Helpful Phrase Dictionary for Readers of Dissertations and Scholarly Articles

I'm not sure which is more disturbing. The thought that I successfully
navigated my dissertation because my committee didn't know about this.
Or that they knew full well and let me graduate anyway.

Regardless, for any of you who need to decipher academic writing, this will prove helpful.

Helpful Phrase Dictionary for Readers of Dissertations and Scholarly Articles. A dictionary for those uninitiated in reading scholarly dissertations and articles, provided by anesthesiologist Clark Venable (who's obviously read a few too many.)

Translations of phrases often seen in dissertations and scholarly articles

  • “It has long been known” … I didn't look up the original reference.
  • “A definite trend is evident” … These data are practically meaningless.
  • “While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to the
    questions” … An unsuccessful experiment but I still hope to get it
    published.
  • “Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” … The other results didn't make any sense.
  • “Typical results are shown” … This is the prettiest graph.
  • “These results will be in a subsequent report” … I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
  • “In my experience” … Once.
  • “In case after case” … Twice.
  • “In a series of cases” … Thrice.
  • “It is believed that” … I think.
  • “It is generally believed that” … A couple of others think so, too.
  • “Correct within an order of magnitude” … Wrong.
  • “According to statistical analysis” … Rumor has it.
  • “A statistically-oriented projection of the significance of these findings” … A wild guess.
  • “A careful analysis of obtainable data” … Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass iced tea.
  • “It is clear that much additional work will be required before a
    complete understanding of this phenomenon occurs” … I don't
    understand it.
  • “After additional study by my colleagues” … They don't understand it either.
  • “Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and
    to Cindy Adams for valuable discussions” … Mr. Blotz did the work and
    Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.
  • “A highly significant area for exploratory study” … A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
  • “It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field” … I quit.

By terrywfrazier@gmail.com. [b.cognosco]

Building a personal knowledge management environment

Just a quiet little pointer from Dave Winer this morning on the idea of his that has ended up driving a huge amount of my experimentation with creating an environment for personal knowledge management.

1/4/01: “In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don’t have to share it with anyone, it’s yours and yours alone. It would be fast!” [Scripting News]

My work means that I am frequently not connected to the web for significant chunks of time. Ten years ago, the solution to that problem was Lotus Notes as both an email and document management environment that understood the problems of intermittment connectivity. Unfortunately, Notes got hijacked by the IS group and locked down behind layers of complexity that prevented amateur programmers from rolling their own solutions.

That was followed by a period where Outlook and Microsoft Office were almost the only tools I used on my notebook machine. For all its strengths, Office, IMHO, is fundamentally focused on the production aspects of final deliverables and is either weak or an active hindrance in the earlier stages of creating and developing knowledge work products. Nor do the components of Office do much helpful to support the real issues of producing final products that are the joint collaborative efforts of a team (compare Word’s Track Changes against any reasonable version control system that software developers would take as a necessary tool in their world).

Somewhere around the time Dave wrote this, I started playing with Userland’s Frontier and Manila and then began to use “Radio” as my< blogging platform. One of the key value added features for me was the built in outlining capabilities hidden inside Radio. Unfortunately, they are a bit too well hidden even for someone who loves outlining as a key thinking tool. Also, the innovative energy around Radio and Frontier dropped off from my amateur's perspective. I no longer have the time or the skill to do major development. I am fundamentally a technology user. What I can do is take advantage of the efforts of others and tweak and adapt what they do to my needs. That works best if you can plug into a thriving environment of developers and users. I've posted elsewhere (Experimenting with Web 2.0 on my laptop, Details of my Windows/LAMP Environment) about my current practices, but I wanted to make the connection back to the original ideas that drove my approach.

To date, most of this experimentation has been about improving my own knowledge work effectiveness over time. Moving that to the level of project team and work group has been more difficult. First, because you need to overcome the blinders imposed by the marketing investments of most software vendors who generally promise more than they deliver and who actively ignore the organizational change issues of new work practices. Second, there are the barriers imposed by IS groups who tend to be more focused on managing the risks introduced by users who are unwilling or unable to understand the technology they already have than they are on helping a handful of mavericks push the envelope. In a world of worms, viruses, and Sarbanes-Oxley that’s an entirely appropriate focus, of course. I work hard to keep the folks in IS informed and happy.

Today, even though I’m making less use of the specific tools he’s developed, I continue to make very productive use of Dave Winer’s insights and perspective.

BlawgThink: Powered by MindManager

This is an exciting addition to the upcoming BlawgThing conference. I've been using and advocating mindmaps
for years (I have one 26-year old hand drawn mindmap near my desk that
I used to organize my studying for exams at the end of my first year of
business school). MindManager was the first, and in my view still the
best, tool I found that made mindmapping on a computer a useful and
productive practice.

Jack Vinson and I have
already been exchanging MindManager mindmaps as we develop our session
for Blawgthink and will likely use it for anything we choose to present
as part of the session. I'm definitely looking forward to having the
tool and the technique be a core part of the experience.

Mindjet is excited to announce the first “Powered by MindManager” conference. BlawgThink 2005,
to be held Nov. 11-12 in Chicago, will be the first large conference to
use MindManager as its central organizing principle. Breakout sessions
will be run with MindManager, conference “scribes” will take notes in
MindManager, the main conference room will feature a large map of all
the thinking going on, and there will be presentations on using
MindManager in the legal field. The event organizers plan to use
MindManager’s External Linker” (available for free in the Mindjet Labs)
to instantly pull information from the breakout sessions into the main
conference map. And they have a lot more ideas in mind on using
MindManager to create the perfect conference environment.

If
you have any interest in how MindManager can be used in the legal
arena, this one conference will probably tell you more in two days than
you would learn in two months. Go to the BlawgThink site for more information on this first-ever “Powered by MindManager” event as the date gets nearer.

And
please let us know if you have any thoughts on how MindManager can help
improve the value and quality of conferences. Think of BlawgThink as a
bit of a test lab for using MindManager to build the perfect large
interactive event. How would you do it?

Fourth blogiversary at McGee's Musings

I've now reached four years of writing in this space. Curiously, I missed my
first blogiversary, but did manage to post this item: Doonesbury on
blogging
.

Obviously, the rewards and benefits continue to outweigh the costs. I still
get a kick out of meeti ng someone who's read something here. I continue to meet
new and interesting minds because of my presence here and I get to stay in touch
with many of the others that I've met along the way. It continues to amaze me
that these words find their way to all sorts of odd and unexpected places around
the planet.

To the following blogging friends I have managed to
acquire because of blogging, thank you for making this an experiment I intend to
continue. Let's see who else we can invite to the party.

Jenny Levine, AKMA, Terry Frazier, Betsy Devine, Buzz Bruggeman, Denham Grey, Marc Orchant, Cameron Reilly, Marjolein
Hoekstra
, Ernie Svenson, Judith Meskill, Jack Vinson, Ross Mayfield, Lilia Efimova, Jeremy Wagstaff, Matt Mower, Ton Zijlstra, Eric Snowdeal, Rick Klau, Greg Lloyd, Chris Nuzum,
Jordan Frank
, Halley
Suitt
, Jon Husband, Dina Mehta, Shannon Clark, Bruce MacEwen, Espen Andersen, Hylton Jolliffe, Stowe Boyd, Francois Gossieaux, Jim Berkowitz, Eric Lunt, Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann,
Jim Ware, Elizabeth Albrycht, Regina
Miller
, David Gurteen, Rik Reppe,

If I've forgotten someone, my apologies. Ping me and I'll update the
list.

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places
for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of
technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing
the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will
continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who
choose to ignore facts and who can't or won't distinguish between the theory of
evolution and the theory of who shot JFK.

In the long run, I still put my bets on the value of curiosity. There is deep
truth buried in Dorothy Parker's observation that provides this blogs
tagline:

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There
is no cure for curiosity.”

On the Menu at BlawgThink

Matt Homan and Dennis Kennedy are putting together a really interesting
get together next month. Jack and I are planning to put together a
highly interactive session to tap the collective interests and
experience of everyone who chooses to join us.

Jim McGee and I are going to host a session on knowledge management / collaboration during BlawgThink 2005, here in Chicago. LexThink! Blog – Speaking of BlawgThink

Q: What do Matt Buchanan, Ben Cowgill, Dennis Crouch, Fred Faulkner, Peter Flashner, Brandy Karl, Cathy Kirkman, Rick Klau, Jim McGee, Steve Nipper, Kevin O’Keefe, Evan Schaeffer, Doug Sorocco, Ernie Svenson, Jack Vinson, and J. Craig Williams have in common?

A: They are all speaking at BlawgThink 2005. We’ll have a few more additions to this list by the end of the week.

Comments

A visit from Buzz

Buzz came through
Chicago last week on his trek
across America
. I was on my way back from a day of interviewing and
recruiting at the University of Illinois in Champaign and found Buzz in a
Starbucks in Glenview. From there, Buzz followed me home in his new Saab. In
typical Buzz fashion, he charmed Charlotte once again and proceeded to demo ActiveWords and a series of other
software tools and tips to her. We also showed off Skype by calling Jeremy
Wagstaff in Jakarta using Buzz's laptop as an impromptu speakerphone. Of course,
I will now be installing ActiveWords on Charlotte's computer when I get back
tonight (I'm in Boston today). Charlotte was suitably impressed and happy to
discover someone who knew things about his computer and its applications that
was news to me as well. Her reaction was the typical one I have come to expect
when a non-technical knowledge worker sees ActiveWords for the first time – “why
hasn't Microsoft bought this and made it part of Windows?”

The next day Buzz and I went on into Chicago where he pitched ActiveWords to
my CIO. We also spent some time with some of my colleagues as we started to
think through how to do a pilot evaluation that would let us demonstrate the
potential value of ActiveWords within our day-to-day knowledge work efforts.

I've been an ActiveWords user now for four years and I still learn something
new about how to make use of this tool whenever I watch Buzz show it off. It is
the kind of tool that can be hard to fully appreciate until you see it in the
hands of an expert. I came away with a number of ideas for new things I would
like to do. I think we have the basis for an initial pilot and should find a
number of user groups for whom ActiveWords will become part of their knowledge
work toolkit.

PC marketing has played the productivity card from day zero. Early on,
however, the marketing message skipped over the part about the behavioral change
needed to realize the potential of technology. Few of us have the time or
inclination to observe and think about how we work, much less think through how
we might go about making our work easier. We still don't have the tools we need
to really address the challenge of improving the
productivity/effectiveness of knowledge work
. One way to think about
ActiveWords is that it is the smallest first step you can take to begin making
your PC a tool to extend your effectiveness that gives you the quickest payback.
With luck, it may also help sensitize you to the notion that you can get more
value out of your tools if you learn how to use them and take the time to
observe your work and look for ways to make it more effective.

We finished the day with a blogger dinner at Reza's hosted by Shannon Clark
of MeshForum. We had a nice turnout and
lots of good conversation and food. I'll post more about the dinner later.

HBS – 25 years out

I'm still digging out from last weekend, which I spent in Boston
celebrating my 25th reunion of my business school class. Friday night
we had dinner at the Top of the Hub in the Prudential Center with a
view of Fenway Park where the Red Sox were beating the Yankees.

Sunset over Fenway

At
HBS you spend your entire first year with your section of roughly 80
people, so the ties are strong. There was a lot of wry laughter about
those fanciful spreadsheet projections we had discussed five years ago
at our 20th in June of 2005. There was also a lot of wonder about the
change we've seen in 25 years and the change we were likely to see in
the next 25.

Over the years, it's been interesting to watch the
evolving conversations and concerns at each reunion.. In 1985, at our
5th reunion, we were pretty full of ourselves (Charlotte had a more
earthy way of putting it). As time has gone on, our conversations
and priorities have become much more focused on family and community.
Then, we all rushed off to hear about the latest new ideas and worked
the crowd. Last week, we blew off the lectures, sat outside on the
lawn on a gorgeous fall day, and walked to Harvard Square to grab ice
cream at Herrells.

Harvard sometimes has a reputation for
encouraging competition at the expense of cooperation; it certainly did
when I was there. On the other hand, you don't have to succumb to it. I
was in Section I and there used to be an apocryphal story of a comment
by the Dean that perhaps eight sections would be better for the school
than nine. As a group, we had a healthy skepticism about authority. I
do recall one thing we did as Section I that did earn us some trouble.

Histroically,
about 5% of the first year class at HBS flunks out–we called it
“hitting the screen.” In our section, we concluded that there was
no reason that any of those people had to come from our section. We set
up a voluntary lunch help session. If you were doing well in a course,
you'd hang out in the classroom to help out anyone else in the section
who felt they needed it. Sometimes I helped, sometimes I needed help.
While we did get some mild pressure from faculty to drop the idea, we
ignored them.

This last Saturday night, while there were a lot
of people still networking over cocktails, you could find the Section I
contingent on the dance floor and, a bit later, closing down the Oak
Bar at the Copley Plaza. A few more of us were drinking Diet Coke this
time than 25 years ago, but we still laugh at Bruce's jokes. And we're
still having fun.

Brad, Mike, Jennifer Sheryle, Allen, Julie