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This two-part research project evaluated the effectiveness of interpretive messages at Fossil Butte National Monument in conveying knowledge about the place and its resources and promoting respect for the fossil resource. The first study measured the short and long-term knowledge gains from a trip to the Visitor Center and the influence of a specially designed fossil respect message on the fossil protection beliefs of Monument visitors. The Visitor Center was successful in conveying information about the fossil resource and story of Fossil Lake, and that knowledge was retained for at least several weeks. However, neither the Visitor Center nor the special message, were successful in improving the fossil respect beliefs of respondents. The second study combined a visitor survey with direct observations of visitor behavior to evaluate the effectiveness of interpretive materials along a nature trail in improving the knowledge of ancient Fossil Lake, increasing fossil respect beliefs, and reducing depreciative behaviors. Six different treatments were applied that evaluated an interpretive sign, box of fossils that visitors were invited to touch, and participation in an interactive interpretive program. Only the interpretive program increased knowledge of the Fossil Lake story. None of the trail interpretive materials improved fossil respect beliefs. The sign was somewhat effective in reducing entry into a closed research quarry. While it is generally thought that those most knowledgeable about natural resources will have the higher resource protection beliefs, Fossil Butte visitors who reported being the most interested in fossils had the greatest knowledge of the Fossil Lake story but had the lowest fossil protection beliefs. Therefore, there was some evidence that fossil enthusiasts were the least likely to respect the resource. / Ph. D.

This study extended previous research by applying Higgins (2007) theory of Regulatory Fit to the context of performance feedback. Participants worked on an in-basket task in two 30 minute segments. Following the first 30 minutes segment, they were given recommendations for improving their performance framed in a manner that either did or did not fit their motivational orientation. Hypotheses predicted that compared to instances of non-fit, conditions of regulatory fit between recommendation frame (Eager vs. Vigilant) and motivational orientation (Promotion vs. Prevention) would have a significantly greater, positive impact on the following three outcomes: 1) Variety and Frequency of Feedback Use, 2) Feedback Recall, and 3) Attitudes Following Feedback. Overall results supported this assertion. Participants in condition of regulatory fit engaged in a significantly greater variety of behaviors and did so more frequently than those assigned to non-fit conditions. And while the effect of regulatory fit on feedback recall was not significant, it did approach significance (p = .07) and produced a pattern of results consistent with the predictions of regulatory fit. Counter to previous research, regulatory fit did not have significant impact on Attitudes Following Feedback in the current study. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. / Ph. D.

Email connects 85% of the world. This paper explores the pattern of information overload encountered by majority of email users and examine what steps key email providers are taking to combat the problem. Besides fighting spam, popular email providers offer very limited tools to reduce the amount of unwanted incoming email. Rather, there has been a trend to expand storage space and aid the organization of email. Storing email is very costly and harmful to the environment. Additionally, information overload can be detrimental to productivity. We propose a simple solution that results in drastic reduction of unwanted mail, also known as graymail.

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Yes / Stillbirth is a global public health priority. Within the United Kingdom, perinatal mortality disproportionately impacts Black, Asian and minority ethnic women, and in particular migrant women. Although the explanation for this remains unclear, it is thought to be multidimensional. Improving perinatal mortality is reliant upon raising awareness of stillbirth and its associated risk factors, as well as improving maternity services. The aim of this study was to explore migrant women’s awareness of health messages to reduce stillbirth risk, and how key public health messages can be made more accessible. Method: Two semi-structured focus groups and 13 one to one interviews were completed with a purposive sample of 30 migrant women from 18 countries and across 4 NHS Trusts. Results: Participants provided an account of their general awareness of stillbirth and recollection of the advice they had been given to reduce the risk of stillbirth both before and during pregnancy. They also suggested approaches to how key messages might be more effectively communicated to migrant women. Conclusions: Our study highlights the complexity of discussing stillbirth during pregnancy. The women in this study were found to receive a wide range of advice from family and friends as well as health professionals about how to keep their baby safe in pregnancy, they recommended the development of a range of resources to provide clear and consistent messages. Health professionals, in particular midwives who have developed a trusting relationship with the women will be key to ensuring that public health messages relating to stillbirth reduction are accessible to culturally and linguistically diverse communities. / Funding was received from the University of Huddersfield internal funding scheme.

Yes / In this report we focus on refugee and asylum seekers views on receiving, understanding and improving messages about public health advice. Refugees and asylum seekers as a group have incomplete access to television and WIFI or data to access the information they need in they way they prefer. Refugees and asylum seekers have constructive suggestions on how to improve key messages so they can be better understood. There is an ongoing risk to refugee and asylum seeker health, and population health if people are unable to receive official messages in a way that is relevant to them. / University of Bradford, NHS England

The injury recovery process is a tumultuous journey many athletes experience in their playing careers. Previous research highlights the importance of injury recovery for collegiate athletes, as a lack of social support leads to mental illness, decreases academic performance, and low levels of self-esteem. Utilizing the theoretical lenses of social support, memorable messages, and the sport ethic, the current study investigated how injuries affect athletic identity, the role that coaches, trainers, teammates, and family members play in the social support process, how injury affects athletes' experience with burnout, and the memorable messages that athletes received during their recovery. Themes emerged from data analysis, including (1) athletic injury affects identity, (2) coaches, trainers, teammates, and family members have a significant effect on the social support process, (3) injuries, long-term involvement in sports, and negative coach interactions are potential causes for athletic burnout, and (4) athletes remember positive feelings related to messages but are more likely to remember the specifics of negative messages. These findings suggest that multiple factors work in tandem to affect the overall injury recovery process for female college soccer players. The paper closes with theoretical implications and real-world practical applications for athletes.

An electronic DCT questionnaire, which was specially designed, pilot-tested, and refined, served as the chief instrument. Thirty students participated in the study and formed three cultural groups: ten native English-speaking American students (NS), ten Hong Kong Chinese learners of English (HKCLE) and ten Mainland Chinese learners of English (MLCLE). They completed the e-DCTs online and participated in stimulated recall sessions afterwards in which they were prompted to recall their thought processes while on task. Six American professors evaluated and commented on a random sample of the e-mails (30% of the corpus). The e-mail data were coded with a modified version of the CCSARP (Cross Cultural Speech Acts Realisation Patterns) manual; open-coding and thematic analysis were applied to the stimulated recalls and recipient feedback, with the aid of NVivo 8. / Concerning the interlanguage aspect of the requests, the major findings were: In making status-unequal requests to their professors, students from all three cohorts tended to be indirect in general. The two learners' groups demonstrated a fairly strong pragmalinguistic control in realising specific indirect requesting strategies with a variety of forms; they relied heavily on the conventionally indirect strategy of Query Preparatory (QP). By contrast, NSs exhibited greater flexibility in their strategy choices, which ranged from very direct to indirect. The CLEs were particularly weak in employing certain syntactic devices as downgraders; to compensate, they made excessive use of lexical/phrasal modifiers and external mitigating moves to soften the requestive force. / MLCLEs were found to always be the least confident group in terms of their language use, as compared to the HKCLE group, which was the most confident. The measurements of power difference and social distance were rather approximate among the three cohorts. NSs were more apt to lessen the power distinction and stress the mutuality of 'showing respect', whereas CLEs were inclined to accentuate unequal power distributions, and emphasise the hierarchical asymmetry. Imposition degree was found to be the most dynamic of the three variables. The reasons for its use were multi-faceted, encompassing diverse affective, cognitive, and social factors. / The audience (American professors) perceived that the students were both direct and polite in making requests. The NSs were found to be the most polite and most satisfactory group in terms of their linguistic production. (Mis)matches were identified between the expectations of the e-mail writers and their receivers. Case analyses revealed disparity in student performance and variations in their developmental progress in terms of pragmalinguistic competence, sociopragmatic awareness, and intercultural communicative competence. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed. Finally, the thesis concludes with suggestions for future studies. / The present study investigated the speech act realisation of requests in student-professor e-mail communication at a university in Hong Kong. This mixed-method study employed an electronic version of DCTs (Discourse Completion Tasks), stimulated recalls, and audience judgements to investigate the verbal behaviour of both native speakers of English and non-native speakers (Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese) who were students at the university. / Pan, Ping. / Advisers: Gwendolyn Gong; Jane Jackson. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 348-363). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Prendre en compte l'aspect sémantique des données textuelles lors de la tâche de classification s'est imposé comme un réel défi ces dix dernières années. Cette difficulté vient s'ajouter au fait que la plupart des données disponibles sur les réseaux sociaux sont des textes courts, ce qui a notamment pour conséquence de rendre les méthodes basées sur la représentation "bag of words" peu efficientes. L'approche proposée dans ce projet de recherche est différente des approches proposées dans les travaux antérieurs sur l'enrichissement des messages courts et ce pour trois raisons. Tout d'abord, nous n'utilisons pas des bases de connaissances externes comme Wikipedia parce que généralement les messages courts qui sont traités par l'entreprise proveniennent des domaines spécifiques. Deuxièment, les données à traiter ne sont pas utilisées pour la constitution de ressources à cause du fonctionnement de l'outil. Troisièment, à notre connaissance il n'existe pas des travaux d'une part qui exploitent des données structurées comme celles de l'entreprise pour constituer des ressources sémantiques, et d'autre part qui mesurent l'impact de l'enrichissement sur un système interactif de regroupement de flux de textes. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons la création de ressources permettant d'enrichir les messages courts afin d'améliorer la performance de l'outil du regroupement sémantique de l'entreprise Succeed Together. Ce dernier implémente des méthodes de classification supervisée et non supervisée. Pour constituer ces ressources, nous utilisons des techniques de fouille de données séquentielles. / Taking into account the semantic aspect of the textual data during the classification task has become a real challenge in the last ten years. This difficulty is in addition to the fact that most of the data available on social networks are short texts, which in particular results in making methods based on the "bag of words" representation inefficient. The approach proposed in this research project is different from the approaches proposed in previous work on the enrichment of short messages for three reasons. First, we do not use external knowledge like Wikipedia because typically short messages that are processed by the company come from specific domains. Secondly, the data to be processed are not used for the creation of resources because of the operation of the tool. Thirdly, to our knowledge there is no work on the one hand, which uses structured data such as the company's data to constitute semantic resources, and on the other hand, which measure the impact of enrichment on a system Interactive grouping of text flows. In this thesis, we propose the creation of resources enabling to enrich the short messages in order to improve the performance of the tool of the semantic grouping of the company Succeed Together. The tool implements supervised and unsupervised classification methods. To build these resources, we use sequential data mining techniques.