As I write, the first day of 2014 is fading and the new year will quickly become just a fact along the way. The reprieve from emails and demands that the holidays permit will be a distant memory. And big data will grow bigger and bigger still and require more and more help from cool research synthesis procedures and meta-analytic statistics. That's why we are here. I am teaching a graduate seminar this spring on the subject, at the University of Connecticut, and I've asked…

I'm winding down after a productive sabbatical leave and of course summer's waning days. I should be working on that new course preparation (yikes, I'm teaching in a week!), but I wanted to say something about trends in recent months (and years) connected to Big Data in the media and science.

It strikes me that the original instantiation of big data is meta-analysis. Isn't it the goal of meta-analysis to pool all the relevant data into one…

Most of what scholars do hinges on having sufficient skill to create meaningful assessments of knowledge and the evidence base that underlies it. Meta-analysis is a skill set you can develop if you work at it with enough deliberative practice. How much deliberate practice does it take?…

It's sunny as I write you from my home office in mid-September, where I work at home during my sabbatical leave. As you probably know, sabbaticals are a periodic break from the regular hum-drum of academic life in order to focus more concertedly on other goals, mainly scholarly.

Popular belief has it that "sabbatical" is just another word for "vacation," but it is not true, well at least not for me: It is true that I am teaching no courses until next fall (and trying hard not to think…