If you look at the left sidebar and scroll down to below the archives, you’ll see that I’ve copyrighted this blog and all the documents linked to it under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Creative Commons License. What that means is that you are free to use the content of this blog, as long as you attribute the work to me, do not use for commercial purposes and do not change it in any way. On the surface, I feel like this is a small thing, but as someone who is publishing his academic research while it is being done, I think there are some real issues to go over here.

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Whenever you do research on actual human beings, you have to get approval from the university that your research is in line with ethical standards.  In your typical undergraduate class, you learn, usually via a really goofy video about the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, that the two pillars of ethical research are 1) Do no harm and 2) Informed voluntary consent.  Of course, these are good ethical principles to adhere to, but as with everything in life, adhering to these things can be a slippery slope.  Unless of course, you are doing research on the use of advanced statistical methods by baseball fans.  Typically, when you are just doing interviews, there is an exemption form that you can fill out and the university gives it a once over and off you go.  However, I have been thinking that another way of gathering data would be through various online forums that SABR or Baseball Prospectus hosts.  I figure that there is already lively discussion about the things I am looking at, so it would be a good source of background information and some ideas for interview questions.  Unfortunately for me, that means I cannot get the exemption and I have to go through the whole human subjects approval protocol, which involves a much longer application and a bigger pain in my ass.

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Most of you probably haven’t noticed, since basically no one knows about this blog yet really, but I’ve changed the template. I was using the default one, but I’ve always been a fan of the three column format for blogs. While I hate the color scheme, the overall layout is closer to what I would like for this things. There’s also a good possibility that I’m going to change the template.  Anyways, I’m still working out the kinks of the blogroll and the links section, as well as adding a bunch more widgets that will make finding things on this blog easier for me and for you. I have to say that so far, it seems that WordPress blows Blogger out of the water in terms of features and customizability. However, it is much easier to make changes to the layout in Blogger, as most of the stuff is done with a point and click interface. With WordPress it is a lot more code editing. Luckily, for someone like me, it isn’t that hard to figure out. However, it is a bit more time consuming.

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Sorry that it’s been so long. Again, this blog is supposed to keep me motivated and were it not for this, I might not have gotten back to my work for another three weeks so it’s working already! Anyways, the next few posts are going to be mostly informational posts designed to get this blog up to speed with where my research is at this very moment. I figure that the first thing I need to do is give a more thorough description of the project in terms of its subject, its genesis, and its future direction.

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Hello Blogosphere! My name is Bob Ngo. I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Some of you may already know me from another blog that I maintain (and I use “maintain” in the loosest sense possible) on these here internets. Anyways, as you might guess by the title “PhD Candidate”, I am working on my dissertation on the Sabermetric movement in American Baseball, and I thought it might be a good idea to track the whole process with a blog. I’ve decided to use a blog for a number of reasons.

1. Read the rest of this entry »