Where Dr. Anderson
achieves his professional desire, he does it by pulling together
disparate pieces of the story that answers a
question, inducing people, facts, and concepts to
work together in new and productive ways. He succeeds, when he succeeds,
by changing arbitrary isolation and darkness into purposeful collaboration
and illumination.
He likes to refer to this process as "commensuration," borrowing the
term from arithmetic. Remember how you learned as a child
to combine quantities of different, even incompatible kinds
by bringing them under common units of measure? His research
company, CoMMensa, Inc., takes its name from this notion and the
intellectual objective it suggests.
A special case of commensuration called meta-analysis has achieved some
acceptance as a specialty. Dr. Anderson's interdisciplinary teams have included some distinguished practitioners.
In meta-analysis, one collects data bases assembled for diverse reasons,
by different practitioners, under inconsistent sets of rules and standards,
but sharing some concerns or subject matter. One then applies statistical
techniques and robust good sense to discover messages that the data may
justify together that they would not justify separately.
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