lalfrey's blog

With finals complete and the New Year just around the corner, the gnovis staff is settling in for a long winter nap.

Please check back in mid-January for the return of regular content on the blog.

Until then, from our awkward family to yours...

Happy Holidays!

-- The gnovis staff (In order of appearance) Lydia, Trish, Akoto, Josh, Brian, Lauren, and Garrison  Read More »

The statement of purpose, a universally dreaded element for prospective college and graduate students.  What is more daunting than writing an essay in which you're expected to justify all your significant life choices and synthesize them into a cohesive narrative for an unknown audience?  And did I mention that you have one thousand words or less?  Read More »

It's been an ongoing joke between fellow gnovis blogger, Trish, and I that a semester full of stats and social network analysis has seduced me into post-positivism.  It's true.  I've learned that I like to measure things.

But in all seriousness, quantitative naysayers out there should consider the benefits of visualizing data. On the one hand, charts, graphs, and indexes are limited by their simplicity, and can often hide nuances and complexities. On the other hand, these same tools can be quite powerful for illuminating patterns previously indiscernable among data sets.  Read More »

From technophiles to technophobes, the internet was abuzz this week about a Time Magazine report, claiming that women constitute a paltry 13% of Wikipedia editors, while 87% are men.

So much for the Internet being a great equalizer?  Bloggers, scholars, and journalists weigh in on the implications:

Feministing:  Read More »

A guy walks up to a girl in a bar and says: "Hey baby, what's your schemata?"

I’m not a psychologist and I don’t play one on the internets, but I do find myself desperate for an empirical model to study the interaction between people and culture. Enter psychology. Psychologists have long used the theory of schema to understand the byzantine mental structures used by our brains to process information. And increasingly, social scientists are using schemata in their investigations of culture.

Yet settling on what we all mean by culture (which varies by discipline, by university, and by individual) can be tricky.  Read More »