I guess somebody has already described somewhere the ways the knowledge transforms and spreads out through various channels, particularly from the scientific source to general public. Here is one interesting example. In the July ELLE magazine there is a short article called "Brain Train". Here what it says:

"A study from Ohio State University found that volunteers who listened to music while exercising improved their scores on tests of verbal ability... "

I was curious about it because I don't like the music playing while I work out in the gym (and they play it all the time.) Search for articles by Prof. C. Emery (the researcher cited in the ELLE article) revealed that the only paper related to studies of music and exercise is titled:
"Short-term effects of exercise and music on cognitive performance among participants in a cardiac rehabilitation program."
Here is the abstract:

OBJECTIVE: Exercise has been associated with improved cognitive performance among patients with coronary artery disease. Music listening has been associated with enhanced cognitive functioning among healthy adults. This study evaluated the combined influence of exercise and music listening on cognitive performance among patients in cardiac rehabilitation center. ...
SAMPLE: Thirty-three men and women (mean age = 62.6 +/- 10.5 years) participated in this study.
METHODS: Participants completed 1 exercise session accompanied by music and a second exercise session without music. Order of conditions was assigned randomly. Before and after each exercise session, participants completed a brief assessment of depression and anxiety, and a cognitive test of verbal fluency.
RESULTS: The music condition was associated with significant improvements in verbal fluency, but the no-music control condition was not associated with cognitive change.

It's not that ELLE article is lying but all those little omissions such as subjects being patients with coronary artery disease; mean age being 62.6 years; short-term effect of music and so on distort the results.
I got an idea that music along with exercise improves anybody's (i.e. healthy young adults' as well) verbal abilities in general. Is this what the study reports? N-not exactly..

There is a possibility, of course, that ELLE talks about some other studies by Prof. Charles Emery, which can not be found in the scientific literature yet.

I got the first comment on one of my posts. I really wonder how people find out that I am writing about them.
This is mysterious and exciting ...

The recently published collection Into the Blogosphere features various essays about blogs. The issues explored include genre, gender, identity, community, communication and design. Most of the essays are based on literature reviews and personal experiences. Few of them provide empirical data and analyses. One paper worth mentioning (except the one where I am a co-author :) is "Blogging as social action: A genre analysis of the weblog." by Miller and Shepherd.

Authors start with description of the context of the blog origins, its kairos, or cultural space-time:

• Increase in general interest in ordinary people's life and in private moments
• Blending boundaries between public and private
• Increasing access to various information
• Increasing voyeuristic tendencies; rise of mediated voyeurism (promoted by three factors according to Calvert, 2000: pursuit of truth in info-saturated world, desire for excitement, need for involvement.)

Interesting fact that contributes to kairos: in 1997 among 15 top-selling hardcover books four were personal memoirs - Angela's Ashes, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Into Thin Air, The Man Who Listens to Horses.

The authors claim that they examined numerous blogs and talks about blogs (no actual data provided) and discuss three features of the blog as genre: semantic content, syntactic or formal features, pragmatic value.

Semantic content (NB: semantic - related to meaning, content - topics or matter; can content be syntactic or pragmatic?):
Blogs can be categorized in various ways, e.g. by topics, by media (text, photos, videos, etc.), by style (filter vs. personal)
Formal features:
Blogs take many forms, but the format (frequency of updates, dated entries, links, comments) is one for all.
Pragmatic actions:
Self-expression and community. Self-expression functions for self-clarification, self-validation, enhancing self-awareness and confirming already held beliefs. Self-expression also contributes to relationship development and social control (opinion manipulation.)

Then the authors discuss preceding genres and divide them by branches. On the filtering branch are the log, the commonplace book, the wunderkammer, clipping service, and anthology. On the branch of political journalism are the pamphlet, the editorial, the opinion column. On the separate branch are the journal, the diary, the homepage and the webcam (?). Diaries are accounts of actual experience of the author and can provide a view on history and portray a self. Considering that blog as a genre shares many features with preceding genres, the authors argue that the blog as a complex rhetorical hybrid with imprints from all these prior genres comes to existence because of the "widely shared, recurrent need for cultivation and validation of the self."

I wouldn't say this analysis provides a solid description of the blog as a genre. Most features except formal are non-distinctive. The only stable thing is a common format, which means that the ground for genre definition is the technology (the format, as many authors point out), not the writing itself. Probably, this is how genre analysis in computer-mediated communication should be approached: the technology provides a format, a container and it gets filled with as much and as diverse content as possible.

Also, an interesting idea in the last part of the paper that the blog is a counter-movement to postmodern destabilization needs to be empirically verified (as many statements about blogs.)

Again I found an unusual word - "exigence". It's in the dictionary but it's not clear how to use it.

Exigence: a rare equivalent for "exigency" - 1 : that which is required in a particular situation -- usually used in plural; 2 : the quality or state of requiring immediate aid or action; urgency.

Usage (from dictionary.com):

1. Exigency can force you to do something as in " ... naked exigency forced the Chinese Communist Party to recognize the crisis"
2. You can prepare for exigency .
3. Or, you can adapt to the exigencies as in "... better than any other species, they had adapted to the exigencies of the Ice Age"

I've encountered this word in the following context: "Our analysis will take a next step in this direction, focusing attention on the relatively unstructured rhetorical environment of the internet where constructing knowledge and getting work done aren’t always the driving exigences." (from Miller and Shepherd, Into the Blogosphere.)

There is no definition for "kairos" in Merriam Webster and I don't have time for extensive search. So here is the interpretation of it from some website for college faculty.

KAIROS: The right word at the right moment.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes “Kairos” (Gr. "right or proper time") as: Fullness of time; the propitious moment for the performance of an action or the coming into being of a new state.
The idea of kairos as related to writing is tied to the force that drives your words into existence, more precisely: kairos is the necessity and urgency in the appearance of your words and ideas at this particilar time. If your writing is perfectly-timed to enter the world around us, it has kairos.
Finding Kairos in your writing:

1. Why is this topic important to write about now?
2. What community might be interested in reading this; why?
3. What can a reader learn from this writing?
4. Have I considered all angles of this topic?
5. How can I make my writing more timely and significant?

I found this word in the following context: "Assuming that the blog is a new genre (and many commentators already assume this) how can we understand the kairos that makes this genre possible - and compelling? And how does the blog in turn help construct the <i>kairos</i>?" (Miller and Shepherd, 2004, from Into the Blogosphere...) In general the usage seems fine although this is not a very precise usage.