Advice giving in telephone interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters

This thesis focuses on the social organisation of advice, as it unfolds in interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters on the telephone. The analysis is based on a corpus of 51 telephone calls from 5 different families. Advice giving is studied here using the methods of conversation analysis and discursive psychology. The main interest has been to consider the dimensions that are relevant to the potentially tricky action of advice giving, building on the dimensions of normativity and knowledge asymmetry that have already been identified in the literature. The less strictly institutionalised context studied here provides a relatively new arena for considering the array of issues that are relevant to advice giving. Indeed, this has provided a broad scope for specifying how recipiency is brought off in advice giving sequences and how the position of advice recipient is managed. The analysis begins by considering the different forms of advice that were found in the data and their affordances in terms of the recipient s next turn. Contingency is identified as an important dimension in advice giving and a range of resources are identified which build contingency into the advice in various ways and which provide the recipient with different degrees of optionality when responding to advice. The thesis then goes on to consider how recipients respond to advice and the sorts of issues that make relevant one response type over another. The analysis identifies the importance of affiliation and alignment when considering different types of advice response. Furthermore, it is shown that morality, activity type, and alignment to the recipient s position, are important features of why a particular response type is chosen over another. The final analytic chapter then considers how the potentially tricky action of advice giving is made relevant in the first place. It is shown that the choice between different forms of advice is related to local issues of entitlement and contingency. In considering these different components to advice giving, the analysis explicates an array of important issues in advice giving sequences including: knowledge asymmetry, normativity, entitlement, contingency, affiliation, alignment and morality as well as considering evidence to suggest that advice is a dispreferred action. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance, as well as considering how we can begin to see relationality being constituted

“It’s Like a Prison without Bars”: Experiences in a Mandatory GED Program

The purpose of this phenomenological research study was to describe how adult students experience a legally coerced GED program in a community alternative to prison program. A phenomenological-hermeneutical approach was used to derive common themes that represented essence of the students’ experiences

Initiating and carrying out L2 instruction by asking known-answer questions : Incongruent interrogative practices in bi- and multilingual peer interaction

Author's accepted version (post-print).Conversation analytic (CA) studies on second language (L2) learning show that known-answer questions posed by teachers form an integral part of the social interaction in L2 classrooms. However, studies on peers asking known-answer questions of each other when orienting to L2 learning have not been conducted. Focusing on L2 learning as social action, and using the CA framework of epistemics in interaction, this study investigates how peers use known-answer questions as interactional practices in L2 learning. In the epistemic framework, known-answer questions can be called incongruent interrogatives; the results show that they appear to initiate instructional sequences and propose epistemically asymmetric positions when peers engage in the joint activity of L2 learning. This study demonstrates that peers are capable of doing L2 learning and illustrates the need to provide students with the opportunity, and responsibility, to do L2 learning with each other.acceptedVersio

Design for assembly : re-design of an electrical switch for the ease of automatic assembly

A design for assembly (DFA) method is used to analyze the existing design of parts of an electrical switch, and to reduce and re-design them, for the ease of automatic assembly. The procedure for the selection of suitable and economical assembly method is presented based on the Boothroyd & Dewhurst methods. Analysis of the initial design for manual assembly and the re-design for automatic assembly are presented. An algorithmic approach for simplified generation of all mechanical assembly sequences and selecting the good assembly sequences is presented with graphical representations. A work station needed for the automatic assembly is developed, which incorporates vibratory bowl feeders, an indexing machine and other equipment

Models for pushing objects with a mobile robot using single point contact

In many mobile robotic manipulation tasks it is desirable to interact with the robots surroundings without actually grasping the object being manipulated. Non-prehensile manipulation allows a robot to interact in situations which would otherwise be impossible due to size or weight. This paper presents the derivation of a mathematical model of an object pushed by a single point and sliding in the presence of friction where the dynamic effects of mass and inertia are significant. This model is validated using numerical simulation. The derived dynamic model is also compared with a kinematic approximation from literature, showing that under certain conditions, the motion of a pushed object is similar to the motion of a non-holonomic vehicle. Finally, the results of experimental investigations are discussed and promising directions for further work are proposed. ©2010 IEEE

X-ray equipment for Lunar Receiving Laboratory, volume 1 Final report, Sep. 1968 - Apr. 1969

Design, fabrication, installation, and operation of X ray diffractometer and X ray spectrograph system for preliminary examination of lunar soil sample within Lunar Receiving Laborator

Sublimating and cracking apparatus

A furnace having a sublimating section, a cracking section oriented off axis to the sublimating section, and a valve for controlling flux between the sections. The valve includes an annular plug having at least one longitudinal slot. The plug is retractable from a fully closed position where the slot is completely covered, to a fully open position where the slot is completely exposed. The slot becomes increasingly exposed as the plug is moved from the fully closed position to the fully opened position, thereby increasing flux from the sublimating section to the cracking section.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste