Author Archives: Victor Barger

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About Victor Barger

Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

The Power of Procrastination

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Last night Jorge Cham, creator of the Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip, gave a talk at CIRTL Forum 2008 titled “The Power of Procrastination: Surviving Graduate School and Deciding What is Next”. Absolutely hilarious! If you’re a graduate student and you haven’t read his comics, you owe it to yourself to take a look. You can read them online, check out the Top 200, or buy one of his books:

Enjoy! :)

What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School

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What They Didn’t Teach You in Graduate School is a practical guide to life as an academic. The authors, Professor Emeritus Paul Gray and Professor David Drew, enumerate the keys to success in a semi-categorized list of memorable (and often humorous) “hints”. Topics include the dissertation, getting hired, conducting research, publishing, and tenure, to name a few. Doctoral students would do well to read this book and refer to it often as they progress through their programs and enter the professoriate.

I Am a Strange Loop

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I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is a curious book. It’s written in a conversational style, but it is by no means an easy read. The author draws on ideas from mathematics, physics, computer science, and philosophy to explain his thoughts on consciousness. The complexity of the subject matter and the author’s writing style make it difficult going at times, but if you have an open mind, are fascinated by questions of human intelligence, and enjoy an intellectual challenge, I think you’ll find it worth the effort.

Hofstadter's Law

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It always takes longer than you think it will take, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. —Douglas Hofstadter

Source: Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop, p. xiv

Emotions Revealed

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Ekman leverages his research on facial expressions to explore human emotion in Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. At the most basic level, the book serves as a guide to perceiving and understanding emotions in oneself and others. More thought-provoking, though, are Ekman’s insights into emotion as a driver of behavior and his conjectures as to the evolutionary bases for emotion. For the motivated reader, references to academic research are provided.

Society for Consumer Psychology 2008 Winter Conference

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I just returned from SCP 2008, which was held in New Orleans. What a great conference! The two keynote speakers, Russel Fazio and John Cacioppo, were simply amazing; it was inspiring to hear them talk about their research.

Joann Peck and I presented our working paper, In Search of a Surrogate for Touch: The Effect of Haptic Imagery on Psychological Ownership and Object Valuation, at the working paper session. We received a number of helpful questions and suggestions. The session also provided a welcome opportunity to interact with the other participants and learn about their research.

Incidentally, here’s the abstract from our working paper:

Previous research has shown that consumers value objects more highly if they own them, a finding commonly known as the endowment effect. This effect extends beyond legal ownership to psychological ownership, which can arise simply from touching an object. In this research, we explore the possibility of using touch (haptic) imagery as a surrogate for actual touch. An experimental study demonstrates that an increase in psychological ownership and valuation can be obtained by having consumers close their eyes and visualize touching an object; moreover, this increase is similar in magnitude to that obtained from having consumers actually touch the object.

If you’d like a copy of our paper, let me know and I’ll be happy to send it to you when it’s available.

Okay, now that I’m all invigorated it’s time to get back to work!

Raising a matrix to a power in R

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A surprising deficiency in R is the absence of an operator or built-in function for matrix exponentiation. I had to deal with this today when porting a function from MATLAB to R. Here is my quick-and-dirty solution:

mpower = function(M,p) {
	A = as.matrix(M)

	if (dim(A)[1] != dim(A)[2]) stop("not a square matrix")

	# M^{-1} = the matrix inverse of M
	if (p==-1) return(solve(A))

	# M^0 = I
	if (p==0) return(diag(1,dim(A)[1],dim(A)[2]))

	# M^1 = M
	if (p==1) return(A)

	if (p < -1) stop("only powers >= -1 allowed")
	if (p != as.integer(p)) stop("only integer powers allowed")

	R = A
	for (i in 2:p) {
		R = R %*% A
	}
	return(R)
}

Not the most efficient method, perhaps, but it works. If you know of a better alternative, please add a comment to this blog entry. One possibility might be to port MATLAB’s expm function, as defined in expm1.m in the MATLAB demos directory, to R.

For a detailed review of methods for computing the exponential of a matrix, see:

Moler, Cleve and Charles Van Loan (2003), “Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix, twenty-five years later,” Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 45 (1), 3-49.

Switching from MATLAB to R

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If you’re an experienced MATLAB user and you want to get up to speed quickly on R, these reference guides may prove helpful:

Similarly, R users may wish to refer to these when using MATLAB.

Doctoral Cynicism

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June Cotte, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Richard Ivey School of Business, wrote an interesting piece for the MarketingAcademics@AMA Newsletter, in which she addresses the cynicism frequently seen in doctoral students as they progress through their programs:

Many first-year students are remarkably curious, wanting to test new ideas every day to see if they are any good. They often possess open minds, a willingness to entertain both sides of an issue … and a tendency to avoid entrenched opinions. They are (mainly) not cynical.

… [T]hese students look so different from how they will be four or five years from now. Why? Often because the system, which I admittedly am a part of, teaches students the skills they need to critically evaluate research but not the skills to appreciate the inherent craziness and difficulty of publishing in top journals. I’ve seen students in seminars trash the work of some of marketing’s finest scholars. Why? Because there were trade-offs made during the research process (of course), and these students do not yet understand that this is inevitable. It’s easy to see flaws (it’s one of the first skills PhD students learn) but much harder to master the breadth of knowledge necessary to be able to locate a piece of work in the field and know whether it is innovative and important, even with its flaws (that’s one of the last skills most of us develop).

So, first-year doctoral students, as you read the papers … that you will discuss in your seminars, take a few minutes to appreciate what the authors have to say, in the context of what others have had to say about the issue, before you head to the meat of the paper looking for methodological flaws to bring up in class. Be wary of the path of the chronic “but-they-didn’t-do…” reader, for that way lies the sarcastic reviewer and the cynical professor.

In my first year as a doctoral student, I heard a similar sentiment expressed by an editor of one of the marketing journals: doctoral students tend to be poor company, because they’ve been trained to think critically but haven’t yet learned to turn this ability on and off. He said it often takes years for newly minted Ph.D.s to master this and start enjoying life again.

Professors as Writers

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Based on his research on scholarly writing and his experience counseling authors, Dr. Boice devised a four-stage approach to writing consistently and productively: (1) establish momentum, (2) develop external controls, (3) foster intrinsic motivation, and (4) leverage sociality. In his book, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, Boice introduces techniques for mastering each of these stages and offers insightful advice to keep the words flowing. Whether you’re currently experiencing a block or are simply looking for preventive measures, this book is a worthwhile read.