This week’s country was Curacao, a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. We cooked the following dishes:
Keshi Yena – cheese stuffed with meat. We used edam and gouda. 8/10. Recipe here.
Fried fish – we were originally planning to cook okra soup called Giambo. The market where we always bought okra from did not have okra unfortunately. Thus, we just cooked fried fish with a Curacao style sauce. 7/10. Recipe here.
Pumpkin pancake – pancake made with boiled pumpkin. The pumpkin taste was so subtle though. 6/10. Recipe here.
Developing Improvisation Skills: The Influence of Individual Orientations – another unique study using Live Action Role-Playing as the data collection method. As someone who is not really good with thinking on my feet, I found their three types/stages of improvisation skills useful. Imitative improvisation refers to merely taking inspiration from others. When you can then create an original response guided by some structure, you then evolve to reactive improvisation. When you do not need anymore external triggers and can just easily break existing structures, then you are at the generative improvisation stage.
The sandwich game: Founder-CEOs and forecasting as impression management – with so many people posting about their successes on social media, impression management is becoming more and more relevant. In this study, the authors argue that founders are less likely to oversell their company’s forecasts due to their concern with their long-term relationship with investors. I find this quite unintuitive especially when my top of mind founder CEOs are Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.
This week, we cooked food from Cuba. Here are the recipes we followed:
Ropa vieja – Translates to old clothes. It is shredded beef. We should have probably cooked our beef more until it has really disintegrated but we were getting hungry already. Reminded me of other beef stews back home. 8/10. Recipe here
Black beans – I’ve never really cooked beans before. I never ate beans either as a dish on its own. I liked it in the end. 7/10. We followed the recipe from NYT.
Fried plantains – The easiest recipe so far. It’s literally just frying plantains. Still do not know what is the difference between this and bananas. 7/10
Arroz con leche – Rice pudding. It’s also a common dish here in Spain. 8/10. Recipe here. Miriam’s family says that their grandma’s version is still the best.
Organizing Crisis Innovation: Lessons from World War II– talks about the role of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development led by Vannevar Bush during World War 2 in spurring innovations such as radar, atomic fission, penicillin, and malaria
The long wave of the internet – traces the history of the internet and the paradigms occuring across each phase of its development
We cooked cuisine from Madagascar this weekend. Interesting fact about Madagascar is that like Filipinos, they are Austronesian. This group spread from Taiwan to other parts of South East Asia, Oceania and Madagascar through boats. We share the same language too. Here are the recipes we tried:
Romazava – beef stew with greens. It reminded me of the Philippine food sinigang without the tamarind. 7/10. Recipe here
Koba akondro – rice cake with bananas and peanuts. It was our first time to cook with banana leaves too. That was a cool experience. 7/10. Recipe here
Behavioral Visibility: A New Paradigm for Organization Studies in the Age of Digitization, Digitalization, and Datafication – A lot of people are working online now. The study then explores how we can become “visible” in this digital age. I can identify with the paradoxes they enumerated in their paper: Connectivity paradox where employees who want to connect with their colleagues may cause interruptions. Performance paradox where people who spend time working hard on a task may not have time to make their work visible. Transparency paradox where organizations which want greater communication can end up obscuring activities.
The coauthorship networks of the most productive European researchers – prolific researchers publish with other highly cited collaborators. Not super surprising. Yet, this is something that I always have to remind myself. You have to find productive collaborators who will help you push your research forward.
This week, we tried Bahamas cuisine. Here were the dishes we cooked:
Conch fritters – I’ve not eaten conch before. It’s sea snail. We made fritters through this recipe. Miriam’s family loved it. For me, it was too rubbery. 6/10.
Rice and peas -This was easy to cook. We followed this recipe. In theory, it should be with pigeon peas. Since there was none in the supermarket, I substituted it with green peas. Apparently, lentils or beans would have been a better substitute. It tasted great. 9/10.
Guava duff – a pastry with guava. Instead of being baked in the oven, it is steamed. Recipe here. It tasted wonderful. 9/10.
In any skill you want to learn, it’s always useful to explore it from two views: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach starts breaking down the problem into components and then trying to understand how each of these building blocks fit. In contrast, the top-down approach starts from the big picture to get a good survey of the landscape and working down from there. It is advantageous to use these two lenses iteratively to ensure that you do not miss important considerations in decision making. Iterating through the two can help you converge to a better understanding of the field.
Let’s say that you are trying to learn a skill like programming. You can start by working top-down. This means that you try to get a general idea of what the skill entails. Perhaps, it is about trying to create a website. From day one, you then start creating the website. You learn the different skills involved in creating the site as you go along. If you want to put a yellow bar on top of the page, you google just to find how to do that. You look at the code of other websites to see how they implemented these features.
On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from learning how to code itself. You learn about the different functions, typically from a book or a guided lecture. After learning these building blocks, you then integrate them to larger components.
The challenge with the top down approach is that the learning process may seem too scattered that you may have some important gaps in your knowledge. While you may end up producing an output that “works,” it may all be based on bad foundations. In the end, the output you get may be in such a bad architecture that it may have to be redone again with experts who are well versed with the bottom up. However, the good thing about the approach is that you get something out of it quickly. You then get a mental picture of what you need to work on next. You create your own map of the learning journey you need to take.
On the other hand, the challenge with the bottom-up approach is the difficulty to motivate yourself to continue along. If you don’t see any product for a long time, you might just give up and see no point to studying the details. However, the bottom-up approach can be rewarding as you have a great understanding of each component. You do not see the field merely as a black box.
The two approaches require balance. You need to work top down to see how each component fits together. You also have to go bottom up to ensure that you know each component well enough.