University College London

Adopting a historical perspective on things we take for granted is often fascinating. For example, measurement is not something one usually spends a lot of time questioning. But did you know that the meter was last redefined in 1983, only 39 years ago?

Three amazing facts about measurements

In this sentence from On Writing Well, William Zinsser gives us four important pieces of advice to write better: use good verbs, prefer the active voice, simplify, and, finally, be concrete. Use good verbs   One of the best advice on verbs is found in McCloskey’s Economical Writing.

Four tips to make your writing four times better

Thriving in a degree programme (and I would argue—as Carmine Gallo does in Five Stars—in most careers) especially at MSc level requires the ability to write clearly and convincingly.

Review of How to Write a Paragraph

I just finished what I call marking season a few weeks ago. It is the period from the last week of August to the end of the second or third week of September when we do most of our MSc dissertations marking. I have had the pleasure to read very interesting work on a broad range of topics during this period.

Simple things to avoid in order to write better, tips for students (and others)

Flashcards are a well known studying technique and are widely used in language learning and medicine to help memorise large amount of information. They are less widely used in social sciences, which raises the question: is this because they are less useful here or because we are collectively missing a trick? So, what are flashcards good for? Can they be used effectively in contexts where memorisation is not central to learning?

Rote memorising or more? Can using flashcards improve learning?

I read Helen Sword’s

 Stylish Academic Writing

(Sword, 2012) on a recent flight. The book surveys major style quirks plaguing academic writing. It is both entertaining and concerning: some of the examples are hilarious, but a look at one’s own writing yields many sentences as wonky as the examples in the book.

Writing: the proverbial struggle

Is data literacy more important than data analytics? I think it is true for most people that learning data analytics is less important than learning the fundamentals of data literacy. This is why after teaching data analytics for about 6 years, I am now creating a data literacy class. My aim is to equip learners with the tools to evaluate claims that are made with data.

The power of data literacy in the data age

Super courses by Ken Bain is a book aimed at University teachers and describing a new breed of courses in Universities. According to the author what sets these courses apart is the fact that they are designed using insights from learning science.

Book Review of Super Courses

Welcome to ten minute to better writing. If, like me, you find yourself writing a lot in English as a non-native speaker, I hope that you will find some of the tips I share in the videos below useful. I have broken down the material into 10 videos each about 1 minute long, this should help you find what you need quickly.

Ten minutes to better writing

Last week, I was talking about how I used gpt4 to get myself out of a colouring book pickle, but my (simplistic) solution, which kept my kids occupied, is already outdated with the release of GPTs: OpenAI has released a GPT that is pre-prompted to produce colouring book images. I played around with it and it is pretty fun.

Exploring the AI frontier: colouring books

Deep Work by Cal Newport is a book about getting more done. For once, I like the title, it both summarises the book well and is more or less unforgettable. In the introduction, Newport suggests that to do important work, you need to find the time to focus deeply. He says that this has gotten harder with the advent of the internet and social media.

Book Review of Deep Work by Cal Newport

This little book makes for delightful and terrifying reading. Delightful because it is very well written, and hilarious at times. Terrifying because many of the rules expose flaws in one’s writing. The book packs a lot of very useful tips in a small format. It is a very good complement to the often recommended Strunk and White Elements of Style, with advice that is particularly useful to the social scientist.

Review of Economical Writing

This article was first published on LinkedIn on 15th June 2020.

Last Saturday (06/06/2020), the Guardian published an interview with Bruno Latour. This article was of great interest to me as Latour’s work on science has had a significant impact on many researchers. Laboratory Life (publisher’s website) was a real eye opener when I read it as a graduate student. The book contributed to my becoming an open-minded positivist.

Bruno Latour and Social Network Theory

Remembering what you learn is essential if your learning effort is to amount to anything. Ideally, you want to build both short-term and long-term retention in order to pass the class but also be able to use the knowledge in the future whenever required. We know that a lot of what feels like studying is inefficient in helping us retain information long term.

You can learn better! Four cool studying tips for students

I decided to redo my old and ugly wordpress website using blogdown and Hugo. Thanks to the great theme for academics by George Cushen and the blogdown book by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas and Alison Presmanes Hill, it was a breeze. In a few hours, I have a better looking website than I thought possible, without having to do too much fiddling. Once more, I am amazed by what can be achieved thanks to the open source software community.

Website

A lot of things are less than ideal in the world at the moment, but I can’t help but be amazed at what one can do with a static website. WebR through quarto-live allows you to run R (you can also run Python with pyodide) in the browser. No server required. Like below: eyJhdHRyIjp7ImVkaXQiOnRydWUsImV2YWwiOnRydWV9LCJjb2RlIjoiMisyIn0=  I can’t help but feel this is a little like magic.

We live in magical times

I am currently preparing for the courses I teach in term 2 and one of my objectives this year is to create course websites

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with course material that the students can access but that can also be made available publicly in the hope that they might be useful to someone

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. It is also an opportunity to move away from a workflow that discourages improvement and makes editing material cumbersome.

Changing tech to teach or how to end up with a weird revealjs slides quasi-theme?

I was reading this article in the Guardian. The study it refers too looks like it was written by Confounding et al. but there is no link to the study for the reader to check this intuition. It feels like a basic requirement for any journalist writing about science to provide a link to the study they are writing about. Scientists do not give you anonymous tips!

Pet peeve: give me a bloody link

Like many others, I have been very skeptical about AI detectors. And my default position, up to now is that you should not use them. Ever. Last week, there was a news bit on the Nature website suggesting that there had been huge progress in AI detection.

AI Detection in Science: A Step Forward or a Misstep?

Yesterday’s headlines have brought a wave of optimism about the UK’s economy. We’re seeing reports suggesting that the ‘UK inflation set to fall ‘dramatically’ to two-year low’ and about how little house prices have fallen. These stories suggest a reassuring picture: inflation is easing, and the housing market is showing signs of resilience. It’s tempting to feel a sense of relief from these updates.

Navigating the Headlines: A Closer Look at UK’s Inflation and Housing Market

Do not read

This one is easy: you should not read from notes. It does not matter if you stutter, search for your words, nothing—NOTHING!—is worse than someone reading from notes instead of presenting. Reading prevents you from connecting to your audience! If you read because your are unsure what you have planned to say, you need to move to the second piece of advice below: rehearsing.

Presentation 101, How to Present Effectively

This is the second installment in my learning to learn series; the first explored four tips to study better (on this blog). When, as teachers, we assign group work, we often hear you grumble

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. Group work often gets a bad rap. And there are (some) good reasons for it. But there are also significant benefits arising from group work. So, why do we assign you to work in groups?

Why should you love group work? It’s hard, but it works wonders!

I have been teaching Data Analytics modules in various forms for the past five years. I started teaching class using R, because it was what I knew and what I used in my work. But over the years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what software to teach. I have given thought to replacing R with Stata, Python, Julia or SPSS.

You should use open-source software for teaching!

Take Great Notes is a very short book from the Sage Super Quick Skills series written by Mal Leicester and Denise Taylor. It is aimed at undergraduates who wonder how they can improve their note taking. The book is also relevant for primary and secondary school students. I picked it up as I am designing material to help MSc students learn.

Review of Take Great Notes

Summary   The Craft of College Teaching is primarily a guide for college teachers reviewing various aspects of college teaching and going over best practices in each of these aspects. I first became aware of the book while reading Ultralearning (my review), which I was reading more for personal enjoyment than as part of an effort of reflection on my teaching practice.

Review of The Craft of College Teaching by Robert DiYanni and Anton Borst

I recently finished teaching three MSc classes online. Here is what I learned. First, online can be as good as in person, and better in some cases. Second, getting there is challenging and it is to be expected that one does not achieve full proficiency on one’s first try. One of the main criticisms of online learning I have heard is the fact that students prefer in-person classes, and so do faculty.

Let’s not abandon progress! How can we learn to love online learning?

In a recent column, Tim Harford said:  While this claim might seem simplistic, I believe that there is something fundamental in it. Sure, debunking certain claims is time consuming and require skills that we might not have, especially when the claims are made with data. Often, however, even limited amount of poking can help us assess the robustness of claims we are exposed to on social media or offline.

One simple tip to avoid falling for fake news and bullshit

This is a review of the book Ultralearning by Scott H. Young. Summary   The premise of the book is that one can learn vast amounts, and master subjects reputed difficult through intense practice. The book presents some of the principles, tools and techniques to achieve this. It is written in an accessible style and is well-paced. While the book might first appear as a charge against higher education, this is not the case.

How Ultralearning helps you learn faster, better and remember more?

There is an easy trap that too many of you fall into. It is a trap so common that some, if not most, of your professors (myself included) have at some point fallen into it. This trap comes from looking at your calendar, seeing a few classes here and there each week, let’s say between 2 and 5 classes, and believe that your workload is totally manageable. After all, you are only in class for anywhere between 4 and 15 hours a week.

Students, classes are but the tip of the iceberg! How to manage your studying time better

In the November issue of the

 Strategic Management Journal

, the editors write about a new initiative, which aims to increase the availability of management data (Ethiraj, Gambardella, &amp; Helfat, 2017)

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. As part of this initiative, the editors will contact authors of impactful papers in

 SMJ

to suggest they contribute the data.

Reproducibility in Management Scholarship

There are two things I try to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching. Helpfully, they are both described in xkcd comics. Ten Thousand    Average Familiarity  The first comic (Ten Thousand) is a reminder that, as teachers, we are privileged to teach a topic we know well to people who are new to it. To me, this suggests two things for us to do: First, learn to enjoy that feeling of taking someone through a process of discovery.

Two things to keep in mind when preparing or delivering teaching

On the 9

 th

of October,

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I attended the Snowflake World Tour event in London. I was curious to learn more about Snowflake as more and more of the industry people I talk to seems to be using it. I also wondered if there was a use case for it for myself. Finally, I wanted to figure out if I should talk to my data analytics students about it. I went there and had an enjoyable day, but what did I learn?

Antoine Vernet's blog

Reproducibility in Management Scholarship

Website