Although databases like ProQuest, LexisNexis, and ScienceDirect do indeed facilitate and vastly improve research productivity. But the new generation of computer-based journal databases and their reliance on keyword searches and abstracts undermines the significantly-more valid critical process of evaluating references for their actual findings and content before dismissing a reference, considering it further, or determining what articles to follow next in the chain.
I’m currently in the second last day of the Academy of Management 2010 annual meeting in Montréal http://annualmeeting.aomonline.org/2010/ , with over 8,000 primarily academics. This afternoon I had the opportunity to sit in on four paper presentations, two of which I had the opportunity to review and critique earlier this year as part of the [...]
I have found that modern scientists have a certain arrogance that was not as evident in the past–a sense that “science has arrived,” and “we didn’t know better back then, but we got it right, now.” And it is this feeling that science cannot do wrong now, I believe, more than anything else, that is dangerous.
It is that elegance, beauty, and simplicity, the complexity, that I have come to appreciate from cubing. And the process of abstracting generalizations that apply to all (n-layer) cubes that I learned by developing strategies for solving (n-1)-, (n-2)-, and (n-3)-layer cubes, for example.