Ok, that’s nothing new right – so what.  Given that you always have planned your project and time right you inevitably have gads of time left once the time comes to write, right?  Perhaps that one time in a blue moon when things don’t go as planed, or the client pushes up a deadline, or just the fact that we live in the real world sneaks up on you, you find yourself writing under pressure.  How can you cope, how can you prepare for the unexpected rush job without losing some of your reputation with a half-assed product?

Good news, I just came across Lindsay Olson‘s article about just that – How to Write Under Pressure.  She gives 8 tips (the first 8 below) for writing under pressure from a PR point-of-view.  I will restate her list in more of an Eval point of view plus throw in a few of my own tips.

1. Get rid of distractions – close down a few Windows on your screen, or turn off the internet altogether if possible. Tune out to whats going on around you so that you can focus on getting the job done.
2. Just do it – stuck on finding the perfect opening or headline? Sometimes it’s best to just start writing and get the juices flowing, then go back to edit later. Imagine what your stakeholders would be talking about were they discussing your paper – what would capture their attention?
3. Break it down – if the idea of writing an entire piece right now is overwhelming, create smaller, more do-able “homework” assignments. When I’m really stuck and not motivated to write something that really needs to get done, I set a schedule for myself. For instance, I’ll tell my lazy self that I must write for the next 30 minutes and then reward myself with another, more desirable activity – such as writing this blog entry.
4. Start with the easy stuff –maybe thinking of a fresh way to write the really cool findings eludes you, but you can easily write the fact-filled introductory paragraph and the boilerplate paragraphs. Doing so makes it look like you’ve written more than you have and could be the inspiration you need.
5. Imagine what the reader will think – every piece of communication you write has an intended audience. Put yourself in their shoes for a second and think about what they want to know, what their first question will be upon reading your headline or opening line or what their reaction will be to your news.
6. Take a break – this kind of flies in the face of my first few tips where I suggest just focusing on the matter at hand, but honestly some of my best ideas come when I switch gears for a short time and get up from my desk to do something different.
7. Keep a diary blog – a lot of writing experts recommend this because it gets you in the habit of writing, gets the ideas to appear on paper and is a fabulous way to get a sense of your writing style.
8. Read – I recall a saying that good writers are good readers, probably because reading a variety of materials will expand your vocabulary, open you to new ideas and keep you current.
9. Explain your ideas to your Grandma – Einstein once said that “you do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”  This means for me, that I try and explain my thoughts to my fiance‘ and gauge her reaction.  She hates this but it helps me to find better ways to explain my thoughts.
10. Trust your unique ideas – You were given this project or hired for a reason.  That reason includes who you are.  Go with a quirky idea, or a unique way of presenting a table/graph.  You never know how it will influence your ability to express your ideas after that bit of originality.

No one gets into Evaluation without liking the work.  Expressing your ideas is perhaps the most important aspect of the work since until you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) no one else knows exactly what you do.  Pressure is just one of those facts of life and, if you let it, can be a stimulus to great writing if you don’t let it pull you down.

Resources like the AEA365 blog, this blog, Custom Evaluation blog, ect… are tremendously valuable to the Evaluation community.  First, they are a free source of great information about what we do for a living.  Secondly, blogs are a discussion within the community; a running dialog between those who have first hand experiences.  Why more people don’t jump right in to that discussion is baffling to me.  I know you’re saying – “well there are many reasons people don’t keep or read blogs everyday; time constraints for one, its complicated to join the conversation, …”  Well I will disagree with both of those and not just because I keep two blogs and consult on a few others.

If time is your limiting factor, find a Web-based aggregator for RSS/ATOM feeds.  I use Google Reader and really like the simple interface.  Several friends of mine use FeedBurner (which is now owned by Google) for the same task.  When I find a blog that I like, has good information I will want to keep up with, or even xkcd web cartoon (which is a techie type 3 day a week cartoon) I subscribe to in my reader.  Every morning when I log onto my computer I check my email and my reader.  The reader gives me in one place all the updates for about 15 bogs or web sites in a quick and orderly fashion.  I become up to date in about 10 mins.  I will comment on the articles I choose and after about 15-20 mins I have made one or more contributions to the daily conversation.

Just reading what is going on in the community you work and live in is terrific, adding to that with comments or your own blog is super fantastic.  I suggest to you if you don’t use a feed reader to try out Google Reader and add a few RSS feeds to it.  Taking the 5-10 mins to keep up with all that is going on is more than worth your time, and will not only increase your knowledge but will make you a better evaluator/consultant/member of your community.

However, beyond those thoughts the heart of many projects/evaluations/research questions rests firmly on previous research – either because it brings up new questions or it is the foundation of a new project.  How many times have you (or I for that matter) read an abstract and thought – “heck yeah, thats exactly what I was looking for” and just accepted the paper simply because it was in a reputable journal and said what we wanted to hear?  I cite two examples as to why it is so important to use your head when reading research.

One is the recent retraction of the article discussing MMR vaccines (measles, mumps, and rubella) which was linked to increases in autism in 1998 by an article in The Lancet.  Jenny McCarthy and Oprah both jumped on this article and preached as gospel.  As it turns out The Lancet made this statement to The Globe and Mail:

Ten of Wakefield’s 13 co-authors renounced the study’s conclusions several years ago and The Lancet has previously said it should never have published the research.

“It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield … are incorrect,” the internationally renowned scientific journal said in a statement Tuesday. “We fully retract this paper from the published record.”

Last week, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had shown a “callous disregard” for the children used in his study, acted unethically and had brought the medical profession “into disrepute.”

Wakefield and the two colleagues who have not renounced the study face being stripped of their right to practice medicine in Britain.

For the study, Dr. Wakefield took blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party, paying them 5 pounds each ($8) for their contributions and later joking about the incident.

I think this not only discredits the article, the author, but also McCarthy and Oprah for blindly accepting it.  More than a dozen other studies, as well as trend data from California and other states, show that neither the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal nor the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. In March 2009, a federal court dismissed both of these theories in a most definitive way after hearing weeks of testimony and gathering thousands of pages of evidence.  If only people would have questioned it as loudly as the supporters praised it.

Secondly, a yet to be published article in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Jason M. Watson, Ph.D and David L. Strayer, Ph.D out of the University of Utah investigate what they call “supertaskers.”

To test multitasking abilities, study authors Jason M. Watson, Ph.D and David L. Strayer, Ph.D, evaluated the ability of 200 participants to drive safely while talking on a cell phone.

First, participants were only assessed on their performance of simulated driving. The test was then performed again with a simultaneous cell phone conversation that tested memory and math skills.  TechNews Daily reports that performance was evaluated in four key areas, including brake reaction time, following distance, memory, and math execution.

Only five “supertaskers” (three men and two women) excelled at operating the driving simulator while simultaneously having the cell phone conversation without any loss in performance on either task.  Not only did they excel at each task, but their memory abilities actuallyincreased by 3 percent.

On the other hand, the driving skills of the majority of participants suffered with the addition of the cell phone conversation.  According toMedPage Today, it took these participants 20 percent longer to hit the brakes when needed and many failed to keep pace with the simulated traffic.  Memory and math skills also decreased.

Perhaps their findings are legit, they did get base line data about how the test subjects drove in a simulator without a cell phone.  Here is my question though – did they get base line data on how well the subjects performed without drive but with only the math and memory questions on a cell phone?  I will have to wait till the article is published to find out.  My point here is that even though it makes sense that it would be rare to be able to drive and analytically think at the same time, people once thought it made sense that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe.

Question everything, accept nothing (on face value) is so very important to remember in today’s world.  The immense pressures on researchers to “publish or die” by universities along with how easy it is to get just about anything published today puts the onus on us as the consumer of the information to question it, follow it up with additional sources, and use the common sense ruler to see how it measures up.  Basic understanding of statistics, logical thinking, and the ability to go find one or two supporting papers will help keep you from falling into the pit of humiliation down the road.

Evaluation is no different either.  Perhaps not for us (granted new techniques and methods are constantly be developed and honed) but for our clients.  Those that need evaluation the most are often scared or at the least, leery of it.  What dose this diagram teach us as evaluators then.  Hopefully you just said something similar to, “teach people about evaluation and they will not only welcome you, but assist you in many way to improve your evaluations.”  But teaching people about evaluation is hard, people are scared of statistics, and no one likes the perception of being judged.  Then there are the times that a client seeks evaluation when there is barely enough time to even do the evaluation much less do it well or take the time to educate the client and plan the evaluation.  C’est la vie…

Perhaps just having a better understanding of the client who is ignorant of evaluation can lead to less stress all around.  Maybe even a 5 or 10 minute conversation can create stressful motivation for the client to learn about evaluation.  Hopefully eustress and not distress though.  It seems that people fall into one of two categories, they either have too much skill and no time or challenge, or too much challenge and not enough skill.  A lot of times clients fall into the not enough skill group.  Understanding the dynamics of your current situation helps to convert distress to eustress, and hopefully there is some education (from both sides) that result in smoother relations in the future.

Dombrowski is an avid amateur photographer and has been documenting graffiti since 2007 at the University of Chicago Library where she works. She has taken the documentation to the nerdy step though. Rather than just posting a blog with humorous graffiti or tracking down and busting the budding artist who can’t afford a proper canvas, she took it to the nerdy level and did a statistical analysis of the graffiti she has recorded. WOW! Just the idea of this project screams “cool” to me. I’m sure that comment just lowered my street credit… However, she has published a book with a selection of the best graffiti, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur: Confessions of the University of Chicago. What is perhaps more impressive is that she has broken down the graffiti into measurable categories and found trends over time. Some of the more interesting findings can be found at at Inkling online magazine.

Ever since I read this article I have had it in the back of my mind. What other seemingly insignificant, everyday occurrences could be analyzed in some meaningful way? Maybe bumper stickers and vehicles they are on; or t-shirts (though it would kinda weird to photo document that); maybe even tattoos. I will set a goal to eventually find something that could be interesting but is typically disregarded as meaningful.

Hi Stewart

Hope you enjoyed the conference! You have me really thinking about setting up a blog and another colleague encouraged me as well. So, I have a few questions for you:

1.       Why WordPress instead of BlogSpot?
2.       How do you filter out negative feedback or being hassled?
3.       What did you say about pasting your e-mail address?
4.       How do you get on the radar? I am still leary about Facebook, etc.

So, are you going to do a blog on blogging? I think others are interested as well.
Thanks very much!
Regards
Gail

Gail V. Barrington, PhD, CMC
President

BARRINGTON RESEARCH GROUP, INC.
P.O. Box 84056, Market Mall RPO
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T3A 5C4
Telephone (403) 289-2221
Facsimile (403) 276-1171
Visit our Website: www.barringtonresearchgrp.com

My reply -

Dr. Barrington,

I will attempt to answer your questions in a manner short enough for an email.

Question 1.
I did start my first blog at blogspot, it works well and is easy and free.  There are many advantages to that, and even Dr. Germuth uses blogspot for her EvalThoughts.com.  If you visit many blogspot blogs, you quickly notice that they are easy to spot as being produced with blogspot even if you spend a lot of time customizing it.  Also, blogspot will always have ads on it, related to your content, so blogspot is a good way to advertise for your competition in a sense.  Using a CMS (content management software) such as WordPress gives you the ability to not only make the site/blog 100% customized but also gives it a very professional look.  Not only is WordPress a good CMS for blogs, but it is super easy to also set up a static page with word press.  In my mind if I were looking for a consultant or even a company for my needs, I would personally chose the one that seemed to have taken the time and money to present themselves as professionally as possible, “if a company takes the cheap way out – what else will they take the cheap way out with?”.  I chose WordPress as opposed to Drupal or XOOPS or any of the many other free or cheap CMS’s for two reasons.  First, it was suggested to me by a friend who uses it on his home server and he told me that it was very powerful and easy to use, as well as the fact it gives you 100% control over everything. Also there are many free templates out there (or cheap ones) to use so that you do not have to know how to set up the page to start out, just be able to install a pre made one.  Secondly, my web hosting service (Hostgator.com) offers WordPress (and a few others) on their servers making installation quick and automated.  I did try a few of the other CMS’s that Hostgator offers and I found them more awkward to use as there was much less ‘how to’s” available when I would do  Google search to learn how to do something.  Another thing to concider is that if you would like your own domain name for your blogspot blog, you will be paying for the domain name thus removing the free aspect, and you may as well put things exactly where you want and be able to do the polishing on the site that blogspot may or may not offer, depending on your wants.  You should however look at this link, for blogs, big name companies like The New York Times, CNN, NASA, ect use WordPress. http://www.creativefarmdesign.com/about/sites-powerd-by-wordpress-gallery/

Question 2.
Feedback or comments is easily handled.  On my blogs, and even my web site pages I have the option in WordPress to do one of three things.  I’m sure the other CMS give similar options as well.  I can either allow all comments thereby having the comment immediately post after someone submits it, or I can moderate all comments.  I sometimes have it moderate the comments if I find I am getting some spam, so I get an email (automatically) when someone submits a comment and then I get to review/edit/discard/allow the comment at my leisure.  The third option is to not allow any comments at all.  A fouth option of sorts could be to force people to register with your site before being able to post, but I felt that if I used this option it could potentially create the need for me to serve as IT support when they had a problem with the site since there was a registration process and they would have “joined” the site.  If that makes sense.
In addition, there are plug-ins (optional modules that can be installed into WordPress created by others for free mostly) that will act as a spam filter like on your email.  I use this as well, but I don’t ever rely totally on it.  I use it along with moderating comments.  I don’t get spam anymore, and while I try to keep the topics non-controversial for the most part, I have never gotten any rude/mean/ect… comments yet.  If I ever did, I would decide then to either edit the comment, or just discard it.  It is my blog after all and I am free to pick and choose what to allow.  The newspaper comments someone talked about, being funny to read because of the absurd things people talk about is something I’m not interested in having associated with my name so I avoid making situations like that available.

Question 3.
99.9% of the time if your email is taken from the Web and added to a spam list it is done by a bot (or automated piece of software that searches the web for anything that looks like an email address) and not a real human behind the desk.  If you make an image of the text of your email address (as in type it out in word/powerpoint and take a screen capture, then crop it down to just your text) and then instead of typing or linking (because they find it even if you just have the text Gail Barrinton Email but have it hyper-linked with your email address) your address use the image the bots are much less likely to be able to harvest it.  You can even use PhotoShop or the like to customize the email address images to match up perfectly and thus look like its typed but you can’t select the text for cut and paste, you would only be able to select the image.  It makes it harder on your visitors as well since they would have to hand copy your email or remember it to send the email.  The best way however is to set up a contact page, where the user enters their info and the email message in a text box on your site and then the email is sent to you behind the scenes, its easy for your users and your email is never out there for bots to find.
I don’t worry with it though to be honest as I don’t yet have a problem with spam.  What little spam emails I do get usually do not get past my email spam filter, but if it ever dose become a problem I may go back and change everything to an image.  I use Gmail (google’s free email service) for all of my email and they do a good job with their filters.  If you are surprised by that since my return address is not ***@gmail.com, that is one of the nice features of Gmail and why I like it so much.

Question 4.
This is the million dollar question.  I was able to boost my page rank and google search returns by doing a few things.  First and perhaps most importantly, you must register with all the major search engines.  Each has a different process, but they are all pretty well explained and not too difficult to do, but a few aspects are on the more technical side (such as making and submitting a site map of your site and keeping it up to date with any changes you make – fortunately WordPress has a plug-in for that).  Secondly, I became active on a few forums that received a lot of traffic.  I made sure that I set up a signature for each forum so that when I posted a comment or reply it would have my website (in the http://xxxx.com format) included in the signature.  When the search engines crawl (the search engines periodically scan pages for changes – my site gets crawled by google several times a month for example) those forums it will see a link to my site, thus making the search engine think my site is more important since others are linking to it.  This is called an inbound link, and the more you have on other active sites the more important your site seems to the search engine.  Also I got my friends with web sites to link to me as well.  Beyond that, having useful information that people want to find will help you get on the radar.  Always remember though that it takes some time, no matter what.  My blog didn’t show up for a few months on the front page of the google search even though I had done all these things, and eventually more and more people started find the site, and as traffic grew, so did my search results ranking.  A caveat is that I perhaps misspoke in the workshop, I am no longer as high in the search results as I once was.  This is becuase a few months ago, I changed how my site was accessed (I changed the file structure to make it more organized for my purposes) and though to anyone else everything looked the same the search engines were able to see the difference and so I am having to rebuild the page rank and search results rank.  Since it is my personal blog and I don’t really care too much aside from ego purposes where it is when you search it, I’m not really worried, but I have taken note before I start to work hard on my consulting site “radar imaging”.  Also, you can invest a little money and use Google Pay per Click which guarantee’s you a top three search results for the keywords you want, but you pay between $.05 and $3 per click from the google search.  You can put a monthly cap on it, along with other management options.  I may look into that more for my consulting site, but not as a forever solution, but just to get the page out there at first.
Facebook and Twitter are great places to have a presence as they are very heavily trafficked and your link will appear a lot when the search engines crawl those sites as well as and perhaps more importantly, they are excellent networking tools, especially with the 20-40 year old population.  There has been recent research into social networks (like facebook and twitter) and though I can’t call that research off the top of my head, I do remember that they are quickly finding that they are very powerful tools that are under utilized still.  I will try and go back and find some of that research.  I will not tell you that Facebook is a totally safe place to be (no where on the net is really), but for the most part if you exercise good sense when using it, it is extremely benign.

I know this is a lot of information, and I tried to make it understandable even if you have no experience in the area.  I hope this at least starts to answer your questions.

“AP is reporting on a suit filed in Northern Georgia in which AT&T claims that Verizon’s ‘There’s a Map for That’ ads are misleading and amount to deceptive trade practices. Verizon had already agreed to modify their original ad to include a tag line that voice and data services are available outside 3G coverage areas. “ What’s interesting is that on some level, this is actually a lawsuit over data visualization.