Starting Afresh…
A new look to keep the trains running smoothly.
404 – Page Not Found… it’s there, I swear!
Error Establishing Database Connection… *grumbles in PHP*
This is why I am in business and not computer science. (Seriously, I was a hair away from being a computer science major in undergrad, but debugging PHP during the dot-com boom turned me off of it.)
Anyway, welcome to the refreshed amckenny.com and catscanner.net. It’s now a WordPress/BoldGrid site instead of my own custom PHP code, so hopefully that means less upkeep and fewer bugs. It also enables me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for some time… this.
I’m doing this mostly to hold myself accountable for staying up-to-date on reading interesting things from both the academic and popular business press. As I get engrossed in my own research, I often slow down on reading other work not directly related to the paper in question. Some of that is natural and appropriate, but sometimes I end up taking it farther than I should… I want to see if this helps.
What to expect…
WILT – What I Learned Today
I love learning new things, and I suspect I’m not the only one. So when I learn something I find novel/interesting enough to share, I intend to post it here. It’s not going to be every day, but a couple times a week seems reasonable.
Publications
As I publish new work, I will provide an extended abstract of the work, perhaps some thoughts about it, and provide a link for those interested in reading more. In academia, we typically take a bit of a passive view on promoting our work. I appreciate the modesty of it all, but it does lend to the feeling that we’re talking (only) to ourselves. Maybe this is a happy medium between isolation and aggressive self-promotion?
Useful Tools/Techniques/Tricks
Jeremy Short and I designed the computer-aided text analysis package CAT Scanner to provide researchers with a free text analysis tool. In my research, I’m often developing little tools to help me do things faster/ easier. If I think others might be interested in trying out these tools, I’ll share them here as well.
Musings
As I am working through perplexity—whether theory development, methodological choices, or pedagogical decisions—it is tremendously helpful for me to get my thoughts down in writing. By trying to articulate my thoughts in a clear manner, I often find that the solution becomes more apparent as well. I see this being useful to that end as well.
At any rate, welcome to the new, cleaner amckenny.com.