Writing

For graduate students, or people in academia, writing is the staple of their life. How to write an organized and intriguing paper is a difficult task, especially for people learning English as a second language.

One tip that I personally feel useful when writing a paper is to determine in advance "what story am I going to tell the readers?" Indeed, people like to hear about stories and even a profound research article can have attractive story lines. The story line(s), or narratives, will make papers not only more readable, but also more coherent.


Another tip of writing a research paper is to make your paper like a "funnel." What this means is that you start fairly broad (introduction of the current field of study), gradually narrow down to the specifics (lay out your research focus and the results), and then go broad again to discuss the implication of your findings and your contribution to the knowledge body.

This structure is also applicable when composing the literature review section, where you start with very broad overview of current literature and end with your particular interests in that study. These points are mentioned in the book on the right side. However, this is only one of many elements that make a good literature review. Another main idea to keep in mind, as far as I know, is to write around arguments, not around authors!

I learn this from my adviser, who might learn this somewhere else too. This statement suggests that literature review is not only an accumulation of various studies from different authors. It should be a systematic depiction and summary about relevant studies. Writing around authors would make the literature section look like a pile of names without knowing the connection or relationship between studies. According to another professor in my department, you can tell whether the authors are students or faculty by reading the literature review. But don't get me wrong. I am not saying that writing around the arguments is the necessity.

The element of good writing should also include choosing the right language. Here I am not talking about selecting the right/ precise word. I am talking about how to "frame" your argument. For instance, "limitation" is a section common to most of research papers. However, many researchers call it "discussion of the NATURE of the data." The difference might seem subtle. But the "nature" of the data would sound more positive and agreeable than "limitation," which make your study sound unimportant. Another point about limitation is that "do not end with it." Your study should finish with the "big bang," not constraints.

These are just some tips that I either heard from my academic mentors or read from some writing handbooks. I believe there are tons more and I'll be extremely happy if anyone would share their own tips or experience with me. A good article, after all, does not come from memorizing principals, it comes from constant practice and discussion.

Recent deadlines

1. Barrow Minority Doctoral Student Scholarship (US citizen only)
2. March 15, NCA Doctoral Honors Seminar @ Boulder, Colorado
3. March 15, Nanorisk annual conference, click here for more information
4. April 1 (11:59pm, EST), AEJMC, submit paper here
5. June 1, 2008, Nicholas C. Mullins Award for more information, click here
6. Call for Papers on Communicating Climate Change
   

• notice of intent to submit, by July 15, 2008
• submission deadline: August 15, 2008
• with an aim for March 2009 issue of Science Communication

Is there a true public opinion

Some public opinion surveys conducted by media organizations have been criticized for its inprecision. The large gap between poll results and the real election results in the 2004 presidential election has illustrated the problem vividly.

A commentary published in BBC Chinese.com pointed out that "one" medium close to the pan-blue camp has long suffered from the high refusal rate, thereby decreasing the reliability of its polls. This commentary was taken as an evidence for many pan-green supporters to attack the KMT and the media friendly to the party.

However, if you read the article, the sentence criticizing the polls conducted by a certain medium was nothing more than an "observation" or "anecdote." No systematic analysis or research is involved. This article was cited by many bloggers just because it came from the internationally acclaimed BBC (British Broadcasting Company).

Here, I am not going to criticize or defend the pollsters. What I care about is what affects survey responses.

In many Journalism research method class, students have been taught to pay attention to sampling methods and sampling errors. But there are way more than issues related to sampling that would affect survey results.

For example, question wording matters. The effect of wordings on responses was documented in the study of Kahnamen and Tversky about framing. The famous Asian disease experiment can be found here.

Question order is also a factor. If a question about president Chen's job performance is preceded by a question asking about current status of economy, chances are that his rating will be low. This is an effect called "priming," with Iyengar and Kinder (1987) being the early scholars in this field. The effect rests on the assumption that human knowledge is composed of a network of inter-connected nodes. What opinion people may have depends on which "note" is activated.

Other factors, such as the numbering of response categories, the choices provided, question context, and so on, also rendered effects on poll results.

As a media audience, we therefore can not just look at the percentages presented in an opinion poll, for these numbers can be misleading. To be aware of this is very important, especially in an era when people frequently encounter opinion polls and when media coverage focuses only on "who is ahead and who is trailing."

Another framing example

"Benevolent act"

A couple of days ago, the KMT presidential candidate Ying-jeou Ma presented the nation's young man a gift. He said, if he is elected, the government will offer those young newly-wed two million dollars as home loans without interest for two years.

Seems a pretty good policy, right?

"Punishment for being single"

The DPP candidate, Frank Hsieh, however, considered this commitment malignant to single people.

Here the same issue is portrayed differently by the two candidates. One deemed it as positive and good will, whereas the other thought of it as negative. This is similar to the abortion issue in the United States that pit "right of choice" against "right of life."

The two frames again invoked very different images and may create different public climate. Needless to say that those who see it as a punishment will be against the policy, or even the candidate, while those think of it as benevolence will react the other way around. Which frame people may adopt rests in their demographic background, social economic status, social experience, and so on. Therefore, many scholars suggest that frames live a double life: one lives in the media and political world, with the other residing in people's mind. Frames work most effectively when these two aspects match!

From this example, we can see that political actors can "package" an issue strategically, arouse different emotions from people, and distinguish supporters from non-supporters. Based on the framing effect, it is evident that what is important is not what you say, it is how you say it! When a candidate or a politician can find a "term" or "frame" acceptable to most of the people, chances are that (s)he will garner their support.

Framing CKS

The blatant act of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to rename the CKS memorial hall and the plague at the front entrance has captured the attention of the whole island.

Many people may be curious why the government would bother to change the name of a memorial hall and make it such a big news?

This is because what's involved is not just name change. It is a struggle of two diametrically oppositional ideologies. To put it differently, it is a war between two "frames."

Frames refer to perceptual filters that tell you how to consider an issue and how to make sense of new information with existing knowledge base. In this way, our brains do not have to learn new things all the time. Many scholars argued that frames are culturally relevant. We can see this dimension clearly in this "re-naming incident."

As the original name, CKS memorial hall, suggests, the former president was such a great leader that everyone should be aware of his contributions. He was so sublime that he has a huge brass bust over hundreds of fliers of stairs. People here are more like pilgrims than visitors. The name and the structure of the memorial hall suggest CKS a historically memorable leader and the country should all memorize him in honor of his contribution.

The other perspective is quite opposite. People holding this opposite belief thought of CKS more as a dictator who should be held accountable for the 228 tragedy in 1947, which led to large-scale social commotions and death. The incident was later characterized by some people as a conflict between Taiwanese and "outside province people." In the eyes of these people, CKS was a person who obstructed the democratization of Taiwan. Since the ruling DPP has long been branding itself as a party representing grass-root voices, it's not surprising that its leaders would advocate changing the "CKS Memorial Hall" to "Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall."

As we can see, the images invoked by the two frames are different; that is, the way people will look at the former president is different. One implies that CKS is a hero, with the other implying him being a villain. One recognizes CKS's contribution to the country; the other holds him responsible for the tragedy.

Therefore, whether you support or oppose to the name-changing act depends on which frames you adopt. In the "war of words," there are no right and wrong. There are just differences!

[Nanotechnology] Scientists worry more than the public

The research published in the November issue of Nature Nanotechnology indicated that nano-scientists worry more about the health and environmental impact of nanotechnology than the general public.

The research has garnered extensive media attention since the article in Nature released. There are also many bloggers talking about the implication of the findings. I am, therefore, not going to spend time doing redundant things.

What will be focused here is the background and stories of the scientists survey leading to this Nature article.

About an year from now when I was back in Taiwan for vacation, I received email from my professor about an seemingly easy assignment--looking for contact information for leading nano researchers in the US.

By contact information, I mean which institution they are affiliated with, their physical address, email address, office number, and everything you can think of about a person. Well, since Google has been so powerful a tool where you can almost find anything, I am not too "worried" about the task, especially when I was only responsible for 700 researchers (out of around 1,000 in the whole sample).

Things turned out to be messier and time-consuming than I expected. First of all, as we are looking for "first author" only, many of them are graduate students and had been graduated by the time their research got published and collected in our database. Second, not all of the researchers were affiliated with a University, which usually maintains a more comprehensive information about its constituent. For those who worked in companies or research centers, such as IBM or Dupont, information was really difficult to gather. The third thing that exacerbated the searching process is the citation format used by the academia. As is widely known, many nano authors are from out of the country and it is extremely difficult to ensure the identity of people with the same last name and the same first name initial. For example, you may find a lot of "Wang, T" in different universities or organizations.

As I rummaging through the webpages trying to collect as much information as I can, I started to appreciate those laboratories with detailed Web site explaining what they are doing and, most important of all, their staff and researchers. The coolest thing is that some of them even listed their past group members and their later whereabouts. This information just saved my life!

I am glad that all these are done and the results published in internationally acclaimed journal. This post is perhaps less academic, but it certainly shows the cumbersome process of collecting valuable data.

More detail about the study can be found with the reference listed below.

Scheufele, D. A., Corley, E. A., Dunwoody, S., Shih, T., Hillback, E., & Guston, D. (2007). Nanotechnology: Scientists worry about some risks more than the general public. Nature Nanotechnology.

For more discussion about this study, please visit: Nanopublic authored by Dietram A. Scheufele.

New site

This cite is mainly for me to post some articles or information relating to my research interests, most of which is about the interplay between media, emerging science, and politics.

Not sure how well I can do and how far I can go. But setting this blog up is at least the first nice step. :)