“If you start again, don’t worry. You haven’t failed”. Relapse talk and motivation in online smoking cessation

In this article, I explore how relapse following initial smoking cessation is discursively construed and how participants position each other to enhance motivation in two different settings: smoking cessation forums and websites from the UK. In my qualitative discourse analysis, I focus on identity construction and relational work to pinpoint how users are re-motivated when they have not managed to reach their goal of becoming smoke-free. Results show an imbalance regarding how extensively relapse is covered in a selection of smoking cessation forums and websites. Relapsing is constructed as a normal part of a quitting journey and not as a deviation from it. Similarly, the moral obligation of making healthy lifestyle choices influences the construction of the relapsed self. My analysis also revealed that writers resort to face-enhancing relational work strategies to console readers and connect with them. Further, while referring to personal experience was a means of normalizing relapses in forums, websites used numerical evidence to back up their informational statements. In both settings, relapsing is transformed into a beneficial learning experience, thereby positioning quitters as having an advantage over new quitters. The findings suggest that there is a common discourse of how relapsing is conceptualized, both on professional and peer-to-peer sites. This paper adds to previous studies of online health practices, providing a different angle by not focussing on success stories. It adds interesting insights by comparing peer-to-peer practices to monologic websites, and it shows that an interpersonal pragmatic approach allows investigating how participants try to impact each other’s decision-making

Persuasion in smoking cessation online: an interpersonal pragmatic perspective

Persuasion in smoking cessation online analyses persuasive discourse strategies from an interpersonal pragmatics perspective within a range of online public smoking cessation sites in the UK. The book employs a mixed methodology approach to study persuasion on multiple levels, comparing professional, institutional websites with peer-to-peer sources. It shows how a content analysis can be successfully combined with a discursive moves analysis, laying the ground for in-situ, qualitative close-readings of relational work, of linguistic patterns and their link to persuasion. In this vein, the book provides a comprehensive picture of how the persuasive intent pervades the selected sources, ranging from the choice of topics, discursive moves to the relational work used. It reveals how persuasion is an intricate linguistic and relational endeavour, far from simply presenting information or resorting to scare tactics. Instead, interpersonal concerns take a centre stage in these sources, where the necessity of quitting smoking is boosted while the connection with addressees is always maintained. With its detailed linguistic analyses and its interdisciplinary treatment of persuasion, this book is interesting for researchers in discourse analysis, interpersonal pragmatics as well as health communication in general

Bushwhacker Belles : Exploring Gender, Guerrilla Warfare, and the Union Provost Marshal Records

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on August 26, 2014Advisor: Diane Mutti BurkeIncludes bibliographical references (pages 42-44)M.A. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2014The objective of this study is to illuminate the stories of women involved with guerrilla warfare in Missouri during the Civil War by creating a website that will collectively draw on primary and secondary source materials to provide the first comprehensive historical study in a public forum of Missouri's female guerrillas. Much of the source material is drawn from the Union Provost Marshal Records. Included in the case files of Missourians accused of disloyalty are letters, testimonies, prison records, and banishment orders. Other source material used to identify these women and their activities come from newspapers, memoirs by guerrillas, census records, and county histories. The website will collectively display and evaluate these documents. Biographical information and scanned documents will be the foundation of the website, serving as an online archive. The website will include an evaluation of the experiences of women in Civil War Missouri in the form of an essay focusing on the findings from the Union Provost Marshal Records. The archival materials found on the website will contribute to future humanities scholarship on female guerrillas, women's experiences during the Civil War, and the conflict in Missouri. This website will include primary documents that previously have not been displayed in one unified locations. Currently a majority of the materials related to female guerrillas are located at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. and various institutions in the state of Missouri. Scanning the documents and placing them all in one location online will allow users to easily access these materials in one place. The audience for this project will be historians -- professional and amateur members of the public, and students, who are interested in many fields of history, including the Civil War, the war in Missouri, guerrilla warfare, William Clarke Quantrill, gender studies, military history, and legal history. The website is geared towards users with levels of education from the secondary level to professional scholars. Users can access this site and use the material for their own research interests, but can also gather information from the essays and biographical sketches. The significance of this online digital exhibit is to provide primary source materials that show female guerrilla activity in Missouri but also to understand female agency during the Civil War. In the further reading section, users can find scholarly secondary materials to assist them in their research of guerrilla warfare, the Civil War, Missouri during the Civil War, and women's wartime experiences.About page -- Interpretative essay: Gender, guerrilla warfare, and Missouri -- Female guerrilla riders: Women who did not faint at the smell of gunpowder--riders -- Female spies, saboutours, and messengers: Communication and guerrilla warfare -- Female suppliers--the basket supply line: The Union had wagon trains, guerrillas had household baskets -- Union Provost Marshal Records of guerrilla women -- Further reading -- Appendices: Mock ups -- Bibliograph

A geophysical survey within the Mesozoic magnitic anomaly sequence south of Bermuda

Also published as: Journal of Geophysical Research 84 (1979): 5487-5496This geophysical survey of an approximate 1° square covers Mesozoic magnetic anomalies M0, M2, and M4 south of Bermuda. Bathymetry, magnetics, seismic reflection profiling, and seismic refraction data are presented. The isochron trend within the survey area at magnetic anomaly M4 time is 025°. Two left lateral fracture zones exist: the southern fracture zone has an offset of <10 km at M4 time and 33 km at M0 time. The northern fracture zone has an offset of 37 km at M4 time and 26 km at M0 time. These changes in offset are accounted for by asymmetric spreading, an 11° change in trend of anomaly M0 relative to M4, and by M0 time, growth of a small right lateral fracture zone. Seismic refraction data provide poor control on the shallow crustal structure but suggest the presence of significant lateral inhomogeneities within layer 2.Prepared for the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-74-C-0262; NR 083-004

Technical Writing as Part of Project Management for Engineers: Using a Writing-Process Approach to Teach Disciplinary Writing Requirements

This article focuses on how formative feedback can be used to help engineering students write precise and coherent management summaries that appeal to a mixed audience. Management summaries are especially challenging to master as students must strive for a balance between adhering to scientific standards and being intelligible for a wider non-expert readership. Students of Energy and Environmental Technology at the school of engineering (FHNW) in Switzerland write a total of six technical reports about their project work (mostly in German). By analysing two management summaries, the focus is laid on the lecturers’ approach of relying on formative feedback which supports and accompanies the students’ iterative writing processes. It is shown how in early semesters lecturers provide hands-on guidance, such as suggesting discourse markers or pinpointing vague references to sharpen students’ awareness of the need to write as concisely as possible for mixed audiences

The functions of narrative passages in three written online health contexts

This paper investigates and compares the functions of narrative passages in three computer-mediated health practices centering on advice-giving: (1) email counseling at a UK university, (2) online forums providing peer support for smoking quitters, and (3) anti-smoking websites by UK governmental, commercial and charitable institutions. We found that the functions of the narrative passages are manifold and often overlapping. They range from seeking advice, giving advice, indicating/seeking agreement, supporting a claim, showing compliance with advice given to reporting on progress and success. In a second step, these insights were linked to how the narrative passages were used for identity construction and relational work. The results show that narratives are employed to create various identities, such as authentic advice-seekers, active self-helpers, successful quitters and advice-givers. Our comparison reveals that narrative functions utilized in all three practices exhibit nuanced differences due to medium factors and interactional goals of the practices. Finally, in these contexts of self-improvement, narratives document stability or transformation in the sense of clients’ improved health and smokers’ change to becoming non-smokers respectively

A study of the seismic structure of upper oceanic crust using wide-angle reflections

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution January 1983The lateral homogeneity of oceanic crust on the scale of a seismic experiment is a condition that most methods of seismic interpretation depend on. Whether this condition is in fact true is largely unknown and only recently have efforts been made to test this hypothesis. This thesis is part of that effort and is focussed on determining with as much resolution as possible the seismic structure of upper oceanic crust, i.e. Layer 1 and the uppermost part of Layer 2. This portion of the crust is of interest, because of the effect of the sediment-basement interface on the transmission and conversion of seismic energy, also because of the possibility of detecting lateral heterogeneities in upper Layer 2 caused by faulting, hydrothermal circulation etc. The data employed are a set of wide-angle reflections from oceanic crust 130 m.y. old in the western North Atlantic Ocean southwest of Bermuda. First, the sedimentary structure is determined by stacking the data along hyperbolae and interpreting the stacking velocities and two-way normal incidence travel-times for interval velocities. This method has not been applied to deep sea marine data before; it gives a more detailed velocity structure of the sediments than does a traditional study of the basement reflections' travel-times. Second, the same data are mapped into tau-p space in order to measure the velocity gradient in oceanic basement; unfortunately the scatter in the tau-p picks caused by the topography of the basement reflector combine with the properties of the tau-sum inversion to make such a measurement impossible. Third, the amplitudes of the basement reflections observed on three seismic lines are modelled by synthetic seismograms; each can be matched by velocity-depth models which contain a transition zone between the sediments and the basement. The different thicknesses of this transition zone near the three receivers is an indication that the top few hundred meters of Layer 2 are laterally heterogeneous on a scale of 3 to 8 km.This work was supported by NSF Grant OCE-7909464 and partia1 support was supplied by a fellowship from the Phillips Petroleum Foundation

Utilization and costs of health care and early support services in Germany and the influence of mental health burden during the postnatal period

Limited evidence is available about health care utilization and its determinants in the vulnerable postnatal period for mothers and their children. Thus, the aim of our analyses was to assess determinants of health care and early support services utilization regarding mothers and their children and associated costs in the postnatal period in Germany. Moreover, we aimed to investigate the impact of noticeable mental health and psychosocial burdens on health care and early support services utilization and costs. Using a two-step assessment process of parents from a randomly selected sample of 30,000 recently born children in the multicenter observational population-based cohort study of the SKKIPPI project, we firstly identified mothers who were potentially at risk of mental health and psychosocial burden. These mothers were then invited to participate in an in-depth assessment, including a detailed self-developed questionnaire focusing on early support and health care services utilization. A follow-up after 6 months was conducted. Potential determinants of early support services utilization were analyzed using logistic regression. General linear models with gamma distribution and log link functions were applied to analyze potential determinants of health care costs and to estimate mean adjusted costs. Mothers with a noticeable mental health or psychosocial burden and their children caused mean early support services costs of €1073 and caused total costs of €10,849 in the postnatal period from a payer’s perspective compared to €349 (early support services) and €9136 (total costs) for mothers without a noticeable mental health or psychosocial burden and their children. The main determinants of total costs were facing a chronic disease (child), preterm delivery, bad experiences with doctors and midwives, and single parenthood. The majority of participants (69 %) utilized some kind of early support services. The most important determinants of early support service utilization in the postnatal period with respect to the children were facing a chronic disease, being the first child, and being born as a twin. Our findings highlight the importance of sufficient appreciation and treatment of mental health problems in the postnatal period from both a societal and payer’s perspective. Future research should investigate whether these and more specific interventions could be a costeffective way to support mothers with mental health or psychosocial burden and their children