-Are your research questions clear and well-motivated?
-Is there a consistent narrative throughout paper?
-Is the contribution well-justified?
-Are the journal guidelines and formatting instructions followed?
Paraphrased from a talk at the Young Scholars Workshop of the Behavioral Operations Conference in July 2016.
Writing:
Elements of Style for Writing Scientific Journal Articles. Funny because I’m also re-reading Strunk and White right now.
How to write a paper. One.
How to write a paper. Two.
Prototyping mathematical papers.
Teaching:
Defining the relationship between professor and student.
Where are we heading? Asked in an academic job interview.
Probabilistic true-false questions.
The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack
This book comes from the idea that you can fit all the financial advice you ever need on an index card. High price/fee advice is overrated and financial good choices are actually simple. Good advice. Here is the index card and the book’s chapters:
The Orator’s Parable, by Doug Samuelson, available on page 66 here.
“He literally doesn’t know the first thing about pubic speaking.”
“And what is that?” Brett inquired, even more surprised.
“Forget about what you want to say,” Ben smiled.
“What?” Brett blurted.
“Focusing on what you want to say is a distraction, or worse,” Ben explained. “You want to focus on what you want the audience to remember.”
Brett took a moment to absorb this.
“This has several advantages,” Ben elaborated. “First of all, you figure out who your audience is and try to meet them where they are – that is, start with what you’re pretty sure they know and believe and build from there. You emphasize major points more, repeat them several times, and make sure they’re clearly and simply – memorably – worded. Write your conclusion first, then your introduction, and make sure the conclusion summarizes your key point in a short, catchy phrase that they’ll remember if they remember nothing else. Then you build from introduction to conclusion in the order that’s easiest to follow, not the order that makes the most sense to you. This also means you time it so that if a session chair might cut you off, you make sure to get the conclusion in even if your delivery runs longer than you intended.”
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport, 2016
Quick read. Builds upon and consolidates the blog Study Hacks.
The premise of the book is that
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).
This book is about getting the most benefit from your limited working hours. During undergrad years, I used to say that as the time to the deadline went to zero, my productivity went to 100%. This is because I stopped being distracted and hit maximum efficiency. This book offers advice on how to get toward that goal without the necessity of constant deadlines.
Related Books:
Willpower
How to Write a Lot
On the Market
A lot of kids seem to have odd shooting mechanics in basketball. While playing yesterday, I was holding a towel to wipe my face with my non-dominant hand. I was still able to guide the ball on the shot with the towel in my hand (with my dominant hand doing the shooting), but I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was a two-handed shooter, like some kids.
Idea: If you want to learn to shoot one-handed, hold something in your non-dominant hand while shooting. A small towel is probably about the right size.
From Content by Cory Doctorow:
We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don’t remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard pscyh prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don’t remember breakfast—we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast.
We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That’s why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only more so.
I taught 3 sections of BUS-P 300: Introduction to Operations Management this spring. It is a course for business minors, and I get a broad spectrum of student majors. Most students were second-semester seniors. Each section had 40-43 students. Here is a bit of postmortem for me for the course.
Things that went well:
-Each test was worth 137 points. This makes it harder for the student to calculate their grade percentage immediately and leads to less complaining. Even if someone gets a 90/137, that still looks like a good score, even though it is really close to a failing grade. Thanks to Richard Thaler for the suggestion.
-All hands-on activities went really well. We simulated a production line to make paper airplanes. We played the beer game online. We tried out some wisdom of the crowd forecasting. I wish there were more ready-made activities for operations courses.
-I added a significant segment on sustainability and a full lecture on behavioral OM. I think both subjects were enjoyable.
-Most students seemed to enjoy the final group project setup, where they got to select their own groups (if desired) and their own topics. Some students wanted more rigidity in the process (forced topics, forced groups, or a more detailed rubric), but more students enjoyed the creativity that the process allowed.
-Videos of manufacturing and service environments helped drive discussion points home. Most students have little/no experience with real-world operational settings.
-I’m glad I stuck with Managing Operations Across the Supply Chain, 2nd edition, by Swink et al. It’s a good introduction to operations for non-technical undergrads. All the necessary material was there. Choosing a more technical book would have been a disaster.
-This was my entire required teaching load at Kelley. While it was hard to teach three courses in a day in the short-term, I think it will be a good long-term decision when I have the next year+ to focus on research.
Things that didn’t go particularly well:
-I allowed students to use laptops during class if they wished. In the future, I will be more discerning about when/how I let them use computers. Getting attention and participation in one of my three sections was like pulling teeth. They all seemed to collude and decide to pay more attention to their computers than me. The other sections didn’t have major issues.
-I tried to steer students toward interesting research projects for their final group project, but I would say that about 25-33% of the topics chosen were just dull or simplistic. Most of these came from groups that didn’t give any indication of their choice prior to the topic deadline. I should make groups come talk to me about their topic prior to selection. Perhaps just before/after class in the 2 weeks leading up to topic selection deadline. (On the other hand, 25-33% of the topics were extraordinary for an intro course.)
-I used half a lecture to teach EOQ and Newsvendor basics. Without showing the solution (calculus) technique (for EOQ) or understanding statistics distributions (for Newsvendor), these topics aren’t memorable, and they were among the most-missed subjects on the homeworks/exams. Most students were not proficient in calculus or statistics. Find a way to teach their insights without showing the derivation next time. Besides these, all other simple equations/derivations seemed to go over well.
-My lectures got more interesting as the semester went on. I was building upon old slides from other grad students, and early on I was not altering them enough for my teaching style. I think some of the early lectures were probably boring. I should have made more significant edits early on.
Overall, a successful course.
Use this strategy from now on:
Guest book reviews from Maria.
Anticancer: A New Way of Life
by David Servan-Schreiber, 2007
and
Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It
by Gary Taubes, 2010
Anticancer: A New Way of Life, which I read quickly in a few bouts over my spring break, combines the author’s personal battle with cancer with a guide to healthy living that he has been practicing as a cancer patient and doctor for the past two decades. Besides the typical “exercise and reduce stress” spiel, he goes into the nutrition and science behind how what we eat affects our bodies’ ability to heal. Most diseases, he says, are caused by inflammation. There are several tables of foods and what kinds of cancers those foods are supposed to help fight against or prevent. (Eric was listening to this book on CD, which goes through those tables too quickly to process or remember, so we rented the book as well.) A few foods that are particularly bad (they cause a lot of inflammation) are refined sugar, white flour, and vegetable oils — basically everything common in the Western diet. A few foods that are particularly good (they help fight inflammation and are packed with nutrients) include fatty fish, broccoli, and green tea. Of course, he is big on organics.
One piece of his advice is to avoid red meat. This needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because he generalizes all red meat – conventional and grass fed – into one lump. Beef has gotten a bad rap because of its imbalance of omega 6 and omega 3 (too much omega 6 is bad). Grass fed beef is much healthier and, personally, I think we don’t need to be afraid of beef if it contains a lot of omega 3. A book I read right before this one, called “Why We Get Fat (and what to do about it)” goes into depth all the science behind eating meat, especially the differences between conventional and grass fed. That book says to eat as much meat as you want, as long as it’s grass fed (and, ideally, organic). Each as many vegetables as you want, especially the green stuff, and especially organic. Carbs — like in refined sugars and flours — are the main evil. They are inflammatory and encourage fat cells to thrive instead of putting their energy into your muscles.
The two books have a lot in common (what not to eat and the role of inflammation in being healthy) and both go into the nutrition and science of food. If you want to figure out why the Western diet makes us fat (along with how to improve your diet), I highly recommend Why We Get Fat. If you want to learn about general healthy practices and specific foods to target cancers, read Anticancer. Read both if you can. I enjoyed both books and they have spurred a revamp of Eric and my diets. We ate well before, but we are more conscious of what we put in our bodies.