+

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
A review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify critically appraise relevant research.

Searching the literature: Having selected a topic the next step is to identify, in a structured way, the appropriate and related information.

A systematic approach is considered most likely to generate a review that will be beneficial in informing practice (Hek and Langton, 2000). While a narrative or traditional review is not the same as a systematic review, its principles and structure may be helpful in determining your approach
(Timmins and McCabe, 2005)

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
In contrast to the traditional or narrative review, systematic reviews use a more rigorous and well-defined approach to reviewing the literature in a specific subject area. Parahoo (2006) suggests that a systematic review should detail the time frame within which the literature was selected, as well as the methods used to evaluate and synthesize findings of the studies in question.

Unlike traditional reviews, the purpose of a systematic review is to provide as complete a list as possible of all the published and
unpublished studies relating to a particular subject area. While traditional reviews attempt to summarize results of a number of studies, systematic reviews use explicit and rigorous criteria to identify, critically evaluate and synthesize all the literature on a particular topic.

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Authors (cont’d)

C. WRIGHT MILLS (1916-1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from
1946 to his death. Mills felt that the central task for sociology and sociologists was to find and articulate the connections between the particular social environments of individuals and the wider social and historical forces in which they are enmeshed. This approach challenges a structural functionalist approach to sociology, as it opens new positions for the individual to inhabit with regard to the larger social structure.

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Authors

RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918-1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercoolded liquid helium, as well as in particle physics.
For his contribution to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1965. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the bestknown scientists in the world. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during WWII.

+
On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)
“To the individual social scientist who feels himself a part of the classic tradition, social science is the practice of a craft.”
 Craftsmanship / ˈ kr ɑː f(t)sm ə n ʃɪ p/
Skill in a particular craft : workmanship , artistry, craft , art , artisanship , handiwork, work; skill , skilfulness , technique , expertise, mastery…

Craft
An activity involving skill in making things by hand :
activity, pursuit , occupation , work , profession , job , position , situation , career , skill, field…
 Wright begins the article with reporting in some detail how he
goes about his craft.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

The most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community…do not split their work from their lives

Using each for the enrichment of the other.

Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; he works towards the perfection of his “craft”; to realise his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of the good workman.

You must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work
✓ “craftsmanship” is the centre of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work.

+
On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

“have experience”: for one thing, your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience.

As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an
“intellectual craftsman”.

But, how? Keep a Journal.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

“Keep a journal”; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.

In such a file…personal experience, professional activities, studies under way and studies plan; as an intellectual craftsman, get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person; relate it directly to various work in progress; may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.

Little personal experience in the course of lifetime is so important as a source of original intellectual work; to be able to trust yet to be skeptical of your own experience is one mark of the mature workman.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

A practicing social scientist ought periodically to review ‘the state of my problems and plans’

Any working social scientist who is well on his way ought at all times to have so many plans, which is to say ideas, that the question is always, which of them am I, ought I, to work on next?

Some such procedure is one of the indispensable means by which your intellectual enterprise is kept oriented and under control. A widespread, informal interchange of such reviews of
‘the state of my problems’, …there ought not to be any
‘monolithic’ array of problems. …there would be interludes of discussion among individuals about future work…on problems, methods, theory.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

In your file… ideas, personal notes, excerpts from books, bibliographical items and outlines of projects… but with many subdivisions

Taking of notes: acquire the habit of taking a large volume of notes from any worth-while book you read

How is this file used? His study of the elite – making a crude outline based on a listing of the types of people, believing in one way in which one’s life experiences feed one’s intellectual work

In the course of work, when you are through with other books… write down whatever your notes and abstracts; on the margins of these notes, as well as in a separate file, for ideas of empirical studies.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

Empirical inquiry: the purpose of it is to settle disagreements and doubts about facts, and thus to make arguments more fruitful by basing all sides more substantively.

Empirical projects must promise:
1)
2)
To have relevance for the first draft, of which I wrote above; they have to confirm it in its original form or they have to cause its modification, having implications for theoretical constructions.
Must be efficient, neat, and ingenious.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

How do ideas come?
“Sociological imagination” means that in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components; it sets off the social scientist from the mere technician.
“It can be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work.” the essence of sociological imagination is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable, for example, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics.
…Playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

To stimulate the sociological imagination:
1)
Re-arranging of the file; simply dump out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing up their contents, and re-sort them
2)
3)
Attitude of playfulness towards the phrases and words with which various issues are defined; for only if you know the several meanings which might be given to terms or phrases can you select
Development the habit of cross-classification; rather than rest content with existing classifications, search for their common denominators and for differentiating factors within and between them, since good types of require that the criteria of classification be explicit and systematic.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)
4)
* Cross-classification is the best way to imagine and to get hold of new types as well as to criticise and clarify old ones; they enables you to discover the range and the full relationships of the very terms with which you are thinking and of the facts with which you are dealing; it is the very grammar of the sociological imagination, so that must be controlled and not allowed to run away from its purposes.
Insights by considering extreme; by thinking of the opposite of that with which you are directly concerned: when you try to contrast objects, you get a better grip on the materials and you can then sort out the dimensions in terms of which the comparisons are made, with a various viewpoints.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)
5)
6)
For the simplicity in cross-classification, working in terms of
yes-or-no: encouraging to think of extreme opposites; because for qualitative analysis cannot provide frequencies or magnitudes – what would pre-literate villages look like with populations of 30 millions?; if something seems very minute, imagine it to be simply enormous.
Comparative grip on the materials; place it inside an historical frame – “some knowledge of world history is indispensable to the sociologist; without such knowledge, …
he is simply crippled”.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)
7)
Distinction between theme and topic, in terms of craft of putting a book together; a theme is an idea, usually of some signal trend, some master conception, or a key distinction, like rationality and reason; “…sort them out and state them in a general way as clearly and briefly as you can … quite
systematically, you must cross-classify them with the full range of your topics. … in the context of literacy craftsmanship, called themes, in the context of intellectual work are called ideas”.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

Using as clear and simple language as your subject to present the work is given; yet “a turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social science” as so-called “a serious crisis in literacy” – ‘ SOCSPEAK ’ by Malcolm Cowley

Do we really need it?: “Such lack of ready intelligibility, usually has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter,
and nothing at all with profundity of thought”; it has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

“To write is to raise a claim for the attention of readers. … To write is also to claim for oneself at least status enough to be read. The young academic man is very much involved in both claims, and because he feels his lack of public position, he often puts the claim for his own status before his claim for the attention of the reader to what he is saying. … Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility”.

To over come the academic PROSE you have first to overcome the academic POSE ; (1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject? (2) When I write, what status am I claiming myself? (3) For whom am I trying to write?

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

Answers:

(1) Ordinary words of common usage are often ‘loaded’ with feelings and values, and that accordingly it might be well to avoid them in favour of new words or technical terms; but many technical terms in common use in social science are also
loaded. To write clearly is to control these loads, to say exactly what you mean in such a way that this meaning and only this will be understood by others;
“The skill of writing is to get the reader’s circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours, to write in such a way that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning”.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

(2) Proactively, distinguish two ways of presenting the work of social science according to the idea the writer has of himself, and the voice with which he speaks; then do not use any voice of any man to present work.

(3) “To write is to raise a claim to be read, but by whom?”; a matter of listeners; if he recognises himself as a voice and assumes that he is speaking to some such public, he will try to write readable prose;
“As a member of the academic community you should think of yourself as a representative of a truly great language, and you should expect and demand of yourself that when you speak or write you try to carry on the discourse of civilised man”.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)
* Final tip: “It will become a new context of discovery, different from the original one on a higher level, because more socially objective. You cannot divorce how you think from how you write.
You have to move back and forth between these two contexts
(between context of discovery and context of presentation), and whenever you move it is well to know where you might be going”.

You are already ‘working’ either in a personal vein, in the files, in taking notes after browsing, or in guided endeavours. Following this way of living and working, you will always have many topics that you want to work out further. After you ‘release’, you will try to use your entire file, your browsing in libraries, your conversation, your selections of people – all for this topic or theme.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

You are trying to build a little world containing all the key elements which enter into the work at hand, to put each in its place in a systematic way, continually to readjust this framework around developments in each part of it. Merely to live in such a constructed world is to know what is needed: ideas, facts, ideas, figures, ideas.

So you will discover and describe, setting up types for the ordering of what you have found out, focusing and organising experience by distinguishing items by name. This search for order will cause you to seek patterns and trends, to find relations that may be typical and causal. You will search for the meanings of what you come upon, for what may be interpreted as a visible token of something else that is not visible.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship
(cont’d)

You will make an inventory of everything that seems involved in whatever you are trying to understand; you will pare it down to essentials; then carefully and systematically you will relate these items to one another in order to form a sort of working model. And then you will relate this model to whatever it is you are trying to explain.

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On Intellectual Craftsmanship

T HE LAST R EQUEST
“Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological imagination.
Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist; let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft.
Stand for the primacy of the individual scholar; stand opposed to the ascendancy of research teams of technicians. Be one mind that is on its own confronting the problems of man and society”.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
“S URELY Y OU ' RE J OKING , M R . F EYNMAN !" is an autobiography of the physicist, Richard P. Feynman—a very unconventional one. Rather than relating the story of his life in a traditional manner, Feynman gives us a collection of unconnected anecdotes loosely organized into this book. After reading the collection of anecdotes, which focus more on mundane details of his life than on major life events (such as marriages, births, for example) and great career accomplishments, what we end up with is a pretty good idea of the day-to-day life and personality quirks of this particular man, and insight into what makes him tick.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)
Along the way to becoming a famous physicist, Feynman puts his inquisitive nature to work in many other areas, and learns a lot about the world outside of his department. He learns about biology, Mayan hieroglyphics, and the ins and outs of Japanese culture. He learns to speak Portuguese, play the drums, profit from gambling, and achieves some recognition as an artist.
Feynman is speaking to us from late in his life, when he has reached the very top of his profession. While he is clearly aware of his own intelligence, his tone is very accessible and encouraging. (It is no wonder he places such a high value on teaching—which is somewhat unusual for a professor of his clout). He encourages his readers to take pleasure in exploring natural and cultural phenomena for themselves.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

One of the most important responsibilities of a professional in any field is twofold: to keep up with new knowledge developed concerning the field, and to contribute to developing such new knowledge about the field.

To use the adjectives "professional," "scholarly," "scientific," and "technical" merely reflect shades of emphasis among the many fields in which people carefully and systematically try to improve humanity's knowledge about, and ways of dealing with, the world and universe in which we live. It would be naïve to try to draw sharp boundaries among these adjectives, or among the fields of human knowledge and inquiry to which these adjectives may be applied.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

Systematic Inquiry
How is new knowledge developed in a field? There is one principal way, along with some interesting occasional alternative ways. The principal way is what is often called
"systematic inquiry": i.e., a careful, deliberate effort to deal with a problem, to investigate something inadequately known or understood.

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can - if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong - to explain it. .
. . In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” (Feynman, 1986)

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

O Americano, Outra Vez!

Certainly, Mr. Big!

An Offer You Must Refuse

Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?
- Immersing into Brazil, Las Vegas, and Japan

7 Percent Solution
- Theory vs. Experiment

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)
✖ ✖
✖

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

O A MERICANO , O UTRA V EZ ! (Portuguese: The American, again)!
“One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting
South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it – it’s no big problem. So I thought, that’s a good idea: I will go to South America. …And since I didn’t know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great majority of the countries there speak
Spanish.”
“Some time later I was at a Physics society meeting in New York, and I found myself sitting next to Jaimo Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked, … ‘Oh! Why don’t you come to Brazil? I’ll get a position for you at the Centre for Physical Research.’ So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese!”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“What they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to
German, so you can imagine a guy who’s been studying
German sitting behind two guys talking Yiddish, trying to figure out what’s the matter. It’s obviously German, but it doesn’t work. He must not have learned German very well.”

“So I learned how to look at life in a way that’s different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that lesson earlier,
I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead of
Spanish.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“When it was my turn, I got up and said, ‘I’m sorry; I hadn’t realised that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of
Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I’m going to have to give it in Portuguese. … and everybody was very pleased with it.
… for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Science.”

“There was a man at the US Embassy who knew I liked samba music. … He said a small group, called a ‘regional,’ practiced at his apartment every week, and I could come over and listen to them play. … I found that interesting, and learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“My theory is that it’s like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At first they’re making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you find there’s delightful twist to their way of speaking – their accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some sort of accent playing the frigideira player.”

“…all the people leaning out of the windows…that was terrific! And I remembered the time I had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands – how I loved the music and nearly went crazy over it – and now I was in it!”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“The people in the band were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn’t look too peculiar.”

“Mr. Feynman, this evening there’s going to be something you will love! It’s tipico Brasileiro – typical Brazilian!”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

C ERTAINLY , M R . B IG !
“…Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive – almost free. … It was just wonderful for a man who didn’t gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages.”
“’You see those girls at the table over there? They’re whores from Los Angeles.’ They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“’And there’s a fella named Gellan, or something like that – a physicist.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was riding in a car full of prostitutes and they know all this stuff!”

“One time I was eating lunch with one of the show girls. ‘See that man over there, that’s Nick the Greek. He’s a professional gambler.’ How can he be a professional gambler? …
‘…because at the table, the odds are .493.’”
‘…I’ll explain it to you. I don’t bet on the table, or things like that. I only bet when the odds are in my favour. … I’m standing around a table. When some guy says, It’s comin’ out
nine! It’s gotta be a mine! The guy’s excited; he thinks it’s going to be a nine, and he wants to bet.’

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)
‘Now I know the odds for all the numbers inside out, so in the long run, I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices – superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.
Now that I’ve got a reputation, it’s even easier, because people will bet with me even when they know the odds aren’t very good, just to have the chance of telling the story, if they win, of how they beat Nick the Greek. So I really do make a living gambling, and it’s wonderful!’”
“So Nick the Greek was really an educated character. He was a very nice and engaging man. I thanked him for the explanation; now I understood it. I have to understand the world, you see.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

A N O FFER Y OU M UST R EFUSE
“When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about
– should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up.
It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind – nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again – I had the solution to that problem.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

W OULD Y OU S OLVE THE D IRAC E QUATION ?
“Near the end of the year I was in Brazil I received a letter from professor Wheeler which said that there was going to be an international meeting of theoretical physicists in Japan, and might I like to go? Japan had some famous physicists before the war – professor Yukawa, with a Nobel Prize,
Tomonaga, and Nishina – but this was the first sign of Japan coming back to life after the war, and we all thought we ought to go and help them along.”
*
For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga , received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“Wheeler enclosed an army phrasebook and wrote that it would be nice if we would all learn a little Japanese. I found a Japanese woman in Brazil to help me with the pronunciation, I practiced lifting little pieces of paper with chopsticks, and I read a lot about Japan.”

“It turned out I was the only guy who had learned some
Japanese – even Wheeler, who had told everybody they ought to learn Japanese, hadn’t learned any – and I couldn’t stand it any more.”

“I have read that the Japanese are very polite, but very obstinate; you have to keep working on them. So I decide to be as obstinate as they, and equally polite. It was a battle of minds: It took thirty minutes, back and forth.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“’Why do you want to go to a Japanese-style hotel?’ ‘Because in
this hotel, I don’t feel like I’m in Japan.’ ‘Japanese-style hotels are no good. You have to sleep on the floor.’ ‘That’s what I want; I want
to see how it is.’ ‘And there are no chairs – you sit on the floor at the table.’ ‘ It’s OK. That will be delightful. That’s what I’m looking for.’
As soon as I got there, I knew it was worth it: It was so lovely!
There was a place at the front where you take your shoes off, then a girl dressed in the traditional outfit – the obi- with sandals comes shuffling out, and takes your stuff; you follow her down a hallway which has mats on the floor, past sliding doors made of paper, and she’s going cht-cht-cht-cht with little steps. It was all very wonderful! … There were all the regular, standard things that you know of now, but it was all new to me.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“…I was a bit disappointed, of course, but this was a meeting of cultures, and I know it was easy to get the wrong idea. … I have read that Japanese baths are very complicated. They use a lot of water that’s heated from the outside, and you aren’t supposed to get soap into the bathwater and spoil it for the next guy. … He (Professor Yukawa) told me the woman had no doubt asked do I want a bath, and if so, she would get it ready for me and tell me when the bathroom was free. But of all the people in the world to make that serious social error
with, I was lucky it was Professor Yukawa!”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“That Japanese-style hotel was delightful, especially when people came to see me there. The other guys would come in to my room and we’d sit on the floor and start to talk, We wouldn’t be there more than five minutes when the woman who took care of my room would come in with a tray of candies and tea. It was as if you were a host in your own home, and the hotel staff was helping you to entertain your guests. Here (in America), when
you have guests at your hotel room, nobody cares; you have to call up for service, and so on. … Eating meals at the hotel was also different. … I had decided that I was going to live Japanese as much as I could. ... So far I had eaten everything in Japan, but this thing frightened me: … I ate it, with some trepidation, because I
wanted to be as much in Japan as possible. … It means ‘chestnut,’ he replied.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. … I said, ‘Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!’ – which means, ‘Let’s
go! Let’s go! Hurry! Hurry!’ I realised my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases from a military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because everyone at the hotel began to scurry like mice, saying, ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’ and the bus left right away.”

“The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. … We realised that in
America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy’s standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilised about those things than we were.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“’…Give me one example’. That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. … So in
Japan I couldn’t understand or discuss anybody’s work unless they could give me a physical example, and most of them couldn’t fine one. Of course who could, it was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a much simpler method of analysis.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. …
One day he was teaching me the word for ‘ SEE .’ ‘All right, you want to say, M AY I SEE YOUR GARDEN ? What do you say?’ ‘No, no!, when you say to someone, Would you like to see my garden?
You use the first ‘ SEE .’ But when you want to see someone else’s garden, you must use ANOTHER ‘ SEE ,’ which is more polite.’
‘Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?’ is essentially what you’re saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella’s garden, you have to say something like,
‘May I observe your gorgeous garden? So there’s two different words you have to use.’

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

“‘No, no! In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant.
So you have to say something that would be equivalent to
‘May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?’ … I gave up. I decided that wasn’t the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(cont’d)

T HE 7 P ERCENT S OLUTION

“The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay.”

“…Christy came out, and I came out, and we both agreed: It’s 2 percent, which is well within experimental error. After all, if they just changed the constant by 7 percent, the 2 percent could have been an error. I called my sister back: ‘Two percent.’ The theory was right.”

“Murray Gell-Mann and I compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on the theory. The theory was rather neat; it
was relatively simple, and it fit a lot of stuff. But as I told you, there was an awful lot of chaotic data. And in some cases, we even went so far as to state that the experiments were in error. … ‘The trouble with theorists is, they never pay attention to the experiments!’”

+
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

“…I never looked at the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester
Conference I would have immediately looked up ‘how strong do we know it’s T?’ – that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have recognised right away that I had already noticed it wasn’t satisfactorily proved.”

“Since then I never pay any attention to anything by ‘experts.’
I calculate everything myself. … I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.” ♬

 Science as a Vocation
 Effects of the Technological Developments for Scientific Research
: Advantage or Disadvantage?

Implications from Weber’s Lesson and Effects of Technological
Developments
 Conclusion
 Discussion Question

•
Max Weber was a German Sociologist, philosopher, and political economist.
•
One of the Well-known Works includes:
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
•
Methodology : Methodological Anti-positivism . Weber focused on individual-level and culture and how individuals can reshape the culture ‘inter-subjectively’ and can influence on the social structure.
There is no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of culture….All knowledge of cultural reality…is from particular points of view…the reduction of empirical reality to “laws” is meaningless – Max Weber, “Objectivity” in
Social Science, 1904
•
Against Marx’s historical materialism, Weber emphasized the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism.

 A Research Question
What are the prospects of a graduate student who is resolved to dedicate himself professionally to science in university life?

 Bureaucracy : the assistant as the worker is dependent upon the implements that the state puts like the employee in a factory upon the management.
 Hazards as too human factors
Agonizing whether one should habilitate every scholar who is qualified or whether one should consider enrollments
Intellectual Aristocracy
Role of chance in career
 Specialization : Difficulty of crossing into even related fields. A really final and proficient achievement always a specialist achievement.






 Progress and the Meaning of Science

Science differs from art in that “it is directed to the course of progress”
A work of art that attains real ‘fulfillment’ will never be surpassed, and will never become obsolete…By contrast, every one of us who works in science knows that what he has produced will be obsolete in ten, twenty, or fifty years.
That is the fate, indeed, the meaning of science work, to which it is dedicated and devoted in a quite specific sense…Every scientific ‘fulfillment’ means new questions, and is intended to be surpassed and rendered obsolete ….It is not only the fate, but also the goal, of all of us to be surpassed scientifically.
 Not evident how this is inherently meaningful
 Why pursue something that never comes to an end and never can?

 Disenchantment
 Does it mean that like magic, every person, or every scientist, knows more than someone in earlier periods in history?

Hardly, All we need to know is that we can ‘depend’ on it to behave in a certain way and can act accordingly. Thus, increasingly intellectualization and rationalization does not mean increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which we live our lives.

It means something else….that if we only wanted to, we could learn at any time that there are, in principle, no mysterious unpredictable forces in play .

 Means Vs. Ends

Science presupposes validity of logic and method, but also “that the products of scientific work are important in the sense of being ‘worth knowing’.
 It is here that our problems begin, for this presupposition itself cannot be demonstrated by scientific means. It can only be interpreted to determine its ultimate meaning , which can then be rejected or accepted according to one’s own ultimate attitude to life.
 Through all sciences, rationalization of means to attain an end whose importance cannot be justified through the same form of reason.

 The Role of Teacher / Value Systems
 Anyone can step into public sphere to debate, e.g., political matters, but must be analytic in the classroom – presenting available positions and enabling the students to take their own position, not forcing views on them
 The scientific justification of an opinion is impossible, except when investigating the means of achieving a purpose that is accepted as a given. It is meaningless, in principle, because the various value systems in the world are in irresolvable conflict with each other.

 What Can Science Offer?
 Assistance to the individual to give an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions to himself, although science usually cannot make an answer for normative questions like “how we should live?”.
 Whether or not under such circumstances science is worthy to become a
‘vocation’ and whether or not it has an objectively worthwhile ‘calling’ itself .
 Science today is a
‘profession’ practiced in specialist disciplines in the service of self-reflection and the knowledge of interrelated facts, and a gift of grace from visionaries and prophets offering revelation and the benefits of salvation.


Cited Resource:
The Internet and Asian Studies(1996 ASAA Conference)
“What Does the Web Mean for Understanding Asia?”

A Special Issue to be Still Valid : Does Digital Divide Still
Matters even in Academia Worldwide?
Frank Conlon : I have a sense of concern that the media, the electronic media, particularly the more advanced, the more technologically demanding media, are very difficult to access for many scholars and institutions of learning and research in the countries that we study……without taking into account the fact that some of the audience who would be perhaps the most critical in reacting to our writings and our comments don’t even have a chance to see them , much less to react to them.

 Hamish McDonald : Many, many Indian academics have had access to email services for some years now and have used them actively….Like many others..
I could I could be dialing for up to three days before I could actually make contact with the net and I must say I came away rather discouraged.
 Frank Conlon : I think in the States there is far too much selfcongratulation about what we’ve achieved electronically without taking into account the fact that some of the audience who would be perhaps the most critical in reacting to our writings and our comments, don’t even have a chance to see them, much less to react to them.
 Babara Metcalf (BM) : I am certainly not at the cutting edge of technology and so Frank’s introductory remarks are relevant. He was talking about the great gap between the technologically informed and uninformed so I am a kind of working bridge.

 Implications for Conducting Scientific Research : Quantitative VS Qualitative Dimension

Fundamentally, Weber’s lesson is that whether knowledge is worthwhile to seek is not known, an endeavor to know for its own sake is to have its own meaning of the process to answer for the ‘calling’ of science by having the right type of academic inspiration and rational experiment, not by components of the magic or prophet.
 Technological developments especially for communication can open the possibility to broaden variety of research methodologies. The development of quantitative methods was due to lots of sophisticated statistical and numerical software to constituting of data set and conducting large-N analysis.
 Although Max Weber seem to focus on anti-positivism toward the establishment of the
‘Science’ through interpretative dimension and shaping through culture and structure the individual lies in, nowadays academic endeavor to make a compromise between quantitative and qualitative has also arisen, as Keohane, King, Verba showed in
‘Designing Social Inquiry’, which states that Quantitative research share the same “logic of inference” that Max Weber wanted to elaborate.

 The most important thing might be whether a scientific endeavor as a vocation was really kept in check , regardless of the debates between the methodology[Quant vs
Quali] or research philosophy[positivism vs anti-positivism].
 Does Specialization Matter?

Rather than ‘specialization’ as Max Weber indicated, nowadays interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches can be adopted to expand the explanatory breadth of the realities, namely the complexity of our world.
 In this respect, with the coordination of various types of academic disciplines, area studies can be a backbone to particularize the contextual settings of an area or region.
This particularization can complement ‘positivism’ which might be at best based on explaining ‘correlation’, not causal links.
 Intensification of the Technological Development
 Although technology has developed further, differentiations between the informed and the ill-informed have not been overcome.

 In this respect, academic disciplines can be Europe or the US-oriented easily. With the help of technology, in terms of social and natural science, it is easy for researchers to access to data sets and accumulate knowledge regarding the reality of the world. The exogenous constraints such as ‘technology’ will not likely to allow researchers to realize hard-boiled ideal as the spirit of science as ‘vocation’ .
 Due to the technological advance, Europe or US orientation of knowledge is unavoidable for an individual because the structure has been construed through the capitalistic and bureaucratic state. Although Internet space even opens the possibility for a democracy as a social experiment, contemporary global academia seems to be still confined by the aristocratic spirit and academic bias.
 In this case, there is high possibility that information circulated over the globe are likely come from the Europe or US. Ambivalently, it is quite important to accumulate information of the non-European and non- American area and keep the rules of thumb in terms of the right way to conduct a scientific research to explore an inquiry, although it can seem meaningless or insignificant to others.

 Although Max Weber asserts that whether or not objectively worthwhile calling itself, science is ‘profession’ practiced in specialist disciplines in the service of self-reflection, the meaning of ‘science’ itself is also construed and can be converted into to ‘inter- or multidisciplinary academic fields from specialist disciplines through the interaction of the social structure : ambivalent aspects of the technology. In this respect, area studies can open the door for a new type of science itself.

