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Taking Laurel Richardson's concept of a ‘take three words’ workshop onto the social media site Twitter with its discipline of quick 140 character answers to the question ‘What are you doing now?’ proved to be a surprisingly intimate insight into the everyday sociology of the lives of 12 writers living in 21st century Britain.

This paper takes the form of two imaginary meetings with the resurrected figure of the writer Sylvia Plath, in 1967 and 2007, informed by the work of Lieblich (1997) and Speedy (2005; 2007b). It is loosely based on recollections by Al Alvarez (1974:20–53; 2005:29–33), one of the last people to see Plath alive before her death on 13 February 1967, and from Plath's journals (1983). I have drawn from Plath's autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, the many speculations on Plath's last days that provided material for Wintering (Moses, 2003), and from Birthday Letters (1999) — Ted Hughes' poetry collection concerning his marriage to Sylvia Plath.

The Internet has revolutionised information exchange. Its rapid connection of users and materials locally and globally make it an ideal health promotion medium, for both the public and professionals. However, the mechanisms through which it might contribute to health improvement are unclear. This paper provides an overview of Internet developments and presents findings from research carried out on behalf of the Health Education Board for Scotland, illustrating some of the assumptions implicit in using the Internet for health promotion. In the absence good evidence on the effects of delivering health promotion online, this paper argues that good practice requires greater responsiveness to user needs and circumstances at the planning stage, better quality assurance, more clearly defined indicators of “success” and the pathways to it, and more comprehensive evaluation of short‐ and long‐term impacts and outcomes.

The first time I saw Sylvia she walked into the room, golden hair swinging around her shoulders. Sylvia’s red lipstick matched her scarlet skirt and her breasts pointed upwards in the fashion of sixties’ underwear design. Her head held high, Sylvia invited attention and, when she spoke, clear New England vowels marked her. My immediate reaction was, ‘I don’t like her.’

In this section practitioner-researchers use writing as a form of inquiry into a range of subjects, some that emerge from their therapeutic and other practices, some that arise from more personal connections, and others that hover between the two. Family relationships with the secrets, lies and loves that bind us; the frustration, pain and questioning of parenting a bullied child, illuminated against the backdrop of cultures—ancient and institutional—that do not bend easily; a questioning of how sexuality is defined—generalised perceptions that contradict the ordinary, lived, yearning life and one woman’s struggle to maintain and gain strength from her position at the borders of academia; a woman’s narrative in prose poetry patterned by the past to lead the reader through a spectacular breakthrough and two accounts of women’s ageing process—one presented in multiple voices (including an uncontrollable canine wit), the other through snapshots of the often underacknowledged freedoms that accompany ageing.

Evidence suggests that place of residence may be associated with smoking independently of individual poverty and socio-economic status. Qualitative research undertaken in disadvantaged communities in Glasgow explored possible pathways which might explain this 'area effect'. A poorly resourced and stressful environment, strong community norms, isolation from wider social norms, and limited opportunities for respite and recreation appear to combine not only to foster smoking but also to discourage or undermine cessation. Even the more positive aspects of life, such as support networks and identity, seem to encourage rather than challenge smoking. Policy and intervention responses need to tackle not only individual but also environmental disadvantage.

One of the current unsolved problems in human factors is the difficulty in acquiring information from lessons learned and data collected among human performance analysts in different domains. There are several common concerns and generally accepted issues of importance for human factors, psychology and industry analysts of performance and safety. Among these are the need to incorporate lessons learned in design, to carefully consider implementation of new designs and automation, and the need to reduce human performance-based contributions to risk. In spite of shared concerns, there are several roadblocks to widespread sharing of data and lessons learned from operating experience and simulation, including the fact that very few publicly accessible data bases exist (Gertman & Blackman, 1994, and Kirwan, 1997). There is a need to draw together analysts and analytic methodologies to comprise a centralized source of data with sufficient detail to be meaningful while ensuring source anonymity. We propose that a generic source of performance data and a multi-domain data store may provide the first steps toward cooperative performance modeling and analysis across industries.