Poster: The cradle of change

The International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994 deemed family planning as one of the essential means to meet the Millennium Development Goals: Reduce widespread poverty, hunger, disease and gender inequality by 2015. As the end of the ICPD Programme of Action approaches, it might be interesting to analyse how the reached level of funds actually influenced the Countries in which these funds were invested. In the topside of the poster, the system map is represented with the metaphor of Newton’s Cradle: The funds, coming from different institutions, are sent to developing and least developed countries to be invested in different activities, which have an effect on society, population and economics. These effects spring back directly through all the stakeholders, reaching again the international level that decides future actions. To understand the quality of these investments, the second part of the infographic shows a comparison between average trends of the world and of LDC, trying to find a possible relation between quantity of funds, population growth and economic evolution. The last part then concentrates on the conditions of women, the improvement of which is at the basis of a global change: the areas taken into consideration are India, first country to apply FP programmes, and Sub-Saharan Africa, region coping with the greatest di_culties in the world.

Report: The Morning After Pill in Italy

The question behind the research aimed to discover what kind of information would find someone interested in knowing something more about the morning-after pill: there are medical websites, blogs, scientific reports or moral and ethical discussions.
After the analysis of each category of website we managed to get a complex but complete answer, to understand the doubts and the certainties a person can solve or create while making a research through google. We also managed to use different tools to expand the ray of knowledge and understanding of the matter. The research protocol starts from 200 links, which are analyzed with Navicrawler, then the useless or irrelevant links, as advertising, are cutted off. This step leads to a total of 1588 links, that are visualized thanks to Gephi, and from which are extracted the main entities with AlchemyAPI. Afterwards all the links are divided into 6 categories, which are pointed out graphically in the gephi results. The entities are also divided in categories and the _nal outcome should be scienti_c characters such as doctor or authors, who are researched in Google Scholar to understand who they are, what they wrote and what weigh in the medical world they have.

Video: Tangled Information

The main topic in the video is the emergency pill, since our aim is to emphasize the importance of analyzing all the useful information that can be found on the web to manage at a second time to decide consciously. We tried to show the complexity of the information and of the controversy through a tangle of threads that at first represents the world, with all the data about funds for family planning and birth control; then the tangle is smaller because it refers to a smaller zone, Europe with its contraception data, to focus then on Italy with an even smaller tangle and data regarding contraception use, the morning after pill and some legal information. At this point we took a closer look to the controversy, and we represented all the kinds of information we found with a user and 4 actors, who communicate through a tin can phone, that’s an easy way to communicate clearly. The user makes some questions to the actors, the first one is an opinionist and represents blogs and discussion websites and will explain where the emergency pill can be found. All the answers are quotations from the websites we found. The second actor is a doctor and the user will ask something about how the pill functions . The answer is a quotation from Wikipedia, since it refers to the World Health Organization statement. The third actor is another doctor, but he’s a conscientious objector, so the question will be about the prescription of the pill, and the answer is the quotation of Renzo Puccetti, a known doctor, who refuses to prescribe the morning-after pill since he considers it abortive. Finally, the last actor is a religious person who talks about the moral and ethical point of view. In this case the quotation is from a religious website that refers to the Catholic Church Cathechism in which are explained what are the allowed methods of natural family planning.
At the end of the conversation, the user has come to know all the different perspectives and is now able to take a decision. All the tangles are released and we decided not to let whoever watches the video understand what kind of decision the user took, so that it can be seen as neutral.

References

Data sources: UNFPA (Financial resources flows and reports); UN Publications; World Data Bank.

Authors

Viviana Ferro
Ilaria Pagin
Sara Pandini
Federica Sciuto
Elisa Zamarian