Workplace genres: a sociohistorical study of communicative practices in a production company

Studies of communication in the workplace have traditionally addressed a limited set of formal texts (e.g., memos, proposals, procedures) and described how those texts circulate in more or less predictable systems. Consequently, many of our assumptions about professional communication activities depend on simple transactional or rhetorical models that do not take into account historical factors and conceptualize too narrowly;This study addresses social and historical variation in a single company\u27s communicative habits from 1920 until 1985 to illustrate how rhetorical performances in the workplace operate in complex networks of activity. This study challenges formalist conceptions of professional communication by examining how communicative practices emerge, develop, and decay as professionals use texts to negotiate their work activities over extended periods of time. This historical study of the complex and often unpredictable interplay of workplace activities and communicative practices reveals how seemingly stable workplace genres are actually contested sites where communicators make decisions to vary and repeat prior practices;Workplace activities at The Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa, form the background for this study. Focusing on the interplay between company activities and communicative practices, the study explores how management techniques, regulatory controls, and technological tools in the twentieth century affected workplace communication

Are We There Yet?: The Development of a Corpus Annotated for Social Acts in Multilingual Online Discourse

We present the AAWD and AACD corpora, a collection of discussions drawn from Wikipedia talk pages and small group IRC discussions in English, Russian and Mandarin. Our datasets are annotated with labels capturing two kinds of social acts: alignment moves and authority claims. We describe these social acts, describe our annotation process, highlight challenges we encountered and strategies we employed during annotation, and present some analyses of resulting data set which illustrate the utility of our corpus and identify interactions among social acts and between participant status and social acts and in online discourse

Pathway Distiller - multisource biological pathway consolidation

BACKGROUND: One method to understand and evaluate an experiment that produces a large set of genes, such as a gene expression microarray analysis, is to identify overrepresentation or enrichment for biological pathways. Because pathways are able to functionally describe the set of genes, much effort has been made to collect curated biological pathways into publicly accessible databases. When combining disparate databases, highly related or redundant pathways exist, making their consolidation into pathway concepts essential. This will facilitate unbiased, comprehensive yet streamlined analysis of experiments that result in large gene sets. METHODS: After gene set enrichment finds representative pathways for large gene sets, pathways are consolidated into representative pathway concepts. Three complementary, but different methods of pathway consolidation are explored. Enrichment Consolidation combines the set of the pathways enriched for the signature gene list through iterative combining of enriched pathways with other pathways with similar signature gene sets; Weighted Consolidation utilizes a Protein-Protein Interaction network based gene-weighting approach that finds clusters of both enriched and non-enriched pathways limited to the experiments\u27 resultant gene list; and finally the de novo Consolidation method uses several measurements of pathway similarity, that finds static pathway clusters independent of any given experiment. RESULTS: We demonstrate that the three consolidation methods provide unified yet different functional insights of a resultant gene set derived from a genome-wide profiling experiment. Results from the methods are presented, demonstrating their applications in biological studies and comparing with a pathway web-based framework that also combines several pathway databases. Additionally a web-based consolidation framework that encompasses all three methods discussed in this paper, Pathway Distiller (http://cbbiweb.uthscsa.edu/PathwayDistiller), is established to allow researchers access to the methods and example microarray data described in this manuscript, and the ability to analyze their own gene list by using our unique consolidation methods. CONCLUSIONS: By combining several pathway systems, implementing different, but complementary pathway consolidation methods, and providing a user-friendly web-accessible tool, we have enabled users the ability to extract functional explanations of their genome wide experiments

Pathway Distiller - multisource biological pathway consolidation

BACKGROUND: One method to understand and evaluate an experiment that produces a large set of genes, such as a gene expression microarray analysis, is to identify overrepresentation or enrichment for biological pathways. Because pathways are able to functionally describe the set of genes, much effort has been made to collect curated biological pathways into publicly accessible databases. When combining disparate databases, highly related or redundant pathways exist, making their consolidation into pathway concepts essential. This will facilitate unbiased, comprehensive yet streamlined analysis of experiments that result in large gene sets. METHODS: After gene set enrichment finds representative pathways for large gene sets, pathways are consolidated into representative pathway concepts. Three complementary, but different methods of pathway consolidation are explored. Enrichment Consolidation combines the set of the pathways enriched for the signature gene list through iterative combining of enriched pathways with other pathways with similar signature gene sets; Weighted Consolidation utilizes a Protein-Protein Interaction network based gene-weighting approach that finds clusters of both enriched and non-enriched pathways limited to the experiments\u27 resultant gene list; and finally the de novo Consolidation method uses several measurements of pathway similarity, that finds static pathway clusters independent of any given experiment. RESULTS: We demonstrate that the three consolidation methods provide unified yet different functional insights of a resultant gene set derived from a genome-wide profiling experiment. Results from the methods are presented, demonstrating their applications in biological studies and comparing with a pathway web-based framework that also combines several pathway databases. Additionally a web-based consolidation framework that encompasses all three methods discussed in this paper, Pathway Distiller (http://cbbiweb.uthscsa.edu/PathwayDistiller), is established to allow researchers access to the methods and example microarray data described in this manuscript, and the ability to analyze their own gene list by using our unique consolidation methods. CONCLUSIONS: By combining several pathway systems, implementing different, but complementary pathway consolidation methods, and providing a user-friendly web-accessible tool, we have enabled users the ability to extract functional explanations of their genome wide experiments

Motivational modulation of bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease off and on dopaminergic medication.

Motivational influence on bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease may be observed in situations of emotional and physical stress, a phenomenon known as paradoxical kinesis. However, little is known about motivational modulation of movement speed beyond these extreme circumstances. In particular, it is not known if motivational factors affect movement speed by improving movement preparation/initiation or execution (or both) and how this effect relates to the patients' medication state. In the present study, we tested if provision of motivational incentive through monetary reward would speed-up movement initiation and/or execution in Parkinson's disease patients and if this effect depended on dopaminergic medication. We studied the effect of monetary incentive on simple reaction time in 11 Parkinson's disease patients both "off" and "on" dopaminergic medication and in 11 healthy participants. The simple reaction time task was performed across unrewarded and rewarded blocks. The initiation time and movement time were quantified separately. Anticipation errors and long responses were also recorded. The prospect of reward improved initiation times in Parkinson's disease patients both "off" and "on" dopaminergic medication, to a similar extent as in healthy participants. However, for "off" medication, this improvement was associated with increased frequency of anticipation errors, which were eliminated by dopamine replacement. Dopamine replacement had an additional, albeit small effect, on reward-related improvement of movement execution. Motivational strategies are helpful in overcoming bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease. Motivational factors may have a greater effect on bradykinesia when patients are "on" medication, as dopamine appears to be required for overcoming speed-accuracy trade-off and for improvement of movement execution. Thus, medication status should be an important consideration in movement rehabilitation programmes for patients with Parkinson's disease

Workplace genres: a sociohistorical study of communicative practices in a production company

Studies of communication in the workplace have traditionally addressed a limited set of formal texts (e.g., memos, proposals, procedures) and described how those texts circulate in more or less predictable systems. Consequently, many of our assumptions about professional communication activities depend on simple transactional or rhetorical models that do not take into account historical factors and conceptualize too narrowly;This study addresses social and historical variation in a single company's communicative habits from 1920 until 1985 to illustrate how rhetorical performances in the workplace operate in complex networks of activity. This study challenges formalist conceptions of professional communication by examining how communicative practices emerge, develop, and decay as professionals use texts to negotiate their work activities over extended periods of time. This historical study of the complex and often unpredictable interplay of workplace activities and communicative practices reveals how seemingly stable workplace genres are actually contested sites where communicators make decisions to vary and repeat prior practices;Workplace activities at The Rath Packing Company of Waterloo, Iowa, form the background for this study. Focusing on the interplay between company activities and communicative practices, the study explores how management techniques, regulatory controls, and technological tools in the twentieth century affected workplace communication.</p