Researchers and practitioners in medicine, pharmacy, pharmacology, public health, psychology, anthropology, engineering, and information technology are working hard to understand why people fall off the wagon, and what might help them climb back on.

One way to support people in remembering health-related behaviours is to remind them. The question that motivates much of my work is: How can we design effective auditory reminders (speech, tunes, noises) that are pleasant to listen to?

I don’t claim that auditory reminders are the solution to all problems – instead, within the massive community of people that work on helping people remember, I focus on the particular reminder modality (hearing) that I know best. When my colleagues Marilyn McGee-Lennon, Steve Brewster, and I asked hundreds of people to tell us how they would like to receive reminders, and what they would like to be reminded of, most wanted visual reminders, but around a third said that they wanted to hear their reminder messages – either as speech or as a little tune. (McGee-Lennon et al., 2011) My mission is to ensure that those people who want to hear their reminders get audio messages that are as pleasant as well-designed as possible.

Telesynth

As part of this research programme, I ran a small study with my colleagues Brian McKinstry, Christine DePlacido, Christine Johnson, and Vasilis Karaiskos that had the following aims:

1. To determine how well older people with and without hearing problems can understand medication reminders when they hear them under adverse circumstances (e.g., high background noise, bad phoneline)
2. To get older people’s views on how to design telecare reminders.

We focused on medications because medication names are extremely tricky words to understand and remember. They are infrequent, latinate, and long. Yet, replacing the names with descriptions such as “the little blue pill” is not safe. Many people with chronic conditions are on generic medications that are produced by several different companies – packaging and pills look different depending on the manufacturer to the other.

In our study, we worked with older people, because this age group is more likely to be on medication, and may have quite complex medication regimes. Older people also have a much broader range of sensory and cognitive ability than younger people – therefore, testing a solution with older people is a good way of making it accessible to a large proportion of the population.

How was the study done?

We tested how well people could remember medication reminders that were generated by one human and two computer voices. Reminders were either for one or four medications at a time. In some of the four-medication reminders, the medication names were repeated, in some, an explanation was added. In the reminders, we used both over-the-counter and prescription medications, and we checked beforehand to what extent participants were familiar with the medications.

Some examples of reminders:
“Please remember to take the following medication: Aspirin.”
“Please remember to take the following four medications: Paracetamol, Aspirin, Corsodyl, and Metformin.”
“Please remember to take the following four medications: Paracetamol, Aspirin, Corsodyl, and Metformin. I repeat: Paracetamol, Aspirin, Corsodyl, and Metformin.”
“Please remember to take the following four medications: Paracetamol, for your pain, Aspirin, to thin your blood, Corsodyl, for your mouth ulcer, and Metformin, for your diabetes.”

Participants were recruited from four general practices in Edinburgh. First, they rated how natural the voices sounded and provided comments in a short interview. Then, they heard 72 reminders. Each reminder was followed by a short sentence, such as “Lucy sees four blue ships.” After they had repeated the sentence, they were asked to pick out the medications they’d heard from a list of 24 medication names, complete with potential indications. Only 12 of those occurred in the reminders, the remaining 12 were distractors.

Participants heard reminders in one of four conditions: high background noise / bad simulated telephone line, high background noise / good simulated telephone line, low background noise / bad simulated telephone line and low background noise / low simulated telephone line.

Before the voice tests, we assessed participants’ hearing and asked them to do several memory, attention, and recognition tasks. 56 participants completed the study, and 44 of these fulfilled the inclusion criteria (no hearing aids, no hearing loss due to middle ear hearing loss, no severe hearing loss).

What did we find?

Overall, people could remember one medication fairly well, but only if they already knew it. Medications were more difficult to remember when there was a lot of background noise, but there was no difference between the voices.

When hearing four medications, people mostly only remembered the one or two they knew. The human voice had a slight advantage over the computer-generated voices. Medications were remembered a little better when they were explained, and best when the names were repeated.

When we spoke to our participants after they’d completed the task, the feedback was very similar to what we found in the 2011 study. Some liked the idea of getting reminders over the phone, some preferred getting texts, while others liked to tick things off on paper. It was important for people to be able to review the information they’d gotten and ask for further information if they needed it. People who took many medications managed because they wove them tightly into their daily routine.

What does this mean in practice?

It is feasible to give people spoken reminders over the telephone even if they have mild hearing problems, but these reminders need to be about something they already know, and they should be reinforced by other measures such as compartment boxes. It also helps to talk to people about their routine – if this is more or less regular, finding a way to integrate the medications with it might be all they need.

Finally, since people prefer to receive reminders in different ways, reminder systems should use different channels, e.g. texting and phoning.

Over to you!

So, what do you think these results mean for your practice? Is this relevant to what you do or too esoteric? Would you like more information about this research? What should we have done differently, and what would you like us to look at next?

Dissemination

I will give a talk about TeleSynth at the Health Informatics Scotland conference on Monday, September 12, 2011; we are also writing up the results for a journal.

Acknowledgements

TeleSynth was funded by the Health Services research programme of the Scottish Chief Scientist Office; it is part of the TeleScot family of studies. The official TeleScot page on the project summarises the context and design.

You can find more background about our work on home and telecare reminders on the web site of the EPSRC project MultiMemoHome.

Zimmer argues that while Twitter is a public medium, “there is a reasonable expectation that one’s tweet stream will be “practically obscure” within the thousands (if not millions) of tweets similarly publicly viewable.” Therefore, he continues, the intended audience for tweets are people who invest the time and make the effort to seek the Twitterer out – but not researchers and other data analysts. Therefore, anybody seeking to use Tweets for research should first ask the Twitter user whose Tweets they are harvesting for “informed consent”.

Eysenbach argues that this is nonsense – Tweets are public, they are apparently not subject to copyright, and therefore, seeking informed consent to perform research on them is tantamount to Ethics Gone Crazy. (Not Eysenbach’s words, but he does appear to feel quite strongly about this issue.) Eysenbach, one of the key figures of medical internet research, has previously examined the ethics of qualitative internet research in depth in the British Medical Journal, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say.

For me, there are several issues here. I’m going to describe them in a somewhat vague layperson’s terminology, and I hope that people with more legal / ethical knowledge than me will be able to correct and comment on this.

The first issue would be “fair use”. As soon as Tweets are published, they become searchable, and they are periodically harvested and stored by Google. It may be your intention to communicate only with the people you are mentioning, but tweetbots, marketers, and others will be alerted to your Tweet through dedicated keyword searches as soon as they are published. Such automatic alerts or even regular hand-searches are common, and can lead to all sorts of serious legal, financial, and personal trouble for innocent tweeps who thought they were just talking to their followers. Twitter itself maintains up-to-date frequency statistics about words and two- and three-word combinations that are displayed as “Trending Topics”. In conclusion, it seems to me that detailed analyses of tweets are normal and, dare I say it, part of the fabric of Twitter – much to the regret of everyone who has ever been inundated by Bieber- and iPadBots.

So, 1-0 to Eysenbach.

Copyright was another issue that was mentioned in the debate (e.g., does retweeting violate copyright?). I am not even remotely qualified to address this point, so I’ll leave it for now.

But there’s a third issue here, and that is privacy and confidentiality. Yes, Twitter is public. But does that mean that everything that is published there can be republished without regard for the twitterer’s privacy? The Press Complaints Commission may think so , but I would like to see researchers hold themselves to stronger ethical standards than this. As we’ve recently seen in the Baskerville case, trampling roughshod over a person’s privacy can do real damage.

It may be argued that users should be aware at all times that tweets are public, and use Twitter accordingly. But that does not reflect the reality of Twitter usage. For me, and for others, it’s a kind of watercooler while we work. While it is true that Twitter is not a chatroom, it can come close, especially for people who work from home, like Ian Rankin. Some might brand this kind of behaviour foolish, but the point is that there are millions of fools just like Ian and me on Twitter. (Other things I have in common with Ian Rankin: Both of us live in Edinburgh. And, er, that’s it.)

Having said that, I try not to say anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t be happy to say to the addressee’s face. You never know, they might have searches set up for misspellings of their own name and tweet at you out of the blue, telling you that they are actually really lovely.

And the watercooler fun is not all. There are plenty of people who rage about their work (pseudonymously, but still, in my opinion, dangerously), and plenty of people who tweet while drunk or when returning home after a long and eventful night out. They may delete those tweets in the cold light of the morning, while suffering from the mother of all headaches, but your bot may still have harvested and stored them. Others take to Twitter when life gets them down, or they have had a bad day, to receive instant messages of support that can make a real difference to their mood.
Last, but not least, there are spoof accounts, set up to ridicule another twitterer. I know at least four people this has happened to, all prolific twitterer users.

When you perform your analysis, as a conscientious researcher, what do you do with all that sensitive data? Would you quote it with name and location? Would you discuss examples of spoof accounts, drunk tweets, dark moods, or watercooler jokes at length? Would you quote the tweets in your research – which would enable anybody with a search engine to find the original author? Would you reference twitterers by name, would you use their location data in your publications?

For me, this is where I draw the line. Harvesting is all well and good, but

1. for analysis purposes, identifying information should be removed as far as possible;
2. for publication purposes, it might be a good idea to contact the twitterer whose tweets are to be cited as examples, especially if the content of the tweets is manifestly private or potentially embarassing and damaging.

Anonymisation is actually standard practice in research – in all the consent forms that people who participate in my experiments, I assure them that their data will be fully anonymised, that nobody will be able to identify them from the data that has been stored about them, and that no identifying data will ever be used when the research is presented. It seems to me that Twitter research should follow similar practices.

I appreciate that there are some analyses where one would want to keep, say, location information, for example for regional topic analysis or news detection. But in such analyses, information from millions of tweets (and, by extension, Twitterers) is typically condensed into a few trends and graphs. Likewise, in research, demographical data stored about participants is often extremely broad – all I would typically store is gender, age (group), maybe education (again very broad, such as highest qualification achieved) or country of birth. This by itself is not enough to identify a person.

Another question is what would count as publication. That is an interesting question in itself. I haven’t asked Eysenbach for permission to link to the tweet I cited earlier, and I do not ask bloggers for permission to link to their posts. The line is extremely fluid though. My one overriding rule is to respect people’s privacy – if they would not want a tweet to be discussed in the Daily Mail, I do not mention it. (For non-UK-based readers, substitute a sensationalist tabloid whose political orientation is diametrically opposed to yours to get the general drift.) I have very specific examples in mind for most of the more touchy privacy issues I discussed above, but I would not want to name the people involved without their explicit consent.

One could argue that since these people were foolish enough to make mistakes in public, they are fair game. But this line of argument suffers from a problem that I see time and time again online – it disregards the fact that there are actual, living human beings behind the screen names, and they are affected, often deeply and sometimes permanently, by the things people write and tweet about them. As researchers, it is our duty to safeguard our research participants, to make sure they come to no harm as the consequence of our work, Therefore, it is incumbent on researchers to protect the best interests of the people whose online output they study – not vice versa.

Looking at Eysenbach’s paper with James Till in the British Medical Journal again, I think we would agree on this matter. For example, they say about newsgroup postings:

The internet holds various pitfalls for researchers, who can easily and unintentionally violate the privacy of individuals. For example, by quoting the exact words of a newsgroup participant, a researcher may breach the participant’s confidentiality even if the researcher removes any personal information. This is because powerful search engines such as Google can index newsgroups (http://groups.google.com/), so that the original message, including the email address of the sender, could be retrieved by anybody using the direct quote as a query. Participants should therefore always be approached to give their explicit consent to be quoted verbatim and should be made aware that their email address might be identifiable. Another reason why researchers should contact individuals before quoting them is that the author of the posting may not be seeking privacy but publicity, so that extensive quotes without attribution may be considered a misuse of another person’s intellectual property.

However, it is entirely possible that we differ on the implied norms of Twitter use. Eysenbach and Till write:

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the perception of privacy depends on an individual group’s norms and codes, target audience, and aim, often laid down in the “frequently asked questions” or information files of an internet community.

[ Twitter does not have a privacy policy, and there are no hard and fast rules or FAQs because there are so many different ways of using the service. ]

Update: As Gunther Eysenbach has kindly and correctly pointed out below, Twitter does have an explicit policy , to which he ascribes the same status as a FAQ.

However, from my own observations of the 800+ accounts I follow, “Twitter as watercooler”or even “Twitter as safety net for people who are going through a hard time in their life” are two frequent, entirely valid, and important uses of the service that need to be handled sensitively in research. Researchers who may not have encountered those uses of Twitter in their own work or streams, or who base their assessment of privacy mainly on external characteristics such as searchability, disregard them at their peril.

In conclusion, I see no problem with a systematic analysis of tweets for research, provided that they are properly anonymised. Twitterers should not be identifiable from publications that result from a piece of research unless they have explicitly consented to be named and/or to have their tweets reproduced in the context of this particular study. Given the private nature of much of Twitter’s content, that is indeed basic research ethics.

I am a bit of a language geek, having studied general and applied linguistics, phonetics, and computational linguistics at university. My first encounter with Gaelic was in 1995/96, when I spent a year at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (now Linguistics and English Language). While there, I decided to investigate the local languages (naturally!), in particular Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic or Gàidhlig is a close relative of Irish Gaelic and one of the three main languages of Scotland, the other two being Scots and English. I ended up taking a term of Scottish Gaelic for beginners and wrote my final thesis in Computer Science on a text-to-speech synthesis system for Scottish Gaelic.

After my return to Germany, I worked as a lecturer for a while, and got married to my husband, who I met at university. We are both Germans, and use the language almost exclusively at home. I moved to Scotland in early 2001, my husband followed in mid 2001, and we have been living in Edinburgh ever since. When we expected our first child in 2005, my dormant affection for Gaelic reawakend (what can you say, pregnancy hormones!), and I decided to put my child through Gaelic Medium Education (GME) . Apart from the obvious advantage of learning one more language, preserving linguistic heritage, and having a strong culture of music, drama, and poetry, GME has an excellent reputation for scholastic excellence. So my decision wasn’t entirely irrational. Oh, and GME kids are not bound and gagged by endless assessments and strict key stage progressions. While they learn at their own pace, they nevertheless somehow catch up with their peers, sometimes even surpassing them, by the time they move on to Secondary School.

When my daughter, and later our son, were born, I took them to the local Gaelic playgroup, Croileagan. Although not much Gaelic is spoken, because most of the mothers are English, it is enough to get a flair for basic vocabulary and sentences such as “Suidh sias aig a bhòrd!” (Sit down at the table).

Both my children started an English-speaking day nursery aged between 7 and 9 months. They go / went there three to four days a week and often attend English-speaking creches. While we will sing English songs with our children, read them English books, and let them watch television and DVDs in English, all other communication with our children is in German, even if other people are present. We will only speak English to our children if we want to make sure others can understand what we are saying (e.g., when admonishing them for misbehaving).

My daughter is now 5.5 years old. Her dominant language is English, which she uses with other children. Her German is hampered by lack of exposure to the language, and we are currently working (informally, of course!) on declensions, conjugation, and irregular verbs. I would say in terms of language acquisition, she is at her age level in English, and one year behind in German. She started attending sgoil-àraich (Gaelic nursery) for four, then five session when she was three. During her whole time there, she rarely used Gaelic at home, and did not even sing songs.

At age 5, when she started primary school, with full immersion in the language, that changed dramatically. She no longer asks for her gloves, but for her miotagan, not for her hat, but for her bonaid. Today, she wanted “an Saft sin” (Saft=juice in German) and declared of an activity “‘S e boring”. All I need to do to get her to speak is throw in the odd phrase or sentence. Since my own Gaelic is extremely patchy, I am sadly unable to provide her with the models that I frequently use to improve her German, but school is, as far as I can tell, doing a great job.

My son is not using any Gaelic yet, but he understands simple words and commands. He is English-dominant, but his German is catching up fast, and come August, he will hopefully join his big sister in the Edinburgh German Saturday School.

Next post (some time in the near future, during another interminable bedtime): Learning to read in Gaelic, how on Earth does that work?

Auracher, J., Albers, S., Zhai, Y., Gareeva, G., & Stavniychuk, T. (2011). P Is for Happiness, N Is for Sadness: Universals in Sound Iconicity to Detect Emotions in Poetry Discourse Processes, 48 (1), 1-25 DOI: 10.1080/01638531003674894

Following a conversation between Sophie Scott and Maria Panagiotidi , I decided to investigate. Let’s get started.

The central hypothesis is certainly intriguing: Speech sounds can be universally, biologically linked to certain emotions. As Auracher et al. correctly note, such a hypothesis flies in the face of a central tenet of linguistics: For almost all words, the link between sound and meaning is arbitrary. Words whose sounds are closely connected to their meaning, such as “pop” or “buzz” are the exception, not the rule. Based on previous work by Wiseman and van Peer (2003) and Albers (2008), they hypothesise that plosives evoke happiness and nasals evoke sadness. Albers, it should be noted, worked on Ancient Egyptian, a language for which no sound recordings exist. What we know about the phonology and phonetics of this language is due to razor-sharp reasoning, long hours spent slaving over parallel texts, and some of the most exacting empirical investigations in the whole of philology. (I would dearly love some Egyptologist input on the feasibility of sound symbolism studies for this language, by the way.)

Oral plosives are a class of sounds that are made by closing off a part of the vocal tract and then opening it again. You can close off the vocal tract at lots of different places. English only uses a few of these: the lips (that would be p or b), the space just behind the teeth (t, d), and the soft palate (k, g). Try saying p, t, k, and then b, d, g, and notice what happens when the closure is released.

Nasals are made in a way that is very similar to plosives, with one important difference: while the mouth is blocked off, the nasal cavity is open. Try saying m, n, ng, and compare this to b, d, g. You will find that the place at which the mouth is closed off is similar, but now, the sound “comes out” through the nose.

Which means that the difference between happiness and sadness is all in the nose …

Anyway, back to the research. What we have here is clearly an extraordinary hypothesis, which requires very strong evidence. Let’s see whether Auracher et al. have been able to provide this. At first glance, their overall approach appears to be very thorough:

[...] this study (a) uses a sufficiently large text basis to test the results for their general validity, (b) includes several languages to test the results for their universality, (c) asks participants to rate the texts to avoid subjective categorization, (d) uses an established dimensional model of emotions to categorize the phonemes, and (e) predicts a distinct relation between the relative occurrence of specific phonemes and the particular meaning expressed by the overall text.

All of these are commendable, but as always, the devil is in the detail. What is a sufficiently large text basis, and what kinds of texts should be used? Auracher and colleagues choose poetry, because there, they would expect to see particularly strong links between sound symbolism (phonosemantics) and emotional content. This is a reasonable argument, because poets harness everything language offers to create complex pieces of art that can evoke strong emotions in readers and listeners.

How many poems did the choose? Why, as far as I can see, two per language, each taken from one particular large collection of poetry. In my book, that is not “large”, but then I am also a computational linguist, and within computational linguistics, my main specialty is corpus linguistics. That is, I am used to dealing with databases of language and speech that contain thousands, tens of thousands, and millions of words of text. An alternative approach, which was taken by Whissell (1999), would be to examine the vocabulary of a language and look at the frequency of different types of sounds in words with positive or negative emotional connotations. This is very difficult to do cross-linguistically, because you need a well-curated lexicon with the appropriate information, or at least a thesaurus which would allow you to extract words for positive and negative emotions automatically.

The way Auracher et al. chose their two poems is linked to (e) – they selected the poem with the highest and the poem with the lowest plosive-to-nasal ratio from four collections of poems, one per language.

Which brings us to (b), including several languages. They selected a total of four languages, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese. German, Russian, and Ukrainian are Indo-European languages, just like Hindi and Urdu. German is a close relative of English – both are in fact West Germanic languages, while the Scandinavian languages form the North Germanic family. Russian and Ukrainian are not only both Slavic languages, they also belong to the same sub-branch of the Slavic family, East Slavic. Chinese in its manifold forms is part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This is hardly a representative sample – Indo-European, and in particular East Slavic, are vastly oversampled, and whole language families have been left untouched. Typologists who study language universals would typically insist on a broader sample.

The authors recruited a substantial number of participants for each language and asked them to rate each poem on a number of dimensions that have been used to classify human emotions. (Let me repeat – each participant only saw two poems, and these were in their native language.) Asking people to rate a stimulus along several dimensions is more reliable than asking them to rate whether a stimulus is happy, angry, or sad, so this was a very good decision to make. Participants did not know the research hypothesis, but they were debriefed afterwards if they wanted to. The dimensional model that Auracher et al. used looks sound enough to me, but having dabbled in emotion research myself, I know only too well that there is no single well-established model of human emotion, and that each of the rating scales that have been proposed so far have their problems. Inter-cultural differences are not the least of these issues.

The four groups of participants, which were opportunity samples (friends, acquaintances, recruited from “clubs or associations”) differed significantly in their gender ratios, age range, and education levels. None of the Chinese participants gave any personal information. As with the language sample, I would expect more of a balance in the participant sample – or at least an attempt at maintaining similar gender ratios and a similar coverage of age groups.

Some of the results were statistically significant.

I would like to leave you with two quotes from the paper. First, one from the discussion:

It has to be acknowledged that other models (e.g., Tsur, 1992) and empirical research (e.g., Miall, 2001; Whissell, 1999, 2000) lead toward different—and partially opposite—conclusions about the meaning of nasal and plosive sounds. In particular, Whissell (1999) identified the nasal phoneme /m/ as an active–pleasant sound and the plosive /t/ as a passive–unpleasant sound.

Whissell (1999) was the empirical vocabulary study I discussed earlier as an example of the kind of methodology I would have preferred to subjective judgements of two poems per language and participant.

Then, there is this speculation from the introduction:

However, if these cross-connections between facial gestures and movements of other parts of the body are hardwired, it sounds plausible to us that the articulation of certain phonemes can sympathetically mimic postures and movements, which are related to emotional states. As an example, this could mean that sounds, expressed with a closed mouth and constantly constrained lips or tongue, such as nasal phonemes, rather simulate the body movements of people who are in depressed, melancholic, sad, or passive moods, whereas the opening of the mouth and the explosive release of the air stream in plosive phonemes is associated with active, happy people.

Remember – the difference between oral plosives and nasals is all in the nose. Hardwired neural links between sounds and emotions require strong evidence. Are you convinced?

Additional References

Albers, S. (2008). Lautsymbolik in ägyptischen Texten [Sound symbolism in Egyptian texts]. Mainz, Germany: Zabern.

Miall, D. (2001). Sounds of contrast: An empirical approach to phonemic iconicity. Poetics, 29, 55–70.

Tsur, R. (1992). What makes sound patterns expressive? The poetic mode of speech perception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Whissell, C. (1999). Phonosymbolism and the emotional nature of sounds: Evidence of the preferential use of particular phonemes in texts of differing emotional tone. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 89, 19–48.

Whissell, C. (2000). Phonoemotional profiling: A description of the emotional flavour of English texts on the basis of the phonemes employed in them. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 91, 617–648.

Wiseman, M., & van Peer, W. (2003). Roman Jakobsons Konzept der Selbstreferenz aus der Perspektive der heutigen Kognitionswissenschaft [Roman Jakobson’s concept of self-reference from the perspective of present-day cognition studies]. In H. Birus, S. Donat, & B. Meyer- Sickendiek (Eds.), Roman Jakobsons Gedichtanalysen. Eine Herausforderung an die Philologien (pp. 277–306). Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein.

EDIT: Misattribution of original Twitter conversation fixed. (January 16)

Dear Colleagues,

One of our classmates recently gave birth and will be out of class for an unknown period of time. This means she will undoubtedly miss one, or more, or all quizzes in VMD 444. Dr. Feldman is not sure how to handle this and has requested the class give input and vote. He has provided us with 6 options on which to vote and is open to any other ideas you may have. Most likely a CERE poll will be up next week and a voting will close no later than Wednesday. If you have other suggestions please email them to Dan or I ASAP. We will alert you to the opening of voting. Below are listed the options that Dr. Feldman has suggested. Please reserve comment on these options and provide us your opinion on them by voting when the time comes. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

a) automatic A final grade
b) automatic B final grade
c) automatic C final grade
d) graded the same as everyone else: best 6 quiz scores out of a possible 7 quiz scores (each quiz only given only once in class with no repeats)
e) just take a % of quiz scores (for example: your classmate takes 4 quizzes, averages 9/10 points = 90% = A)
f) give that student a single final exam at the end of the quarter (however this option is only available to this one student, all others are graded on the best 6 quiz scores and the % that results)

Please let us know if you have other thoughts on how to handle this situation and please keep your eye out for the upcoming vote.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Your Presidents

A full account of the circumstances can be foundhere, together with some reactions from UC Davis students.

I would like to comment on this from the perspective of somebody who worked as a lecturer at the University of Bonn for three years (November 1997 – Februrary 2001) and who has been a guest lecturer and supervised MSc and Honours students at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Queen Margaret University, UK.

First of all, such a dilemma is unlikely to occur in the UK and Germany, countries who are familiar with the idea of granting multiple months’ Maternity Leave to women as opposed to the few weeks US women often get. In my time, I have taught many students who interrupted their studies or took on a reduced course load when they became parents. Students negotiated these solutions with their directors of studies (UK) or devised them on their own (Germany). In case of problems or conflict, they would contact the lecturer directly, and the lecturer would maintain total discretion.

Even though I have never worked in the rigid, family-unfriendly structures that UC Davis appears to foist onto its veterinary students, there are a couple of ethical guidelines of conduct that lecturers throughout the world should follow, such as confidentiality and a commitment to fostering and nurturing each student’s abilities.

From those principles, it follows that, on learning about the student’s pregnancy or new baby, the very first thing Dr Friedman should have done was to review the relevant institutional policies. I’m sure student services would have had some pretty good suggestions, as well.

Next, he should have conferred with the new/expectant mother. In the UK, the student would also have had a director of studies, a personal mentor who is responsible for pastoral care, and would normally help students with maternity leave arrangements. With the best interests of the student at heart, professor and student should have reviewed the available options, and discussed what fit best with the student’s previous performance, professional aspirations, and the postnatal support available to the student. As a lecturer, I would see this as the basic minimum required to fulfil the duty of care I have towards my students.

If there were any doubts or uncertainties, the case should have been referred to upwards, student services should have become involved, and due process should have been followed. Note the passive voice – I am assuming that there are processes and guidelines for such cases. I don’t for one moment believe that this was the first time a student has had a baby, or for that matter fallen very ill, or required an extended break, in the middle of a semester. I would be astounded to hear that UC Davis requires its lecturers to reinvent the wheel every time they encounter a tricky situation.

No matter how this played out in the end, at NO STAGE IN THE PROCESS should this decision have been left to the fellow students. It is a gross violation of the professional ethics I have been taught to respect as a lecturer. It doesn’t matter how many teaching awards a lecturer has, this is a matter of basic human decency.

However, I am even more disgusted at the students. If I had attempted such a stunt while still a lecturer at Bonn, the Fachschaft, who represent the students in each discipline, would have hauled me over hot coals the minute they heard about this. Never would they have let a fellow student down like this. I mean, not even the local Conservative student organisation, which at the time mainly consisted of over-ambitious young law and economics students, would have condoned such behaviour.

Now, I don’t know whether Friedman did indeed try to talk to the student and work out a solution with her in private. But that does not change one startling and horrifying fact – that it was the students themselves who turned on one of their own.

Why did the Presidents of the Year let themselves be used as a cover for a lecturer who was either not willing or not capable of following the procedures that would be common practice at almost every university I am familiar with?

Truly, a sad story. I hope it is reblogged and discussed widely.

(P.S.: Before you go off on an extended rant about the selfishness of reproducing breeders in the comments, replace “new baby” with “a couple of weeks in hospital after an accident” and consider whether that would change your point of view.)

What would a “Nature for the Humanities” be like? A behemoth of a publication, majestic in its impact, expansive in the size of the collaborations it fosters, and mighty in its outreach towards the public. Funders shall fall to their knees in awe before the glamour publications contained therein.

HAHAHAHAHA.

First of all, I hate to break the news, but not all sciences work like the disciplines that populate Nature and Science. In computer science, one of my fields, journals play a relatively subordinate role, impact factors are typically between 1 and 3, and many of the really groundbreaking publications are reserved for extremely competitive conferences with an acceptance rate of 20-25%. A core journal in one of my other fields, phonetics, the venerable and highly respected Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, has an impact factor which makes it unattractive to many medical researchers.

This colourful variety has its drawbacks: papers aren’t properly indexed, subject-specific literature search engines like CiteSeer or the ACM Digital Library are quite limited in their functionality. Computer Science is one field where Google Scholar has made a real difference in literature searching, leading hopefully to fewer reinvented wheels.

And despite a lack of traditional glamour publications, we computer scientists get our funding, we get big grants, and we talk to people about what we are doing.

But this is not about computer science, it’s about the Humanities. Well, let’s see what Christopher highlights as some of the major differences between the humanities and the sciences:

- Less formal engagement with the public
- Vastly differing research practices and disciplines
- Fewer large grant-funding opportunities
- Fewer collaborative research communities
- Prestige exists primarily in monographs rather than journals

He then outlines the following desirable practices for a Nature for the Humanities:

- Ensuring the humanities matter (to agencies and the public)
- Agreeing that subject differences are a strength
- Promoting collaborative research projects and practices

I can see at least two massive holes in Christopher’s argument. The first regards engagement with the public. Now, this observation might be biased because I am used to German media with a wide variety of weekly newspapers and magazines that give a voice to psychologists, sociologists, and historians. I have spent countless hours reading reviews of the latest historical treatises – many of these were books that were used to obtain postdoctoral qualifications at German universities. Nevertheless, these monographs (which could be eBooks in the age of Kindle) were designed to be accessible to everybody with an interest in history. Often, books by major theoreticians and philosophers in history, sociology, and philosophy were extensively discussed in the full glare of the public view.

Sociology, history, philosophy, and literature are fascinating – they deal with phenomena that are familiar to many people, they address pressing issues, and articles in magazines and newspapers (and, for the Web 2.0 fiends among you, blogs) can and will find their audience. You don’t even have to manufacture an impact culture-friendly motivation of cross-cultural exchange – people are fascinated by people, period. If we live in a culture where humanities don’t appear to matter, there are deeper cultural issues involved which a journal modelled on a particular style of academic communication won’t solve.

What might motivate Christopher’s assessment – and it would need an anthropologist or an expert in comparative media studies to assess this properly – is the different media landscape in Britain. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur not only put the highly influential Pierre Bourdieu (sociologist, innovative theorist) on its cover when he died, but devoted pages upon pages to a retrospective of his life and work. I can’t see that happen in Britain. The closest you would get to that here is probably a cover on the tired science versus religion debate with a fierce Dawkins or a sage Grayling.

(Again, I could be wrong, and I’d love to be corrected if I am. The British press might be more open to discussion of theoretical sociology than I have observed, or the German and French press might no longer be the comparative hotbeds of theory they used to be. I am well aware of the tits and blondes that pervade the Italian press, thank you very much. But oh look, the semioticist and historian of culture Umberto Eco has a regular column in L’Espresso where he talks about culture in its manifold forms.)

The second problem is with Christopher’s insistence on collaborative research. While collaborative work is indeed essential when working on large projects such as dictionaries, surveys, or inventories of artists’ works, the humanities have plenty to offer for the lone theorist ranger. But does that mean there is no collaboration? No – what you find instead is a strong spirit of discussion and debate. Collaboration does not happen in the form of co-authored papers, but in the form of a web of articles that, over time, yield new, improved theories and concepts. The literature is awash with elaborations, explanations, extensions, criticisms, and rebukes of the work of these theorists. Influential writers will even use – gasp! – textbooks to synthesise their thinking and influence generations of scholars.

To conclude, while there are some aspects of research in the humanities for which Christopher’s concept of a Nature-like journal might work, there are plenty of others for which it might be downright detrimental, in particular basic research, which often involves theoretical edifices and elaborate arguments that cannot be compressed into four pages plus supplemental material. Not to mention the substantial problems involved in forcing all kinds of research endeavours into the Procrustean bed of biomedical publication structures, but that’s another post.

Now, if you’d proposed a “Humanities American” in addition to “Scientific American”, that would have been another matter entirely.

(In this context, it might also be instructive to look at Melody’s discussion of the difficulties Nature and Science have with processing and reviewing papers on language.)

Projects

I’m a Senior Research Fellow, and in that capacity, I will be working on four projects, in teams of 5–10 other researchers for the first three and around 40 researchers for the fourth.

• Multimemohome: Designing effective, adaptable, acceptable, and accessible reminders for the home. Funder: EPSRC Until February 2013. Work Package 1 successfully completed. Major dual-tasking experiments in the planning stage.
• TeleSynth: How well can older people understand spoken medication reminders under adverse listening conditions? Funder: Chief Scientist Office. Until August 2011. In the Data Collection stage.
• CADENCE: Towards an Intelligent Cognitive Assistant that helps older people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease use simple software, such as a calendar, independently. Funder: Leverhulme. Until December 2012. About to start qualitative work – user requirements capture.
• Help4Mood: Telecare for people with depression, with a decision-support system on the clinician side and various kinds monitoring wizardry, including a virtual agent, on the patient side. Funder: European Commission. Until December 2013. About to start work.

(I work three days a week, so time management is going to be somewhat interesting. For various personal and professional reasons, I won’t be going up to four days a week until late Spring / early Summer.)

Papers, Publications, and Travel

I urgently need to turn around two journal papers that have been dogging me for years – one where I kept missing “golden time slots” for finishing the write-up, and one that has been rejected twice, and will go into a final journal before being laid to rest as a Technical Report.

Other than that, I have three papers scheduled for publication in 2011, a full paper and a note at CHI 2011 (second author on the paper, third on the note), and a second-authored paper at the INCLUDE 2011 Inclusive Design Conference in London.

For INCLUDE 2011, I’ll travel to London in April, for CHI 2011, to Vancouver in early May, and in late May, I’ll be in Dublin, co-chairing a workshop at Pervasive Health 2011 on Advances in Techniques and Technologies for Assisting Care at Home (ATTACH).

I plan to submit at least three papers:

• A four-page paper to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Hong Kong. It’s every four years, it’s fab, all phoneticians will be there and IPA’ing it up. Extremely popular, hence only one first-author submission per person.
• A journal paper expanding on work we did on using Amazon Mechanical Turk to assess the intelligibility of computer voices. The data’s almost collected, I’m just waiting on a final lab validation study, and then, the write-up can begin.
• A journal paper reporting on the TeleSynth results

Grants

I am doing bits and pieces on an EU Framework 7 Information and Communication Technologies application and revising a Marie Curie Initial Training Network grant for resubmission. Both are due in January. After they’re in, I don’t intend to write any more grants until TeleSynth has finished in August 2011, being already funded part-time until the end of 2013 and all that jazz.

Blogging

I hope to post at least three entries a month. One will be about a piece of research I’m doing or that I will be presenting, the second will be about linguistics, speech, statistics, or research life, and the third will be an entry to the month’s Scientiae carnival.

If you have any suggestions for topics, please comment below or let me know on Twitter.

It taps into two different controversies:

• Subjectivity versus objectivity
• Quality of scientific writing

The subjectivity versus objectivity debate is illustrated quite nicely by the comment thread to Sylvia McLain’s recent post on active versus passive. The central assumption seems to be that using the active voice acknowledges the researcher as an agent that introduces subjectivity into the process. Of course, using the active voice does no such thing. It is the methods that determine the extent to which there is leeway for subjectivity during data collection. If the results leave room for uncertainty or different interpretations (which is almost always the case), this should be made clear in the discussion. Whether the active or the passive voice is used for reporting the work is mainly a matter of convention. While the active voice certainly makes it easier to weave a good yarn, it is perfectly possible to write a bone-dry treatise drenched in positivism and realism without using a single passive. It is also perfectly possible to write a paper replete with passives that is a real rollercoaster of a read. Just take the simple sentence: “These results were not predicted by the standard model of particle physics.” BOOM!

This sentence neatly leads me to my next point. It is often asserted that the active voice is the key to good writing. Well, no, it isn’t. Our sample sentence would not be half as effective, had it been written in the active. As it stands, in the passive, the whole sentence is a single crescendo. We start with the results, then learn that they were not predicted, and then learn that the foundations of physics have just been shaken to their very core. The key information is in sentence-final position, where it is more likely to be remembered due to the recency effect. In English, the sentence-final position is also a classic place for presenting new or salient information. Since English word order is relatively fixed, the passive is often the best solution for moving the agent of an event to the end of a sentence.

The passive also comes in handy when it quite simply does not matter who did what. For example, when I wrote “this should be made clear”, the passive neatly avoided the clunky “author(s)” or the agony of deciding whether to say writer(s) instead of “authors” because it is possible to have authorship without having written a single line. I would imagine that something similar holds when describing the methodology of a standard experiment in biology, physics, and chemistry. (Come on, why say “We added chemical X to chemical Y” when the royal plural is meaningless because the lowly PhD student did all the hard work?) In linguistics and psychology, it’s somewhat different, because we tend to ask our guinea pigs / long-suffering students / valued participants  to take in stimuli and do stuff, and this usually lends itself well to descriptions using the active voice.

But if using the active voice isn’t the holy grail of good writing, what is? Well, if you want to know what makes a good text, ask a friendly linguist. Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists have spent decades studying the effect of linguistic form on the comprehension and retention of read text. There is a whole field of linguistics, text linguistics, devoted to studying the structure of texts. Based on all this research, your friendly linguist would tell you that although active versus passive voice may have an effect on comprehension, that effect is dwarfed by an issue that is often overlooked by grammar fiends: Coherence. A text that does not cohere is not a text, it is a jumble of words and sentences.

There are many ways of achieving coherence. For example, the text could be structured according to an easily recognisable schema, like clinical trial reporting standards. There are also linguistic means for ensuring coherence. These are often called markers of cohesion, following Halliday and Hasan‘s seminal work. Markers of cohesion can be on the level of words (lexical) or syntactic structures (grammatical). Examples from the blog entry so far include the parallel structure “good writing” … “good text”, anaphoric constructions such as “these”, “all this research”, and conjunctions such as “although”. Try removing them from the text and see what happens. How does it affect the flow? Does it become easier or harder to spot the connections between statements?

And I haven’t even gotten started about syntactic complexity, garden path sentences, and exotic vocabulary yet …

Armed with what I have told you so far about the active and the passive voice, about cohesion and coherence, and about the kinds of people who know about language comprehension, I would like to leave you with a little exercise:

Fisk the paper referenced in this blog entry by golden lady Pascale Lane. If you find it hard to get started, look at the references and count the number of references to the linguistic literature on texts, then divide them by the number of references to pontificating prescriptive position papers. You could also go to the literature review, and count the number of statements substantiated by actual experimental results. Feel free to report back in the comments.

For extra points, explain why the authors’ recommendation of standard ratios of active to passive voice in medical journal articles is poppycock and why any journal editors who follow it should be made to read William Topaz McGonagall’s complete works in one sitting, no toilet breaks allowed.

When analysing a piece of text for ambiguities, we need to ask:

• What possible readings of a sentence exist?
• Are those readings resolved in the text?
• If yes, where – in the next section? In the next paragraph? In the next sentence?

When it comes to documents that are relevant to public health, such as information about treatments for cancer patients published by the foremost UK cancer charity, Cancer Research UK, we need to add three additional questions:

• Is it possible to get a reading from a sentence that sends an undesirable message?
• What sorts of readers are vulnerable to this undesirable message?
• Is the message so undesirable that the text needs to be revised to remove the ambiguity?

In a heated discussion on Twitter, some people, like Alice Bell and Rebekah Higgitt, have argued that the CRUK guidance on homoeopathy is acceptable – it points out the caveats, while ensuring it does not alienate people who use or are sympathetic towards homoeopathy. Others, such as Ben Goldacre, Dorothy Bishop and David Colquhoun have argued that the text sends some extremely undesirable messages and needs to be revised.

In the remainder of this entry, I will explain how some of these messages can be derived. Throughout, I will assume that the authors of the original web page wanted to convey the message that homoeopathy is not dangerous, and that homoeopathic consultations can even be helpful, but only when practiced by a qualified, reputable, conscientious therapist who sees their role as supporting, not supplanting, traditional treatment.

Before I go on to explain how these undesirable readings can be derived, it’s worth taking a look at the discourse of cancer in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Because cancer is such a frustrating and horrible and maddening disease, because treatment often seems worse than the disease itself, and because it is easy to feel lost in a complex system of machines and procedures, people with cancer are a prime target for CAM practitioners. Many practitioners are themselves cancer survivors who mistakenly credit all or a large part of their recovery to the CAM modalities they used during their treatment. Orac explains why this is a very easy mistake to make. (By the way, when it comes to cancer and CAM, it is hard to top Respectful Insolence, a blog I cannot recommend enough.)

Often, CAM practitioners can give people the kind of ongoing, empathetic support that can be difficult to get while in the medical system. However, there is potential for great harm if practitioners give advice that runs counter to that of the treating clinicians, or, even worse, if they actively lobby their clients to give up their conventional treatment. Sadly, such practitioners are not a negligible minority. Satisfied CAM customers such as the American Kim Tinkham, who may be about to die of her cancer, go on massive multipliers like Oprah to sing the praises of their particular “alternative”, dissuading countless others from life-saving treatment. In her book Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich illustrates the intricate synergies between CAM therapies and the can-do, self-help, positive-at-all-costs attitude of many people with cancer in the US. Think yourself healthy! If you die, it’s your fault.

So what, Maria. These are all Americans. We’re British, we’re more sensible than this. Besides, these practitioners you speak of are just a few bad eggs who should be slapped down hard by their regulators. The web page quite clearly states:

It is very important that you have homeopathic treatment from a qualified therapist.

(Back to top)

Finding a homeopath

If your doctor refers you to one of the homeopathic hospitals you won’t need to find a homeopath privately. But if you are looking for private treatment, you need to make sure that you have chosen a qualified and reputable homeopath.

Currently in the UK, there is no single professional organisation that regulates homeopathic therapists. Therapists can join several associations. There is no law to say that they have to, but most reputable homeopaths do belong to one of the useful organisations. The best way to find a reliable therapist is to

Contact one of the organisations below and ask for a list of therapists in your area

• Ask the therapist how many years of training they’ve had and how long they’ve been practising
• Ask them if they’ve treated cancer patients before
• Ask if they have indemnity insurance (in case of negligence)

For more information about finding a reliable therapist and the questions you should ask look in our about complementary therapies section.

But it leaves out the most important question: Ask them whether they would ever knowingly give you advice that overrules that of your treating clinicians . (Also, run, don’t walk, if they start talking about their success rates.) For paediatric homoeopathy, the equivalent question would be “Do you support childhood vaccinations?”

There is also a problem with the wording of the second item of the list, because it is not clear what practitioners can claim to be able to treat. “Treating cancer patients” can mean “treating side-effects of cancer such as low mood” or “treating cancer itself”. The preceding paragraphs favour the first reading, but nowhere in the text is the second reading explicitly excluded. Readers are expected to make the correct inference themselves.

Personally, I would be very wary of any CAM practitioner who claimed they could “treat” cancer, and if a practitioner uses that expression in conversation with a new client who has cancer, I would again strongly advise the prospective client to run. All they can do is work with people with cancer or support the conventional treatment of people with cancer using complementary methods, and this is the wording I would recommend. Since homoeopathy is so badly regulated, it is all the more important to give people who insist on using it the right tools to find somebody they can usefully work with – so why is the ambiguity left in? Why are the all-important caveats never made very clear and explicit in a text that is almost certainly written to be accessible to people with a low(ish) reading level?

Next, let’s have a look at this gem:

More than 100 published clinical trials have looked at how well homeopathy works in treating various illnesses and symptoms. None of these trials give any scientific evidence to prove that homeopathy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer. Many people say that homeopathy has helped their symptoms and some small trials have shown that homeopathy can have a positive effect. But some doctors and researchers have concerns about the way in which the trials were carried out. Below is a summary of recent research into homeopathy for cancer.

So, there’s no evidence that homoeopathy can cure or prevent, but trials have shown that there may be positive effects. Now stop and read the second-to-last sentence aloud. What readings do you get when you put particular stress on “some”? Which ones do you get when you stress “concerns”? Is “some” correct, or shouldn’t it be “doctors and researchers who are not homoeopaths themselves”, complete with implied “all”, or, as a compromise, “most”. After all, not so long ago, there was a certain report by a parliamentary committee which definitely seems to point in that direction. (Also, how many is “many people”, and in reference to which set is the quantifier defined?). It may be argued that we’re splitting hairs now, and that this ambiguity is not really relevant.

Well, what about the final piece, which again I will quote in full context:

Homeopathy is one of the most common complementary therapies used by people with cancer. As with most types of complementary therapy, people use it because it makes them feel better or more in control of their situation. Some people choose homeopathy because it offers a completely different type of treatment compared to conventional medicine.

Homeopathy for people with cancer is promoted as a natural way to help you relax and cope with stress, anxiety, depression and control other symptoms and side effects such as pain, sickness and tiredness. Homeopaths believe it can treat a wide range of symptoms and conditions.

The text does not state explicitly that homoeopathy is also promoted as an alternative treatment for cancer by unscrupulous practitioners, and that such practitioners are unethical. This is implied and can be easily derived from the web page if you read it in a sufficiently sceptical frame of mind – it does state in the following paragraph that there is no scientific evidence that homoeopathy can cure cancer. But another possible reading is that there is no scientific evidence yet, and if homoeopathy may well have effects, then maybe what the homoeopath says is true, conventional researchers just aren’t looking hard enough or in the right place; maybe this case – my case – will be the one that convinces the medical establishment that homoeopathy can indeed cure cancer? After all, doctors have tried to use homoeopathy to treat cancer! (The money quote: “In 2006, a review of 6 trials of homeopathy in cancer care could not find evidence that they worked in treating cancer.”)

I am not saying that this second reading is the intended, or indeed the default reading. What I am questioning is whether it should be possible to get this reading at all, and why there is no clear statement anywhere on the page that it is unethical for a homoeopath to claim to be able to treat cancer, and that making such a claim is a massive red flag.

The generic web page on CAM, which is two clicks away from the homoeopathy web page, is similarly open to unfortunate readings. On this page, it says:

A complementary therapy means you can use it alongside your conventional medical treatment. It may help you feel better and cope better with your cancer and treatment.

An alternative therapy is generally used instead of conventional medical treatment. All conventional cancer treatments have to go through rigorous testing by law in order to prove that they work. Most alternative therapies have not been through such testing. Some are not completely safe and can cause serious side effects.

What these paragraphs omit is that any complementary therapy can become “alternative” in the hands of the wrong practitioner, and that quite a few complementary therapists will advocate alternative therapies, even though they may not practice them themselves. In this way, complementary therapists can be the “gate keeper” or “entry drug” for the really serious alternative approaches. This fact is partly acknowledged in the section that states

A good complementary therapist won’t claim that the therapy will cure your cancer. They would always encourage you to discuss any therapies with your cancer doctor or GP. Complementary therapies are available from many different types of people and organisations. Later in this section you can find out where you can have complementary therapies.

But in the following section on alternative therapies, all this good work is obliterated with a single stroke when they state “Unlike complementary therapies, alternative therapies are used instead of conventional medical treatment.” The distinction between the two is not categorical, it is gradual, and the line between good and bad depends not on the treatment, but on the qualifications and ethics of the practitioner.

Good nutrition is important, curing cancer purely through nutrition is dangerous nonsense, but there are many steps inbetween, such as wheat-free dairy-free meat-free diets that may be recommended unthinkingly, leading to severe nutritional deficiencies.

A positive attitude may help, but thinking your tumors away is dangerous. In fact, the particular type of CAM described in the book by Brandon Bays I just linked to, “The Journey”, is a great example of the slippery slope. The Journey is a lovely guided body-centric meditation with elements of counselling. In itself, it is quite harmless. The danger is the ideology behind it, which the practitioner may choose to downplay. The Journey was how Bays healed herself after developing a massive tumour. It’s not clear whether the tumour was indeed cancer, but what is abundantly clear is how important it was for Bays to “clear” this herself, and how passionately she resisted the attempts of her doctors to treat her. From there, it’s just a short jump to seeing Kim Tinkham on Oprah, reading “The Secret”, and feeling you let the sisterhood down if you let those evil doctors poison you with their chemotherapy.

While we’ve been discussing lots of different readings up until now, all of this may feel very detached and theoretical – especially if you belong to the group of people who get the (possibly intended) reading without any problems. It is possible to devise a reading comprehension study that tests what sort of statements people think are supported by this text; all of the readings I have advanced can be reformulated into testable hypotheses. A carefully run study along these lines would surely be useful, involving people both with and without cancer, and with and without previous exposure to CAM.

Ultimately, whether any of these ambiguities or multiple readings are sufficient cause for concern to put public pressure on Cancer Research UK to change the wording is not for me to decide – I’m not a doctor, nor am I a medical researcher. I’m just a linguist. And I’m worried.

Given the recent debate on tuition fees, I might expand this definition to include other groups (working class, non-academic family, etc.) – any suggestions for a good phrase to use or further groups to include?

One of the ways in which we hope to help people from underrepresented groups is social media. From what I have seen, blogs / twitter / facebook and related networks are a great way for people to connect and support each other. Are there any formal studies (qualitative or quantitative) that I could cite to support the argument, and any good summaries of strategies that have been shown to increase the percentage of people from underrepresented groups that will stay on after their first degree?