text:
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After reviewing your revised manuscript, I now consider it suitable for publication.
There are a few minor grammatical, spelling and clarity problems remaining in your manuscript. I have attached a copy with the problems indicated in yellow highlight and an inserted comma to suggest alternative wording and, in some cases, explain the problem. It should not take you long to make the changes and then the manuscript can be accepted.
Overall, the revisions to the manuscript have addressed all the major issues raised by previous reviewers and the editor.
However, because the analysis was changed, it was necessary to find a reviewer able to assess the new information theoretic approach. This reviewer was asked to focus only on this aspect of the statistics. The reviewer confirmed the validity of the overall approach, but suggested that some clarifications and justifications were needed. I would like to elaborate on one point made by this reviewer. He or she noted the unusual procedure of using the 90% CI instead of 95% and requested a justification. Looking at the data in Table 1, I suspect that 90% was used because the effect of number of livestock would not be statistically significant if 95% was used. If there is no independent, a priori justification for using 90%, I suggest that the authors return to 95% CI and in their results indicate that ANL approached significance and was the most important variable.
Furthermore, with the revised description of village selection, I have a concern about potential bias in the study design. I am not sure I understand the procedure for village selection on L93-95. As written, the text implies that you selected villages that were reported to have high rates of wolf predation on livestock but included some villages that had low reported predation rates. If this is the case, there is a problem with the study design because the proportion of high and low predation villages you selected will influence the average reported rates of predation. The potential for bias is obvious: if you wanted to show high rates, you could use more high-predation villages. If you wanted to show low rates, you could use more low-predation villages. This might not affect your analysis of villagers' attitudes, but it could certainly affect your measures of average effect. If my interpretation is correct, you will have to calculate your mean loss rates separately for the pre-selected high and low predation villages and give the number of such villages used as well as an estimate of the proportion of high- and low-predation villages in the area. There might also be some attention in the Discussion to why some villages have more predation than others and perhaps even a statistical comparison if there are sufficient data. If my interpretation is not correct, you need to be clearer about how you selected the villages. Please contact me if you need to discuss further this issue.
In addition, there are several grammatical problems that I have highlighted in an annotated version of the manuscript, which I have attached to my review.
I am therefore returning the manuscript again for minor revisions.
The editor asked me to comment and evaluate the statistical methods used in this manuscript, more particularly on the Information theoretic approach and AICc.
Overall, the statistical methods are valid and used properly. I only have some minor comments to clarify the Data Analysis section.
1) Line 137-141: More details should be provided concerning the reason why authors used model averaging.The authors should mention somewhere that the model with the lowest AICc is the best model, independently from being 2deltaAICc from the next best model. Then, it should be state clearly that if some models are within 2deltaAICc, it means that these models also have support to explain the data and should also be accounted for in the results/analysis. It is the reason why the authors used model averaging, i.e. to account for the support of more than 1 model. This will help neophytes to understand the use of Information theoretic approach (i.e. AIC).
2) Line 137-138: The deltaAICc (difference between 2 models) does not give you a measure of how much likely a model is the best one. The ratio between the model-normalized Akaike weight (or relative importance) of two MODELS can be interpreted as a likelihood. The same method can be used for the variable-normalized Akaike weight.
3) Line 141: I use Information theoretic approach and AICc regularly and never heard about the natural average method. The authors should provide a reference or add more details about this technique.
4) Line 142: This is a very technical question but why the authors used the 90%CI instead of the 95%CI? The 95%CI is more widely used.
5) Line 145: Could you also provide a reference to support your statement about the association of a variable to the response variable when the w+ is larger than 0.7? A variable can have a very high w+ but very low explanatory power (i.e. not within the 95 or 90%CI). The w+ of each variable helps to compare variables among each other by examining the ratio of w+.
6) Table 1: The last two variables should be inverted in order to be consistent (decreasing value of w+). Education_secondary and above should come before Education_elementary school.
No Comments
See basic reporting.
No Comments
Editor's Comments
Both reviewers indicate that your manuscript contributes to our limited knowledge concerning human attitudes toward wolves in Asia, although both suggest that the contribution could have been greater if you had used alternative approaches. Both reviewers have suggestions for improving the analysis and presentation, and I have some additional suggestions of my own. I am therefore encouraging you to make appropriate revisions to address the concerns of the reviewers and submit a revised version to PeerJ.
Reviewer 1 indicates that you should have addressed human fear of wolves or at least state why you did not address this topic.
This reviewer would like a more explicit statement about whether there is any independent information about wolf population size and conservation status and about the injury caused to humans and livestock in the study area and broader region. If there is no such information, you should state this explicitly.
This reviewer indicates that semi-structured interviews might have provided additional information to provide a more complete overview of people's attitude toward wolves. I realize that you cannot change your sampling method, but it is possible that you can supplement the information provided by insights gained in informal discussions with the respondents.
The reviewer also suggests that you should frame your suggestions regarding mitigation in the context of how limited your understanding of the origins of the conflict remains. Perhaps adding more indication of additional information that could guide conflict reduction would be helpful.
Reviewer 2 suggests that you should be careful to explain that livestock losses are self-reported in the interviews. Is there any way in which you can verify the magnitude of these reported losses?
This reviewer also suggests that you attempt to use more precise and quantitative terms rather than general descriptive terms whenever possible.
Furthermore, this reviewer feels that you have not adequately integrated the large available literature on this topic into your findings. I note that for some contributions of your study you have related your findings to the literature (the relationship between magnitude of livestock losses and negative attitude, the lack of a relationship between personal characteristics and negative attitude, potential mitigation strategies). For other topics, however, you have not indicated whether there is any comparable literature and how it affects your interpretation. These topics include public perception of changes in wolf abundance and the relationship between number of livestock owned and a negative attitude toward wolves. For the topics where you have not incorporated literature, please review available literature to integrate previous findings or indicate that previous researchers do not appear to have examined that topic. For the topics where you have incorporated some literature already, please consider whether there are other important references and whether you have adequately related your findings to previous work. For contributions where there is no previous literature as far as you know, state this explicitly as it emphasizes the originality of your contribution.
This reviewer questions your use of logistic regression because of concerns regarding the categorization of responses, the high proportion of negative attitudes, and recently increased awareness of the risk of incorrect conclusions from a probabilistic analysis. The reviewer proposes the use of content analysis or another social science method. Although I do not disagree with the reviewer's concerns, you have used an established approach and I would not insist that you change your entire analysis for this manuscript. However, you should clarify how easy or difficult it was to categorize responses and, for each finding, critically address the strength of the conclusion in your Discussion. I agree that a more complete Table 1 would help the reader understand your analysis and findings. You could look at some current publications using a similar analysis and see what information is normally presented in the table.
Reviewer 2 also suggests clarification of the study population and sampling procedure. In the Abstract, it is important to indicate that you sampled a subset of the local population who were more likely to have had experience with wolves. Selection of this sub-group does not sound like stratified random sampling, but you might have been referring to the distribution of sampling among villages or some other aspect. Please clarify your sampling procedure.
This reviewer also requests a more in-depth discussion, including consideration of alternative explanations for your findings and consideration of broader implications of your proposed mitigation strategies.
Additional comments from the editor:
When introducing the study area, it would be useful to indicate which species of livestock are kept, the husbandry practices (for example are the animals left to range freely or are they fenced, are they guarded by people or dogs, are they returned to a protective corral or barn at night). What are the natural prey species of wolves in the area? Indicate whether the wolves primarily diurnal or nocturnal in this area if it affects the risk of livestock mortality?
When interpreting the effects of number of livestock owned and proportion killed, it does not seem evident that loss to wolves would be less important for those with fewer animals. Isn't it possible that those with fewer animals might be poorer so that the loss would be more important? Also, is there any relationship between the number of livestock and proportion lost? For example, a large herd might be better protected or more able to resist a wolf attack. A relationship between herd size and proportion killed might help interpret the observation that the number of livestock but not proportion lost is related to attitude toward wolves.
In the Discussion, please try to take a more self-critical approach to your findings and indicate the strength of the pattern and potential confounding effects.
I think that assigning 0 predation to informants who had no livestock will artificially reduce the predation intensity. In your methods, be sure that it is clear this applied only to the regression and not to the descriptive statistics. (It does become clear in the Results, but you should not raise concerns in the reader's mind in the Methods.) It is possible that assigning 0 predation to respondents that had no livestock may have affected the apparent relationship between depredation losses and attitude toward wolves. Is there any way you can test the effect of percent loss using only those informants who had livestock, perhaps by carrying out a supplementary analysis?
In the Results, give ranges as well as means for the number of livestock owned and the percent depredation because these are independent variables in your regression and the range of values could have an important effect.
L132. Fig. 2 shows that people with a more negative attitude owned more livestock than people with a neutral or positive attitude, not the other way around as you stated. This is also incorrectly restated in the Discussion L148. If you are basing this statement on your regression analysis rather than Fig. 2, you need to rephrase it something like, 'People with larger numbers of livestock were more likely to have a negative attitude toward wolves'.
L145. It is not clear what you mean by wolves 'relocating to private lands'. Where were they previously?
On the headings of the supplementary data table, Annual is not spelled correctly.
In general, the quality of the English is quite good. However, there are some errors in grammar and spelling that should be corrected. I will email you a pdf of your manuscript with yellow highlighting to indicate problem areas because there are too many to list here. In many cases, I added a comment box to indicate alternative wording or punctuation. If you are not certain what the problem is, please contact me by email.
In the Introduction, when defining the conflict between wolves and humans, authors neglect strong emotions toward wolves. It is known from earlier studies that the attitude formation is strongly driven by fear of wolves as well as the specific characteristics of the species. Fear of wolves is a common phenomenon in the whole distribution range of the species and it needs to be acknowledged also here. Unfortunately, it seems that this lack in defining the conflict has restricted authors in the material and method section too. If this has been intentionally done by the authors and is, as such, a result of choice, then this choice should be clearly clarified and an explanation for this must be given.
In spite of this criticism, the manuscript includes results that are relevant in terms of the objectives set in the Introduction; to determine the wolf population trends and the level of livestock depredation caused by wolves and to examine peoples' attitudes towards wolves in terms of socioeconomic variables, religious beliefs and ownership of livestock.
Authors need to indicate the estimates on wolf population in China as well as in the study area of the Jiuzhaigou County in the Introduction. If there are no reliable estimates available, this should be clearly stated in the text. Also, the conservation status of wolves in China needs to be indicated.
This research and its findings are a good example of a basic study. In particular the topic of attitudes toward wolves at local level is very important, and research in different countries and in different contexts is needed. In gathering material semi-structured interviews offer an excellent opportunity for the researchers to output a thick description of attitudes in its context. However, this is not the case in this research. Instead, authors have had very basic approach with questions limited to three in assessing the attitudes. Method is limited to quantitative measures whereas more holistic qualitative approach is missing. Valid information is missing for understanding the conflict and attitudes.
However, keeping in mind the purpose of the manuscript, relevant results are gained with selected methods.
Main concern is about the sections of Discussion and Conclusions in the context of conflict resolution. As the authors are Chinese they also have a basic knowledge on national and local preconditions of planning the wolf policies. These preconditions should be somehow included in the text. By being unfamiliar with the carnivore conflict circumstances in China I would be interested in the relation and significance of the economic losses that wolves cause. Are there any known wolf attacks on humans and are those cases well documented? Human injuries caused by wolves can pose a several threat to human welfare, and therefore, they cause large scale economic losses. In the Conclusions authors do not try to ask the question, if is it possible to harvest wolves or intimidate them, and therefore get wolves to be afraid of humans.
Authors suggest that local peoples should be adjusted to reduce their dependency on livestock in the long-term. How about local defiance toward authorities, who are going to implement these actions? If fear is one of the main motives to cause negative attitudes toward wolves, will local people change their attitudes towards wolves regardless of their livelihood? This is why it is short-sighted to draw this kind of conclusion because no holistic approach on attitudes toward wolves has been conducted in this study. These limitations should be stated in the Discussion.
No comments
Scientific validity - questionable (see below)
Suitability to join the scholarly literature - This manuscript requires fairly major editing, a more intensive literature review, and the analysis is overly simplistic. The manuscript contains multiple terms that probably shouldn't be used or, at least, need to be defined (e.g., severe, fairly common, good ways, large, reasonable, hopefully). Authors need to report findings as self-reported livestock losses (depredations) because reported losses may differ dramatically from reality (e.g., L123; many more examples exist, such as the Abstract). Author's do not adequately incorporate the large volume of literature on this topic from all around the world. Finally, I have concerns regarding experimental design (see Experimental Design comments).
The data collection approach (semi-structured interviews) does not fit well with the data analysis approach (logistic regression), which requires condensing highly complex data into qualitative categories that can be subject to interpretation. The data analysis approach is problematic because of the fact that most respondents were negative (84) and only a few were positive or neutral (15). This severely limits the statistical inferences of the study. Furthermore, many researchers have challenged the validity of step-wise model building using significance as it can lead to spurious results.
It would have been more appropriate to use content analysis and explore the intricacies of specific responses to the three main questions, of another qualitative social science method. Furthermore, many of the variables were not adequately assessed - assigning default values to respondents who did not have a particular response associated with a given variable is not appropriate - particularly given the variety (usually two possible outcomes) of potential responses.
Education level of the respondents was reported as achieving only 80% of respondents - what were the rest?
The authors should make note that their survey was biased towards those more likely to have experiences, particularly, negative experiences with wolves as they selected for individuals who lived near the forest and grazed livestock or did other activities near the forest - thus, these results represent a particular unique subset of the population and are definitely not representative and need to be reported as such (this is why such a large percent of individuals owned livestock). Furthermore, this is not stratified random. This is a biased interview approach. Which is ok, but needs to be reported as such, since it represents a particular unique subset of the population.
No Comments
This paper is interesting as little has been reported on wolf-human interactions and attitudes regarding wolves in Asia. However, besides that it is very simplistic and analyses are questionable.
Some of the alternative hypotheses proposed by the authors to explain their findings have some obvious additional alternative hypotheses (e.g., perception of increasing wolf numbers could be due also to a reduction in wild prey, changing livelihoods of locals, changing cultural perspectives of locals, etc). Lastly, reducing dependence on livestock only shifts livestock production to different areas - which may have different environmental impacts. The authors should further discuss the potential role of compensation and other alternatives such as, education and marketing to increase tolerance or limited removal of problem wolves by governmental employees or locals.
Table 1: You had so few variables why not show the output for all models considered so we can better understand what you did and how you are interpreting your data.
Figure 1: Provide some geographical information to help people unfamiliar with China understand where you are located (particularly in the inset)
Figure 2: What are the error bars?
All text and materials provided via this peer-review history page are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.


text:
To order images and/or obtain permission to use them commercially, please contact the KSHS Reference Desk at firstname.lastname@example.com or 785-272-8681, ext. 117.
For more information see the Copyright and Permission FAQ.
A photograph of the 20th Kansas Regiment taking a meal in a trench while stationed in the Philippines. This photograph is from the Metcalf album collection.
Creator: Rockett, P. Fremont
Date: 1899
Item Number: 442702
Call Number: E726 Ks.Inf20 .PI *3
KSHS Identifier: DaRT ID: 442702
Collections - Photograph
Date - 1890s - 1899
Military - Service - Army - Infantry - 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry
Military - Wars - Spanish American War
Objects and Artifacts - Communication Artifacts - Documentary Artifact - Photograph
Places - International - Philippines
Type of Material - Photographs

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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For questions regarding our website: E-Mail - La Plaza Telecommunity


text:
Owning or managing a business certainly has its rewards, but it can have its stressful moments too. Not only are you responsible for the needs and satisfaction of your customers and employees, but you are also in charge of keeping them safe from workplace incidents that can result in injury. An injury within in the workplace has the potential to lead to legal trouble so it's important that you take the steps to prevent such incidents before they occur.
Common employee and customer accidents, such as slip and falls, must be prevented within the interior as well as the exterior of the business. "Slip-and-fall and trip-and-fall accidents typically occur because a hazard that has not been cleaned up repaired...in most cases, this is due to the negligence of the property owner," reports DSSLaw. Whether you are the property owner of the business or the manager, it's vital you prevent accidents whenever possible.
Most common workplace incidents
In the workplace, the most common work-related injuries are overexertion of the body, falls, slips, and trips, or contact with an object or equipment. The injuries related to these common accidents can range from a minor strain to severe injuries leading to days away from work to a fatality. While thesework-related injuries are preventable and workplaces strive to have a "zero accident" record, thousands of workplace accidents continue to occur each year.
Before you can take steps in the prevention of accidents, it's important to figure out why such injuries continue to occur. Are employees not following Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)? Are they not trained properly? Are you missing safety equipment? Are your employees simply just clumsy? Chances are, it's a combination of all of these things. Here are ways to make sure your workplace is a safer environment for your employees:
- Have a safety plan in place: This is a plan that is well-known throughout the workplace, it is clear to all employees, and it detailed on what to do in the event of an injury or accident and how to proceed. Contact OSHA or view some of their samples to make your own plan.
- Provide proper training, enforce safety: There's a lot to cover when training a new employee, but safety should definitely covered. Even if you run a small convenience mart, your employees should know how to keep themselves safe. Whether you require safety gear, specific footwear, or other safety implements, make sure it's enforced consistently.
Keep customer safety in mind
The success of your business can rise and fall with a customer's experience, including an injury received in or outside of your business. Like employee injuries, slip, trips, and falls are common customer injuries, which means you need to take extra care in making sure your place of business is free from any hazards from puddles on the floor to uneven concrete to bunched up floor mats to cords strewn across the floor.
In addition to making sure your place of business is free of hazards, you should always post signs that clearly indicate a potential hazard. For example, if your floor is wet you must post wet floor signs. If your automatic door suddenly stops working, you are responsible taking quick action to have it repaired while making sure all customers know of any potential dangers involved with an inoperable door.
Keep your successful business running smoothly, make your employee and customer safety a number one priority.
* Image: Shutterstock, copyright: Lee Torrens


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Sunglasses/ Thierry Lasry - Bracelet/ Marni - Sweater/ Sandro - Leather shorts/ Rag & Bone
I might have a BIG passion for orange at the moment. Not some orange, coral orange.
I would love to wear it with some white and blue. It makes a very funky look don't you think?


text:
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text:
|Kelly Lynch (1959 - )
|Heaven's Prisoners (1996) [Annie Robicheaux]: Shot in the chest by a couple of thugs while in bed; we hear the shots from outside, then her body is shown when Alec Baldwin rushes in and discovers her. Her body is shown again (more clearly this time) in a nightmare sequence later on.
Persons Unknown (1996) [Amanda]: Shot by one of the bank robbers as she tries to run away. (Thanks to AnnRK)
Cold Around the Heart (1997) [Jude Law]: Killed in an explosion when the gas station blows up, after being shot and wounded by David Caruso (whom she had just stabbed). (Thanks to Richard)
Charlie's Angels (2000) [Vivian Wood]: Killed in an explosion when Sam Rockwell fires a missile at his mansion while Kelly is fighting Cameron Diaz on the balcony; Cameron jumps to safety (along with Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu) as the building blows up. (Thanks to Germboygel)
The Jacket (2005) [Jean Price]: Burned to death (off-screen) when she passes out with a lit cigarette in her hand; we learn of her death when Keira Knightley tells Adrien Brody. Her death is undone when Adrien goes back in time and leaves her a warning note. (Thanks to Alex)
Kaboom (2010) [Smith's Mom Nicole]: Killed (off-camera) in a car crash (along with all the other major characters) when they go over a collapsed bridge at the end of a chase. We only hear the crash after seeing close-ups of each person reacting in horror.


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Keep up with my doings in Australia...
Sunday, May 07, 2006
A job and a didj
One the first day I arrived, Dan Garner and I wandered around Sydney, site seeing. I wanted to see some didjeridus so he took me to the circular quay and a piss-poor little shop. The didjeridus were not great either. The shop owner told me about the Didj-beat shop in the Rocks (a lovely bit of Sydney) so a few days later I went and had a look.
It was Aladin's cave. Didjeridus of many shapes and colours. Of course a lot of them were tourist didjeridus but a good 50% were the real deal, and had that sound that only comes from hardwood. Mel (the owner) is a bit knowledgable about the whole thing. She knows about the colours and what they mean, the crosshatching (rarrk) and dot work. Red means blood, black means people, yellow means sun and white means bone.
She knows a lot about pitch and is a very good western-style player.
So I visited and tried out 'the toys' as she calls them. I met one of her people (Takk - who plays bloody well) and swapped playing skills. She put me in touch with Peter Lister and Jeremy Cloake (who I had a lesson off a few days after that).
I played a lot of those didjeridus and each time I went back afterwards there was one stick that I wanted to play again and again!
So yesterday I bought it.
It is over a metre long and has yellow, red and black bands on it. The mouthpiece is less than 3cm. It is a yirdaki (not a didjeridu and not a mago) so it toots easily. I now have the stick that I am going to learn traditional playing on. I wish (a little not a lot) that I was back in the UK so that I could learn traditional playing off Shozo. But for now, I am going to try and learn the soft-style of playing that he showed me a few months ago, on a piece of plastic pipe :)
I went to the didg-beat shop with Bertrand, the french bloke from the hostel. He is pretty sound - a bit tiring because of the langauge barrier but thats okay. After I bought my new toy, he and I went on a boat round the harbour. Of course, my camera was in the hostel! But Bertrand will give me copies of some of the pictures I think.
Most of the people in the hostel are okay - of course there is the odd pratt, but in the main they are backpackers out having fun. The mix is great - lots of different people from lots of different countries. What amuses me is that 99.99999999% are from Europe! There is the odd kiwi kicking about (chups!). We have had koreans, chinese, japanese (dirty knees, what are these?), norwegians, dutch, germans by the million and a few brit-folk.
It is like fresher's week at uni most of the time. During the day, people are out wandering about and in the evening, we all sit around and drink Tooeeys (that is not how you spell it but I can't remember) or cheap red wine (which is often better than the stuff from the UK).
NB - do not go and see MI-3. It is tripe from start to finish.
I saw it on Thursday night with friends from Wake-up. It was Rrr-ubbish! Tom Cruise should get his head out of his scientologist's bum, and do a good film.
Books - "Popcorn" and "This other edan" both by Ben Elton.
"Veronika decides to die" by Paulo Coelho.
5 comments:
'sightseeing', it's 'sightseeing'
Did you learn NOTHING from me?
- 7:40 pm
- Dan said...
Whats the bloody difference? Am i missing some minutae of grammer here Mr Chitty?
- 1:36 pm
'sight' a thing regarded as worth seeing -- usually used in plural (the sights of the city)
'site' a space of ground occupied or to be occupied by a building.
Now, it may be that you went out to see the latter, but it seems to me that they could me more boring than is strictly necessary, so I chose to infer that you were engaged in seeing the former.
you are gurly and wet and hav no idea of gramar
- 10:01 pm
- Dan said...
Thing is o thou weedy wet is that wot you wrote is 'sightseeing' and 'sightseeing'.
I can see that grammer is of high import, but how can the student learn, when the teacher has written the same thing twice?
*heavy sigh*
- 3:28 pm
I wrote it twice for EMPHASIS, boy.
Do try and keep up. I think we may have to think about putting you in a lower set.
- 12:49 am


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Whenever a person is let go from a job, there is the potential for that person to feel that he or she has been wrongfully terminated. There are a number of reasons that a job termination may not be legal, and it is important to have a good grasp on the basics of wrongful termination laws to help you evaluate if your experience was illegal or simply frustrating. One of the key elements to many wrongful termination cases is whether or not the firing was retaliatory.
What is a retaliatory firing?
New Jersey Wage and Hour Class Action Trial Attorney Discusses Overtime-Exempt "Executives" and the Federal Salary Minimum
Or... How can an "Executive," "Administrative," or "Professional" make
What is reasonable accommodation?
Individuals who suffer from disabilities are fortunate to be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which offers a range of requirements employers must abide by. Not only does the ADA restrict an employer from discriminating against an employee with a disability, it also requires an employee to make "reasonable accommodations" to allow disabled employees to fully or near-fully participate in everyday activities.
Violating the rights of service dog owners
The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) is quite clear when it comes to the issue of equal access. Owners, managers and employees are forbidden from denying full and equal access based on a number of categories, including race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation and disability. When it comes to people with disabilities who use service animals, the effect of the law is that animal, be it a guide dog or other type of service animal, and its owner cannot be denied access. This applies to restaurants, shopping centers, rental properties, schools and just about property on which members of the public can go. Federal law likewise prohibits people from denying access to service animals and their owners.
Responding to sexual harassment
Sexual harassment has certainly diminished a great deal in the workplace over the last couple of decades, but it is unfortunately still a reality for many people. If you are experiencing sexual harassment, there are a number of steps you can take to put an end to it and make the workplace safer and more productive for everyone. Taking action against sexual harassment is rarely easy, but it is not only the right thing to do for yourself, it's also the right thing to do for thousands of other workers who want to feel safe at their jobs. When you confront sexual harassment, you are contributing to a better workplace experience for many more people than only yourself.
Fox News hit with more allegations of sexual harassment
A lot of news coverage was devoted to the election in 2016. So much so, in fact, that some significant stories failed to get the coverage and attention they deserved. One of those stories, arguably, was the ousting of Roger Ailes, chairman and co-founder of Fox News. Ailes was fired over allegations that he had sexually harassed former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson, as well as other female employees.
Employment And School Bullying Civil Rights Firm Of Costello & Mains, LLC, Applies New Jersey Civil Rights Act To Harassing Conduct By School Professionals Directed At Student
In what appears to be a case of first impression, a New Jersey Superior Court Judge held on Friday, January 6th, 2017, that a student has a right to bring a claim under the New Jersey Civil Rights Act when she is non-discriminatorily harassed, intimidated or bullied at school by teachers and administrators.
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text: Hey guys, Run into my first real problem with Mac! And i just can't fix it, which isn't really common for me so its a little anoying . Anyway. The problem occurs when i try to access my "Sites" directory from the web browser - http://localhost/~mark/ - which basically throws a great big Forbidden aka 403 error message. Something that shouldnt happen if i am to believe the articles at: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/collections/webserving.html Since everything should be configured. Nether the less I've checked the Apache config file and everything looks in order and the file permisions for the Sites directory seem to be correct at 775 (drwxrwxr-x). Any clues would be much appreciated! This one has me stumped and i can't find anything of use on google . If this is a problem with OSX 10.3.4 then maybe i should ring tech help and report it? Thanks guys, Mark.


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Come watch a different family movie each week! This week's movie is Paddington 2! In this sequel, Paddington must recover the pop-up book he purchased for his aunt's 100th birthday. It was stolen from him, and he'll stop at nothing to get the book back!
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- Research
- Open Access
Disciplinary variations in academic promotional writing: the case of statements of purpose
- Sibo Chen1Email authorView ORCID ID profile
© The Author(s). 2017
- Received: 23 December 2016
- Accepted: 15 February 2017
- Published: 23 February 2017
This paper explores disciplinary variations in academic promotional writing via a comparative analysis of statements of purpose (SoPs) written for different disciplines. A total of 100 SoPs written by English as an additional language (EAL) applicants from mainland China were collected, which were drawn from five academic disciplines: business, engineering, humanities, science and social science. Following a corpus-driven research design, these SoP samples were analyzed in terms of their lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features. The data analysis suggests that although on the surface these SoP samples share similarities in lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features, they are quite different in terms of their preferred persuasion strategies. While SoPs written for engineering and science primarily base their self-promotional arguments upon the applicants' previous research experiences and future research prospects, those written for business, humanities and social science tend to focus on how the applicants' unique Chinese socio-cultural backgrounds would contribute to their desired programs. The above finding sheds light upon how academic genres are invariably embedded in disciplinary practices, with each discipline having its own communicative purposes, discourse community members, academic expectations and disciplinary constraints.
- Statement of purpose
- Personal statement
- Self-promotion
- Academic genre
- Disciplinary variation
Statements of purpose (SoPs), also known as personal statements, are self-narrative essays required by the graduate application processes of most universities in the West. The SoP is arguably the most significant piece of writing during the transition between undergraduate and graduate studies since it is often the only discursive space among the required graduate application documents that is fully controlled by the applicant. Nevertheless, the SoP remarkably differs from other academic genres mainly produced by undergraduate writers: it tends to be a fairly short, personal and open-ended text with considerable disciplinary variations (Chiu, 2015, 2016; Samraj & Monk, 2008). Even within the same discipline, different graduate programs may vary in criteria for evaluating submitted SoPs. Such program-specific information is often opaque, which, combined with the fact that authentic samples of successful SoPs are not readily accessible to prospective SoP writers, makes the SoP a "semi-occluded" genre (Samraj & Monk, 2008; Swales, 1996). Consequently, many graduate applicants consider SoP writing as an exceedingly daunting task and this challenge has been further intensified by the lack of institutional support for SoP writing at many universities (Dubb, 2011).
Although a few studies have explored the SoP's textual and rhetorical features and evaluative norms (Brown 2004; Chiu, 2015, 2016; Ding, 2007; Dubb, 2011; Samraj & Monk, 2008), to date a thorough examination of disciplinary variations in SoP writing remains missing nor have findings been based on corpus-driven analysis. This paper thus aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the SoP genre via an exploratory corpus-driven study of the genre's potential disciplinary variations. The broader theoretical and pedagogical concerns of the study lie in the growing prevalence of promotional genres in academic writing and their potential pedagogical values for English as an additional language (EAL) writing instruction.
The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief sketch of previous research on the SoP genre, especially in terms of its unique genre features and potential disciplinary variations. Section 3 proceeds to the present study's data and research methods, followed by the report of the data analysis results in Section 4. Sections 5 concludes the paper by discussing the study's theoretical and pedagogical implications, especially the SoP genre's pedagogical potential for EAL writing instruction.
Review of literature
The concept of genre has been understood in a variety of ways in applied linguistics. Briefly speaking, the available definitions of genre have addressed it from three basic perspectives: textual regularity, social function and social context (Hyon, 1996). The perspective of textual regularity refers to the fact that texts belonging to the same genre can be recognized by their "shared structure, style, content and intended audience" (Swales, 1990, p.58). English for academic purposes (EAP) research, for instance, has paid special attention to structural move analysis to detect functional units regulating the global organizational patterns and content of different genres. The perspective of social function is mainly addressed by new rhetoric scholars' discussions of the relationship between text types and rhetorical situations (Coe, 2002) and Swales' (1990, 2004) conceptualization of "communicative purpose". This perspective suggests that genres are not merely collections of identifiable texts, but also textual schema we rely upon to create meanings that make sense to our intended audience. Finally, the perspective of social context describes the settings that different genres are situated in, with concepts such as "discourse community" (Swales, 1990, 2004) being proposed to depict the socio-rhetorical assemblages of people, who, gathered by shared occupational or recreational goals, develop different genres for within-group communications.
Viewing from a genre perspective, the SoP is a highly complex academic genre. Unlike other student genres with relatively rigid structures, few graduate programs offer detailed requirements for SoP writing, which, combined with the varying expectations held by different graduate programs' gatekeepers, creates enormous challenges for novice SoP writers (Chiu, 2015, 2016; Ding, 2007; Samraj & Monk, 2008). These challenges have been further intensified by the lack of institutional support for SoP writing (Brown, 2004; Dubb, 2011).
The SoP also differs from typical academic genres in its overt communicative purpose of self-promotion. Although promotional genres have been traditionally associated with texts produced in business settings (Bhatia, 1993). In recent years, researchers have increasingly recognized the "invasion" of promotional discourse into other discursive territories, including higher education. While on the surface the SoP resembles the cover letter genre in that both are produced for self-promotion, it should be noted that the SoP is not a genre used for within-group communications: SoPs are produced by graduate school applicants to gain access into their prospective discourse communities. Thus, the SoP writing process is also "a means of establishing a (credible) claim to a scholarly identity" (Hyland, 2012, p. 72) and many SoP writers have found such process extremely challenging (Chiu, 2016; Dubb, 2011).
Finally, the SoP is a "semi-occluded genre" characterized by a limited access to previous samples and an opaque evaluation process (Samraj & Monk, 2008). Swales (1996) defines "occluded genre" as genres with limited/no open access to the public and this feature adds extra obstacles for prospective writers outside particular discourse communities. Although the SoP is absent from Swales' (1996) occluded genre list, it resembles other occluded genres in that accessing SoPs already submitted to graduate programs is generally restricted to admission committees due to privacy regulations and a considerable amount of graduate school applicants are unwilling to share their SoPs due to the personal details revealed in these texts. While there are numerous popular guidebooks for SoP writing, it has been found that the suggestions offered by these books are too general to effectively assist applicants who need specific suggestions for different academic disciplines (Samraj & Monk, 2008). In short, the SoP is a complex undergraduate genre with occluded and self-promotional features, which partially accounts for the lack of relevant studies within the genre literature.
There have been two analytical focuses within the previous research on SoPs. The first analytical focus is the textual regulations of the SoP genre. Most of the previous studies on the SoP genre have adopted move-structural analysis to explore its prototypical rhetorical move structure. One common finding emerging from these studies is that the SoP genre involves four essential moves (introduction, relevant background, reasons for applying and conclusion) and one optional move (extra-curricular information or career goal) (Ding, 2007; Samraj & Monk, 2008; Chiu, 2016). Meanwhile, the previous research also suggests noticeable disciplinary variations in terms of which move should be SoP writers' primary focus. The comparative analysis by Samraj and Monk (2008) found that while SoPs written for three disciplines (electronic engineering, linguistics and business administration) are identical in terms of their general rhetorical moves, they differ across disciplines in the associated steps: in their SoP corpus, SoPs written for electronic engineering paid much more attention to the "step of research focus" in contrast to their counterparts written for linguistics and business administration. Chiu (2016) further attributes such disciplinary variations to SoP writers' sense of writer positioning, target audience and the writing process.
The second analytical focus is the varying evaluative practices of SoPs across disciplines. Several studies on the SoP genre have tried to reduce its opaqueness through interviews with graduate admission committee members (Brown, 2004; Samraj & Monk, 2008; Chiu, 2015). One contentious point emerging from the reported interviews is whether SoP writing should pay special attention to the construction of a "personal-self". While some disciplines such as psychology and electronic engineering tend to prefer a scientific epistemology by discouraging excessive personal details, this norm is not necessarily shared by disciplines oriented toward a humanistic epistemology. Another contentious point is to what extent a SoP would determine an applicant's fate. Chiu (2015), through her interviews with 19 faculty members in education, found that the evaluative processes of SoPs are broadly associated with the epistemological assumptions and the bureaucratic admission procedures of specific discourse communities.
Although the previous studies have offered many interesting findings on the SoP genre, they are limited in two aspects. First, these studies have included relative small data sets, with each study only handling 20 to 35 SoP samples from few disciplines. Such inadequacy of data inevitably compromises the generalizability of their findings. SoPs written for natural and social science programs, for instance, have not been analyzed so far. Second, these studies have mainly focused on the SoP genre's macro features (e.g. functional move structures) whereas the micro features of the SoP genre have been largely neglected. Overall, the results of these recent studies indicate the need for a multi-perspective analysis of SoPs produced for a variety of disciplines.
Data and research method
- 1.
What are the prominent lexico-grammatical features in SoPs produced by EAL writers?
- 2.
To what extent do SoPs produced by EAL writers follow the prototypical rhetorical move structure identified in previous research (i.e. Ding, 2007; Chiu, 2016; Samraj & Monk, 2008)?
- 3.
Is there any noticeable variation among EAL SoPs written for different disciplines, in terms of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features?
Disciplinary information and token sizes of SoP samples
SoP (100 in total)
Discipline and sample number
The Arts Division
(19,408 tokens)
Applied Linguistics (5), Arts Administration (1), Asian Studies (8), Comparative Literature (1), Cultural Studies (2), Translation (3).
(18,787 tokens)
Accounting (3), Advertising (2), Corporate Communication (2), Finance (3), Hotel Management (2), Management Studies (2), Public Administration (3), Real Estate Management (3)
Social Science
(19,847 tokens)
Anthropology (2), Communication (3), Economics (2), Environmental Policy (1), Journalism (2), New Media Studies (1), Political Science (2), Psychology (2), Public Health (1), Public Relation (1), Social Work (2), Sociology (1)
The Science Division
(18,384 tokens)
Chemical Engineering (3), Civil Engineering (3), Computer Engineering (3), Electronic Engineering (3), Information Technology (1), Logistics (3), Manufacture Engineering (2), Mechanic Engineering (2)
(18,444 tokens)
Biology (4), Chemistry (3), Computer Science (4), Environmental Studies (4), Material Science (2), Physics (2), Plant Science (1)
100 samples and 94,870 tokens
Moves and steps in the coded SoPs
Move 1: Introduction
This move is primarily used by the applicant to get readers' attention or to provide a brief introduction of the SoP's content.
Step 1-A: Generalization/Attention catcher
The applicant provides descriptions to catch readers' attention or to claim the statement's aim.
Step 1-B: Background
The applicant states his/her education and personal background information.
Step 1-C: Goals or decisions to applying
The applicant states his/her goal or decision to applying for the target program.
Move 2: Establishing credential
This move reveals the applicant's relevant credentials for studying and conducting research at the graduate level.
Step 2-A: Education background
The applicant reveals academic achievements related to the proposed field of study.
Step 2-B: Research experience
The applicant addresses research experiences, research interests or potential topics for graduate research.
Step 2-C: Work experience
The applicant discusses professional experiences.
Step 2-D: Personal attributes
The applicant describes personal attributes that he/she believes are appealing to the target program.
Step 2-E: Other experience
The applicant provides other personal information such as language/cultural knowledge, volunteer experiences and self-reflections.
Move 3: Reasons for applying
This move is used by the applicant to state reasons for pursuing graduate study at the target program or institution.
Step 3-A: Gap in applicant background
The applicant discusses how his/her background can be improved by pursuing graduate study at the target program or institution.
Step 3-B: Positive gains
The applicant describes the positive gains offered by the target program or institution.
Step 3-C: Program/university attributes
The applicant describes the appeal of the target program or institution.
Step 3-D: Disciplinary and research reasons
The applicant expresses his/her reasons for applying from the research/discipline perspective.
Move 4: Conclusion
This move summarizes the SoP and makes a final appeal for the admission committee's favorable consideration.
Step 4-A: Goals/predictions of future
The applicant states his/her future goals or career plan upon the completion of the target program.
Step 4-B: Self-evaluation
The applicant re-states his/her relevant accomplishments for self-promotion.
Step 4-C: Final appeal
The applicant makes a final appeal to end the SoP.
Research findings
Lexico-grammatical features
Top ten most frequent content words in the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
Chinese (162)
social (67)
social (93)
research (105)
research (140)
language (113)
knowledge (66)
China (92)
engineering (94)
study (80)
culture (109)
university (64)
research (84)
university (86)
university (75)
English (101)
study (63)
media (70)
knowledge (59)
engineering (61)
teaching (75)
management (60)
communication (62)
study (58)
knowledge (61)
university (68)
China (52)
study (61)
time (51)
project (56)
China (66)
financial (51)
university (60)
design (48)
program (53)
literature (65)
research (50)
work (59)
system (48)
science (50)
study (65)
program (48)
Chinese (54)
work (47)
computer (46)
research (64)
work (48)
school (45)
project (46)
experience (39)
Number of concordance lines of the lemma "research" in the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
Past Experiences
A closer examination of these concordance lines and their surrounding texts also suggests that the concordances in the Science division tend to include more details than those in the Arts division. Such difference is likely to be caused by academic disciplines' different trainings in research design: compared with their peers in the Science divisions, students enrolled in the Arts division in China tend to have less opportunities to conduct independent research. Examples 1a and 1b below illustrate how the applicants in both divisions summarize their past research experiences. Although both examples are research intensive narratives by the applicants to establish their credentials in research skills, they achieve the same communicative purpose through two distinctive persuasive strategies: example 1a focuses on the applicants' education trainings and how these trainings have provided him/her with research skills and inspired further curiosities. By comparison, example 1b offers more details by discussing how's the applicant's specific technical skills and research expertise.
I've already spent 3 years in the study of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. […] It has not only built me solid academic background, but also prepared me for the future China studies. Thanks to what I've learned through my undergraduate study, I have demonstrated proficiencies in RESEARCH and analytical skills. It was after attending RESEARCH seminars in my junior year that I began to set foot in the area of RESEARCH. Then the interest for RESEARCH was nurtured. […] However, the RESEARCH of Chinese acquisition and pedagogy demands the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to ensure the validity and reliability. Statistics for Business and Economics by David R. Anderson, Dennis J. Sweeney and Thomas A. Williams really helped me build the statistical frame for my RESEARCH when I started to learn statistics. […]
Four years of professional study and practice fostered not only my independent learning and research abilities, but also my innovation and continuous probe in scientific RESEARCH. But there are still a lot of problems in reality that I am not able to solve with my limited knowledge. […] Hence I hope to gain further study, master advanced knowledge and RESEARCH methods and engage in cutting-edge technologies to answer my questions. Through my professor's recommendation and my RESEARCH, I found that the MS program in Biomedical Engineering at X University fits me the most. The department of biomedical engineering possesses excellent faculty and professors along with leading RESEARCH fields. This program provides students flexible and comprehensive curriculum, in which the RESEARCH area of biomaterials about both living tissue and artificial materials used for implantation and to foster cell function as well as the RESEARCH on the selection of an appropriate material to place in the human body attract me a lot. In addition, this program stresses the development of students' RESEARCH abilities and creativities, which benefits students' career developments. […]
Concordance lines of the lemma "China" in the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
Socio-cultural issues
Functional Moves of the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
Move 1: Introduction (106/120)
Step 1-A: Generalization/Attention catcher
Step 1-B: Background
Step 1-C: Goals or decisions to applying
Move 2: Establishing credential (120/120)
Step 2-A: Education background
Step 2-B: Research experience
Step 2-C: Work experience
Step 2-D: Personal attributes
Step 2-E: Other experience
Move 3: Reasons for applying (117/120)
Step 3-A: Gap in applicant background
Step 3-B: Positive gains
Step 3-C: Program/university attributes
Step 3-D: Disciplinary and research reasons
Move 4: Conclusion (105/120)
Step 4-A: Goals/predictions of future
Step 4-B: Self-evaluation
Step 4-C: Final appeal
Examples 2a and 2b below illustrate both narrative strategies. Both strategies are particularly favored by the humanities corpus and the social science corpus, probably due to the two fields' close connections with culture-oriented epistemologies. Occasionally, such expressions construct China as a country inferior to the West in terms of its academic, social and cultural developments, as shown in Example 2c in which the applicant regards "escaping from China" as his/her primary motive of studying in Hong Kong.
I have been exposed to various kinds of CHINESE culture since I was a child. At the age of five, I started to learn CHINESE brush calligraphy. I was attracted by CHINESE painting and made efforts to grasp it when I was 10 years old. During junior high, I began to read China Five Thousand-Years History and especially developed great interest in Chinese history. I was so mesmerized by CHINESE culture and the beauty of CHINESE characters in particular that I chose the major of Teaching CHINESE as a second language in English for my undergraduate study. […]
Back in CHINA, as the only undergraduate research assistant for a project on civil protest online, I began to pay attention to the issue of "massive Internet incidents", which involves one million or more visits by users and generates billions of online discussions. With the recent explosive growth of social media in CHINA, the Internet has further multiplied its importance as an alternative outlet for the CHINESE public's discontent whereas traditional mass media are largely silenced by state regulation. Noticeably, in the past a few months, CHINA has seen several spectacular environment- related massive Internet incidents. […] Given CHINA's unique information environment characterized by stringent regulation on mass media, the comparatively "freer" Internet becomes an ideal incubator to nurture public concerns for environmental justice, an educational tool for raising awareness of public health risks, and a platform for organizing large-scale civic interventions.
To be frank, I have difficulty in adapting to mainland CHINA's education system which neglects independent thinking, imagination and stress tolerance. With X University's teaching culture of critical thinking and intellectual confrontation, I'm looking forward to being with students and teachers with various culture backgrounds and social experiences, enjoying pleasure brought by thoughts collision. […] As the international financial and trade center and CHINESE circle core city, Hong Kong, in which I anticipate to broaden my horizon, is a huge attraction to me. Also, Hong Kong is a developed information society with freedom of press and freedom of speech which mainland CHINA does not have. What's more, it is home to numerous world-renowned media organizations, providing me with broad development platform of media industry in the future.
Rhetorical move structures
Table 6 shows the frequencies of the functional moves and their associated steps across the five SoP corpora. Although most coded SoPs include the four general moves "Introduction" (IN), "Establish Credentials" (EC), "Reasons for Applying" (RA) and "Conclusion" (CO), there are a couple of inter-corpus differences in the frequencies of each move's associated steps. Among the four general moves, EC and RA are the most well-established, with all SoP samples including the EC move and only three of them missing the RA move. The other two moves, IN and CO, also appear in most SoP samples. Among the 120 SoP samples, only 14 lack the IN move and 15 lack the CO move. Thus, the results in Table 6 provide empirical support for the prototypical IERC (IN-EC-RA-CO) move structure proposed by previous research (Chiu, 2016; Ding, 2007; Samraj & Monk, 2008).
In terms of functional steps, the corpora are similar with each other in each move's most frequent step. For example, in the EC move, "education" is the most frequent step across disciplines and this pattern is also shown in the "program/university attributes" step of the RA move. Meanwhile, no clear pattern is found in the most frequent steps of the IN and CO moves, which indicates that the SoP writers have different opinions on what should be addressed in these moves. Inter-corpus variations also emerge in other steps, especially in those of the EC and RA moves. In the EC move, the step "research" appears more frequently in the Science division than in the Arts division whereas the steps "work experience" and "other experience" are more frequently found in the Arts division. Similarly, in the RA move, the step "disciplinary/research reasons" was frequently adopted by corpora in the Sciences division, but not in the Arts Division. By comparison, the step "positive gains" tends to be more preferred by the Arts division than the Science division.
Average move length ratios of the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
p value
1. Introduction
10.51% (17)
9.53% (18)
10.47% (20)
9.72% (16)
11.07% (20)
10.29% (107)
2. Establishing credential
53.93% (20)
57.48% (20)
49.62% (20)
59.32% (20)
65.57% (20)
57.18% (120)
3. Reasons for applying
29.02% (20)
23.83% (20)
32.50% (20)
27.61% (19)
18.45% (18)
26.43% (117)
4. Conclusion
7.26% (17)
8.44% (18)
6.87% (19)
6.75% (19)
7.91% (16)
7.42% (105)
Average step length ratios of the SoP corpora
The Arts Division
The Science Division
Social Science
p value
Step 2-B: Research experience
28.35% (9)
17.21% (11)
25.86% (11)
32.01% (17)
36.30% (20)
29.40% (68)
Step 2-C: Work experience
16.05% (12)
21.04% (14)
19.37% (10)
22.03% (9)
14.86% (6)
18.99% (51)
Step 2-E: Other experience
22.68% (13)
20.51% (17)
24.13% (13)
19.43% (8)
18.05% (6)
20.55% (57)
Step 3-B: Positive gains
15.04% (11)
11.63% (16)
15.64% (9)
10.73% (10)
6.92% (4)
12.54% (50)
Step 3-D: Disciplinary and research reasons
16.15% (9)
14.86% (7)
28.01% (11)
17.17% (13)
11.19% (15)
17.25% (55)
Discussion and conclusion
This study has examined the SoP genre's potential disciplinary variations in lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features. Following a corpus-driven, bottom-up analytical procedure, the study has revealed a somewhat surprising picture, finding that there are noticeable differences between SoPs written for the Arts division and those written for the Science division. Thus, while this study has provided further empirical evidence to define the SoP as an academic self-promotional genre, it has also offered several valuable insights of the SoP genre's disciplinary variations in textual regularity.
To be specific, when discussing research experiences and prospects, SoPs written for the Science division tend to include much more details than those written for the Arts division, which is shown in the concordance lines of the lemmas "research" and in the two Science corpora's high average length of the RA move and its associated "research experience" step. One possible explanation for these results is the difference in academic training between the two divisions within China's post-secondary education system: students in the Science division tend to receiving more formal instruction in research methodology than their peers in the Arts division.
The concordance analysis also identifies how the Chinese EAL writers, especially those in social science majors, using the discussion of China's academic, social and cultural issues as a persuasive strategy when explaining their reasons for applying. However, privileging Western cultures and education resources may not be effective. Although it is understandable that many SoP writers here address the inadequacy of studying in China thereby justifying their desires of studying abroad, in essence such negative expressions imply the "self-critique" strategy in Chinese rhetoric and it may not be an appropriate rhetorical choice for self-promotional writing in the tradition of Anglo-American culture. For graduate programs (e.g. Asian studies and sociology) requiring in-depth thinking into socio-political issues, the one-sided interpretation on Chinese society may leave graduate admission committees with negative impressions. To a large extent, this rhetorical strategy reflects the Chinese EAL writers' struggles in entering the Western academic community. While most EAL writers in the present study are able to overcome the language barrier, they still need to deal with unfamiliar academic conventions (especially in the Arts division where research tends to be contextual) and cultural preferences. As such, the present study also invites us to how cultural factors play in the complex genre-discipline interactions (Hyland, 2012).
Taken together, the above findings offer meaningful implications for future research in promotional genres and potential pedagogical developments in EAL writing instruction. Methodologically, this study differs from previous research on the SoP genre in that it takes a quantitative, bottom-up approach. Although corpus-driven genre analysis is still in its early development and its accuracy at the discursive level can be unsatisfactory, its ability to handle large-size data remains extremely helpful in improving research validity and detecting less-obvious textual patterns. Although many findings are somewhat expected, the quantitative analyses are still insightful in that they improve our understandings in how self-promotion, the SoP's overarching communicative purpose, are achieved at micro levels. Given the increasing availability of online language corpora and the advancement of text compilation technologies, corpus-driven methods would make more contributions to genre research in the near future.
Pedagogically, the study sheds light upon the potential benefits of using the SoP genre in EAL writing instruction. Although the EAL writers in the present study have demonstrated their awareness of the SoP's general genre features without formal SoP writing instruction, we should keep in mind that the study's data selection process excluded most "problematic" SoPs. The SoP's semi-occluded nature remains a great challenge for prospective writers. Inappropriate SoPs can hurt one's graduate application and thus SoP-related instruction can benefit EAL students in their graduate application processes and even in their long-term academic development. In addition, SoP-related instruction can even benefit students without graduate study plans since rhetorical strategies in self-promotion are also needed in professional contexts. In this respect, we may consider the SoP as a "bridging" genre since many discursive strategies learnt from it can be transferred to other academic and professional genres.
Admittedly, the study is limited by its exclusive focus on Chinese EAL writers and the disciplinary variations of the SoP genre. Thus, the findings may not be generalized to other research scenarios. As a less-studied genre, many aspects of the SoP are yet to be addressed and I hope that the present study would serve as a call for future research into this complex student genre.
The lemma frequencies in the concordance analysis differ from the lexical frequency results since a lemma's different forms are calculated together: "research/researches/researching/researched" and "China/Chinese". In addition, to improve accuracy, concordance lines with the lemmas "research" and "Chinese/China" being used as parts of proper nouns are also excluded (e.g. CHINESE academy of science, CHINA central television, electronic engineering RESEARCH group, etc.).
For SoP samples missing certain moves (e.g. IN and CO), their length ratios are treated as "missing" during the statistical analysis.
I would like to thank Dr. Li-Shih Huang and Dr. Hossein Nassaji from University of Victoria for their constructive suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I would also thank Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for its support of my research at Simon Fraser University, and the editors and reviewers from Functional Linguistics for their insightful comments throughout the peer review process.
Competing interests
The author declares that he has no competing interests.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Data collection of this paper has followed the standards and guidelines of the research ethics review board at the author's home institution.
Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Authors' Affiliations
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Best of Fall: Boozy Party Treats
Tomorrow is September. Wait, what? Where did summer go?
I live in Washington, DC so it will actually probably stay hot outside for another month or longer (boo) but I've got cooler weather, sweater and boots and pumpkin spice latte fever.
Since I am in the mood, I thought I would throw together some of my most popular boozy treats for fall weather. Bring on the crunchy leaves.
1. Pumpkin Cheesecake Pudding Shots – Because they are freaking delicious.
2. Pumpkin Pie Sangria – Because c'mon PUMPKIN PIE in a drink. Real pumpkin pie.
3. Washington Redskins Jello Shots – Because, football!!! And because I miss you Darcie.
4. Pumpkin On Fire Pudding Shots – Because FIREBALL.
5. Caramel Apple Jello Shots in Real Apples – Because this is why I am here. This was my very first viral jello shot.
6. Pecan Pie Jello Shots – Because bourbon and fall go hand in hand.
7. Candy Corn Jello Shots – Because I love this photo and they are another viral classic from That's so Michelle.
8. Pumpkin Spice Latte Jello Shots – Because the PSL is a fall MUST HAVE.
Check out my fall jello shot and boozy pages if you want more.


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Vault Clerk
: Adecco
: January 13, 2017
Reference ID
: 774345450
Our customer is searching for a Vault Clerk. This is a temp position. Many of our associates have enhanced their current skills, had their contracts extended, converted to full time employment, or been re-deployed after their assignment ends.
As a contractor at Adecco, you will have benefits available after one week of employment. These are highlighted in detail below.
Position Details:
Position: Vault Clerk
Location: Simi Valley, CA
Able to perform clerical work such as sorting, pulling and filing. Meet department production standards. Perform system research and updates. Work under strict deadlines and minimal supervision. Must be able to communicate with business partners on inquiries and follow up requests. Follow all agencies and company guidelines as required by business unit and management team. Complete all mandatory training and comply with federal and business guidelines. Responsibilities: Sort files/trailing docs, pull files, file back and/or trailing docs. Scan doc's scan package and deliver files to other departments. Inventory, research/locate missing files or trail docs, system research for unable to locate documents. Customer Service for internal and external, Balancing request populations (using various systems ) performance and production, ability to cover various Vault Operations positions. Microsoft proficient (Excel, Word) and able to lift 25 lbs. 90% Standing all day.
Click on the "Apply Now" to be considered for this position.
Highlights of Working with Adecco:
Why Adecco? Because Adecco provides one of the most COMPREHENSIVE BENEFITS package in the industry to contract workers. Benefits available to you as a contractor after one week of employment include:
Medical Coverage - access to an affordable and comprehensive group medical coverage plan
401(k) - Adecco offers all temporary employees the ability to participate in a 401(k) savings program
Pay Options/Direct Deposit - we make it as easy as possible for you to get paid
Service Bonus - rewarding employees who make an extended work commitment
Paid Holidays - selected paid holiday, based on accrued hour requirement
State-of-the-artCareerCenter- training and resources available for all employees
Highly trained and professional staff - Our team cares about you and your career
Adecco is an equal opportunity employer. The Adecco Group is a Fortune Global 500 company and the global leader in HR services. Our group connects over 700,000 associates with our business clients each day through our 6,600 offices in over 70 countries and territories around the world. We offer employment opportunities at any stage in your Professional Career.
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"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else."
~ Steve Prefontaine
"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else."
~ Steve Prefontaine
This year, I made a promise to myself to enter more long distance races. I decided that I feel that I get more out of 10K's and up rather than the 5K races. With that said, I will be partaking in the Sweetwater 420 5K on April 19th. I couldn't pass up on an event like this one. For $38, you can get registered and purchase the three day event as well. That give you an opportunity to see the likes of Sublime, Chris Robinson and Steel Pulse. Plus you get a beer voucher for after the run.
A quick morning run with a post race beer and Sublime can't beat it!
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Air quality is being impacted by the Mendocino Complex Fire and other fires in Northern California
Air quality in Mariposa County is moderate to unhealthy for sensitive groups through the area.
You can view current air quality around Mariposa County by visiting PurpleAir. The Mariposa County Air Pollution Control District is working with the Mariposa County Unified School District to install Purple Air Sensors at all school sites. These sensors are an indicator of air quality status but they are not as accurate as the emergency response monitors we use during a local fire.
Persons with health conditions that are affected by smoke should consider relocating to a smoke free area when smoke is present
For additional information on air quality you can visit the AirNow website.


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With Phil Lacombe
Joshua "Tree" Sipe
Where do you tat:
I currently work from my private studio space by appointment. It's located in Bermuda Dunes. I have had the pleasure of working in almost all the shops out here in the valley, really blessed they had me. My clientele really like the private thing though and that's where I'm at most of the time.
Why did you start tattooing:
I started tattooing in 1995 in Venice California. I had been in the movie industry (camera department) for years. That work was slowing down so I was looking for a new job. I fell in with some guys at the beach that agreed to apprentice me and from there I fell in love with it. I always loved to draw and paint and this seemed like the next step for me. To do it on skin is the highest form of Art to me.
What style of tattooing do you enjoy the most:
I have always loved doing any style my clients ask for, it is always challenging. If I had to pick a specific style now I would say large color and realism. Those would be my favorite but I never liked to limit myself to just one style because all of it is a lot of fun!
Who inspires you to tattoo:
Some of my earliest influences were Paul Booth, Tim Lehi, Freddy Negrete, Bob Tyrrell, Guy Aitchinson and lots of others. Now currently there's so much talent out there the list is pretty long. People like Josh Duffy, Rich Pineda, Cory Norris, Jeremiah Barba, Victor Portugal, Johan Finne', Boris, Roman Abrego. One huge influence on me has and still is my good friend and fellow tattoo Artist Ty McEwen, he always had my back and continues to push me with my Art.
If you could tattoo anywhere in the world where would you go:
I haven't had much chance to travel as of yet, I'm a single dad and everything goes for my kid first. If I had a chance to I would travel to Europe and get lost for many years going everywhere and anywhere I could to soak up all the Artistic influences going down over there. In the states I would love to hit the east coast up since I've never been that way yet.
Tell me your favorite tattoo story about one of your clients:
One of my favorite stories is about this guy named Sam. Sam first started coming to me back around 2005 or so. He didn't look to have a lot of tattoos but he was covered already on his arms and chest/torso area. The day I met him he was wearing long sleeves and had long hair that covered up around his neck line. He had this huge beard like ZZ Top. It was too cool. I asked him how long it took him to grow, he said 'like 8 years' hah! Well over the time I worked on him I learned how much he loved getting his ink but to respect his parents never had any that were too exposed. He would were long sleeves and use his long hair and beard to cover them up. I respected that and he was a super cool guy….nice, quiet and a great client that never moved haha! I covered every inch on his body except for his neck and hands. The real deal as far as clients go, thanks for the support Sam!
Contact Joshua at 760-636-3671
email – email@example.com


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#Occupy Protester Climbs Through Window & Steals Neighbor's Furniture for Protest Camp
They make good neighbors, too.
#Occupy protester Jeffrey Scott climbed through his neighbor's window in November and stole his furniture for the #Occupy Pensacola camp at city hall.
The Smoking Gun reported:
Meet Jeffrey Scott.
The 32-year-old "Occupy Pensacola" protester was arrested yesterday on felony burglary and larceny charges for allegedly robbing a neighbor's home of furniture that he used at the protest group's encampment outside City Hall.
Scott was nabbed shortly after victim Ned English called police to report the theft of a couch, a recliner, four wicker chairs, and four couch cushions from his home, according to an Escambia County Sheriff's Office report.
When questioned by a deputy, Scott stated, "Yes, I took the furniture. I was going to give it back, but haven't had a chance to." Scott, investigators noted, admitted entering English's home through a rear window, taking the furniture, and using some of the purloined items "at the Occupy Pensacola Camp located at City Hall."
Hat Tip Paul
And yet they're the ones complaining about robbery…
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Gov. George Deukmejian has signed into law a bill to encourage local governments to build their own sound walls along freeways rather than waiting for state funds to build them.
The new law, by Assemblyman Dave Elder (D-Long Beach), guarantees that city sound-wall projects will retain their positions on a state funding list if cities build the walls themselves. The cities will be reimbursed by the state when their projects reach the top of the list.
Local governments had previously been guaranteed reimbursement, but for a variety of reasons some projects had moved down the list while others moved up.
Elder has said the law is intended to prompt the City of Long Beach to build a 1.5-mile wall along the Artesia Freeway in North Long Beach. After the bill passed the Legislature, however, local officials said the city does not have enough money to build sound walls.


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Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Love is not a state of being. It's a house that takes up the whole world.
Angela and Greg may be no stranger to you at all. Angela is the owner of Lace & Ebony, and the blogger ambassador of Etude House. You might even remember seeing quite a bit of her on my space before because I love working with her over the past one year, and we always have this sort of chemistry and the same end in mind that we want for the images. I've also met Greg through our photoshoots which he will find time to come and help Angela out as and when his time permits. It's really nice because Greg has always come off as a really quiet person to me, but over time, we've found common grounds for our topics and I've also witnessed the love and dedication between these two busy individuals and how much effort they put in to balance every aspects in life just so they would have sufficient time for each other.
They are without a doubt, one of the easiest couples to shoot till date. I said so because, I barely needed to guide them and I will find them lost in their own conversations and each other. All that is needed is for me to find a corner and snap away. We got lucky with the petals that we found along the way and put it to good use. The last shot is undoubtedly one of my favourite shots ever. (: The unexpected things do turn out to be the best at times.
I shot Angela and Greg way more than half a year ago in 2013 (I'm really trying to keep up with my updates!), and over this half a year I've had the privilege of meeting more crazy, kind and gorgeous couples and made more photographs I could share on this space. In the next few months, I've aplenty of exciting new plans coming up and it will be a matter of time before all of you get to share my joy together.
Labels: Shoot
1 comment:
- Yina said...
HI what lens do you recommend for portrait shoots?
- Thursday, March 27, 2014 8:56:00 PM
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Joy Charlton and David Page of Swarthmore are very pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter Lindsay Arizona Charlton Page to Martin Elliot Murray on July 2, 2017, in a lovely and lively outdoor ceremony at Tyler Arboretum, in Media, Pennsylvania. Lindsay's cousin, Judge Durke Thompson, officiated, and Charlotte Page, sister of the bride, served as attendant and flute soloist.
Lindsay graduated from Strath Haven High School, class of 2007, and the University of Virginia, class of 2012, where she earned a B.A. in English Literature and a Masters of Teaching degree.
Martin, the son of Allan and Sheila Murray of Sheffield, England, is a graduate of The Eckington School and the University of Manchester. He has played semi-professional soccer, and has been a coach and a teacher at multiple levels.
The couple honeymooned on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes, and reside in Budapest, Hungary. They both teach at the American International School of Budapest, where they met.


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all is calm - One week only!
The Western Front, Christmas, 1914. Out of the violence a silence, then a song. A German soldier steps into No Man's Land singing "Stille Nacht." Thus begins an extraordinary night of camaraderie, music, peace. This acapella musical, based on a remarkable true story, is told in the words and songs of the men who lived it. Created by Peter Rothstein, it is an incredibly moving and beautiful piece of theatre.


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Potentially in reaction to everyone's wish to see him team up with directors other than Tim Burton, Johnny Depp is teaming up with Kevin Smith to make the action-adventure movie Yoga Hosers. The movie marks the second in Smith's "True North Trilogy", which began with Tusk and are movies steeped in Canadian culture and mythology. In addition to being the follow up to Tusk, Yoga Hosers will feature the entire cast of Tusk, including Michael Parks, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez, Ralph Garman and Harley Morenstein.
This week principal photography started on Yoga Hosers which will star both Depp's daughter Lily-Rose Depp and Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith. Seriously.
As Hollywood Reporter tells it in their piece:
"Hosers, written by Smith, centers on 15-year-old yoga nuts Colleen Collette (Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen McKenzie (Harley Quinn Smith), who have an after-school job at a Manitoba convenience store called Eh-2-Zed. When an ancient evil rises from beneath Canada's crust and threatens their big invitation to a Grade 12 party, the Colleens join forces with a legendary man-hunter from Montreal named Guy Lapointe (Depp) to fight for their lives with, according to the producers, "all seven Chakras, one Warrior Pose at a time."
The two apparently had a small role in Smith's Tusk and it's possible that their characters in Yoga Hosers are the very same they briefly play in Tusk.
StarStream Entertainment is partially financing and producing the film, seeing it as a great way to delve into the underrepresented female-centric superhero movie. Said StarStream CEO Kim Leadford: "The timing couldn't be more perfect as so many production companies are struggling to find content to fill a serious void in the market of female superheroes and antiheroes. And it's pretty exciting to have their dads making the film with them."
Smith said that in this movie the antiheroes are the most feared and formidable creatures known to man: teenage girls. He also considers this his entrance into superhero movies, after having written comics for both DC and Marvel.
Now, digest all this information. This is something that people are actively giving Smith and Depp money for. This, a movie about teenage girls, yoga, lame Canada puns, high school parties, and leads with the same first name, is something that seemingly multiple people had to read over and think was a good idea. This is astounding to me.
There's a lot to be said here and a lot of jokes that can be made, but let's get beyond that. There's plenty of examples of famous fathers using their influence to get their kids into starring roles in movies, but I think this is a bit much. Lucy shows us that action films can definitely work with a female lead and Smith and Depp get their kids in front of the camera with a story involving yoga. Insanity.
Do you think Smith and Depp just might be on to something with their teenage girl-centric action-adventure?
Source: Hollywood Reporter


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