Monday, March 16, 2009

How to Get Cited a Lot

Ultimately for an academic researcher the goal is to get your research cited and used by other people whether in their pure science work or in policy applications. Getting published is nice, but just the first step in an academic career. Also, I believe that as people get more and more familiar with the online citation databases citations will be used more and more to evaluate researchers. So, if

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Book Reviews: Gladwell

I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. While it is a good read I found it rather frustrating. I agree totally with the tone of the Wikipedia article. I guess it is too journalistic and not analytical enough. Sometimes making intuitive judgments is good and sometimes it is not. Some people are born with the abilities to make them and other times they can train to have those abilities. Well, the real

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Book Reviews: Zilliak and McCloskey and Taleb

Shuang brought home borrowed copies of Ziliak and McCloskey's "Cult of Statistical Signficance" and Taleb's "The Black Swan". in a way both are rants against standard practice in quantitative analysis. But Taleb's book is ten times better or more than Ziliak and McCloskey's. The latter have a single point that researchers often misuse the concept of statistical significance and ignore the actual