Smoke rings

Essay."On this episode of The Missouri Review podcast, we'll be listening to Rachael Hanel's 'Smoke rings,' the winner of the Voice-only creative nonfiction category of our 2008 Audio/Video Competition."--Publisher's Web site

2018 Scholars at Work Conference Program

Program for the 2018 Scholars at Work Conference at Minnesota State University, Mankato on March 30, 2018

2019 Scholars at Work Conference Program

Program for the 2019 Scholars at Work Conference at Minnesota State University, Mankato on March 29, 2019

Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman\u27s Path from Small-Town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army

The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Rachael Hanel ventures further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/university-archives-msu-authors/1455/thumbnail.jp

It’s Not Just About Patty: The Real Inside Story of the Symbionese Liberation Army

Jeffrey Toobin’s 2016 book American Heiress and 2018 CNN docu-series resurrected the strange case of Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress kidnapped in 1974 by a band of domestic terrorists calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. The American public knew the Hearst name, so coverage of the kidnapping and aftermath focused squarely on Patty. But when Patty Hearst is the blinding sun in this story, the SLA members remain in the shadows. Who were these people? How they did they make the journey from middle-class kids to revolutionaries brandishing weapons? This presentation will give a brief overview of the SLA members, focusing more precisely on Camilla Hall, a St. Peter, Minnesota, native who was part of the Hearst kidnapping and who was killed along with five other SLA members in a May 17, 1974, shootout with Los Angeles police

Strategies for Teaching Large Lecture Classes

Large lecture classes pose unique challenges for instructors that are not found in smaller classes. Typically in large lecture classes, students are packed into rows in an auditorium facing the instructor, which limits the opportunity for pedagogical approaches such as small-group discussions, team work, and other activities. Additionally, instructors must find ways to adapt to a student body with a wide range of ages, abilities, learning styles, and interests

Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis

In this crowdsourced initiative, independent analysts used the same dataset to test two hypotheses regarding the effects of scientists’ gender and professional status on verbosity during group meetings. Not only the analytic approach but also the operationalizations of key variables were left unconstrained and up to individual analysts. For instance, analysts could choose to operationalize status as job title, institutional ranking, citation counts, or some combination. To maximize transparency regarding the process by which analytic choices are made, the analysts used a platform we developed called DataExplained to justify both preferred and rejected analytic paths in real time. Analyses lacking sufficient detail, reproducible code, or with statistical errors were excluded, resulting in 29 analyses in the final sample. Researchers reported radically different analyses and dispersed empirical outcomes, in a number of cases obtaining significant effects in opposite directions for the same research question. A Boba multiverse analysis demonstrates that decisions about how to operationalize variables explain variability in outcomes above and beyond statistical choices (e.g., covariates). Subjective researcher decisions play a critical role in driving the reported empirical results, underscoring the need for open data, systematic robustness checks, and transparency regarding both analytic paths taken and not taken. Implications for organizations and leaders, whose decision making relies in part on scientific findings, consulting reports, and internal analyses by data scientists, are discussed