Business & Education Blog of an MBA Grad and PhD Student
Posts tagged science
Amazon’s Kindling 2 for Poor Research Habits in the New Generation of Young Researchers
Sep 5th
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Scholarly ResearchShare
When I began work on my honours thesis in receptor-ligand kinetics during my biology and biotechnology degree, in 1998, electronic journals were not on the minds of legitimate mainstream research scientists. At the time, Carleton University introduced an extremely-beneficial agreement it had reached with the National Research Council to allow fourth year honours students working on their theses access to the NRC CISTI Library Stacks–as a government agency, the NRC CISTI library did provide services to the public, but the actual stacks were out of bounds, public patrons could only access the extensive resources in their East Ottawa library
facilities by submitting reference lists on paper and waiting for library staff to retrieve them. As fourth year honours thesis students, we benefitted from the more intimate time we got to spend with the references, and the ability to follow the chain of research articles much faster. Remember, this was all during a time when there was no way to conduct research comprehensively in one pass;
you simply had to look up a set of initial promising-looking references, find only about 75% of them are in the library collection to begin with, and a further 25% More >
Walden should encourage its students to present their research: My impressions of AOM 2010 so far
Aug 9th
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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 blinded review process. Being able to interact with scholars from other institutions and evaluate their research increasingly shows me that whilst Walden’s quantitative requirements are probably less than most PhD programmes’, that their introduction to research theory and design in their newly-redesigned 8008 Foundations, RSCH 8100, and RSCH 8200 that I have completed so far, really allow us to make sure we’re asking the right questions when we get to the micro level.
This afternoon, one of the questions posed to a presenter who is a PhD student and faculty-member at the University of Maryland, was about the epistemological foundations of his definition of “aggressiveness” in terms of competitive signalling (the four papers were themed on competitive signalling in the Business Policy and Strategy division), and he could not answer the question. Walden’s systematic approach to research design necessarily would have addressed the fundamental epistemological and ontological issues More >
Arrogance of Science, and Rubiks Cubes
Mar 6th
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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. The other day, I heard on CBC radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is Canada’s public broadcaster, and might be compared to NPR, but it also comprises three radio streams and does broadcast content from alternative, contemporary, and classical music to talk radio) the other day that some scientists had begun to think that the greenhouse gases were out of control and that a viable solution would be to build an orbiting solar shield to counter global warming. That is precisely the kind of thinking that I find is absolutely irresponsible that happens across the pure, applied, and social sciences. We see it in medicine when a researcher makes the leap from “low blood levels of X result in Y,” to a drug that raises X and causes all sorts of complications with Z, W, and the other due to complex interactions that were difficult to More >
