Update to Research Methods Book

I posted a minor update to my Research Methods book back in January.  The price is the same, $10, and for anyone that bought an ebook, just email me and I will send you the PDF of the update.  I think that I already sent all purchaserse of the old verison (before January 1, 2013) an email with a link for the new version.  If you didn't get the email, just let me know and I can send it out to you.

Purchase once, get free updates for the foreseeable future - kind of like a lot of my favorite software.

Sure would be nice if the textbooks I use for class could issue my students updates.  Oh well, that is the advantage of an ebook.

Here is a list of the table of contents (and the starting page)

1. Introduction  (1)
2. Advice for New Researchers    (2)
3. Literature Review Tools and Practices   (21)
4. Statistics Refresher   (32)
5. Survey Methods   (51)
6. Multivariate Statistical Analysis  (75)
7. Multidisciplinary Research Landscape  (92)
8. The Use and Misuse of Graphical Figures   (99)
9. Presenting Research   (106)
10. Documenting Research  (119)

Chapter 7 - Multidisciplinary Research Landscape was contributed by Dr. Ntokozo S Mthembu of Industrial Development Corporation of SA Ltd and Vale University of Technology and Dr. Michael O Kachieng’a of the University of Pretoria.

I still have material to improve in various places.  Feel free to give it a try though.  It is just $10 and a PDF that you can read on desktops, laptops, or tablets and I'll be giving free updates at least for the next few years.

Researching High Tech Recruiters using Honeypots

Elain Wherry posted a very interesting study that she conducted on javascript recruiters.  She is an executive in a small company and was needing to recruit more developers quickly.  She needed to answer questions such as "Is it best to use internal or external recruiters?" and "How important is Linked-In for recruiters?"

She created a fake persona and then watched as recruiters came a calling.  This is a less commonly used research design but showed how she could gain important managerial insights with minimal effort.

Elain doesn't mention that the idea of a "honeypot" is a classic tool in monitoring potential computer security threats - I like the elegance of using this as a research design for examining software developer recruiters using Linked-In and other tools.

My first attempt at an e-book

I have a book on Research Methods that I've been putting together.

It has been available at PSU's Bookstore using the OdinInk Print On-Demand system.  This has worked out well but I've been wanting to try making it into an ebook as well.

After doing reading on Amazon's Kindle publishing program, Barnes and Noble's Nook program, and Apple's iBook, I decided to try the Kindle's program first. the tools seemed to be pretty straightforward but I knew it would be a challenge to take a complex word document and convert it over to ePub or Mobi.   The book has a number of features including:

• Mathematical symbols in the text (font issues!)
• Equations (not handled well when ebooks typically emphasize plain text)
• Tables (hard to handle in ebooks where page layouts are not strictly contained)
• Figures (same as for tables)

I spent about an hour last night and this is what I came up with when viewed in Kindle's preview program.  The first picture is how it would look on the Kindle Fire (an inexpensive color tablet) and the second picture is how it would look with the very common e-ink Kindle ereader.

The pagination seems to change slightly but in both cases the equations are fouled up.  Let's see how it looks in a PDF.

The result is that it will take a lot more work to get this ready for Kindle.

I'll give it some more work but in the meantime, I found a service that allows for selling the PDF and will give that a try.  It is a quirky service that I found from a series of articles on e-publishing that I found on tuaw.com.  Gumroad certainly makes it easy and then you can load it on to any device that can handle a PDF.

Here is a direct link to the book on Gumroad.  https://gumroad.com/l/Timd

It is a first edition so comments and suggestions are welcome.  It is also the version that will be available at the Portland State University OdinInk publishing system.  I think textbooks have really gotten outrageous so I plan on keeping the book very reasonably priced.  The physical OdinInk version is $15 and the  PDF version is $10.  The PDF is DRM free to make it as convenient as possible for readers.  Pages have "gutters" so that it can be printed and put in a 3 ring binder or other binding.  The PDF is in full color while the OdinInk system is black and white except for the cover.  The cover is not included in the PDF but you can use the image at the top of this post or email and I can send it to you.

I'll write another post discussing the book's content.  Suffice it to say that it covers the material that I wish that I had known when I was starting off as a grad student at Georgia Tech many years ago.
I plan on using it as a supplemental book for most of my classes but anyone is welcome to get it.

Have fun!  Feel free to post corrections.  People that identify errata will be acknowledged and thanked in future editions.

Kickstarter Launches Now Provides Live Stats on Project Success

Kickstarter was talked about a lot in Spring's Emerging Technologies course.  While Sourceforge helped play a major role in open source software entrepreneurship, Kickstarter is covering a much wider range.  As an organizer of the PICMET conference, I was really impressed with the conference that they are funding using Kickstarter.  What a novel idea that all the all registrations are being done through Kickstarter.

While we talked about interesting  Kickstarter projects in the class, I really missed data that Sourceforge provides on projects, their activities, and success.

Fortunately, Kickstarter has just opened up a stats web page with a lot of this information.  The data is still at the aggregate level but this should prompt a lot of interesting new product development research over the next few years in the same way as Sourceforge has.

While Kickstarter is getting a lot of attention and publicity, I'm also very interested in what Quirky is doing.  If you haven't heard of them, Kickstarter projects are generally pretty mature - prototypes have been tested and now they are getting ready for full production.  In contrast, Quirky helps take ideas from the earliest, raw idea stage.  

Kickstarter, Quirky, and others are broadening the ability for everyone to get involved in New Product Development.  If you have a great idea, you can now do something about it.   Now there is opportunity to mine these sources for data to test ideas and I expect that we will be seeing research papers coming out using this data over the next few years.  

Michael Lewis: Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie

In this season of graduations, I ran across one speech that jumped out at me.

I recommended Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball, years before it came out as a movie.  Fundamentally, it is about a rational decision making transformed an industry stuck with metrics that were essentially unchanged for over 50 years through the lens of baseball.  A smaller, poorer company (team) could compete against the well-funded industry giants (actually Yankees rather than Giants...)

I really enjoyed reading his graduation speech at Princeton where he discussed how he made the transition from Princeton grad to best selling author.  The research and writing skills developed in his thesis were key to creating his later books.  You can read the speech or watch a youtube video.

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem

Leif Singer and colleagues conducted an interesting study on how programmers evaluate each other.  A variety of online communities and status systems have helped strengthen the potential for assessing skill.

This could have significant influence on the future of job hunting and how engineers manage their careers.  It could also affect educational systems as these merit evaluation practices could eat into the value of traditional college degrees.

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem
HACKER NEWS | JUNE 2, 2012
http://blog.leif.me/2012/06/mutual-assessment/

The Democratization of Innovation

The last three or four decades seen a major democratization of innovation.  In the 70's there were hardware startups growing toward becoming the big main stream companies like Apple.  The late 90's and the dot com saw the mad rush for the IPO.  The 2000s saw a growth of angel investors and other forms of pre-IPO funding but which still relied on a small number of wealthy people to fund the startups.  (If not the 1%'ers).

The last few years have seen a big push in of the larger population participating in this.  There was Kiva for combining charity and microlending.  This moved on to kickstarter for allowing the masses to help fund projects but without any equity stake.  This could be changing now into kickstarter equivalents that allow for taking an equity stake.

This article in Fast Company does a nice job talking about these new opportunities.

Should be an interesting source of ideas for ETM 590 capstone projects and others classes.

The Crowd Comes Of Age
FAST COMPANY | MAY 31, 2012
http://www.fastcompany.com/1838895/the-crowd-comes-of-age