Libby Hemphill » Links

NSF Workshop Report on Qualitative Research

libbyh — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:44:14 +0000

The report for NSF's two-day workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research is now available. The goals of the workshop were to (quoted from the report):

articulate the standards used in their particular ﬁeld to ensure rigor across the range of qualitative methodological approaches;
identify common criteria shared across the four disciplines for designing and evaluating research proposals and fostering multidisciplinary collaborations; and
develop an agenda for strengthening the tools, training, data, research design, and infrastructure for research using qualitative approaches.

The whole report is 180 pages long, but you can get the gist from the executive summary. For graduate students, the longer sections on "Recommendations for Producing Top Notch Qualitative Research" and "Promising New Research Areas and Topics" are especially interesting reads. I'll post more details when I have a little more time. We don't get to see into the minds of our faculty members every day, and reports like this one give us a glimpse. Take a look, and keep working on your top notch research.

Review: iPhone glass replacement from Mission: Repair

libbyh — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:51:27 +0000

My Situation

I dropped my iPhone 3G and broke its glass. I was so distraught about dropping it that I never got a picture of the broken glass. Trust me, it was depressing.

I checked with the Apple store about a repair, and they offered me a replacement for $299 + tax. That seemed steep and wasteful, so I went hunting online for repair options. No need to fill landfills with broken iPhones. I found two companies who do iPhone glass repairs and had positive reviews: Mission: Repair and iResQ. After blogging about my broken glass, I got emails and blog comments from employees at both companies. Way to be on top of the blogosphere, guys. After checking prices and reviews, I decided to go with Mission: Repair.

Disclaimer: Ryan at Mission: Repair offered to pay me for the ads on my blog whether I got my repair through them or not. He also offered me the same discount available to Apple store visitors who get a coupon from the Genius bar.

My Repair

I chose the 3G iPhone Digitizer Glass Repair and the "I'll send it in; return it to me overnight!" option for $9 extra.

My Review

So, how did it go? Swimmingly!

I sent the phone off via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation on Monday from Ann Arbor. According to the USPS, my package arrived at 11:25am. Less than 2 hours later, I received an email from Phil at MR letting me know they had received my iPhone and would fix it right away. They fixed it Wednesday, shipped it first thing Thursday morning, and I received my phone back in near-new condition on Friday in Los Angeles (I was traveling). At first I was concerned that the glass was not flush with the sides of the phone, but I saw the "real" thing at the Apple store today, and the glass isn't flush on brand new iPhones either.

Bottom Line

Mission: Repair will fix your iPhone glass for less than the other guys and will do it fast and right. I highly recommend them.

Death and Taxes: 2009 Poster

libbyh — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:07:20 +0000

Have you seen this fantastic poster from WallStats?

I'm digging interesting visualizations even more than usual lately, and I especially like this one of our federal spending. I'm not posting it here to start an argument about how we should spend; I just really love the poster and how it shows us where we do spend.

Thanks, FlowingData for telling me about the poster. You should all go visit and subscribe to FlowingData immediately. You may even be able to win a Death and Taxes:2009 poster. I won't enter because I'm trying to cut down on the stuff I buy and will eventually have to move. Please, someone, win a poster and show it to me!

Moving Data

libbyh — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:07:44 +0000

A couple months ago someone hacked into a perfectly innocent server some friends and I use for things like storing backups of our dissertations and running Perl scripts. I was in Seattle when this happened so couldn't be much help in the recovery process. The helpful people at SI Computing recovered all the data from the server and put in on another server ("SIC") for me to access. My job was to move all the data from SIC to a third place so that SI Computing could have their Projects space back. I haven't ever had to remotely administer such a data transfer task. So, I had to learn a few new UNIX commands. Here's how I was able to move 57GB of data from the "SIC" server to the "Hosted" server. I used "screen" and "scp" commands to securely copy my data without requiring a Terminal window to stay open for the 36 hours it took the data transfer to complete. The most helpful websites I could find for those are

screen: http://jmcpherson.org/screen.html
scp: http://kb.iu.edu/data/agye.html

1. ssh libbyh@sic.edu 2. screen 3. scp MyData libbyh@hosted.com:MyData 4. Ctrl+A, d 5. exit

That should do it. You can check in on the data transfer by typing this at the prompt:
screen -r
Hopefully your next big data migration will go as smoothly as mine did.

Flickr junkie turned photojournalist

libbyh — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:27:40 +0000

I'm on Now Public* as a contributing photographer again. This time, someone requested the use of some of my pictures of salmon at and from the Pike Place Market in Seattle. I don't know much about salmon supplies and how they affect people, but this may be a year to learn. The story claims British Columbia's First Nations people are facing a salmon shortage.

Read the story with photos

* Now Public is a participatory news network. Learn more here.