Research Method Suggestions

Status Identity Issues in Crowd Sourcing: Transaction Costs or Reputation Effects? (mTurk vs. CrowdFlower)

2010-11-27T16:47:00.005-06:00

Another interesting point about crowd sourcing - what does identity have to do with it? Now, due to the strong presence of scammers, many of the researchers in this area think that reputation is the best way to control quality with micro tasks. (E.g. http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/08/reputation-integration-and-future-of.html) But I'm a contrarian sociologist, so I am not so sure that I would necessarily agree. To see why, I first need to point out the issues of social standing and transaction costs that factor into this labor market.

First, I started to think about transaction costs as a reason why micro tasking was popular for over qualified people like college students to make very little bits of money. (Leaving out the 'game-like quality' arguments here.) For example, as a PhD student, I can always go work part-time at something, but getting the job, training for it, and then settling into a routine of work that won't interfere too much with my research takes time and effort -- indeed, it would probably require a lot of searching with the current economy. On the other hand, I can work in little bits and pieces with Mechanical Turk, earning little money, but in a way that doesn't require a lot of startup costs. I can tell you from experience that motivation is there, and low barriers to entry (transaction costs) make it easy to sign up with mTurk and start working right away. Who doesn't already have an Amazon account?

However, should we also think about this in terms of a status identity-driven distinction? It might take a lot of effort to go and get a reasonable part-time job, but maybe the issue is also that it just feels wrong or demeaning to take a low skilled position. However, with mTurk, who of my friends are going to know that I'm doing this for extra money? Nobody, unless I tell them. Thus, this is work that the overqualified could do, easily, but without the negative reputation effects that could occur if, say, your friends knew you were working in fast food management instead of doing corporate law. Working on mTurk -- say if I were unemployed or staying home with kids or between jobs or just part time -- wouldn't necessarily have the same status identity hit. I could rationalize this to myself as "just earning some extra money" and it would be unlikely to generate negative reputation effects with my peers, because it is unlikely that they would find out I was doing this unless I told them.

And that, my friends, is why I think we can definitely find overqualified workers lurking on Mechanical Turk. (So long as they don't get burned too quickly by scammy requesters.) In other words, maybe we should be asking "to what extent are 'too good' workers using mTurk as a way to generate some extra money in ways that are a) easy and/or b) not identity-threatening/demeaning?" (This is also a nice explanation for why you might see overqualified people doing temp work, together with the ability to move into a good FT position...)

Testing Status Identity vs. Transaction Costs
A nice experiment to test this would be to see how well or quickly the same people completed a boring task using CloudCrowd vs. mTurk -- experiments anyone? The way that CloudCrowd works is to use a Facebook login to start working, which is what gave me the idea for this post in the first place, because I immediately went "eww.... I don't want to let my friends know I'm doing this low-status work."

CloudCrowd uses facebook and existing accounts to guarantee that people are 'real' by looking at facebook. But not only will this create the status identity issues I mentioned above, with one's friends finding out you were doing menial labor, but a corollary is that we might get in fact worse quality work from some people who would be just fine in the semi-anonymous mTurk scenario.

Here's why that might happen: for some people, requiring login with your facebook ID is just fine, and through social sanctions and reputation effects, there will be an incentive to provide high quality work. I imagine this works just fine for some workers. Using the issue of status identity, however, I can also see a quality-destroying incentive here: if I don't want to show my friends I'm doing this, I might make up a new facebook ID, and then with that "worker login" I would probably feel less pressure to do quality work. Heck, if I'm going to start creating fake IDs, I may as well make a couple of them, and maybe have a throwaway bank account as well, to make it easier to abandon if one was flagged.

So, to be academic about it, I would expect to see this the two-tiered quality effect, and it would become my testable hypothesis if I were going to do this kind of research. (But I'm not, so it's fair game, people!) Another alternative might be that overqualified workers would just not do this type of work if they had to go through facebook or another social media source that was linked to their visible personal profile.

Well, now I really need to stop messing around with mTurk and work on my real research...

Mechanical Turk and Artificial Reviews

2010-11-26T10:37:00.005-06:00

So I've been very interested in the whole mTurk phenomenon, with crowdsourcing small tasks. I decided to start doing tasks myself in order to see what things were best for this type of work, but frankly, I was appalled by some of the uses. I've seen solicitations for newsletter signups, which are bound to get someone spammed. I've seen solicitations for "please post 3 comments to the following blogs" to artificially get a conversation going. I've seen requests for Facebook follows/likes/etc., requests to break CAPTCHA's, requests to "download college material from this site," and "fill out a free credit report online." (If that last one isn't a serious identity scam, I don't know what is.)

Now I am able to see that this is part of the engine behind artificial website rankings and reviews, to pump up garbage, and game the ranking metrics. Here's a terrible one for academics: just today, I saw someone use it to artificially bump up his SSRN downloads, which I happened to report to both SSRN and to mTurk. I also 1-starred the book who's PR company was soliciting 5 star reviews on Amazon.

This brings me to an interesting point, though, because a whole community of people has evolved around mTurk, and some of them have moral stances, flagging questionable tasks like this. (See http://turkers.proboards.com/) The sad thing is though, not everyone has this kind of moral compass or perhaps they need the money/just don't care. I can understand those motives even if I don't condone it. So I have to say that this experience has really changed my view of what is "real" on various ratings and review sites. We might think those things are easy to moderate out, but some of the requests are really so specific as to require "at least 200 facebook friends" or other qualifications, and of course the sanctioning power of reputation effects doesn't matter if someone has already created an artificial online presence or several. (See what I mean by googling up "black hat SEO" where people will proudly talk about creating multiple artificial identities and "even using them to talk with one another.")

Ok, that last one is a little involved for the mTurkers, and could still happen even before the internet. But if there are people who will post bogus reviews for $0.05 each, at least there are a few people who will probably feel the moral outrage at this kind of thing, like myself, and post a negative comment on some of those same sites. At least that's what I'm hoping.

But I can easily see how this is going to become an increasingly difficult business to check and to moderate. It is going to require new and perhaps more sophisticated methods of doing marketing research, for example, because it is just so easy to post a "help me vote for funding for X medical disease online" task on mTurk--I actually saw this one--and if one just trusts the survey results, you might not be getting anything near a real sample. I'm just waiting until I see one along the lines of "buy one share of this company stock."

That said, mTurk does have some great potential, and I'll have more later on the useful and interesting tasks you can do with mTurk. However, I have come to the conclusion that if Amazon wants to police this better, they need to moderate requestors better (ala Amazon stores), and/or create an "approve this mTurk task" as an ongoing HIT to clear each and every request, which would work nicely with new or otherwise questionable requestors. I am sure that if they police things, new blackhat sites will spring up, but since Mechanical Turk is associated with the Amazon brand, they do need to be careful not to let it be the wild west, or they could suffer their own negative reputation effects.

Read More
A nice academic blog on Mechanical Turk: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/
Interesting labor regulation issues from the crowdflower blog: http://blog.crowdflower.com/2010/06/regulating-distributed-work-part-three-why-its-a-good-idea/

Preparing for the academic job market

2010-10-21T16:18:00.002-05:00

Useful online powerpoint presentation from UPenn. Kind of general, but good to get your feet wet.
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/gradstud/resources/AcademicJobSearch/player.html

My EZ solution to get people to pay for online news

2010-09-05T17:15:00.004-05:00

Sigh. I've been very disappointed with garbage SEO content from web searches lately, which only reaffirms my feeling that there will have to be a new type of shakedown with web providers, rankings, and so forth. (Lame SEO as the new spam? Maybe.)

The issue comes back to my previously mentioned problem of needing online curation methods. Which websites do we trust? Which provide the best* information?
*Yes, that's subjective, and I know plenty of people would take TMZ over NYT, but still.

So how does this relate to the issue of newspapers and online content? Well, if you break the problem down to essentials, the reason you'd pay for a paper newspaper vs. just hearing your neighbor tell you about the warehouse fire down on the docks is an issue of quality and reputation. You pay for reputation. (Let's exclude the entertainment-purposed newz lite for simplicity.)

Online news provision changes the game though, now information can spread, it can travel, and it doesn't take an economist to figure out that people don't like to pay for things that they can get for free, or where they can get acceptable substitutes for free. Question is, how do you then monetize high quality news online then?

Well, I've got a solution. In an online age, where information travels quickly, monetizing the news is difficult, because there are so many alternatives. But you can certainly monetize community participation. Let's think about this a bit more...

What's the difference between reading the news at the New York Times and paying for some content, vs. finding an AP story elsewhere for free? Well, NYT is reputable, and hey, they don't have a bunch of flashing graphics ads that are distracting. (Yes, I would pay for no ads versions, but I think I'm in the minority on that one.)

Actually, let me change examples to a site where this will work a lot better, and use an example close to my heart (as an academic) to talk about The Chronicle of Higher Education. What the Chronicle offers, and you wouldn't find on other websites that might repost the same or similar content, is the comments section. Take the following randomly selected story about professors being required to be present in their offices for a minimum number of hours per week here: http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-at-U-of-North/124308/. As you might find from a quick skim through the rest of the website, the Chronicle requires subscriptions to view some articles, but not all of them. However, almost all articles now allow comments, and with many things, you get quite a healthy argument going under the fold.

Which brings me to my point - the Chronicle may be charging for some content, but I bet they would convert a lot more people by switching to charging for the right to participate in the conversation and making comments. Yes, moderation issues and TOS issues will probably have to be worked out to disallow spam, and of course with an audience of PhDs and university administrators, you usually get very high quality comments, which won't be the situation for many other news providers. But these caveats aside, I think it would be pretty effective to charge readers for the right to comment, rather than the right to read material. Basically, we've got it wrong - forums used to be where you could get free information, but maybe the future of news is that you only get to participate in forums if you pay, whereas the news itself is free.

Of course, this isn't a perfect solution, because it could have negative effects like shifting news providers toward comment-worthy or controversy heavy stories, it would make active management of forums essential, you would miss out on intelligent comments by people who wouldn't pay, it might be undemocratic by not allowing poorer people to participate,* the commentary might drive away some potential readers, and who knows, I could be wrong about the majority of people being willing to pay to comment. So it's probably not the panacea, but it would be an interesting experiment to see how well this would work to monetize high quality news and reporting, vs. the paywall schemes that are being rolled out lately.
* This could be mitigated by allowing editorial selection of some comments for free, the same way letters to the editor are sorted and chosen.
** Also, we do still need a viable micropayments system to capture the nonsubscriber / infrequent visitor issue, which decreases the 'barriers to purchasing' in technical terms. Hello, Google? Paypal? Why isn't one of the big boys working on this?

Research organization using OneNote

2010-07-18T16:29:00.000-05:00

I think I can safely say that for the past 3 years I've been looking for the ideal way to organize my research materials. By the time I went to do my fieldwork in New York, I had already started on a big paper collection, and since that time it has only expanded. (Yes, how many people do you know that fly off with a suitcase of papers and journal articles. I am ashamed to say that has been me.)

In starting on the ethnographic work in earnest back in 2008, I did a survey of qualitative analysis software, and after testing Atlas.ti, MaxQDA and nVivo, I picked nvivo to work with. (I later ran across Qualrus, which some people like, but I had already bought nvivo so I didn't review it particularly.) Now nvivo is a very powerful tool for qualitative researchers and it definitely helps us to be better organized. But it wasn't quite the holy grail that I had been seeking for research organization, although I definitely will keep using this type of software.

I found that I wasn't using it quite as often as I would have imagined for a key reason: it takes a long time to load in XP, and having said no to Vista, I'm currently waiting to have the time to move over to Windows 7. So it wasn't the easy interface that I could just pull up to make notes with the same way as writing in a physical journal like I do when I'm out interviewing.

Now, to take on that function, I tried a few different things in the last few months - evernote, Mendeley, OneNote, back to Mendeley, and now back to OneNote. Now that I have been working with OneNote for a while, I have to say that I absolutely love it. It apparently was started as an initial technology for tablet PCs, and has great integration there (so I hear) but it is so much more. I suppose this is the kind of epiphany that mac users had when they stared using Devonthink, but for those of us who are on PC, there wasn't this great kind of option.

You can do an online search yourself and see all about onenote and why people like it, but let me tell you why I like it for research.
1. It's intuitive and easy to use
2. There are many more useful features once you get going with it
3. Easy searching in it
4. Easy to draw
5. Stays pretty organized by default
6. Easy way to hold all those notes and scribblings

Now, I won't say that there are no problems. It isn't great with PDFs, and does this silly 'print to OneNote' thing for those. If you make a table, you can't do an autosum, as one might expect. If you draw, there's no way to group the drawing objects like in word or powerpoint (sigh). There is no OneNote mobile for blackberry.

But regardless, it is making me so happy to use this and I feel that I'm now able to put together my research notes and quotes in a way that really makes sense, and is searchable. This is definitely worth the $80 or so that I paid for it, and to be quite honest, it should probably be included with all versions of Office, because it really is just that useful. But really, don't just take my word for it, download the trial version and give it a whirl.

Social media, curation and watching tv these days

2010-04-12T14:43:00.005-05:00

Lately I've been forming an opinion about the importance of categorization, comparables and curation on the web. I know everyone is keen on social media, and companies are scrambling to keep up, but perhaps we should think more about the contexts in which having reviews, comments, and other forms of interaction make sense. I am certainly not against social media, as it provides a very interesting counterpart to published information, and I have to confess that I am just the kind of nerd that loves to read amazon product reviews. But at other times, say when I am looking for a nature documentary on Hulu, I find the information, well... less than helpful. (Do I really need to see anti evolutionist comments when I'm looking for a nature documentary?) Let's think about this more.

The Hulu problem is that entertainment products such as TV don't appeal to all groups. I can easily love things that other people like and vice versa. At present, the type of user reviews we see online aren't distinguished by different marketing segments, and there are of course many people who think that others should think like them. Hulu is also a case where I'm often very aware of my own preferences, so in that case, I don't care for a long description. I'd prefer something like stars, expert reviews or really, nothing at all. People should save those opinions for dedicated fan / anti-fan sites.
Social scientist spoiler: It might also be interesting to get some observed behavior, rather than opinions, such as "total completed views" divided by "total views started" or something of this nature. Or if reviews were tagged with this information, I would be better able to see who has full information, and who is just writing a snap judgment based on 5 minutes of watching a complicated drama.

This problem of whose views count seems to be showing up now with the implementation of google news, as the company struggles to figure out which blogs are news, which are opinion, which are garbage, etc. Obviously, this is a problem of curation. When I read the New York Times, I know that the company is exercising judgment and restraint over its writers, and if something slips by, they will print a retraction or update. But what about if a prominent writer publishes a blog? What about scientists? (A favorite example is the Becker-Posner blog, which is very entertaining.) Actually, this example makes me think that perhaps academics realize this distinction much better than anyone else, because we know that what is published as peer-reviewed research in journals or as books with university presses will be held up to the highest standard. When we do a blog, it has many advantages: it can reach more people, we can speak in a conversational fashion, it will be updated quickly, and so forth. But this work is categorically different than the highest standards set by peer reviewed research journals. (I am not decided about open access journals, but certainly to grad students who wonder whether they should spend more time on their articles or blogs, the answer is clear. Having a lot of followers on your research blog won't get you tenure, and because it is not vetted by experts in your field, I am not sure that it should ever serve that function, even if you may eventually get points for public engagement.)

Another clear and big problem with curation involves my frequent hobby: watching TV. (Sadly, as an academic, reading feels too much like work, and so aside from the newspaper, I am not reading much outside of work, unless I have been on vacation for a while.) With factors like the digital switchover making it difficult to receive more than a few local channels at once without endless fussing and refinding channels, as well as the growing number of sites to watch shows online, we are moving away from the power of the major networks to provide a curated package of shows. This is no problem when you already know what you like -- just buy the show in physical or virtual form and watch it sequentially. This works great for me, especially with intricate shows that have a lot of character development, which I used to not watch until the dvds were out, due to my busy and erratic schedule. (Perhaps this correlates with why I liked one off episodes of shows like CSI so much?)

On the other hand, now that I've watched most of the episodes of shows that I liked, and have followed series, and got rid of my tv in moving and digital hassles, I am finding it increasingly difficult to figure out which new shows to bother watching. My extreme frustration with networks for cancelling two shows I really liked--life on mars and defying gravity--is part of this problem, pushing me to go after older network shows and new cable shows, which have less chance of being cancelled just after I've started watching regularly. The question is how to find those things that I'd like to follow? There are also times when having someone else curate would be better, because I just can't be bothered to do a big long web search. The advantage of cable tv is that you can just turn the thing on and start watching a lineup of shows picked by the network that follow both a sequential and temporal order. This is one of the reasons why I like listening to dj sets and shows as a way of finding new music; although TV is somewhat different from music, there is still skill involved in that selection process, putting together a package of things that go together.

Spending a lot of time finding new things is more of a problem for busy me, as opposed to being something fun for people who have a lot of time on their hands to find and discover things that you like, like teenagers and college students. The search process here is also likely to be related to their process of identity discovery, finding things that are popular or rare, current or historic.

So in my view, the curation and collection are the true missing elements to both Hulu and Amazon, because although they do have certain types of collections, the collections are static as opposed to dynamic. The TV programming TV of old was dynamic, in that you had a relevant collection of shows at a certain time, which could seem out of date at a later time. Think of Christmas episodes of sitcoms. This temporal movement was also helpful to weed out things that I would watch, but didn't LOVE -- ok, I'll watch dancing with the stars because it's there, but I'm not going to go online to watch old episodes because it's not my thing. I wonder how much this "good enough" vs. blockbuster effect is to blame for changing viewing patterns with buying episodes ala carte? (A perfectly fine show, but I certainly wouldn't be inclined to pay for it... which I suppose relates to the arguments about bundling that are still being resolved around cable tv.)

This magical filtering and movement also relate to why watching tv was such a pleasure for me before - although I had to tune in for a favorite show, to just watch something took no more effort than a few clicks of the remote. In switching to watching online, the seductive brain rot of old TV is replaced with an endless process of overfilled netflix queues, too many show subscriptions on Hulu, and the sense that I am somehow behind on things with my online tv viewing (!).

To think about cable, perhaps what happened with the proliferation of cable channels was an ever splintering specialization that gave us channels that would fit a mood or a wish, but lacked the generality of the average network. This was a gain, but it was also a loss, because how many hours of programming could one possibly sit through with the cooking network or fitTV? Then the more successful of these networks generalized up again - witness the personality chefs, to take the place of talk show hosts or news anchors. But that's when they lost me, because I'm not a just the lifestyle cooker, who learns about products to buy them at whole foods, but someone who wants technical details and expertise.

So I imagine that there must be a balance between specialization and generality in show content and viewing audiences. But this is where online content is brilliant, because the same shows can now be recollected into different packages now, for example with a customized daily watching of 2-3 hours for type 1) the lifestyle cook, type 2) the travel and food culture type or type 3) the technical shows watcher.

Well, this post is getting long and I'm not sure where I've gotten to, but I can at least say that this seems to be what happened with the networks vs. cable channels and police dramas. So perhaps the model isn't as unfamiliar for big media as one might imagine, and the details are more in who curates and how well they are able to construct viewing sets that are updated frequently enough for daily watchers, while still being able to engage those of us who might check in once a week. Here's hoping that we can create playlists for TV shows, and eventually someone will put together a regularly updated collection or channel of shows for me to watch online, so that I can, for example, have high quality nature programs for relaxing evenings. I'd probably even sit through the advertising.

And so goes google...

2010-04-11T15:52:00.003-05:00

Google has recently scrapped the whole searchwiki option to hide or promote search results. I really wasn't aware of using it that much before, but OMG, now that it's gone I really miss it. The last couple of days I was doing a bunch of web research because I was thinking about buying a new computer mouse, and I came up against so many garbage websites with no way to clear those out of the search results. Luckily, it took me all of an hour to find two options: "search filter" and google blacklist. (Unfortunately, both are only for chrome, and I wasn't able to find anything quite the same for firefox.) After trying both, I think I prefer google blacklist.

As an academic researcher and nerdy web shopper, possibly the only thing that could make this better would be a "hide temporarily" option. For some things, you know a site is complete garbage, so you want a permanent blacklist entry. But at other times, the option of 'delete search results for just this session/day/whatever' would be a good way to reduce information overload when doing research. It would work the same way, but maybe with a different icon to hide things, and then once you're done with that particularly bit of research, you click something in your preferences to release all the temporarily hidden items. This way you can cull content, but get full search functionality back for when you're doing another product search or writing another article or whatever. Sure, I know you can tell which sites have been visited by the color of the link, but it's still a bit too much information overload to have all those links on screen, no matter the color.

Translating UK Academic Job Titles

2010-03-09T16:58:00.002-06:00

As a US based PhD student, the UK provides another excellent arena to look for jobs. But to understand the job postings on the UK sites, one has to know what the titles actually mean.

Here's my rough understanding, and please take it with a grain of salt.

Studentship = fellowship for being a PhD student
Research assistantship = same as above, for pre-doctoral, although this usually involves part-time work on someone's project
Research fellowship --- usually means a postdoctoral position, but not always. Check the listing.
Teaching fellow --- approximately the same as VAP, but sometimes can be held by someone who is ABD
Postdoctoral researcher -- same as in the US
Lecturer -- usually looking for a junior faculty, approximately assistant professor
Senior lecturer -- someone who's a few years in, and has a good record of publications
Reader --- getting close to a high level associate professor (update 04/12/10: this could also be equivalent to a full professor position in a university that differentiates between full and chaired positions.)
Professor -- a senior, high-level professor and very similar to the US sense.
All prior positions for PhD holders are addressed as "Dr. so and so" rather than "Professor," as this is a specific job grade, not an honorific. And on the subject of titles, did you know that in the UK a surgeon is addressed as "Mr. so and so" due to historical conditions. I wonder if female surgeons get "Dr." or "Ms."...?
Chaired professor --- this honorific is basically the same.

Before you get too excited, note a few key differences.

Most calls want people who have finished the PhD, so you may have to "explain" if you are applying during the last year of your PhD, as is common in the US. (Less of a problem for postdocs, usually.)
(Update 04/12/10: As most people do a UK PhD in 3-5 years, you it is likely you will also have to explain why you took longer, usually in the interview stage. Be versed in your department and field's mean and median time to completion statistics. If you are fast, you can say so. If you are slow, you'd better have good reasons. As opposed to US jobs, I imagine this could be one situation where saying you went on leave or 1/2 time to have a baby won't be seen as a black mark.)
Some disciplines have lower salaries relative to US positions, eg. finance.
No tenure in the UK, and you typically work on 3 year contracts, although there is such a thing as 'effective tenure'
Mandatory retirement age. This is currently at 65, although may go up by a few years, in a few years.
The different pool of academics and somewhat different research focus areas may mean it would be difficult for you to come back to the US in the same exact discipline. Because this is field-specific, you should research this more for your area. On the other hand, a focus on more of the top US journals would usually be a desirable thing for the UK department.

Also note that when they are doing hiring, they bring all the candidates in on the same day, and while you don't give your talk or interview in front of them, you may get to have lunch with your competition. While that could feel weird, you should just treat this like a conference situation. The upshot of their different hiring process is that they usually decide who to hire very quickly, and try to notify the top candidate that week. (If it takes some time, this probably means you were 2nd or 3rd choice. But hey, a job is a job.)

Switching to Gmail and using the Blackberry

2010-03-07T12:41:00.001-06:00

So, in preparing for my trip to the UK, I realized that the Blackberry (BB) wasn't going to have the BIS integration, unless I paid extra, and I decided that wouldn't be worthwhile for just a few days trip. But with the data access, you can use the gmail app, without needing the dedicated BB email. Since we've already been urged to forward our school accounts to gmail, I thought this might be a good time to switch over.

Pre-trip, that just meant forwarding my email to gmail, and I set up my US blackberry to get this mail normally. This was easy, and started to work right away, no problem. (Note that I don't use the gmail app on this phone, as I've gotten used to the BB interface. Plus it requires network access every time, not that this is a problem, but I just prefer the email push. I do have it installed to use in case I want to access my other folders/labels or older messages.)

While in the UK, this worked like a charm. Something I love about transit in London is that you don't get people yammering on their cell phones all the time, mostly because people are sending text messages, emails and whatnot. (Note that text messages caught on in Europe's mainstream population much earlier than in the US. I believe it was due to higher calling rates vs. text message rates.) Well, I don't particularly care about phone calls, as I take calls in public too sometimes, but the lower frequency does make riding the bus nicer. On long distance trains, you are also encouraged to take your calls to the space between cars, and this also has a bit better sound buffering of noise from the train relative to Amtrak.

So, trip done, good, great. Now back, I start to think that maybe I should just put all my old emails into gmail. there is apparently a conversion tool to do this, but if you use a desktop editor with IMAP like Thunderbird, you can do this yourself. I picked the latter option because I wanted to save my folder settings, although given that this took more than 2 full days, perhaps it isn't the best strategy unless you have a weekend to kill, have nothing on your plate at work, or are super unproductive due to jet lag, as I was. This probably took more time because I was going through various emails to delete and refile things. But all in all, fairly productive. Note that Thunderbird 3 is better to use with gmail, due to the trash vs. all mail issues. (Get started thinking about this here.) Also note distinction between gmail labels and TB folders: you can have more than one label, but TB behaves as if it is still using folders.

This process meant a big dump of messages into the Blackberry, so you might want to turn off the email push if you're going to do a big session. It generally worked fine for me, but twice it lost the gmail password and I had to re-verify, so during those times I wasn't getting new messages on the BB. Obviously if you're at your desk the whole time, it isn't a big deal, but it could be a problem if you don't notice this happened and miss an important mail.

Ok, now email is all in one place, and then I realize that yikes, I have a serious email overload. With teaching and not working in an office job, I've gotten very bogged down, and so now I need better email management tools. But, that is an even longer post, that I will leave for later.

Travel, Time Zones, Calendars and Blackberry

2010-03-05T18:22:00.002-06:00

So, just back from London for a job interview, (didn't get it), and this makes me think about time settings. Thanks to the darling man, I have become addicted to using the Blackberry together with google calendar. It works very well most of the time. But coming back, I noticed my London appointments had all shifted times, showing up at 3am or something weird.

Turns out, this is a normal feature of the Blackberry, which is that when you make a calendar entry, it will enter using the phone's currently set time, meaning that a 10am London meeting turns into 5am in NYC. (Well, depending on daylight savings time, but let's keep the simplest case and ignore that.) This makes perfect sense if you think about how the BB was designed - for business people. Business people who travel often have to call back for a conference call or whatnot, so it's important to keep that original "home office time" so that they realize that a call scheduled for 6am in NYC is going to be at their 11am in London. Ok, most of us don't start working at 6am, but you get the point.

Still with me? If you've gone to London, of course you experience 11am as your (now) local time, aside from jet lag of course, but need to be reminded properly of the home office time. If you keep this in mind, the fact that you originally had to manually change the time on the BB is completely obvious: you don't want to shift around any meetings that should be in the home office time if you've changed up your current local time. With current models, you can set the device time to be either from "Blackberry" or "Network," and the latter would automatically change the device time. (Note that BB calendar keeps meetings at the original time zone entry, which is why they shift around when you change the device time zone.)

The downside to this strategy is that people think of time relative to themselves, rather than to the home office, so I always think it would be nice to have a setting that would also allow non-shifting appointment times. (Basically, if you could check a box and the calendar would display all your previous and future meetings in their original local times, so the 11am London meeting, followed by the 2pm NYC meeting on the next day don't get shifted by their time zone differences.)

Well, that's more useful for an individual than a company, but here's hoping. For now I can just look at my physical, honest to god, paper day planner, and that serves the same function. Writing things down in two places also helps to reduce errors. (Although given that I managed to write down the wrong train time for last weekend in my planner and didn't bother with the BB, this doesn't work if you don't actually do it.)

Note for computer programmers: this non-adjusted time would be exactly what is needed for good integration of tasks into the calendar.... this is already the case for the BB alarm clock. Why can't I have a setting for tasks "in time relative to me" as opposed to always having to specify a time zone?

So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, when setting non-local events on your BB, you want to pay attention to the time zones setting. Apparently google calendar doesn't do the shifting time zones thing well, but BB certainly does. Hey, it was made for business people after all. Then you can just sync to google calendar to have things show up on your computer, and non-local events will be adjusted for local time based on the time zone difference. It's no trouble to enter a different time zone for a particular event, but quick tip - if you're entering a bunch of different events that are in a different city, you could also change your BB time zone settings to that location and then change back when you're done entering events from your upcoming business trip or vacation. (Date/Time source must be set to "BB" and not "Network" for this to work.) Or, as I checked, you can also switch to a different time to check past events, as I did to see what time my London meetings actually were in London GMT.

It seems that as opposed to this sensible strategy, google calendar tries to impose a single time zone, and may end up changing the times of your past events if you update the local time. For this reason, it may be best to stick with entering events just using the BB and then only using the desktop or browser interface to view details later. It seems that although you don't have the option to specify this this in google sync, when there are conflicts between google calendar online and the device, the BB wins.

Despite these foibles with the google calendar interface, the BB and google sync work well. The brilliant thing about using the google sync is that it makes it possible to then set up another unlocked cell phone with an international SIM card and download all of your calendar entries using google sync once there. We have an older unlocked BB, and at least in the UK you can get data services easily, I think automatically, with a new SIM. The blackberry service is additional, and only available on some networks, like Orange. I managed with just the gmail app and data services--lots of google maps usage--while the dear man paid extra to use the BB email push and other services. While it can be annoying to carry two phones around, this is a lot less annoying than paying massive international roaming charges, particularly for data. In order to be reachable in emergencies, I turn data services on my US phone off but keep the network on. Be sure to check this carefully, especially if you have email/data push services.

Well, this one turned out a bit of a ramble, but I figured I'd throw in a bit more about unlocked cell phones while I was at it, because really, all of this is going to be pretty expensive if you just use your US phone, and not all of us have a company to pick up the phone bill.

Handbook to Being a Graduate Student

2010-01-31T14:46:00.000-06:00

Excellent guide, ne book, online about professional development for graduate students. Developed for Harvard, here's a link to the University of Chicago's version. http://grad-affairs.uchicago.edu/academic-resources/Scholarly%20Pursuits.pdf

Collaboration Using EndNote Web

2010-01-07T16:40:00.001-06:00

Well, the future in academic research has arrived - sort of. We now have online tools to deal with references, and we can have a shared online library via myendnoteweb.com. In theory, one may actually be able to collaboratively work on documents now without the constant fear of killing the paper's formatted list of references. (Yes, there are other tools for this. No, not interested in switching at this point, as I am too invested in EndNote at this point, which is what they had hoped for, I imagine.)

Here's my experience with it so far.

Endnote web vs. Desktop version: actually, once I recovered my password from a long forgotten account, it worked pretty smoothly to upload and download references. (Using version X2 right now.) This seems like a good idea for a backup, although the limits on the number of references do mean that the initial imports are a bit jinky. (Also seems that there is no synchronize function to find new references that have not been backed up online or brought from online down to desktop library. Thompson seems not to have conceptualized the online list as also a convenient way to backup the library. I doubt this would be difficult to program, as Evernote and Mendeley have this feature, so maybe we'll see it in the future.)
Endnote groups and sharing: Another good feature, and now we're getting closer to what I wanted this for, because you can share references with other users, designating who has read vs. read/write permissions to the references in a shared group.
Using EndnoteWeb for editing references in a document: Wow, I just discovered this today, and it is really cool! Ok, so the Word icon-based toolbar could use some work, but in a pinch, this is great. Downside: you can't predefine bibliography styles, so although I think the presets are good, it would have been nice to provide at least the simple mod of allowing page numbers to show in in-text citations. (You have to put the number in as a suffix.) Also, if you import a traveling library, there are likely to be many duplicates, and I'm not sure that the weeding out function is so well developed. Fairly small downsides though, if you think about it, well, aside from the tendency for trying to edit things too quickly to crash my firefox, but I guess this is early stages.
What about using EndnoteWeb for online document editing? Well, not so much. You still have to pass along a copy of the document via email, server, or whatever.

Overall, the Endnote team still think they're in the software business, rather than the document citation business, but they seem to be gradually coming around.... The killer app would be to either integrate with google docs or provide a competing application that allows us to edit a group document online with working references. Well, perhaps with some security clauses due to intellectual property, etc. Another useful thing would be to allow integrated online/desktop notes and annotating of papers in one's bibliography, but given that evernote, mendelay and papers pretty much have this covered, it's the group academic writing that this researcher would prefer to see.

Some more resources:
Link to Endnote 1-2-3-Easy. http://www.springerlink.com/content/v22823l501v467u6/

Podcast on publishing in journals

2010-01-06T16:11:00.000-06:00

Well, this podcast just scratches the surface of what is necessary for a journal article, but give it a listen for some crucial suggestions. Note the key suggestions about structuring the article, formatting it for the journal specifications (content and mechanical details), preparing the work for blind review, revising after a rejection, and having the confidence to resubmit it somewhere else.

Of course, all this is easy to say, and the hard work comes in reviewing specific articles of the journal, working on the format, and ensuring that your article has a clear direction backward and forward. (This last point is important because we learn as we write, and so it is not uncommon to end up with a conclusion that means your initial literature review does not match the direction of the article.)

Also remember that a rejection with a lot of comments may seem harsh, but this is ultimately a very helpful guide toward revising the work to submit to another journal. Although some (older) journal writing advice is to just put the thing in the mail to your second choice journal immediately upon receiving a rejection, you are doing the article a disservice if you don't at least consider these comments. Not to mention, you may get exactly the same criticism somewhere else, so you'll want to head that off at the pass.

Grad School Suggestions: In Marriage, Diversify

2010-01-04T18:48:00.000-06:00

Oh boy, interesting discussion on the Chronicle forums lately about spousal hires here. What this leads me to suggest is that it is a bad idea to marry from within the ranks of other grad students, unless one of you was always planning on working in industry or is willing to make this switch. It seems that schools don't do spousal hires as often as you'd think, though it seems if the spouse is research-side and grant-winning, that seems to work.

Perhaps my advice should be "upon marriage, one spouse should drop out of PhD program to start MBA/law degree," because if you didn't already know it, there are low odds of a couple independently winning good positions in the same city, especially if they are in the same discipline, and most especially if they are in the same subfield. We may not like the implications of this, but it's better to know these harsh job market realities before it comes down to brass tacks, like in a failed dual-academic, same sub-discipline job search.

Ethics for Research Publication

2009-12-31T13:39:00.000-06:00

OK, so this comes from IT/CS, but still useful to be mindful of these types of research ethics issues. Link is here.

Pet peeves for online newsletters, CFPs, and the like

2009-12-31T12:54:00.000-06:00

A bit off topic with this, but hey, a blog is a good place to complain. I have been noticing a shift to people using online PDFs for newsletters and whatnot. (Think Accounts and such.) However, apparently the editing teams of many newsletters apparently haven't realized that many people would like to read these on the computer, rather than wasting the paper to print them out. I infer this because of the strong preference to using multiple columns for a newsletter, which works great for printed documents, but is a huge pain to read on screen. (Scroll down, scroll up, scroll down, page up. Tedious. If you think that Acrobat's Reading Mode helps with this problem, I will suggest that you give it a try yourself.)

On the other hand, some organizations do it right, by having single column PDFs. As an example, the 2010 AOM Call for Participation. (Links directly to PDF.) Clean, easy to read on screen, and hey, now I don't have to print out all 70 (!) pages.

The Importance of a Regular Schedule

2009-12-30T10:59:00.000-06:00

Found this lovely post on time management today, talking about the importance of making tasks habitual and sticking to a fixed schedule. The key is - you have to ruthlessly pare down to the most important tasks and then police your schedule. (Not that I always do this, but I do try to set my schedule and also have weekly goals for the number of hours spent on important tasks like research, writing and teaching prep. The best part of that is - when you meet the goal, you can relax, rather than having that existential anxiety about having too much to do. Clear and measurable results, baby.)
PS, don't make the mistake of waiting to publish until after you come back from field research. Publish early and often, because that's what will help you to get an academic job.

Rules for Graduate School

2009-12-26T14:25:00.001-06:00

Courtesy of Fabio Rojas from Orgtheory, here. Read them, learn them by heart, and follow them. Especially that bit about publishing. As we say in Chicago, publish early and often.

Preparing files for Acrobat Paper Capture

2009-12-12T16:47:00.000-06:00

Ok, I admit to being cheap and not having upgraded Acrobat Pro since version 5. But it still works, so I keep using it. I like to scan articles and notes to keep archived on my computer, which is great when you end up traveling abroad for research, as I did, or if you are in a long distance relationship and have to fly to see one another, as I am and do. (Wait, that doesn't sound quite right...)

Grammar aside, I am constantly frustrated by having to select the correct dpi settings for a file to use with the paper capture software. Granted, there are other options, like Windows, but I really like being able to edit the 'capture suspects' as you do with Acrobat. Today I gave our library's new printer-scanner-copiers a test. They do a reasonable scan to PDF, but then when I tried to do a test conversion by running the paper capture on these files, I had problems. TIF didn't work, PDF-A worked, but then the dpi settings got messed up. (As in, "I thought I printed this to 300dpi greyscale, why doesn't the Paper Capture tool recognize this as within the range?")

But now after some trial and error, I have the solution! If you have Acrobat Pro, that means you probably have the handy Distiller installed as a printer. You can use this to fix the problem. Open the file in Acrobat, select print to Distiller. For the job options though, you need a custom setting. I based mine off of eBook, and modified it to print to 300 dpi and turned off "downsample text and images." (Don't forget that second part.) That seemed to be the ticket. The new, properly 300 dpi files--at least according to Acrobat--will print out to wherever you save them, and depending on your settings, automatically open. Now, you should actually be able to run paper capture on these files without it complaining.

Rebit Automatic Backup Review

2009-12-10T14:24:00.000-06:00

Back in the summer I ordered the Rebit backup program, because I don't like to bother thinking about whether I'm going to back up, and because as I mentioned, we all need to backup, especially when on the academic job market. (Granted, as I have a laptop, I do have to think hard enough to plug the drive in, but that's getting to be more of a habit.) The first full backup takes a while, but they tell you that, and the software is easy to install.

So... how does Rebit do now that I've been using it for a while? I'd have to say pretty good. I have an external hard disk and just bought the software, and was consistently backing up. Then XP started to slow down, as it inevitably does, and so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and reinstall windows. (Yes, that is worth doing, and no, I'm not ready to get Windows 7 yet, although may try it out on my old computer... And no, I will not switch to mac so I can run TimeMachine.)

Ok, so I re-backed up everything to make sure it was current, which was fine. Then I took the day and a half to reinstall windows XP, the many many updates, and my software. As you can tell, I didn't want to just 'recover' my laptop, but reinstall windows so it would be faster, and it is. Then I started to get the files back from the Rebit backup. What's nice is that you can just plug in the HD and then "open the files using the Rebit application" will be one of the options, so you aren't reinstalling the rebit software. But from there, things started to be a bit of a hassle -- not terrible, but not dead easy.

You see, I only wanted my data files and a few things that escaped into templates or other documents and settings folders, not the restoration of my previous disk image. But with Rebit, you don't really have that option, and instead have to manually copy and paste these files. Ok, not such a big deal, but I did notice that there is an odd thing where you can't just drag and drop those files, but have to do a copy-paste operation, either by keystroke or file menu. Ok, I can live with that, although it isn't exactly fast.

But then I thought maybe I should reinstall the full Rebit software and the only option seemed to be a complete wipe and reinstall of the hard drive -- I can't say this 100% as I didn't try it, given that I wanted to wait for a while to see if there was anything missing from the non-data files that I needed. (Turns out I did miss a few useful templates, customized styles for Endnote and so forth, so good thing.) But you see the problem - now it's been a few weeks since the reinstall and I haven't actually been backing up because I didn't know if I needed anything from the drive and didn't want to take the chance of wiping it in order to reinstall the program. But I can live with this for a bit, as I do have another drive. (Back to SyncToy maybe.)

So in the end, I was thinking I was pretty happy with Rebit, until a few days ago. This is when I found that actually, although it had copied *almost* all of my files, there were a few ones missing. (Notably, my cover letters and sample items from one of my early job packets.) At first I thought I would find them, but no, after some extensive searches of the Rebit drive, I can see references to these files in Office/RecentDocuments or whatever, but the actual files themselves cannot be found. Now, I don't know what the issue was, whether I moved them and that tripped things up, or I had Rebit plugged in when I was working on these files when it did the first backup... (Actually, that's probably about the same time I sent those out, so perhaps.) But, whatever the reason, a couple of files and folders are gone, baby, gone.

The annoying thing about this is that I would assume that doing a subsequent backup would have noticed the issue, so that even if they weren't copied the first time, the problem would get fixed on say, backup #20 or whatever. But unfortunately, that was not the case. So while I have older versions of these saved in my email that I sent out to my committee, I do not have the ones that I actually printed and mailed out. (Obviously if I'd sent my application via email, I wouldn't have a problem because I'd have copies of the files in email.) The worst part is that now, I have no idea whether there are other missing files and no way really of checking unless I go looking for something specific and find that it's not there.

So at the end of the day, I guess Rebit gets 9.5/10 for ease of use, but only 6/10 for accuracy....

Snack Writing: Little 30 Minute Writing Chunks

2009-11-23T17:12:00.000-06:00

So I have an invited submission due imminently, and as a consequence, have had to step up the work to revise the conference paper I am using. One excellent suggestion was to use small chunks of time to do writing and revision, because 15-30 minutes here and there can really add up. Hislop et al (2008) termed this 'snack writing,' while Belcher (2009) recommends this as a strategy to support a longer writing session sometime during the week, such as over the weekend.

Having just done a 30 minute block, I can really attest to how effective it can be, plus it is very easy to commit to just 30 minutes working on the writing, no matter how stressed out about it you might feel. I think that setting time goals for variable writing time over a week works better for me than assigning a certain time of day to write. This is probably because my schedule is perhaps more variable, and this takes advantage of the fact that I might feel more able to work longer on some days. With variable blocks of time last week, I did writing and research on my paper for 17 hours (exceeding my goal), and I'm already getting toward this week's goal. I just write these times into my (paper) planner, and keep an eye on the goal number of hours vs. my progress. (NB - this tracking technique also works well for making sure you get enough exercise if you're not a 'morning run every day' type of person. Sometimes those weekend long workouts get longer, but it's more likely to happen with pre-determined goals.)

Now if I can just remember to keep track of my writing time when I don't have an imminent deadline, it would be great, but with winter conference deadlines coming up, there is no shortage of external deadlines.

References:
Belcher, W. L. (2009) Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks CA.
Hislop, J., Murray, R. and Newton, M. (2008) Practice Development in Health Care, 7, 156-163. (Requires journal subscription.)

Should Graduate Students Publish?

2009-11-17T17:31:00.000-06:00

Another gem from the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (link is here; requires journal subscription). Allan Pasco questions whether graduate students should publish while still in school, given the time required for revision and mental fortitude necessary to handle critical reviews. Well written and clear, this article also discusses important considerations such as choosing the right journals to target, spending adequate time on revisions, following journal formats carefully, and other considerations.

Pasco gives a persuasive argument about why one might think carefully about working on publishable articles, and I do see that his title is meant to be more controversial than his actual advice to graduate students. However, to take the title at face value, I am afraid that in this academic job market, not publishing while working on the PhD is a luxury that few can afford. Most disciplines will require a job candidate to have one or more peer reviewed articles to be hired, perhaps many more in some humanities disciplines. (If you are in a field that only requires an excellent, unpublished job market paper, count yourself lucky.) However, his advice about publishing only a few, higher quality articles while in graduate school is a reasonable compromise.

My personal feeling, however, is that one should try to get that first article out as quickly as possible, as long as the research and methods are reasonable, and you are confident that you will be able to stand by the findings in the future. This is because it often takes a year or more for an article to go through peer review to print, (assuming you get an 'accept with revisions'), so time is of the essence if you are to have one publication in a short PhD program. Even in a longer program, it is beneficial to go through this process early, with something that you think is reasonable, even if it is not "The Perfect Article." (In fact, sending a reasonable article rather than a prized major manuscript may be better for the ego - you will probably be more able to accept and work with peer review comments for something that you are not treating as your baby.) After you get one out, you'll understand the process and its time demands much better, allowing you to move forward with more significant portions of your research.

Full citation: Pasco, Allan H. 2009. "Should Graduate Students Publish?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40(3):1710-1166.

Writing the Empirical Journal Article

2009-11-17T16:37:00.000-06:00

In looking up manuscript writing suggestions, I came across this article (http://dbem.ws/WritingArticle.pdf). Although it is targeted toward psychologists and social psychologists, it still provides useful suggestions for writing up survey or experiment-based research. I also happened to find the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, which has articles about various topics of interest.

Books for demystifying the publication process

2009-09-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

This post is a start to demystifying the journal article writing and publication process. I have quite a few books about academic writing, but since they are all boxed up right now, I'll just mention my favorite: Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, by Wendy Belcher. Now, the title should really be something like "revising your existing class or conference paper for journal submission," but that's not quite as catchy. Structured as a workbook, with clear and helpful exercises, this book has been very helpful for illuminating some of the taken-for-granted expectations that you may not have learned in your PhD program. For me, it has been most useful when I've gotten stuck, and to give a clear structure, with beginning and end dates, to what can seem like an endless process of revision.

More tools for the home office / overseas research

2009-09-23T09:46:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I mentioned how helpful it is to have skype for calling and earthclass mail to forward or PDF your postal mail. Here's another helpful service: efax.com. Not only can you send US-based faxes from efax, you can also get your own fax number. Now I know that faxes are not the most cutting edge communication technology, but you still often have to use faxes for things like signatures (eg. requesting transcripts) and submitting to er, less cutting edge companies, like this morning, when I requested frequent flier mile credit from a certain airline. (I wonder if email addresses would just get too much spam? Does anyone remember fax spam?)

Excellent article on how to diagram articles

2009-09-18T10:37:00.001-05:00

Working on an R&R today inspired me to look for more information about how to diagram articles. (When writing, I commonly diagram both articles for the target journal to get the desired structure, as well as my own drafts to see if they fit the structure and if they are coherently presenting what I intended.) In my search, I came across a great new article written for medical doctors, that I think is still quite useful for social science researchers, not only for writing articles, but also for keeping track of literature reviews in a concise fashion.

Citation:
Neely, J. Gail, Ron J. Karni Karni, Eric W. Wang, Jason T. Rich, Randal C. Paniello, Courtney C. J. Voelker, and Brian Nussenbaum. 2009. "Practical Guide to Efficient Analysis and Diagramming Articles." Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery 140:4-8.

Here's the link: http://www.umfiasi.ro/atdoc/Doctorate/Cursuri/ORL_140-4_guide_articles_references.pdf

Abstract:
OBJECTIVE: In a busy practice, time is a commodity in rare supply, and keeping abreast of the relevant medical literature is a daunting task. Even after reading an article carefully, important information may be lost because of undue attention to the methodological minutia.

METHOD: Fundamental to reducing a complex article into a well-organized and consistent format is the technique of quantitatively diagramming the principal components in the design and findings of the study. This approach allows a coherent brief summary statement of the article, and a platform for a focused scientific discussion and analysis of the clinical applicability of the findings.

CONCLUSIONS: The technique of diagramming an article is a tool that the senior author has used for years and has found it valuable in capturing the scientific fundamentals of a manuscript. Once prepared, the diagram has proven to be useful in clarifying presentations during journal club, preparing the background and significance sections of grant applications, reviewing articles as a journal editor and as a journal reviewer, and easily retrieving documents to support evidence-based practice efforts.

Practicalities of job packets in the academic job search

2009-09-13T17:26:00.000-05:00

Now that I'm getting ready to send out job packets, I have some additional useful tips.

Get a laser printer. This is so worth the investment, and I was surprised to see how much prices have come down so much compared to the last time that I looked. I got my HP on sale for under $100, and ordered an ink cartridge at the same time. Of course, I'll keep my old multi-function inkjet because of the utility of having color at times, or being able to scan. (Alas, I possibly should have gone for another brand because when I added the new printer it totally messed up the HP all in one utility, but that's a whole other story...) Why is the laser printer necessary? Not only does it look nicer, but you can print almost two 50 page articles in less time than it would take to do just print your CV on an inkjet. Plus it works out cheaper per page in the long run, although $65 for a toner cartridge does hurt.
Possibly at the same time as when you get your printer, but at least before the major job packet push, you should also get the essential items for job packets: paper, envelopes, paper clips and those little binder clips. Also an extra ink cartridge for the printer would be a good idea, as you want to avoid having to chase down materials when you are on a tight deadline. (Staples had a buy two toners, get a free case of paper deal when last I looked.) I should also point out that this is no time to worry about saving trees- you need to get a job! I wish I hadn't had to send 3 lbs of paper to Denmark for my first job application, but hey, if that's what they want, that's what they get.
And if you don't have one already, for heaven's sake, buy a backup drive and software! If you have a mac, you are in luck, because the time machine program is so easy to use, as my partner keeps pointing out. (He really wants to convert me to mac, but as a GIS user, that's not the best idea...) But I digress. For those of us with PCs, having the automatic sync is a little harder. I wanted something similar that I could just plug in and forget, without having to bother with setting backup times, clicking a box or any of that. Not that I couldn't do that--I can be technically skilled if necessary--but I wanted to make it so simple to back up my laptop that it would actually happen every week or few days.

So far, I have been using the effective, if a bit slow, SyncToy 2.0, which is free from microsoft, and quite easy to use. The problem is that it just isn't as idiot proof as I want. With SyncToy you set up a the folders and options to sync, and then when ready, you plug in your external hard drive and select the backup sync you want. Which was pretty easy, but not as easy as say, just plugging in a hard drive and having things sync automatically like the time machine software. So the other day I ordered the Rebit backup software, (cheaper if you order from Amazon), and am waiting to see whether I like it. They claim to do the autosync that I'm looking for, so I have high hopes.

Useful practices in the job search

2009-09-05T10:59:00.000-05:00

One of the most horrifying parts of the academic job search is the anxiety about what needs to be done. It can certainly seem endless, and at this point in my first academic job search, it often feels this way. However, this can be moderated by having a good idea about what will happen in the year on the market. Schedules matter and if you are prepared, then the job application process is more of a tedious compiling of materials than endless writing of new things for 50 applications.

The Schedule of Deliverables
So what do I mean? The Academic Job Search Handbook, among other good resources, has a nice schedule of the tasks you need to complete starting 2 years ahead of when you would plan to take a position, (assuming a fall start date.) This advice, and that of my department, is that you should have at least 2 good chapters or papers ready prior to about August. However, it was my experience that you should think about having drafts of all the job packet materials by about May. Why is this? Unfortunately, in business and management, the Academy of Management meeting is the major pre-screening interview venue. Many institutions that will interview there will want a number of materials, especially if they are European universities. (Some will even expect you to have the full package ready to send them by say, mid-July, so that they can look over all of your materials prior to that first interview.)

This is considerably earlier than the most often heard advice about having materials ready for about Sept / Oct, but think about the payoffs. If you can get a packet together by early summer, you can apply to any of these early jobs--don't confuse them with late-season 1-year hires/postdocs for the current fall though--and then you have reduced a lot of the pressure from the job search process. Moreover, when you do prepare packets for the traditional Sept/Oct deadlines, you will have had the chance to let these early materials sit, revise, revise some more and when you go to revise them finally for the fall deadlines, not only will they be more polished, but you'll be more able to notice any problems than if you had prepared them in a hurry.

What else is helpful?
For me, an Excel file listing all the positions. This is for me, and I will soon also be editing it to send to my recommendation letter writers so they can also stay organized. Another helpful thing is printing each job position announcement to PDF and putting in a position listings folder, and this can go into the folder for the specific job when I compile that packet. (I title them starting with the university name, as that seems quickest to search.) Also, since I've been getting a lot of announcements in email, I have an email subfolder called "fall deadlines to check" and when I enter the details into excel, that email goes into "entered into excel," along with--you guessed it--a PDF print of the page into the position listing folder. This all may sound compulsive, but the mindless task of organizing this material is kind of relaxing, not to mention the benefit of knowing that there isn't some announcement lurking out there that I wanted to look at but now can't find. Whatever reduces the stress, right?

What about postdocs?
Well, I'll apply for some of them, but I've decided to skip most of the ones that have the same Sept/Oct deadline and seem like a lot of additional work. I just don't think there will be time, so why put out some half-baked proposals? I'll see about whether I can manage some of themfor Dec/Jan deadlines. As with everything else, I'm trying to keep these organized. At first I listed them in a separate tab in my excel file, but then I realized that I might actually miss dates if they weren't in the same one, which can be sorted by post date or final due date....

What about UK jobs?
Indeed, I will also apply for jobs in the UK, but in this case, the calendar is a bit different, since UK universities post jobs much later. It seems they are posted about 6 months in advance, rather than the 1 year+ that happens with American jobs and some European jobs. So, I'll start to worry about these in December or so. (I wonder whether this is beneficial or not for the UK universities in the 'competition' for academic talent...?)

So, enough procrastination, it's time to get back to the job listings and organization.

Boingo wifi for Blackberry: Too bad it's not so easy outside the US

2009-09-02T05:24:00.000-05:00

As anyone who has traveled outside of the US knows, getting some cheap and convenient wifi service can be a hassle. With phones, things have become easy -- I have an unlocked old Palm Treo and I can buy a SIM card in most countries these days. Just this week I got one from Vodaphone in Portugal for only 9.95 euros, which included 5 in credit. Added 5 more and it unlocked the phone for international calls and text messages. Now my partner can call me with Skype and we avoid high long distance charges. Easy peasy.

However, for wifi, this is not so much the case. Said phone can do some mobile internet browsing, and the data connection worked fine for drawing down from my balance, but I'd prefer to get email on my Blackberry, which has a much nicer interface. I have an AT&T data plan, so no need for this in the US really. (Despite their claims of faster airport wifi, I did not notice any difference between AT&T 3G and Boingo wifi. Note also that since the Blackberry is not unlocked, I probably can't just put in the Portuguese SIM.)

Naturally, AT&T do have excellent non-US roaming services, but you will certainly pay for them. $1.99/min to make calls? No thank you. I do not have a corporate benefactor who will pay my phone bills as yet. Data/wifi service is also quite expensive. Let's just say that when I called in to enable international roaming, the technician just suggested I turn the phone off so I don't get any of the huge charges. Given this situation, Boingo mobile seemed like the way to go, with the $7.99 international mobile phone wifi service. (I thought about the laptop application, but then I have to carry around the computer and the laptop wifi services are more expensive.)

Boingo started out promisingly. The application was easy to download and load at the Philadelphia airport. It was easy to create an account and pay, and then it seemed to work just fine when I tested it with the radio off (ie no phone or 3G connection) and only wifi on. Worked just fine in the US, that is.

Problems came when I tried to use it here in Portugal. Some of the notable problems:

1. The webpages for the hotspot finder using jiwire are THE SLOWEST EVER. Granted, I was doing this on my old phone with the Portuguese SIM, and in theory, this isn't boingo's fault, but given this free hotspot finder is rubbish, they really do need their own service. I can only imagine the millions of requests this page is getting from all over the world all the time. Sigh.

2. Couldn't log in at hotspots. First, I thought maybe there were some hotspot problems or that I had configured the settings wrong, which leads me to the next couple of issues.

3. Couldn't update the hotspot directory. I know the wifi on my phone works and I've redownloaded and reinstalled the boingo blackberry application. Now I'm happily logged into a nice university network, and think 'maybe I just need to update the hotspot directory from the 2003 one listed in the advanced settings.' Oh, but no. You could try 20 times and no dice. Is this because the hotspot update server is overwhelmed with people like me trying to update? Is there some other problem? Who knows? This is partly related to the next issue.

4. Boingo forums are offline. What?? Ok, let's release an unsupported beta blackberry version, say that you need to look for more info on the forums as customer support won't take questions, and then let the forums go offline? As far as I can tell, that's ALL boingo forums, not just the blackberry one. Truly strange. Did they face a barrage of complaints and shut 'em down? Or maybe the volume is simply too high? Who knows. (Hello, grid or cloud servers?)

5. Finally, I think, hm, maybe I should check on my account via the website. Oh, but wait, I can't log into the website. When I think maybe I entered my password wrong, I tried the forgotten password option, entered my zip and last 4 digits of my credit card, and was directed to call customer service: "we cannot recover the password on this account." (I still need to call customer service, and will update when that is done.) Well, maybe this account creation was the problem from the beginning, but hey, they already charged my credit card. Sigh.

So in summary, I'm pretty disappointed with the boingo blackberry app. It worked in the US, where I don't need it, and didn't work abroad, where I do. Probably it would be better for me to just pay for some PT-wireless vouchers (as in Portugal). Perhaps my call to customer service will clear things up.

Easy Online Geocoding

2009-08-25T10:56:00.000-05:00

I've been casting about for an easy way to do global address/city geocoding. (This is where you take a written address and get the latitude and longitude so that it can be put on a map.) Although I am a regular user of ArcGIS, the professional mapping software, the geocoding left something to be desired in terms of a) base data for world addresses and b) ease of use. Fortunately, if you can find another program to geocode that will attach the latitude and longitude to your addresses, this is very easy to put into the ArcGIS maps.

Today, I found a very quick and easy solution: http://www.batchgeocode.com/. In their online interface, which draws from google maps, you can simply paste excel format address data into a form and get back a lovely list of addresses with lat/long to paste back into excel. They even give you a quick map of your addresses below. Now, I only did 180 addresses and that took under a minute, but I suspect that thousands of addresses would take longer or not work. Still, for my needs, this is the perfect thing.

Now, say you want to put these back into GIS. Here are some instructions:
First you want to convert that excel data to dbf4 format for compatibility. Remember to set the attributes on the lat/long cells to number with 6 decimal places before doing this. Then you can follow the instructions on http://www.lib.unc.edu/reference/gis/faq/xy.html to turn these XY points into an event theme in your map. Note that the batch code data is in WGS1984 coordinates. Remember also that Longitude is the X field and Latitude is the Y field. (Or you will get some strangely mapped coordinates, as I did until I figured out what I was doing wrong.)

Remarkably, from doing my 180 addresses with just city/country data, I got a 100% match rate from the batch geocode, (after respelling Dusseldorf without the accent marks), and then of course they all mapped just fine once in ArcGIS because it was via lat/long coordinates. I guess this is the benefit of using google maps as the underlying data. I'm so pleased with this, I'm going to make a donation to batch geocode. Keep up the good work!

A Nice Model for the Publication Process

2009-08-22T20:23:00.000-05:00

In the social sciences, peer reviewed journal articles are king. Here is a nice suggestion about a timeline for developing an article and then sending it out for publication that was suggested by my advisor.

You start by developing an idea and then presenting it at a local workshop to get some feedback. At this point, you may have written a short version or just have the powerpoint. Then you submit this to a conference, where you will need to both write a full paper--though not yet of journal submission quality--and also get feedback on it. After that, turn it around and revise, (maybe again presenting locally or at a related workshop), and then get it cleaned up enough to submit to a journal.

So how does that work in practice? I thought of a reasonable paper topic from my dissertation last summer, and had a short synopsis. I started writing an initial conference paper over the fall and submitted the 20 page initial version to the ASA (sociology) conference in January. It ended up being accepted, and I spent about 6 months off and on revising it, developing the theory, refining the literature. (We had to send the final conference version out to our panel discussant, so I wanted it to be pretty solid.) Along the way, I sent it to about 5 people for comments, from my phd cohort and others, and got some useful feedback. Note also that in about May/June I diagrammed two typical articles from the journal to help inform the format and writing expectations. Now it's August, and I've had some good feedback for the article, and today I just submitted it. Fingers crossed -- I'm hoping that it will go to review and get an R&R, which means revise and resubmit in academic publishing lingo.

Best advice for new PhD students

2009-05-25T12:48:00.001-05:00

This one is easy. Although you think you're doing a PhD to engage in research--and you are--you also need to be learning about the vagaries of the academic job market. Aside from books about an academic career, some of which I've reviewed for the blog, the other good source of information is the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, which are free. (The subscription-based CHE weekly journal is also very useful and you'll probably have some form of proxy access through your university library.)

Here are two threads from the forums to get you started:
What have we learned this year?
Worst advice about the academic job market

Cautions about the CHE forums:

Remember that this is online and searchable, so if you participate, be careful not to reveal so many details that you'll lose anonymity, unless you're treating your online persona as one that could be recognized as you from the very beginning.
Take the advice with a grain of salt -- There is a huge variety of opinions and experience in the forums, as with most things online. Moreover, your field may have different conventions than people in other fields, so try to give some pointer to the area, even if you don't want to disclose your particular field (eg. social science, humanities).
Be nice. Oh, you can be mean if you want to, but the results aren't pretty, and there are few people who can be as snarky as an English professor who's in the 7th year of the tenure track job search.
Don't be a snowflake. This is the common term for inexperienced students, whether demanding undergrads or clueless people in grad programs. People may be unkind to you if you ask stupid questions before doing a search of the previous posts. For example, I saw someone post the question "Can I list my blog on my CV under publications?" Sigh. The results were about what you'd expect.
Please don't use "hu" for he/she/they. (That's my pet peeve.)
Don't spend all your time on the CHE forums, which could make you too depressed and cynical. Spend more time in the lab, writing up results, and most importantly, getting papers ready for journal submission.

Another book for the academic job market

2009-05-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

In my continuing research on the academic job market, I recently bought a book on Amazon that turned out to be a real gem: What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School: 199 Helpful Hints for Success in Your Academic Career by Paul Gray and David E. Drew (2008). Stylus Publishing.

The helpful-hint format makes it an easy book to pick up when you have 5 or 10 minutes, and they deliver the message in a clear, humorous style. I particularly like this because the dissertation research and job market process can be very stressful, so having something like this to read in little bites is nice. If you happen to have a loved one or friend who is working on a PhD or is a young professor, this would make a great gift.

For those considering graduate school and in the early stages of a PhD, Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. by Robert Peters (1997 for revised edition) might be a better choice.

Collaboration Productivity

2009-05-05T12:34:00.000-05:00

There are some new and exciting ways to collaborate with people who are out of town or at another institution.

Getdropbox.com is something I just picked up, and with a free account and a software install, you get a virtual network folder on your computer, which is good for collaboration since you can share this folder. It can also be used for backups.
Endnote web. Granted, I haven't been able to get this to access my account for some reason, but there is a lot of potential in being able to share references with collaborators.

Books for the Academic Job Market

2009-04-15T14:22:00.001-05:00

Well, so I did a review of books for the academic job market for the American Sociological Association's Science, Knowledge and Technology section, but they don't seem to have that newsletter online, so I'll post it here:

Review: The Job Market and Your Academic Career

Erica Coslor

Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology

University of Chicago

In preparation for going on the job market next fall, I have a number of books on my shelf. One new title is The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science, which I had initially picked up to review for the newsletter for insight into the careers of scientists. While it does serve this function, with topics like ‘who owns the [laboratory] notebooks?’ it has also turned out to be a good read for someone preparing for the job market. In this respect, it pairs nicely with The Academic Job Search Handbook and The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career.

Both of the Chicago guides provide an overarching view of an academic career, from entering graduate school, picking a topic, finding a job and then getting tenure. The Academic Job Search Handbook is more targeted to the job search process itself and how to prepare the necessary pieces of your job packet, with useful samples of cover letters, CVs, and advice about campus visits. It also highlights some of the common complications to finding an academic job, such as being part of a dual career couple. The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career takes a conversational style between three professors, highlighting the diversity in research styles, academic positions, and other elements of one’s academic career. The conversation-based format makes the book easy to read, but in my opinion, more difficult to refer back to specific topics. On the other hand, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science, despite being tailored to the needs of research and laboratory-based scientists, reads much better as an academic career reference. In addition to being a newer publication, it is laid out with easy-to-scan subheadings, and covers topics like making poster presentations, time management, and working with others.

If you have the time, I found all three books useful, and I would recommend that you start with The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career, move on to The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science, and then read The Academic Job Search Handbook. If you are trying to choose between the Chicago guides, you can see my personal preference, and I suspect this might be because I am already close to the end of the PhD. The conversational style of the Guide to Your Academic Career might be a better way for new graduate students and those considering graduate school to ease into the topic.

The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science

A Toolkit for Students and Postdocs

Victor Bloomfield and Esam El-Fakahany

University of Chicago Press, 2008. ($20.00 paperback)

The Academic Job Search Handbook, Fourth Edition

Julia Miller Vick and Jennifer Furlong

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. ($18.95 paperback)

The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career

A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School Through Tenure

John Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold

University of Chicago Press, 2001. ($14.00 paperback)

Moving abroad for fieldwork

2009-04-15T10:37:00.001-05:00

As anyone who has gone overseas to do fieldwork knows, moving is a big hassle with many small and annoying details. This should not discourage you from doing it, but you should know that it is important to start preparing for things well in advance of the actual move time. Although I went off to prep school in Hong Kong before undergrad with little more than my two overpacked suitcases, doing PhD fieldwork means that you need to hit the ground running. Here are some helpful tips.

Here are some important details to consider and tips for handling the hassles:

Visas
You might have to worry about both entry visas and research visas for some countries (eg. India), which have different approval processes and timescales. Even if you don't need two different types of visas, you might have to think about the visa categories if you are doing academic research. For example, with a UK visitor visa, as a US citizen I can go over for up to 6 months as long as I am not doing paid work, but if I were going to be paid as a research assistant, I would have to apply under a different category. (This info is current as of 2009.)

Best advice: use an expediting service if there is anything available; it is money well spent. If not, look in online forums for application tips and apply as far in advance as you possibly can. You can also see my other post about visa hassles here, but the situtation varies widely by country and at the time I applied, they had just put through a number of bureaucratic changes that probably slowed everything down.
Clothing and other things
I'll edit this post later. There are so many details to think about. But do a calculation- if it is a cheap country, it's probably cheaper to take less and buy more there. If it is an expensive country, or if you have weak currency, like the dollar vs. the pound when I went in early 2008, you are probably better off taking more clothing and paying for excess baggage. Be sure to think about the seasons when you do this.
Books and papers
When I went to London, I took one suitcase full of papers, and that was after weeks of scanning things into PDF. (Yes, I am pretty paper-based, but getting better over time.) Coming back, I had way too much material to fit into this bag, so I was in a bind. Should I pay for excess baggage? But then, I worried, I'd either have to take a super-expensive car service to Heathrow, truck 4 bags through customs at JFK, recheck them to transfer to my connecting flight, and then what would I do if my partner couldn't come pick me up from the airport? I thought about mailing them, but surface mail takes 3 months and regular airmail was actually pretty expensive, plus someone in my PhD cohort had a bad experience with mailing his books from Germany. My solution: I mailed two bags using First Luggage, a baggage shipping service. They picked them up the day before I left, and dropped them off a few days after I arrived. No hassle and minimal interruption of my workflow.

Caveat: the rate is only cheaper than airmail if you actually pack your bags quite full of books, which I did. Apparently they also mail wardrobes and trunks, if you happen to have this older luggage technology.
Mail
While moving between houses in the US is pretty easy, because you can get your mail forwarded, going abroad is a big hassle. In my case, my parents let their own mail pile up for weeks, so it wasn't like I wanted to forward things to them. Also, I didn't want to impose on my friends, and my partner was already in London. But, there is a great solution, and that is mail forwarding. There are a few companies that do this, but I went with Earth Class Mail, which will not only collect your mail, but they will also scan selected pieces to PDF for you within a day or two, which is great for when you're abroad. Now, I know people might have privacy concerns about this, but apparently the company uses a clean room environment (no pencils or pens) for people doing the scanning, and hey, I figure someone could always steal my mail out of the mailbox anyway for ID theft. This way, at least I know the first place to look for a culprit? (I'm so happy with the service that I'm still using it, especially since I will need a stable address when I send out job applications.)
Phones
Yet another hassle, but it doesn't have to be. The easiest thing to do is to go and purchase an unlocked phone and SIM card once you're there. I ordered a phone and sim prior to my travel, but let's just say that the US companies that cater to this need are getting a pretty high premium for a crappy phone. A better idea is to buy an unlocked phone from eBay or Amazon. You might also be able to order a phone and sim from a major company there, prior to leaving. (For London, I have a Virgin mobile UK SIM which I purchased there, but you might be able to pre-order while still in the US.) The great thing is that rates for calling back to the US are low- about the same as calling locally, and unless you're on the phone all the time, this option is probably much cheaper than a monthly plan, not to mention easier to set up. Also, in Europe they have this wonderful invention called pay as you go data plans, so that you could either do a monthly plan or get a set number of MB data access for a given price. (Why I can't get this here, I do not know.)

Anyway, start thinking about these things well before you go, and it will make the travel so much easier.

Overseas Research Horror Stories

2009-02-25T15:40:00.000-06:00

My story isn't that bad, and I have heard much worse, but perhaps we can share these um... adventures to help out other PhD students and academics new to the travails of overseas research.

Anyway, here's my story. So when I was preparing to do my overseas research in London, I dutifully put together my application for a 1 year visa, and sent it out, only to find, to my horror, that I heard nothing back 6 weeks later, when I was supposed to leave, as a result of which I missed my initial flight and ended up living in the walk-in closet of our apartment for almost a week, as the person taking over my room had moved in. The visa website said you cannot apply more than 3 months in advance and that most applications were processed within about two weeks, so I had thought 6 weeks ahead of time was fine, but apparently not.

I am not sure if this time lag was because I applied under the wrong category, did something in the application wrong, or if it was because the UK consolidated various operations into the New York office that summer and this just slowed things down. But whatever the reason for the delay, in the end, I had to withdraw my application to get back my passport and documents, then took the risk of flying over with the plan to enter under the visa waiver program, which gives you up to 6 months of time if you are an American. (I wouldn't have risked it if it were a different country, but in my panic waiting for my passport, I had been researching the issue.)

On arrival, I was able to show all the relevant documents to the border agent, who was concerned because she could see that I had withdrawn a visa application. I gave her all the documents and mentioned that this reduced time was actually preferable since I had not gotten a hoped-for grant. She ended up letting me in under the newer 'student visitor' category. (I also had to take these with me when I went to Italy for a conference; coming back in I was questioned, although did not actually have to show the documents, but may have needed them.)

I should mention that UK customs officers were always very polite when I was able to talk to a real person, the problem was just not having any information on the status of my application or knowing when or if it might be approved. (There is no way to check your status- the info number provides application advice, but not information about the status of an application.) Furthermore, when I did request to withdraw my application and asked for my application packet and passport back, they were able to locate it very quickly using the FedEx tracking number and express mailed it back to me the next day.

My advice- always apply for visas well in advance and use a visa expediting service if there is one available for your country of interest, because although the move to putting visa applications online is supposed to speed up and simplify the process, it makes it much harder to know if you have done something wrong or left something out, as opposed to talking to a real person. Also remember that if we are doing academic research, we're typically in a weird visa category, that could have less good instructions. The additional cost is between $80 and $200, and considering that I lost out on the $450+ application fee, a trip up to Hartford from New York for my biometric scan ($75+), and missing my initial flight, the expediter fee is just money well spent.

Feel free to share your overseas research horror stories and suggestions for new researchers.

Some useful books for organizing qualitative research

2009-02-25T15:25:00.001-06:00

Does research organization and data drive you crazy? It has certainly been driving me crazy, but luckily I came across Lyn Richards' Handling Qualitative Data (2005). This is a very practical book about how to physically and conceptually handle your data- organizing it, sorting it, giving you steps to go through. Very very useful stuff.

Another classic- Wolcott's Writing Up Qualitative Research.

Does anyone else have suggestions about physical/virtual research organization strategies or books that they would like to share?