An approachable reference tool that packs in an impressive amount of information.
Towsey’s comprehensive guide aims to help employees plan, manage, and scale their research to improve methods and results.
Anyone whose job description involves researching—whether as a ResearchOps specialist, marketing manager, or professor—will be interested to learn new methods for improving their operations processes. The first section of this manual breaks down scaling research vocabulary and strategies, including the relatively new term “ResearchOps” (which largely refers to maximizing value wherever it’s most needed) and the ways that “research outputs, people, and systems must be balanced and orchestrated to achieve strategic priorities.” The second section covers the eight elements of ResearchOps: “Participant recruitment” (how to find people for your study); “Knowledge management” (emphasizing the importance of trust within a study team); “Onboarding and support” (which includes choosing the proper support operating model); “Tools and vendors” (how to create your own “research tooling blueprint”); “Ethics and privacy” (how to protect your participants); “Money and metrics” (including the four operational tactics to get maximum money for your research); “Program management” (how to prioritize tasks); and “People and skills” (how to attract and keep top talent). Each chapter contains plenty of industry and real-world examples, such as when the author observes that any map of a public transit system mimics a kind of “decision tree.” Despite its nearly encyclopedic length and density, Towsey’s guide manages to leaven the heavy use of technical terms and jargon with a warm and engaging tone. Copious amounts of graphs and charts, many of which are extremely technical, break up the text and provide guidance for more visual learners. The author even works in some lightheartedness by recommending that readers “tackle one or two big hairy audacious goals.” While the material certainly isn’t for beginners, Towsey’s suggestions are both useful and relevant for professionals in the field of research.
An approachable reference tool that packs in an impressive amount of information.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781959029229
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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