July 03, 2009
An excellent dissertation
Here's a short, reasonably good report on a study of faculty opinions about what makes an excellent, good or unacceptable dissertation, from a book (Developing Quality Dissertations in the Social Sciences, B. E. Lovitt and E. L. Wert, Stylus Publishing, 2009).
Posted by jmm at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
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Effective bulletpoint presentations
I'm generally pretty critical of the traditional bulletpoint style for a presentation. But most people, of course, use them anyway. They might as well do it well.
Here is a presentation by former SI communications manager, Frank DeSanto, that he did for our summer undergraduate research program (REU) last year. He makes a number of good suggestions.
Posted by jmm at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
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May 07, 2009
Content to contribute: Wikipedia
From time to time I find pages in my areas of professional knowledge that seriously need improvement. On my long to-do list, editing Wikipedia never seems to make it to the top. But I might as well start a list in case I am looking for something to do in the future, or better yet, to suggest as an exercise for graduate students in my area.
Today I noticed:
- Incentive compatibility: For example, the article says that there are different "types" of IC (dominant strategy, Bayes-Nash). These aren't different types of IC. IC is a constraint (or sometimes a desideratum), and one can impose it on problems which we solve under different rationality assumptions. (This isn't a very good statement either!) Also, Bayes-Nash is defined incorrectly (the definition given is for Nash more generally.)
- Strategyproof: This one is really dreadful. The concept is defined incorrectly at least once (and the mere fact that it is defined more than once in a single entry is not good): the claim is made that "strategyproof" is equivalent to incentive compatibility + individual rationality. NOT. Also, the rather absurd claim is made that the concept is "most natural to the theory of payment schemes for network routing". I can't even fathom what metric one might use to measure whether a concept is more or less "natural" in various settings, but in any case, it seems absurd on its face to privilege network routing applications over all other applications for which dominant strategy constructs (such as strategyproofness) are useful. I actually looked this one up because I heard someone use the concept incorrectly in a research presentation, and that reminded me that a careful definition for strategyproofness is rarely stated, though it is used quite often.
If you happen to pick up on one of these and do some editing, be sure to note it here!
Posted by jmm at 01:32 PM | Comments (2)
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May 03, 2009
Deliberate practice, delaying automaticity, developing expertise
I wrote a blog entry in my music blog about what the "deliberate" part of "deliberate practice" means. The results of Ericsson and other psychologists on the role that deliberate practice has on expertise acquisition -- possibly to the extent that "talent" is irrelevant -- are fairly well known. But what is deliberate practice? It is assuredly not just lots of repetitive practice. See my entry in From the Bench.
Posted by jmm at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
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April 21, 2009
What makes good qualititative research?
The debate between "qualitative" and.... non-qualitative (it's not all "quantitative"!) research has been going on for many many years. Qualitative research includes ethnography and various methods based on interview and detailed field observation, often of a relatively small number of cases. Typically, qualitative research eschews the more traditional approach to scientific research, described by King, Keohane and Verba (Designing Social Inquiry (1994)):
start out with clear, theoretically anchored hypotheses, pick a sample that will let you test those ideas, and use a pre-specified method of systematic analysis to see if they are right.
Quals claim their work is underappreciated and underfunded; non-quals criticize qualitative work as "unrigorous, unreplicable, unfalsifiable" (John Comaroff, in Michèle Lamont and Patricia White, Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research (Washington: National Science Foundation, 2009), available at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/ses/soc/ISSQR_workshop_rpt.pdf, p. 37.)
Howard S. Becker, one of the leading qualitative sociologists, recently wrote an essay elucidating this debate, and offering some criteria for good qualitative research. He bases it on a review of two NSF reports released (one in March 2009) on the use of qualitative methods. (This is the same Becker known to many of as as the author of Writing for Social Scientists.)
I enjoyed reading this, as someone who has long struggled to understand what criteria are useful for judging whether qualitative research is "good" or not. What constitutes a contribution to knowledge? While Becker's criteria, unavoidably, are a bit, well, qualitative, he offers specific characteristics to look for, and I find his list convincing, at least as a set of necessary conditions, if not sufficient.
My main beef of comes down to this: Qualitative scholars often describe their work as "exploratory", and sometimes that it's purpose is to generate "grounded theory". I'm all for creative insights and hypothesizing. But how much of a contribution to knowledge is it -- especially if the hypotheses can't even stand alone as rigorously true logical deductions (which may be surprising and enlightening on their won) -- if no one ever follows up the exploratory hypothesis generation to actually test, with reliable methods, whether those hypotheses are more or less supported by sufficient, and sufficiently controlled evidence to change our priors?
Posted by jmm at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)
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