When the subject of GMAT comes up in conversation, I always want to share the best online resource that I found when studying for it. It currently can be found in word document form here. It helped me learn the tricks of the GMAT. Hope it helps you.
Archive for the 'commentary' Category
A colleague forwarded me a nice blog post by an MIT PhD student on grad school advice.
It is a great list… except exercise is missing from it, as well as timeboxing.
Today Chad Anderson reported on the ground work for his dissertation. He cited several Organizational scholars who have called for more theorizing in how materiality relates to the IT artifact.
He then related the theory of affordances which originated from Gibson’s 1979 work in Ecological Psychology. Gibson died shortly after proposing the theory, and many others have gone on to explicate it. Chad relates affordances to IT research as the relationship between “features of an information system and the abilities of an individual within the context of an environment.” It will be interesting to see where this goes… and I am sure Chad can correct me if I mis-discribing something!
This colloquium session was a bit more theoretical than most, but very interesting.
I recently wrote a paper on “Ordinal Logistic HLM” for my methods class. There are only 3 google results if you search for that.
I thought I would post my assignment, for good or for bad, to help bump up that statistic.
Ordinal Logistic HLM Description – DOC
Ordinal Logistic HLM Description – PDF
If you find mistakes or errors in the paper, leave a comment.
In a very provocative research seminar at GSU yesterday, Alan Lee explained how information systems researchers typically test how well the data fits their model (establish formative validity, modus ponens), but rarely test how well the theory works, or predicts (establish summative validity, modus tollens).
Here is a few other items I noted:
- He asked: Instead of doing a grounded theory investigation of the literature, why not do a hermeneutic interpretation? He cited scholars who have said that the logic of the hermeneutic circle is hypothetical deductive reasoning, which is the logic of modus tollens (summative).
- He sees a truce between the different research camps (qualitative, quantitative, etc.) not an open armed embracing, all-on-the-same-team feeling. I can see that.
- In his paper, there are useful tables which outline how each research method area uses formative and summative validity… formative validity is found in the hermeneutic circle, replication across cases and the principle of dialogical reasoning.
- There was a discussion about how methodological papers can become a check-list for researchers, which stifles creativity in methods.
His paper should be published in MISQ.
Instead of having multiple email accounts, I have everything forwarded to gmail where I have it rigorously sorted through hundereds of filters and labels. I am currently using 5432 MB or 74% of my alloted space.
I must have been snoozing because offline gmail came out a few weeks ago and I missed it. This should be extremely useful. There has even been a new release already.
Many people are unaware that you can add dots to your gmail adddress. Instead of putting tim@gmail.com I could put t.im@gmail.com, and it would still get to me. I can give online stores my t.im@gmail address, and then filter out those messages if I wish.
EBSCO and ProQuest are easy to use to find PDFs of research journal articles, however, their PDFs are very large, and poor quality. My friend Chad passed me this list of direct links to journals where higher quality, and smaller PDFs can be found. These links work best if you are on a university network. Here they are:
MIS Quarterly 1977-present
Information Systems Research Back issues are currently unavailable
Journal of Management Information Systems 2000-2007
Communications of AIS 1999-present
Journal of AIS 2000-present
European Journal of Information Systems 1997-present
Information & Organization 2001-present
Decision Support Systems 1985-present
Organization Science 2001-present
Management Science 2001-present
Journal of Strategic Information Systems 1991-present
Information & Management 1977-present
I have been impressed with the quality and consistency of sciencedirect.
Have any more good links? Add them in comments!
Mentions of Open Innovation continue to appear in diverse places. Here are a few mentions in the past day or so.
A FastCompany expert blog tells how PetMD is choosing not to adopt Open Innovation blindly, to differentiate itself from its competitors.
Jeong Kim, President of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs tells how the new joint research lab with Institut Telecom “repres
ents another important step forward for us in realizing our open innovation strategy”.
Science Archived links to an OECD study which lists Open Innovation as a recent trend in the innovation process.
The Atlanta Management Society put on a lunch seminar at the Emory Business School on Netweaving today. The inventor of the concept, Bob Littell, explained that if networking is about “What’s in it for me”, Netweaving is about “What can I do for you”. Thus it relies on reciprocity. Another key is introducing people to each other. He has encouraged Georgia State MBA students to read the Atlanta Business Chronicle and setup meetings between two news makers.
Two insights:
- When in a networking situation, skip long spells of small-talk, initiate meaningful dialogue by asking questions such as, “What is the best business book you have read in the last few years, or what are the challenges and issues your industry is currently facing?” Small talk does not develop meaningful relationships.
- Instead of just sending an email to a new contact saying “good to meet you” – send them a useful resource with your summary of the key takeaways.
If you are interested — there is the Netweaver skills assessment, and the Netweaver’s creed (pdf).
Open innovation in education, OLEDs, and Nature
Mozilla, Creative Commons, and P2P University announced a new open innovation initiative to partner with educators in extending Mozilla’s role in the education space. This post has more about Mozilla’s strategic position to engage in the open innovation process build educational materials.
Innocentive and Nature just announced a partnership of somekind to engage scientists in solving global scientific challenges. It is refreshing to see this large publisher getting involved in such a worthwhile endevor. Perhaps this is in response to MIT’s announcement to make all it’s faculties scientific papers available for free on the internet.
Lastly, Novaled, an OLED maker, and Holst Centre, an open innovation R&D company announced a partnership.
Read Pascal Finette’s blog about the interesting name change for the LinkedIn Open Innovation group.