Commonplaces in risk talk: Face threats and forms of interaction.

Talk about risk is problematic for interaction; it can involve the speaker or hearer saying things that threaten participants' 'face', the ways they want themselves to be seen by others. One way of dealing with these threats to face, and to keep the conversation going, is the use of commonplaces. Commonplaces, generally applicable and generally known arguments, play an important role in interaction, invoking shared, taken-for-granted perspectives embedded in familiar roles and everyday practices. They are similar to some of the frames discussed in risk communication, but they focus our attention on rhetoric and interaction rather than cognition. In this paper, I show how commonplaces are used in focus group discussions of public choices involving dangers to life or health. They tend to be used in response to dilemmas, when a speaker is put on the spot, and they tend to lead to other commonplaces. Analysis of commonplaces supports those who argue that studies of public perception of risks and programmes of communication about risks need to be sensitive to the personal interactions, rhetorical strategies, and cultural embeddedness of any risk talk

Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs.

Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is selfpresentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been called stancetaking. When writers mark their stances, for instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others, marking disagreement, enacting surprise, andironicising previous contributions. All these moves are ways of presenting one’s own contribution as distinctive, showing one’s entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus on those relatively frequent words that mark stance and analyse these markers in context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual positioning over collective and deliberative discussion

Ultra-Deepwater Riserless Mud Circulation with Dual Gradient Drililng

Drilling deep holes in very deep water presents the offshore drilling community with major wellbore stability challenges that are typically mitigated through the circulation of dense drilling mud to prevent hole collapse and to remove drilling debris (“cuttings”). This is normally accomplished through the application of a riser system (Fig. 1); however, riser lengths ; are presently limited to use in water depths of around 3047 m. In the scientific ocean drilling realm, we have been very successful in drilling relatively shallow holes (<1500 m) in water depths greater than 3657 m, a range we call “hyper-deep”. Drilling in these extreme water depths requires the use of the “riserless” drilling technique (Fig. 1A) which is not constrained by the length limitations of a riser system (“riser”)

Impersonal you and stance-taking in social research interviews

The pronoun you is prototypically used to refer to the addressee or addressees in an interaction, but it also has other uses, including a kind of impersonal reference that does not pick out any particular person, but is the equivalent of someone, anyone, or one. This paper focuses on how the shift to an impersonal you works in one genre of interaction, research interviews by academic social science researchers, where the participants often use you where the previous turn might have projected the use of I or they. We argue that the shift, and related cues of the dimension of specific vs. general, can be seen as a form of stance-taking. We explore three possible functions: (1) recategorising of the speaker and their category-associated experiences, (2) displaying perceptions as shared, not merely individual, and (3) invoking commonplaces to deal with dilemmas posed by the question. These rhetorical actions can be related to the demands of the research interview, with the interviewee claiming or disclaiming an entitlement to have a stance, supporting their stances against possible challenge, and giving accounts or resisting judgments of the interviewee's behaviour or views. Attention to these shifts can make social science researchers more aware of the interactions underlying the transcripts

Influencing Factors on the Choice of College Business School Major

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a variety of factors encountered by college students influence choice of college major for undergraduate business students. We examine factors including introductory courses, importance of professors, professor use of classroom resources, professor’s discussion of career and future employment options, employment potential, future earnings potential as well as personal and family characteristics of a student. These findings will provide guidance for department chairs how to staff introductory courses, and professors who have the requisite work experience to emphasize future employment options and benefits of keeping families of students informed on the profession who have interested students

Influencing Factors on the Choice of Accounting Versus Other College Business School Majors

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a variety of factors encountered by college students influence choice of accounting versus other college majors for undergraduate business students. We examine factors that include introduction to financial accounting, opinions of family members and friends of the family, the mentoring of high school teachers on career choice, and the information obtained from business people and recruiters. In addition, there is some evidence that the timing of the first major course taken by students in the sequence of business school courses may have an impact on choosing accounting versus other business majors. These findings will provide guidance for department chairs how to staff introductory courses, and professors who have the requisite work experience to emphasize future employment options and benefits of keeping families of students informed on the profession who have interested students

Response to ‘Reading in the age of the internet’

This response reviews the contributions to the Special Issue, pointing out some common issues in their treatment of reading

Everyday oracles:authors on Twitter

Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by 10 authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylistic patterns characteristic of the corpus as a whole or of individual authors. The article then looks at tweets by others that mention the authors or use quotations from the authors in new contexts, creating an online presence for authors whether they tweet themselves or not. Authors are subject to the same tension between ordinariness and specialness that others have noted with stars in music, television, film, or fashion. Literature, because of its assumed cultural position, and its production in private, has sometimes been seen as being apart from and opposed to the cultural system of celebrity and promotion. But this cultural position also means the ordinariness of authors is treated as surprising and interesting, while the specialness makes them available to all as oracles

Tissue hemoglobin index: a non-invasive optical measure of total tissue hemoglobin

Introduction: The tissue hemoglobin index (THI) is a hemoglobin signal strength metric provided on the InSpectra ™ StO2 Tissue Oxygenation Monitor, Model 650. There is growing interest regarding the physiologic meaning of THI and whether a clinically useful correlation between THI and blood hemoglobin concentratio

Use of the Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment Program in Indiana Nursing Homes

OBJECTIVES: To assess the use of the Indiana Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST) form to record nursing home (NH) resident treatment preferences and associated practices. DESIGN: Survey. SETTING: Indiana NHs. PARTICIPANTS: Staff responsible for advance care planning in 535 NHs. MEASUREMENTS: Survey about use of the Indiana POST, related policies, and educational activities. METHODS: NHs were contacted by telephone or email. Nonresponders were sent a brief postcard survey. RESULTS: Ninety-one percent (n=486) of Indiana NHs participated, and 79% had experience with POST. Of the 65% of NHs that complete POST with residents, 46% reported that half or more residents had a POST form. POST was most often completed at the time of admission (68%). Only 52% of participants were aware of an existing facility policy regarding use of POST; 80% reported general staff education on POST. In the 172 NHs not using POST, reasons for not using it included unfamiliarity with the tool (23%) and lack of facility policies (21%). CONCLUSION: Almost 3 years after a grassroots campaign to introduce the voluntary Indiana POST program, a majority of NHs were using POST to support resident care. Areas for improvement include creating policies on POST for all NHs, training staff on POST conversations, and considering processes that may enhance the POST conversation, such as finding an optimal time to engage in conversations about treatment preferences other than a potentially rushed admission process