mollysteiny

[mollysteiny]

Are you sure?

[mollysteiny]

Canadian mother’s powerful post on measles: ‘I blame you’

[mollysteiny]

#WomenBetrayed is trending, so I thought I’d post this in response.

[mollysteiny]

Gotta NOT catch ‘em all: why Vaxcards is an immunisation game changer

Dr Dan Epstein, Vaxcards co-creator

As a child, when I got vaccinated, my doctor gave me a stale jellybean from a giant glass jar. The kind of 10-year old jellybean that crumbled and cracked when you chewed it.

I got a painful jab because my Dad said so. I wasn’t sick but somehow it stopped me getting sick. Plus I got a jellybean. So I rolled with it.

Then I grew up, became a doctor, and started interacting with parents and children following the vaccination schedule. But the reward for vaccination had not changed since I was small, and education for children and parents remained in the form of handouts and print offs.

Most people agree that vaccines should be cool, but that’s not going to happen without better education and incentives. That’s why I started Vaxcards with my friend Adam Zemski.

Vaxcards is a game, where infectious diseases are illustrated as characters based on their symptoms and distributed within a collectable trading-style battle card game.

After an immunisation, you get the collectable card as a reward. As your immunity gets stronger, so does your collectable card set.

We believe Vaxcards could be a game-changing tool for delivering education and rewards for vaccination. Here’s why:

They pitch education at children, teachers and gamers

Information disguised in a Pokémon-like character with special attack and defence moves provides a platform for children and adults to learn through play.

Disease symptoms, as defined by the World Health Organization, have been carefully worked into each character’s design and statistics as well as the game’s mechanics. These include epidemiological data on disease incidence, mortality, route(s) of transmission and microbiological classification.

Information on symptoms helps children recognise the illness, data on epidemiology gives perspective on more damaging diseases while highlighting the main route(s) of transmission shows how the spread of an infectious disease can be reduced.

They provide an incentive to vaccinate

Every generation grew up with the need to collect something. Baseball cards, Pokémon cards, Panini football cards, Barbies or Octonauts.

For every child, being vaccinated could be viewed as collecting a set of antibodies against preventable diseases.  Pairing a card game to this experience provides an incentive for children to collect the whole set. With Vaxcards, each inoculation is is represented by a special character card possessing special powers and attack moves.

Comparing collections in the playground creates a demand for stronger or a more complete set of cards. In real-life, we hope that this creates a generation of children, who will understand the gain from the pain whenever they look at a vaccination needle

Vaxcards personalise diseases

Giving each disease a name, a face, special moves, strengths and weaknesses creates awareness of diseases that we rarely see thanks to vaccination.

This is important for understanding the potential seriousness of preventable diseases, recognising the symptoms and reminding us why we should push for eradication.

The potential to go viral….or bacterial ….

The artwork is amazing, and the characters are engaging. According to serious gamers, it is great fun to play and has robust game mechanics.

For these reasons, Vaxcards should appeal to science-minded game lovers, children, parents, teachers, health care workers or anybody who has been immunised.

Vaxcards has all the elements of a trend that could take off. If it achieves anything like the popularity of other children’s card games such as Pokémon or Digimon, the global health impact of Vaxcards could be immense.

The generational quest for herd immunity

Creating a generation of educated vaccine-getters is the most important consideration, and one of the greatest challenges of programs. Vaxcards has the potential to provide a generation more likely to vaccinate their children and take an extra step towards herd immunity.

The game that is a game-changer

In the context of increasing herd immunity, Vaxcards should be seen as an incredibly informative and engaging tool, imparting vital information about disease symptoms, warning signs of infection and epidemiological data.

More importantly, it helps children participate in the vaccination schedule. This can be very difficult to achieve, given the lack of health literacy in areas with poor immunisation coverage rates.

In the future, we hope to distribute Vaxcards alongside vaccination programs in developing areas.

In order to achieve this, we must secure funding, investment and grants to translate the game and establish a sustainable costing model that provides subsidised or free cards in need of education and rewards for vaccination the most.

After all, educating a generation of vaccine recipients could prevent a range of diseases, saving many lives and dollars in the process.

If you could like to help Vaxcards expand their product’s reach, you can support them via this crowdfunding link.

Anybody interested in contacting the creators on further distribution, drop them a line at email@vaxcards.com, view their crowdfunding at kickstarter here, see their website http://www.vaxcards.com or find them on Twitter @vaxcards. 

[mollysteiny]

A few weeks ago my mom stapled pages of a story in one of her women’s magazines together and handed it to me. She gave it to me pretty much with the tag lines “for your feminist blog” and “something new to consider.” Indeed it was; she knows me well.

The story is titled “I was forced to be pregnant.” With a title like that, reading it was actually not on the top of my to read list. I thought it was about women not exercising their right to choice. I was very, very wrong on that one.

Have you ever heard of Reproductive coercion? It is a term that was quite recently coined by the advocates against domestic violence to describe a certain type of abuse some women face. It occurs when a man pressures their partner to have kids and/or impregnates them against their will. Reproductive coercion comes in three different types: 1. Emotional pressure that turns into verbal and physical abuse. 2. Sabotaging birth control 3. Marital rape Over 75% of women 19-49 who reported once experiencing domestic violence also endured some type of reproductive control by men. It’s all about control and domination over a woman’s body.

The first story in the magazine is about a woman who got married around 36 years of age. After a few months of dating her boyfriend talked excitedly about having children. After he proposed he began calling her “The Babymaker.” She then confided with him that one of her fallopian tubes was blocked. He in return insisted she see a fertility doctor. She recounts, “I had finally met a great guy who was eager to start a family with me. What woman wouldn’t fall for that?” Soon after her honeymoon he persisted on in an obsessive manner, but his efforts had to be temporarily halted as she had to get emergency back surgery. Alas, 6 months into recovery he was back to pressuring her again. She was in much pain at the time due to her back, but she agreed to In Vitro Fertilization. She then became pregnant, but soon miscarried. In response, her husband grabbed her by the neck, choking her. He apologized, blaming his outburst on his grief and had her sign up for another round of IVF. And then a third round. She tried to put him off with the excuse that she needed to weigh more before she could take treatments, her husband forced her to get on the scale often and filled the fridge with fattening foods. “It hurt that all I was good for was getting pregnant.” She recounts. At the end, he screamed at her, threatening to replace her with a maid if she couldn’t get pregnant and she told him she no longer wanted to have his child. He destroyed bedroom furniture, pushed her down the stairs and threatened her with a gun. She fled to a domestic violence shelter.

The second story was about a woman who faced marital rape. This woman was 40, had a then boyfriend and two children from a previous marriage. After telling her boyfriend she did not want any more children, her boyfriend refused to wear a condom and began to rape her.  She then became pregnant with her third child. Birth control was never an option for her because she couldn’t hide pills anywhere for he went through all of her belongings. Three months after giving birth, he raped her again, impregnating her with twins. She lost the twins in a physical fight with him, but soon became pregnant again. During her recovery she begged her obstetrician to remove her ovaries and devise a lie to tell him; that she had cancer. After a decade of sexual abuse and violence she was able to get a job that kept her out of the house and often times traveling.

One in four callers to the National Domestic Abuse hotline said that their partners had tried to force them to become pregnant. Why? As one woman stated, “Its like he wants to own me from the inside out.”  Having a baby is the perfect tie that binds. These type of abusers want to create a circumstance in which their partner is dependent on him.

WHAT’S THAT HAVE TO DO WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD?

Many voters never consider how defunding these clinics could hurt victims of domestic violence who turn to them for counseling as well as pregnancy prevention. Abused women will turn to health care providers long before they will turn to domestic abuse hotlines and organizations. Many women in abusive relationships rely on life saving, affordable care programs such as Title X. It is critical that such places are open and operation when women and children need them so desperately.

[mollysteiny]

Vaccination is not an individual choice, it’s a social choice.

The consequences of failing to vaccinate your child extend to society at large: you jeopardise herd immunity and expose those who cannot be vaccinated to deadly diseases.

It’s incredibly simple. You aren’t allowed to choose to drink and drive, because you might kill someone; you should not be allowed to choose not to vaccinate, because you might kill someone.

[mollysteiny]

[mollysteiny]

hi everyone! since the holidays are over for most of us, i thought i’d make an inspirational and motivational masterpost all about notes! upgrading your notes by changing the layout, adding doodles, banners, using sticky notes, changing your handwriting etc. motivates me personally to study! 

out with the sloppy last minute notes and in with the new!

handwriting

how to write in cursive

some fonts to try out

how to improve your handwriting

note taking systems

study methods summed up

stationery to make it all happen

sticker printables to jazz it up

notes

how to take lecture notes

how to annotate books

taking notes from a textbook - studyign

note taking system - theorganisedstudent

note taking system - emmastudies

another note taking system - academicmind

another note taking system - wonderfullifee

the 2 notebook method

note taking with highlighters and post its

pretty timelines

note taking printables

plot summary with sticky notes

20 uses of sticky notes

colour code your notes

method with columns 

the cornell note taking system

the cornell note taking system using onenote

in class notes

another in class note taking format

what are sketchnotes?

online whiteboard

flashcards

how to make flashcards

another how to make flashcards

an example

another example (with sticky notes)

and another example (biology)

8 ways to improve your flashcards

make  and test flashcards online

alternative to flashcards - studyign

print onto flashcards

mindmaps

how to mindmap (1)

how to mindmap (2)

some examples

apps

notability

banners

simple banner

more banners

it’s a banner party over here

banners (shown how to draw in gifs)

illustrate your notes

how to illustrate your notes - reviseordie

sketchnote tips (banners, lettering, doodles)

more sketchnote tips

even more sketchnote tips

how to make your notes pretty - theorganisedstudent

how to make your notes pretty - studyspoinspo

how to make your notes pretty - booksflowersandtea

what is visual note taking?

a visual alphabet

note taking printables

dot grid 

note outline printables

lined cornell method printable

grid cornell method printable

hope you all had a good rest and are ready for a new year of studying!

xoxo lou

[mollysteiny]

lmao😂/smh🙄

[mollysteiny]

The worst part of Pride each year is riding the subway late at night and seeing the gay guys, mostly the ones riding by themselves, slowly take off their rainbow stickers and beads and what-not in preparation for their walk alone in their neighborhood, doing their best to prevent the off-chance of being jumped. I saw one guy with a flag in his bag turn it upside down so it wouldn’t poke out.

So yeah, fuck that heterosexual pride day nonsense.

[mollysteiny]

do you ever feel yourself slowly losing your current hyperfixation but you’re not particularly interested in anything else rn so you have nothing to fill that void and ur just bored and ready for death

[mollysteiny]

[mollysteiny]

remember swine flu reblog if ur a tru 2009 kid

[mollysteiny]

Fortune Teller reading my palm: It just says “yikes.”

[mollysteiny]

i just wanna know how one teaches a dog to do this. my pug is over here struggling to even give a high five smh

[mollysteiny]

Republicans smh

[mollysteiny]

I hate the timeline we live in