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Friday Fluff – May 13th, 2011

FF3

1) First, a post from the past: Why the indigenous still dominate the Andean region.


2) Weird search query of the week (#5 keyword!): “sara sidner ethnicity”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Edge question 2011”:

At business school (at a well-respected, major research university) one of my profs prided herself on being the most “scientific” of our professors. That was her reputation and she liked to brag about how rigorous and “scientific” her classes were. What her approach consisted of was to demand that any claim made by a student be backed with a citation in the literature. That was it. You can imagine what kind of science gets produced in MBA literature and the quality of studies used to prove or disprove various management fads.
(She was also a huge proponent of using Myers-Briggs test to make hiring and staffing decisions. I consider Myers-Briggs to be one step up from astrology personally.)

Anyway, it was scientism at it’s best. And, given the non-science backgrounds of a typical MBA class, maybe that’s all that can be hoped for — to get them to look past just the management fad books at Borders. I don’t know. Still, it was an odd style. Any analysis without a citation was dismissed as just personal opinion, while any citation, regardless of the quality of the paper, carried gravitas. An in-class discussion was like a debate on scripture — except each side was quoting scripture from holy books that nobody else in the room had ever heard of before that moment.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

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