diversity. It may be of use to sexuality and gender researchers, as well as clinicians, activists, and individuals, but has not been empirically tested.In the present study, we tested the qualitative application of SCT in interviews with 25 gender and sexual minority participants and addressed 2 research questions: RQ1 ("Insights"): what features of partnered sexualities and gender/sex emerge from individuals' engagement with SCT diagrams? and RQ2 ("Utility"): how might SCT be useful for qualitative research with sexual and gender minorities? We thematically analyzed participants' engagement with SCT and its diagrams in the interviews. Results showed that SCT and its diagrams allowed participants to represent diverse experiences with their partnered sexualities and gender/sexes, and also to articulate nuanced conceptualizations of the structure and significance of SCT parameters, including gender/sex sexuality, partner number sexuality, and individual gender/sex, in their own lives. We discuss implications of our findings for qualitative research with sexual and gender minorities, social justice, and sexual and gender diversity more broadly. Public Significance StatementIn this interview-based study based on sexual configurations theory (SCT), participants used SCT's diagrams to locate their gender/sex identities and sexualities (including separating out gender, sex, and gender/sex, a combination of the 2) and partner number sexualities (including separating nurturant and erotic sexualities). We describe how SCT provides useful ways to conceptualize and study gender/sex and sexual diversity and gives important insights into sexual and gender minority experiences, orientations, and identities.

Policy debates have focused on who can participate in or access single-sex activities or services. This article describes how science of the biology of sex is relevant to three major policy areas: parenting (including leaves), sports, and public spaces. We focus on what scientists know about sex and gender (and gender/sex, where gender and sex are intertwined), and the role of various biological factors, including hormones such as testosterone and estradiol as well as genetics, gonads, genitals, and more. The policies under debate often use “biological sex,” but this fails to account for scientific understandings of sex and gender, misrepresents sex as single-faceted and binary, and overlooks scientific consensus about the importance of gender and identity.

Two experiments investigated the role of phonemic information in adult reading comprehension and replicated the visual tongue-twister effect in a new paradigm-a modified probe memory task. College students took longer to read sentences that repeated word initial consonants (tongue-twisters) than matched control sentences. Equally important, subjects also took longer to respond to probe words from tongue-twisters. Slower response times in both the sentence reading task and the probe memory task indicate that the tongue-twister effect is indeed phonemic in nature and that phonemic information is used in memory during comprehension.What role does phonology play in reading? While there is general agreement that facility with phonemic aspects of printed words contributes to reading acquisition and children's reading skills (see Wagner and Torgeson, 1987, for a review), there is less agreement regarding skilled adult readers. Much of the controversy derives from apparently contradictory accounts of word identification, with some studies providing evidence for prelexical activation of phonemic information (Lukatela and -lexical controversy is moot because it results from erroneous assumptions of the dual-process theory of reading (Coltheart, 1978).Despite the pre-versus postlexical controversy, there is little question that phonemic information is involved downstream in higher levell comprehension processes in both children and adults. Models of comprehension must permit availability of some phonemic information in order to explain skilled readers' acceptance of orthographically incorrect homophones during reading, such as the bare growled (Baron, 1973;Coltheart, Avons, Masterson, and Laxon, 1991; Claneman and Stainton, 1991; Treiman, Freyd, and Baron, 1983). Additional evidence for downstream effects comes from studies of sentence processing that show signs of comprehension difficulties when sentences contain phonemic confusions. For example, Baddeley and Lewis