Personas
Robert and Mark are best friends who are trying to establish their new start-up business. After noticing the slow pace of discovering diagnoses, Mark approached Robert with the idea of using his AI model to detect diseases from symptoms and family history. The two quickly established their business to try to beat competition to the field. Robert runs the business while Mark focuses on medical school and advises the direction of the company.
While trying to find investors, one prospect expressed concern in the regulatory restrictions and legality of using AI models in the medical field. Robert realized that in order to grow the company, they need to find some way of verifying their work, which is how he found Medic Pro Limited. He hopes that they can provide a quick certification and background check to legitimize their practice, without slowing the pace of the company.
Accessibility
Page Title
The landing page title is simply “Leaf Philanthropy”, which is accurate to the purpose of the website. Different pages appeared to generate new titles, both in the browser and in the tabs, which is good for accessibility purposes.
Image “Alt Text”
No image on any of the pages have alternate text added to it, which should be changed to increase accessibility.
Text
Headings: Generally, the headings seem to be nested properly. There are some pages that do not start with a <h1> heading and instead start with <h2>. This may not be the end of the world, but should be corrected since the choice in doing so involved laziness in text formatting rather than thoughtful choices.
Contrast Ratio: Overall, the website has a decent contrast ratio, however there are some points that may cause issues. Due to the colour theme of the company and website, there are multiple instances of white and orange being used on each other. There are also a few cases of reverse type, which can also cause accessibility problems. The ‘Donation Tracker’ page is a contrast nightmare with the fireworks background and should be changed.
Resize Text: The increase in text size seems to work well, except for in the navigation menu. At a certain point, the buttons disappear into a nested dropdown menu that could be difficult to navigate.
Interactions
Keyboard Access: The keyboard access is about average. The selection box is noticeable around elements and it does not seem to get stuck anywhere. However, on every page the selection has to go through every navigation menu item until it reaches the page content, and the navigation menus are also selected only by ‘tab’ and not through arrow keys.
Forms, Labels, Errors: There are not many forms, but those that exist are mostly accessible-friendly. The only thing of note is that the email address boxes have the text within it instead of next to the form box.
General
Moving, Flashing, Blinking: The ‘Team’ page has a moving background that is slow, but has no way to pause and could cause vertigo or other unease. The ‘Events’ pages have moving backgrounds activated with the scrolling of the page, which could cause similar issues.
Multimedia Alternatives: There are no videos or audio in this website.
Basic Structure: Outside of issues previously mentioned, the website has a basic structure that is easy to navigate. There are broken elements on the website, such as links, that need to be addressed.
Journalism Style
Converting a Scientific Paper into a Journalistic Article
Understand. Reading scientific papers can be difficult, especially in complicated fields such as astronomy and astrophysics. Take the time to understand what is being said in the paper and what message the authors are trying to portray. In astronomy articles, there are typically “Discussion” sections at the end of the paper that try to explain their research in easier to understand terms.
Simplify. After understanding the purpose of the paper, boil the concepts down to layperson terms. Remove figures and tables unless absolutely necessary. If there is a pretty image in the paper, maybe try to include that for a nice visual for the reader. Try to re-write what the paper said in your words, then re-write that again as if you are trying to explain it to a child.
Emphasize. Gather quotes and other noteworthy information that emphasizes the main concepts of the article. If you can interview the authors, that is even better. Develop an attention grabbing header to grab your reader’s attention and a thoughtful kicker to leave a lasting impression.
Structure. Formulate all these thoughts into a cohesive story that keeps a reader’s attention throughout the article and makes them read to the end. Use of the inverted pyramid structure is highly recommended for a general structure.
Podcast Script
Q&A 1: Life in the Universe
The first question we have sent in is a big one: Do you think there’s life in the universe? The simple answer is ‘Yes!’, but let’s understand why I say that so easily. It’s all a numbers game. I will specify, I’m talking about life at all, which would likely be some sort of microbial life. If we are talking about intelligent life, I would still have to be convinced a little more.
First, imagine the amount of area in the sky covered by holding up a grain of rice at arm's length. In that tiny area, the Hubble Space Telescope shows us that behind that grain of rice there are about 10 thousand galaxies being covered!
Now, think about going outside and looking up at the night sky and seeing a full moon. Covering the full moon with our outstretched grain of rice tells us the Moon hides about 50,000 galaxies behind it.
Why are we talking about galaxies? It’s because galaxies are made up of stars, and stars have planets around them. And what could a planet have? Life!
Let’s put this all together. The full moon takes up about half a degree in the sky. Degrees are the unit we use to measure the sky in astronomy. Well, if there’s 360 degrees in every direction, it would take a couple million moons to cover the whole sky, which tells us there are a couple trillion galaxies in the universe. Each of those trillions of galaxies have hundreds of billions or trillions of stars. Each of those stars have, on average, a few planets orbiting around them. I don’t know about you, but there’s too many zeros to count. Let’s just say, that’s a LOT of possible planets out there.
So is there life in the universe? Statistically, it’s more probable there IS life out there than that there ISN’T! Even if the odds of life being on another planet are, say, 1 in a hundred billion. Well, we have the numbers to say that it’s there!
Plain Language
The primary purposes of requiring a Concept Outline are to ensure that the concept being proposed by the prospective PI is appropriate for the proposal type/funding opportunity, and to help reduce the administrative burden associated with submission of a full proposal. Concept Outlines are considered by cognizant NSF program officers to determine the appropriateness of the work to the proposal type/funding opportunity. The prospective PI will receive an email that specifies whether a full proposal may be submitted. Full proposals submitted without the requisite "Program Officer Concurrence Email" for proposal types/funding opportunities requiring a Concept Outline will be returned without review or not accepted. See Chapter II.F for additional information. Concept Outlines also may be voluntarily submitted at any time by prospective PIs seeking early feedback on the general appropriateness and potentially relevant funding opportunities for a project idea prior to developing a full proposal. For voluntary submissions, the prospective PI will receive feedback by email or follow-up discussion with a cognizant NSF program officer, however, a "Program Officer Concurrence Email" is typically not provided.
3. Plain Language Techniques
Conciseness
Break up into separate concepts
Short paragraphs
More headings with less text in each
Use of questions for headers
Eliminate unnecessary words
Use words like “you”
2. Revised to Plain Language
Concept Outline Overview
A Concept Outline is to check that what you are proposing matches the proposal type and funding opportunity you are applying for. This helps to lower the administrative work with a full proposal submission. Each Concept Outline is created by the NSF program officer and is unique to each proposal type and funding opportunity.
Full Proposals
You will receive an email letting you know if they want you to submit a full proposal. We will not review nor accept Full Proposals that have not yet received the “Program Officer Concurrence Email” after submitting a Concept Outline (See chapter II.F for more details).
Can I Get Feedback?
You are welcome to submit a Concept Outline at any time prior to making a full proposal to receive feedback on the appropriateness and relevance of the project idea. If you voluntarily submit early, you will receive feedback by email or by other means with the NSF program officer. A “Program Officer Concurrence Email” is not usually given for early submissions.
4. Discussion
Plain language is something I’ve thought about without putting a title to it, but I’ve never dived too deep into. It was weird at first, trying to make sure not to remove anything necessary to the document, but you start to get into a roll after a little bit. I think it definitely helped to make this document a little more digestible, which isn’t always easy for proposal related documents. Funny enough, it took me a little bit of searching to find a document that wasn’t in pretty much plain language, so good on both Canadian and USA government websites for being better at that!