September 2008 Archives

Today, I saw Professor Yehuda Baruch from the University of East Anglia at Norwich run a workshop called _Opening the black box of academic reviewing and editing _. The session was jointly hosted by the department of Management and International Business and the department of Psychology.

It was a most informative session, so much so that subsequently, I got his book out of the library:

As much as the workshop was useful the book is even better. If I get some time, I'll summarise the ideas here.

PhD's and productivity. What could be relevant at this juncture? Academic Productivity does what it says on the box.

Tucked away on the site are the following observations:

1. Doing a PhD is lonely
2. Your picking the right advisor will determine your happiness level more than anything else

The second point reminded me of a joke. I found this copy at Rabbitchick

One sunny day a rabbit came out of her hole in the ground to enjoy the fine weather.

The day was so nice that she became careless and a fox snuck up behind her and caught her. "I am going to eat you for lunch!" said the fox. "Wait!" replied the rabbit, "You should at least wait a few days." "Oh yeah? Why should I wait?" "Well, I am just finishing my thesis on 'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves.'" "Are you crazy? I should eat you right now! Everybody knows that a fox will always win over a rabbit." "Not really, not according to my research. If you like, you can come into my hole and read it for yourself. If you are not convinced, you can go ahead and have me for lunch." "You really are crazy!" But since the fox was curious and had nothing to lose, it went with the rabbit. The fox never came out.

A few days later the rabbit was again taking a break from writing and sure enough, a wolf came out of the bushes and was ready to set upon her. "Wait!" yelled the rabbit, "You can't eat me right now." "And why might that be, my furry appetizer?" "I am almost finished writing my thesis on 'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves.'" The wolf laughed so hard that it almost lost its grip on the rabbit. "Maybe I shouldn't eat you; you really are sick ... in the head. You might have something contagious." "Come and read it for yourself; you can eat me afterward if you disagree with my conclusions." So the wolf went down into the rabbit's hole and never came out.

The rabbit finished her thesis and was out celebrating in the local lettuce patch. Another rabbit came along and asked, "What's up? You seem very happy." "Yup, I just finished my thesis." "Congratulations. What's it about?" "'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves.'" "Are you sure? That doesn't sound right." "Oh yes. Come and read it for yourself." So together they went down into the rabbit's hole.

As they entered, the friend saw the typical graduate abode, albeit a rather messy one after writing a thesis. The computer with the controversial work was in one corner. And to the right there was a pile of fox bones, on the left a pile of wolf bones. And in the middle was a large, well-fed lion. The Moral of the Story: The title of your thesis doesn't matter. The subject doesn't matter. The research doesn't matter. All that matters is who your supervisor is.

Ouch. The grammar fairy didn't like that last sentence at all.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been switching over to Zotero for my PhD thesis. With over 300 references and 1,000+ citations this hasn't been a quick task. Anyway, on Thursday I finally pressed ALT+3 (the key I've set up to insert the bibliography) and was rewarded with a VB run-time error '6' (Overflow).

It seems that there is was a bug in the Zotero.dot code. Anyway, a day later there was a fix. Thank's to "Mat Hickman" for posting the fix. It was a matter of changing two variables for INTs to LONGs.

So, I've now generated my bibliography.

The next step is to check my work. I've produced to text files from my current (Zotero-ised) version and my Endnote version. There is a really nice tool, called WinMerge that does a spiffing job of visually showing the differences between the two text files.

Sometime later this even, I should have a 'correct' version of my thesis with all the citations correct from Zotero. Then I can get back to writing ....

Two little features, that I haven't checked on the Zotero forums are:

1. If a bibliography has been inserted in a document, then adding/amending citations takes a long time as the bibliography is recreated, and
2. Editing an existing citation, with multiple authors, doesn't correctly sort the authors (and there seems to be now way to manually move them).

Nevertheless, I'm really happy to be using Zotero.

Over on Study Hacks there is an article on How to Build a Paper Research Database. The article describes:

This is how you win a Pulitzer Prize. Imagine, then, what this technique would do for an undergraduate research paper or your senior honors thesis. In this article, I'm going to teach you how to build a simplified Branch-style Paper Research Database using Microsoft Excel. I'll tell you how to format it, populate it, and use it to structure your writing.

It seems to me that just by using Zotero would do much (if not all) of what the article recommends. Not only that, Zotero would do it more easily and quickly.

Today I was asked if I would be acting as a discussant at the next PhD conference. I'd see the emails about the conference and had already decided that I wasn't going to put a paper forward and that I wasn't going to act as discussant.

Why?

Although I glibly said "It's not my core business", what I really meant is that I had asked the question Does it make the boat go faster?¹, and the answer was no.

Having spent sometime thinking about what I do here, there are only three things that make up my "boat" here :

1. Teaching well
2. Publishing two good articles per year
3. Finishing my PhD

So, when I'm asked to do something, if I can't see an immediate and direct connection to making the boat go faster, then I'm probably not going to do it.

"So", I can hear someone saying, "what about your blog?"

Good question. I regard self-reflection as fundamental process in becoming a better manager, teacher, and researcher. This blog provides a semi-structured forum for me to engage in self-reflection, so I'll keep on doing it (as much as ever, and possibly a bit more).

¹ Attributed to Peter Blake

It's been suggested that I should allow comments again ... now, let's see if I can find the right button to push.

(and so far, the button eludes me)

I have a large number of documents that I need to 're-style' before I import them into nVivo. I can import the necessary style into each document one-by-one, but I've been looking for a way to apply styles across multiple files (either all at once, or automatically/programmatically).

As I trawled the web looking for a solution, I can across this amusing rant against the font Trajan. Indeed, there is an entire website devoted to retiring Trajan.

We won the first National League Case Competition.

As the new Dean said:

The University of Auckland Business School has been crowned Champions of the inaugural National League Case Competition sponsored by Deloitte.

The league began at Otago University on May 9th with three more preliminary rounds in Christchurch, Hamilton and Wellington before a three-round final held last week at Massey.

Auckland went into the final week 5 points behind the University of Waikato. The scoring system for the League placed a greater weighting on the final rounds, so the team had to deliver in every round to be successful. They started well with with two close seconds on Monday and Wednesday and although Auckland had a 50 point lead over Otago going into the final day the outcome was still uncertain.

The fledgling New Zealand Feijoa Industry was the subject of the final case and the team produced another strong performance to once again, finish a close second! Their consistency of performance was ultimately what carried the day.

Well done to "head coach" Brendon Potter and to the students in the teams.

There is a good (50 minute) podcast at the University of British Columbia

 
Adapted from:
Peräkylä, A. (2004). Conversation analysis. In C. Searle, D. Silverman, J. F. Gubrium, & G. Gobo (Eds.), Qualitative Research Practice (pp. 165-179). London: Sage.

It seems that I haven't addressed the issue of my PhD Topic anywhere on this blog, So ... as I say in my thesis:

The question that I seek to answer is "What is the nature of effective strategising in professional service firms?"

This question contains two parts:
1) How do strategy practitioners in professional service firms 'strategise': what is the nature of their praxis (i.e. the formal and informal 'day-to-day' activities in which they engage when strategising)?
2) How do strategists in a professional service firm have impact beyond themselves; what characterises the praxis of those whose strategising is consequential and thus strategic?

These questions come out from my long-term interest in both strategy and professional service firms.

Whilst I focus on engineering consultancies in my thesis, I have also carried out research in the context of accounting firms and law firms.

Having spent a lot of the weekend sorting out the styles and templates for the blog, I think it's about time to get back to work; i.e., the PhD.

However. before I abandon this 'diversion' I thought I'd make a few notes about what still might need to be done on the site:

• The main page of the blog just lists the ten, or so, most recent posts. At the bottom of the page there is a link to the site's archives. I wonder if I need something upfront, such as a search box, to allow people to find old material more easily.

• I've done away entirely with the sidebar. That gives the page a cleaner look, but it doesn't invite people to explore more of the site.

• Finally, I've started using the hierarchical categories. I had planned to do this earlier. But, having now installed the latest version of the software, it's been so easy to do. Now I'm wondering if I should use tags as well as categories.

I'm amazed at my capacity to get distracted by something. Such as fixing these templates and styles. I could easily spend much more time doing this. But at the end of the day, I wouldn't be moving forwards on what is really important; my teaching and my research.

Actually, it has taken me less time than I expected to do the changes I needed wanted to make. That's all down to Google's new web browser Chrome. It's a slick and tidy piece of software. I would make it my main browser except that it doesn't (yet) support ad blocking, and two essential Firefox add-ins ( Zotero and libx) aren't available for it (Oh, and it isn't yet available for FreeBSD).

Anyway, Chrome has this really neat feature that allows you to inspect elements of a web page to see which parts of your stylesheet are 'active'. Without this, I would have spent a lot more time tweaking the site's CSS.

And now, back to the salt mine.

Update
Andrew pointed me towards CSSViewer. This neat add-on for Firefox shows what the CSS is for a particular element on the screen. Google's Chrome inspector shows which parts of the style sheet is being used (or overridden) so it is easier to tweak one's style sheet.

Well it seems that my upgrade of Movable Type didn't go as smoothly as I thought.

Having moved to version 4.1, I rapidly, and too hastily moved to 4.2.

Unfortunately, I didn't test things properly and I only realised a few days ago that all my old templates and style sheets were broken. The "solution" I found on the web, of 'refreshing' the templates, actually installed new templates over the top of the old ones. Not quite what I had in mind.

So, I'm now redesigning/rebuilding new templates ... so the site may not be too pretty for a while.

I have seen the future and it's name is "Team based learning"

Today, I went to Larry Michaelsen's seminar on Team Based Learning

He was impressive. Next year I will redesign one course around Team Based Learning (yes, it was that good).

I've been using a range of elements in my own teaching, that are compatible with Team Based Learning. However, it is clear to me that Larry has spent much more time thinking about his teaching than I have (he is, after all, an emeritus professor and has been using this approach for 25 years). So, I think he has a much more robust way of connect the elements together.

A few notes:

He has written a few books many of which are about Team Based Learning.

Apart from the main "Team Based Learning web-site", information can also be found here

I've stumbled on to a couple of sites that I'm quite enjoying. The first is Academhack. It focuses on a subject dear to my heart--the intersection of teaching and technology. So, I've signed up to the author's RSS feed

Whilst reading the Academhack, I came across a reference to The productive student. It makes very interesing reading ... especially the dicussion on LaTex