I am sharing some plans for how I introduce topics to students. I would like other teachers to use them freely. From my course ‘Illicit Markets, Criminal Organizations’ Crime is fundamentally an instance of human insecurity. We need to know what systems create security and insecurity, how and for whom, …
We want to be useful to society. But any attempt to show that or to have it guide us either destroys what we are, or turns us into technical servants or mouthpieces of other peoples’ ends. If you want to see how that turns out, enjoy listening to Christian Rock. …
Many grants have I reviewed, grasshopper. This blog post is meant to give some advice on how to frame a grant effectively so it appeals to reviewers. The first point is to look for what data scientists call “Stop words”. Stop words in data science are terms that are not …
That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ …
Sharing some short and long essay questions from my course on illicit markets and criminal organisations particularly for other teachers but also to help students in how they go about selecting a question to answer. The short essay is either a guided book review, where the student examines the essay …
A PhD applicant did me the service of sending a list of questions in advance to see if we would be a good fit. It was a fantastic idea which led to a focused and creative discussion. It got me thinking about all the questions that went unasked in various …
The aim of this post is to provide a work in progress demo of how using titles for your paragraphs can structure your writing. The idea is that each paragraph has a named purpose in bold. I remove these before submitting the article. The titles add up to a narrative …
A research review is a summary, evaluation and critique of a book or other work, like a report or a collection of research articles. Its purpose is to comment on the state of knowledge on a topic and/or to evaluate a particular theory or contribution. The first task you have …
You know that bit at the end of your dissertation or research paper where you suggest what could be done next, and which is always the last thing everyone writes and which you give less thought to than a status update on Insta? You are doing it wrong. Typically these …
Life is generic, and therefore so is our AI. Botcopalypse postponed for now. Technofear can stand down. As with Zombie move tropes, the real threat is from the humans. Interacting with ChatGPT is not that different from talking to any bureaucracy. I have in the past set out a few …
