Recently in Research Category

Norvig says (with tweaks to the contemporary references by me) ...

Researchers (Bloom & Sosniak, 1985; Bryan & Harter, 1899; Hayes, 1981; Simmon & Chase,1973) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Malcolm Gladwell (2009) reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".

References

I'm stepping down as the bibliographer of the strategy-as-practice website. That site is going through a redesign, and as part of that, the team is considering how/what to do with the bibliography.

My own view is that a social bibliography, such as mine might be more useful than a stand alone bibliographic silo.

As many people know, I keep my bibliography in Zotero. Zotero also does community base groups too, such as this one on strategy as practice

From time-to-time its necessary to display time-series data. I've always tended to use some form of line graph. But there are other ways. In 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time, Nathan suggests aside from the line, one might use:

• the scatter
• the bar
• the stacked bar
• the area (I think Nathan skipped this one)
• the stacked area
• the bubble
• the colour scale
• the timeline
• the everything
• the animation

And in the comments there are a whole lot more suggested.

I was so interested in Nathan's post, that I read more of his site. It's good. Very good. So much so that I've subscribed to his RSS feed.

I really like Zotero. The more I use it, the more useful and powerful I find it. Also, the technical support for the product (from the community of users and especially from Dan Stillman is outstanding.

Dan pointed out a really useful feature to me today. When adding items to Zotero, sometimes the title of the item is published ALL IN UPPER CASE or sometimes In A Mixture Of Upper And Lower Case (i.e., title case). It is really tedious to fix by hand; but there is a better way. I viewing mode (thats in the right-hand-side panel), right-click on the title and choose "Transform text->lower case". It can then be quickly tweaked to be sentence case.

I think it was Stephen Turner (2007) who lamented that much sociological theory is uninformed by our contemporary understanding of neuroscience.

David Rock, in series of articles (2006, 2009) looks at leadership and management from the perspective of neuroscience. One particular section caught my eye, in which he writes about teams; the Relating to relatedness of the title.

Fruitful collaboration depends on healthy relationships, which require trust and empathy. But in the brain, the ability to feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they are perceived to be part of the same social group.... Each time a person meets someone new, the brain automatically makes quick friend-or-foe distinctions and then experiences the friends and foes in ways that are colored by those distinctions. When the new person is perceived as different, the information travels along neural pathways that are associated with uncomfortable feelings (different from the neural pathways triggered by people who are perceived as similar to oneself).

Leaders who understand this phenomenon will find many ways to apply it in business. For example, teams of diverse people cannot be thrown together. They must be deliberately put together in a way that minimizes the potential for threat responses. Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled. These qualities develop only when people's brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and repeated social interaction.

Once people make a stronger social connection, their brains begin to secrete a hormone called oxytocin in one another's presence. This chemical ... disarms the threat response and further activates the neural networks that permit us to perceive someone as "just like us." Research by Michael Kosfeld et al. in 2005 shows that a shot of oxytocin delivered by means of a nasal spray decreases threat arousal. But so may a handshake and a shared glance over something funny.

Conversely, the human threat response is aroused when people feel cut off from social interaction.... Leaders who strive for inclusion and minimize situations in which people feel rejected create an environment that supports maximum performance. This of course raises a challenge for organizations:

This, of course, has implications for teaching, especially when teams are used (as in team-based learning). We have always known that how teams are put together is important, but this article gives us a more nuanced understanding. It also reminds me how important it is for teams to have some (structured) time to get to know one-another.

References

Since moving to Zotero, I've found my 'work flow' to be much smoother. These few tips have made things even easier. I particularly find it useful when I've found a link to the full-text of an article, just to drag the link to the item in Zotero (and have Zotero auto-magically download into my library).

As I look back at my last entry it occurs to me that I use two distinct approaches to citing and referencing ideas, works, etc. Specifically, I use a mixture of hyperlinks and APA referencing.

My habit seems to be that for non-academic works, I tend to use hyperlinks that go to appropriate sources. This seems consistent with normal practice of web-based publishing.

For scholarly works I follow APA conventions for citing and referencing. This seems more consistent with the academic expectations and practices. In acknowledgement of the fact this is electronic or web-based publishing I use COinS to ensure there is enough information so that programmes such as Zotero or LibX can scrape/find all the information they need to quickly locate an electronic copy/source of the document.

However, I feel mildly uneasy about this situation. Should I use only APA (albeit with COinS); afterall it does have citation styles for blogs etc? Or should I only use hyperlinks; after all, this is the web? For some things, such as blog entries, APA seems entirely sensible for paper-based writings. However, for this (and other e-media), APA feels out of place. I am use to clicking hyperlinks to take to "more information". I think I can live with the mixed method of referencing. At the end of the day, I do try and acknowledge my sources, and perhaps it doesn't matter what means I do that by, providing most people recognise that I am doing it; i.e., most people recognise the practices that I am using.

Here we tend to use nVivo for qualitative research/analysis. It's pretty robust, but the handling of PDF files leaves a lot to be desired. What nVivo seems to do is to convert the PDF into some sort of RTF-like format. Unfortunately the fidelity of the converted file isn't that good. In fact, it can be darn difficult to work with most converted files if they are anything more than plain-old-text.

The problem is so bad, and I am so keen to analyse/work with PDF files I'm thinking of changing to Atlas/ti. That programme handles PDF files in their native format ... there is no loss of fidelity when working with them.

What I can't decide is whether the learning curve/downtime is worth the change.

Jo Badge talks a bit about her personal learning environment, and so I thought I'd draft out mine. I'm really web-centric and spend most of time 'in' Firefox (I sometimes think about switching to Chrome, but I'm hooked on Zotero).

I found it interesting to consider what is missing here ... there is no Powerpoint. I so rarely use 'slides'; often all I have is a single slide so students coming into class know they are in the right place. Increasingly, when I need slides I'm trying/learning to do them using Beamer. Having said that, for the odd complex set of ideas I do use MindManager in presentation mode to show how I see the connections between things.View image

Since writing this, I've come across Hull, Pettifer, and Kell (2008). They present an interesting figure, which seems to show how much I can actually do in Zotero (which is most of it).

Figure 4. A typical workflow for using a digital library representing a subset of the literature. Tasks represented by white nodes are normally performed exclusively by humans, while tasks shown in blue nodes can be performed wholly or partly by machines of some kind. The main problematic tasks that make digital libraries difficult to use for both machines and humans are ''GET'' (publication) and ''GET METADATA''. These are shown in bold and discussed further in the Identity Crisis section of this paper. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204.g004

References

One blog I always find myself going back to is by Thomas Basbøll, who is the Resident Writing Consultant at Copenhagen Business School. He calls his blog Research as a second language.

I was promoted to mention it now as I was reading his article Free Time, Blank Pages, and other Catastrophes. As I hurtle/stumble towards the end of my thesis, I find myself wondering about the practices associated with "doing" a PhD. Here, at the University of Auckland Business, or at least in this part of the Business School, a thesis seems to be a largely individual exercise. And yet it doesn't have to be that way. A colleague has some theses from a renowned Swedish institution. The detailed structure of each PhD thesis is very similar to each other ... down to the number of paragraphs per section. Clearly there has to be a greater level of congruence between practices there than, say, where Saku Mantere did his thesis (which exhibits some lovely ideosyncracies).