Writing as talk

Historically, the psychotherapies have subscribed to an idea that the spoken word is the first language of psychotherapy. This idea has influenced my practice but work with Susan challenged this prejudice. We have worked together to find ways of using writing to communicate things which were not finding their way into spoken language. This paper shares some stories from our written and spoken conversations. Susan and I reflect on the place of writing in our work and talk about the experience of reading each other’s writing. In this paper, I propose that writing and reading are relational practices. I suggest the reflexive movement in these activities both anticipates and shapes the responses between self and other when while reading the writings to the writer-as- listener. In preparing and presenting these writings and reflections from within and about our conversations, I hope to create some coherence with a dialogical collaborative style of working and propose writing as a form of systemic practice and systemic inquiry

The ‘frustrated’ housing aspirations of generation rent

No abstract available

The Paroxetine 352 Bipolar Study Revisited: Deconstruction of Corporate and Academic Misconduct

Medical ghostwriting is the practice in which pharmaceutical companies engage an outside writer to draft a manuscript submitted for publication in the names of “honorary authors,” typically academic key opinion leaders. Using newly-posted documents from paroxetine litigation, we show how the use of ghostwriters and key opinion leaders contributed to the publication of a medical journal article containing manipulated outcome data to favor the proprietary medication. The article was ghostwritten and managed by SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Scientific Therapeutics Information, Inc. without acknowledging their contribution in the published article. The named authors with financial ties to GSK, had little or no direct involvement in the paroxetine 352 bipolar trial results and most had not reviewed any of the manuscript drafts. The manuscript was originally rejected by peer review; however, its ultimate acceptance to the American Journal of Psychiatry was facilitated by the journal editor who also had financial ties to GSK. Thus, GSK was able to take an under-powered and non-informative trial with negative results and present it as a positive marketing vehicle for off-label promotion of paroxetine for bipolar depression. In addition to the commercial spin of paroxetine efficacy, important protocol-designated safety data were unreported that may have shown paroxetine to produce potentially harmful adverse events

Employee Age as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Ambition and Work Role Affect

Past research has demonstrated a negative relationship between ambition, or the desire to get ahead, and job satisfaction. In the present paper, age was hypothesized to moderate the relationship between ambition and job satisfaction such that the relationship between ambition and satisfaction is more negative for older employees than for younger employees. Three studies, with three criterion variables (promotion satisfaction, extrinsic job satisfaction, overall job satisfaction), were used to test the hypothesis. Results indicated support for the hypothesized interaction. The discussion focuses on the implications of the results for organizational and individual career management strategies

Advertising in Duopoly Market

The paper presents the dynamics of consumer preferences over two competing products acting in duopoly market. The model presented compared the majority and minority rules as well as the modified Snazjd model in the Von Neumann neighborhood. We showed how important advertising in marketing a product is. We show that advertising should also consider the social structure simultaneously with the content of the advertisement and the understanding to the advertised product. Some theoretical explorations are discussed regarding to size of the market, evaluation of effect of the advertising, the types of the advertised products, and the social structure of which the product is marketed. We also draw some illustrative models to be mproved as a further work

The Rachel Carson Letters and the Making of Silent Spring

Environment, conservation, green, and kindred movements look back to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring as a milestone. The impact of the book, including on government, industry, and civil society, was immediate and substantial, and has been extensively described; however, the provenance of the book has been less thoroughly examined. Using Carson’s personal correspondence, this paper reveals that the primary source for Carson’s book was the extensive evidence and contacts compiled by two biodynamic farmers, Marjorie Spock and Mary T. Richards, of Long Island, New York. Their evidence was compiled for a suite of legal actions (1957-1960) against the U.S. Government and that contested the aerial spraying of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). During Rudolf Steiner’s lifetime, Spock and Richards both studied at Steiner’s Goetheanum, the headquarters of Anthroposophy, located in Dornach, Switzerland. Spock and Richards were prominent U.S. anthroposophists, and established a biodynamic farm under the tutelage of the leading biodynamics exponent of the time, Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. When their property was under threat from a government program of DDT spraying, they brought their case, eventually lost it, in the process spent US$100,000, and compiled the evidence that they then shared with Carson, who used it, and their extensive contacts and the trial transcripts, as the primary input for Silent Spring. Carson attributed to Spock, Richards, and Pfeiffer, no credit whatsoever in her book. As a consequence, the organics movement has not received the recognition, that is its due, as the primary impulse for Silent Spring, and it is, itself, unaware of this provenance

Getting the Right Stuff with the Write Stuff: Instructional Methods to Improve Writing in a First Year Engineering Course

Engineering Problem Solving (ENGR 1300) is a first year engineering course at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) designed to prepare students for the rigors of the engineering majors by introducing them to engineering skills such as problem solving, programming, and professional writing. This embedded writing element, taught by members of the UTA English Department, differentiates this first-year course from many others. Heeding the concern of faculty members regarding the students’ ability to write professionally, the curriculum committee for ENGR 1300 collaborated with the English Department to create an initial curriculum that tasked students with basic writing tasks such as professional emails, resumes, reports, and simple process papers. While these assignments seemed to answer some of the overall concerns of faculty, the wide range of reading and writing abilities we see among our students caused many to be frustrated because they could not complete these tasks, while others expressed resentment at having to replicate tasks they had mastered in high school. Writing instructors, too, noted their limited effectiveness when attempting to give meaningful feedback to large enrollment sections of students. To address these issues, the writing curriculum was revised to include the rhetorical précis assignments that build upon each other. These rhetorical précis assignments require students to assimilate large amounts of technical information and summarize it into a few, complex sentences. Using these assignments for our writing instruction not only allows writing faculty to give specific feedback even in large enrollment sections, but also challenges advanced writers, offers sentence level writing practice to less-prepared writers, requires critical thinking, and encourages complex synthesis of ideas. This paper will explore the effectiveness of this method for all writing levels and will attempt to identify and compare correlations between the students’ writing and overall grades in the course using these two methods.Cockrell School of Engineerin