Recent studies have examined how argumentation around science is positioned and used in everyday interactions. Our research extends these investigations into a virtual world called Whyville.net and its annual outbreak of Whypox, a virtual epidemic. We observed and recorded players’ conversations and contestations about Whypox in an after school gaming club. We found that club members’ argumenta...

Intercultural communication is concerned with communication across cultures. Since cultures as well as languages differ from one another in significant ways, speakers conceptualize the world around them in different ways. These cultural conceptualizations form part of the collective cognition of a speech community or cultural group. This paper is an attempt to delineate some cultural schemas in...

Recently, we proposed a dialogue model for social support. To validate this model, we analyzed 23 real world chat conversations. After some adjustments, the dialogue sequence patterns specified in the model cover 87.4% of the data. Based on this result, we conclude that the dialogue model accurately describes comforting conversations. Next, the model will be incorporated into a comforting ECA.

Adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients seem to be in a sort of no-man's land, halfway between the two different worlds of pediatric and adult medical oncology and bearing the brunt, in terms of inclusion in clinical trials and quality of professional care, of the lack of integration between these two worlds. This article discusses the different organization models of care used in pediatric o...

In an editorial titled “We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems” the authors Hutchinson, Balabanova, and McKee hope to encourage a wider conversation about corruption in the health sector. Such conversations are difficult to hold for at least five reasons; it is hard to define corruption; corruption may allow some fragile health systems to subsist, shifting blame – are those involved...