Improving Adult Literacy Outcomes: Lessons from Cognitive Research for Developing Countries. Directions in Development.
Despite the existence of about one billion illiterates in the world, adult literacy programs make up 1-5 percent of government or donor budgets, and they remain severely underfunded in comparison to primary education. Though dropout and course completion rates improved in the 1990s, the outcomes of literacy instruction are still modest and may have improved little since the 1970s. The results may disappoint governments and donors who expect that once taught, people will have usable skills and remain literate. The modest results make it hard to increase coverage and to argue for increased expenditures for this sector. The results may be due to inefficient instruction but also to the structure of human memory, which has important implications for adult literacy acquisition. The need to learn the rapid recognition of complex patterns poses problems that are not apparent to people who became expert readers in their childhood.
User Interface Design for Low-literate and Novice Users: Past, Present and Future
One of the greatest challenges in providing information and communication technology access is that about 775 million people in the world are completely non-literate and many are able to read only with great difficulty and effort. Even though mobile phone penetration is growing very fast, people with low levels of literacy have been found to avoid complex functions, and primarily use mobile phones for voice communication only. This monograph looks at how we can design ICT user interfaces (UIs) such that novice and low-literate users can access a broad range of services and utilities, increasingly available to them, with minimal training and external assistance. It begins by observing the challenges in designing for low-literate users, and in conducting user studies among low-income communities in the developing world. It discusses techniques used by researchers in overcoming some of these challenges. It presents a review of existing examples of UIs for novice and low-literate users, which have used various combinations of input– output modalities other than text. It goes on to discuss strong trends that are starting to emerge in this design space and concludes with opportunities and future directions for research and design of UIs targeted at populations with low-literacy. I. Medhi Thies. User Interface Design for Low-literate and Novice Users: Past, Present and Future. Foundations and Trends © in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–72, 2014. Copyright c © 2015 I. Medhi Thies DOI: 10.1561/1100000047. Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1100000047
Phytochemical and FT-IR Spectral Analysis of Certain Bamboo Species of SouthIndia
Bamboo with its varied uses has historically been an integral part of livelihoods and lifestyles in India. The present study was carried out to characterize the bioactive constituents present in the leaf extracts of certain bamboo species using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic analysis (FT-IR). The various solvent extracts of various bamboo leaves subjected to qualitative analysis showed the availability of phytoconstituents including alkaloids, phenolic compounds, flavonoids, saponins, glycosides, terpenoids, steroids, coumarins and phytosterols. Quinones were completely absent in all the five bamboo species. The FT-IR spectrum confirmed the presence of sulphides (SS), phenols (C-O), aromatic compounds, thiols (S-H), aliphatic compounds (C-Cl) and amines (NH) in different bamboo species. The present investigation has also opened avenues for further research into the development of potent phytomedicines from different bamboo species.