My impressions of Allan Wicker’s Ghanaian narratives remain the same, and what I still stand by what I wrote last week about the use of narratives.  However, one thing I noted about the presentation was how the use of pictures drastically heightened the sense of empathy provided by the narrative.  With the use of images, images of Ghanaians’ homes, their workplace, their neighborhoods, etc., it becomes easier to imagine what daily life might be like living in a place such as Ghana.

[More]

Reaction to Marianne De Laet

I thought that the lecture of Dr. Marianne De Laet showed a good example of transdisciplinary research. The processes from funding to building of the 30m telescope in Caltech presented that a modern, technology related project might requires many different disciplines as societies become complicated. Doing successfully a big modern, technology project can be considered as solving a complex problem, because the project is related to not only engineers and scientists but also many stakeholders and cultural and socio-economic factors, and the relationships between factors are non-linear and complex. Therefore, it is not easy to implement the project successfully. Usually it requires a comprehensive approach and a series of painstaking efforts, including solving conflicts between stakeholders and trying to reduce potential side effects caused by the project.

There can many examples for this kind of problems. As Dr. Marianne De Laet said, Hawaii’s antagonistic attitude for building telescope because of tradition and cultural reasons are very natural to Hawaii residents but also very important for the success of the project. There is a similar example in Korea. Korean government had tried to build a facility in a place to store gavages from atomic power plant. It was very important for future electricity of Korea and its national economic benefits were expected be huge. But Korean government failed to build the place because they failed to solve conflicts between related stakeholders. It shows that a comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach becomes more important.

[More]

In figuring out which of the two qualitative methodologies we should use in this course, I think that we need to really think about what we are trying to accomplish.  In aligning this work with the point of the class, I think that it is obvious that we are trying to understand how inductive knowledge plays a role in their academic careers.  In the interests of time, we are also limiting the scope of this project to only examine professors at CGU.

 

As a result, I think that the best way that we can approach this project is as a case study.  We are studying a particular theme in a bounded system.  While it would be interesting to expand our results to a larger population, such as all professors, we have explicitly narrowed it to a single location.

 

The next best way to approach this study would be as a phenomenological study.  Rather than be interested in professor’s lives to better understand the person, we are trying to understand what they do, how, and why.  While this is not as appropriate as a case study, due to the limited scope, it would still be very appropriate.

[More]

I am impressed with the descriptive interviews and vivid pictures from Ghana at Professor Allen Wicker’s talk. Traditional qualitative studies tend to use limited instruments such as voice recorder and existing documents. As Internet usage and many multimedia supported applications bloom, I think it is very important to embrace a variety of multimedia including photos, pictures, voice clips, and videos into research materials and evidence, especially in qualitative studies such as interviews and field studies. For example, Professor’s Allen Wicker’s Web site for the Ghana research project can be further enhanced and impress the audience if each interview was associated with the interviewee’s pictures (e.g., a picture at work).

[More]

Swanson and Ramiller state that the origins for their theory is psychology and organizational theory, so it could be applied to fields other that I T as you have very succdesfully done here.  So you could be published in journals of military strategy or political strategy and analysis.  Regarding the religious angle, I also thought of the concept of mindfulness as coming from religion.  One of the Jewish daily prayers states to "be mindful and do them (the commandments)".  Another translation says the same thing as "to heed".  This means not just to mindlessly do as commanded but to pay attention to what you are doing and why.

[More]

That is disturbing. Not too long ago, I heard on the news radio that some Army recruiters invited some high school boys to an informational social, but it ended up being a swearing in ceremony.  I don't know how it turned out for the kids who were tricked into swearing in, but it made it onto the news that the parents were upset and trying to reverse their enlistment.

[More]

"So, my point is that the bulk of the law in this sense categorically is a reflection of the common consensus of any given society (again, ideally), and new legislation ought to keep this in mind."

[More]

I ran a similar test to see if it was an IT article, and I think some of the specific control and security  variables are software-specific, such as scripting language, S-HTTP support, SSL Support, Database Linking.  However, many of the other variables are generically applicable to other markets. Triability is definitely something that is apparent in the detergent and cereals markets.

[Delete]

[More]

You ask some interesting questions, Karen.  If you could find something for an IS360 class to read that discusses non-western philosophy of science, I would be glad to consider it.  If there is anything out there arguing for non-western PoS, I haven't seen it.  What would a non-western PoS look like?  How would it differ from any of the ones that are being considered by Godfrey-Smith?  (I would suspect that one would need to be able to say how non-western, non-science-oriented philosophies differ from western ones.  This may be part of the body of knowledge of philosophers, east and west.)

The reason we are reading "what a bunch of mostly old guys think" is that PoS is the intellectual (if not the pragmatic) foundation for what scientists do.  Since our PhD program is meant to turn non-scientists into scientists, it seems reasonable to introduce foundation ideas.  (The rationale is not that "it is important to learn new things," because you won't find lots of interesting things to learn that are unrelated to IS&T in the program.)

The question of whether there are more scientists in China than in the US and Europe would be a question of fact.  I haven't looked it up, but it should be relatively easy to get the numbers.  (My guess is that size of population alone wouldn't determine number of scientists.) 

It would also be an empirical question to assess whether Chinese scientists have a distinct PoS.  This would be a somewhat more difficult question to assess, but it should be possible to find out.  (My guess is that people who get labeled as scientists here and there would share a paradigm, including a PoS.) A careful study of this would be of interest to people in China and in the west.  (Of course, the question would have to be begged as to which PoS to use in conducting the study, if more than one exists.)

[More]