#self-audit
56 articles
- Quantifying Human-Technical Stability: My Final Survey Deck & Its Weakest Slide
Five minutes to pitch a survey I designed end to end. One slide carries the whole validity argument, and that slide has a circularity problem.
- Sex Differences in PTSD: The Response Paper Where I Confused Prevalence with Vulnerability
Women have higher PTSD rates and lower trauma exposure. My draft read that as fragility. The meta-analysis says something more careful and more interesting.
- The Robotaxi Case: Competitive Pressure as a Root Cause
A sensor missed a pedestrian — that's the proximate cause. The fifteen-day concealment came from somewhere else, and incident reviews rarely name it.
- Psychological Capital Is State-Like, Which Makes It a Manager's Job
PsyCap — efficacy, optimism, hope and resiliency — sits between a mood and a fixed trait. That placement decides whether you hire for them or build them.
- Letter to Reviewers: Answering Every Critique of My Scale in Writing
Ten critique points across eight sections, answered one by one. Sorting my replies revealed the pattern: my concessions were cheap and my refusals expensive.
- Nonresponse Bias Strategy: Planning for the People Who Won't Answer
Four strategies, submitted and defensible. Then I reread my own sentence about leveraging positional power to convert refusals — in a study about power.
- The Public Speaking Final Exam: Studying for a Test About Talking
A silent final with 54 questions showed which half of public speaking a paper test can measure — and how much the recordings contributed.
- My TKI Conflict Mode Results & the Instrument That Wasn't the TKI
A syllabus linked a free sample test and called it the TKI. Six modes, 36 items, a formula predicting who wins. The real instrument has none of those.
- Mission 4: A Correlation of 0.75 & the Wrong Reason I Gave for It
A fitness dataset returned r = 0.75 between sit-ups and broad jump. The coefficient was right. The reason I gave for reading it as positive was not.
- Inhibited and Uninhibited: Kagan's Temperament Study & the Child I Was
Kagan followed 462 infants for seven years. The finding isn't that temperament predicts who you become — it's that it closes off one corner of the range.
- Upward, Downward, Sideways: The Axis That Decides Whether a Comparison Helps
Upward or downward turns out to be the wrong question. Whether you see the person as reachable decides the outcome — and that is a judgment you make.
- The Etymology Exercise: Tracing "Privilege" to Its Root & What the Root Can't Tell You
An assignment sends you to a word's Indo-European root. Privilege comes apart into private and law, and the derivative list shows why a root is not a meaning.
- Seven Files on Getting Triggered: The Toolkit & the Line I Had to Rewrite
Seven PDFs on emotional triggers are really one four-step protocol. The hardest step is noticing — the second hardest is writing down what a camera would see.
- A Letter to Future Me: The Assignment I Sealed & Reopened This Year
The exercise asked for six SMART goals. My letter has the congratulations, and where the goals should be it says 'pppp'. I opened it to find out why.
- The Telephone Survey Is Dying: Reading the Task Force Report on What Replaces It
Cell-only households went from 3% to 57% in fifteen years. The profession's own task force says the replacement is unsettled, and is honest about it.
- The Walls Were Doing the Counting
Kirkpatrick's four levels, controlled experiments, learning hours: every instrument L&D owns needs a program to point at. Continuous learning removed it.
- Informative Speech: The Messy Outline & the Blunder Log
A four-minute speech taught me that a cluttered outline is a design defect you feel on stage — and that my mid-speech corrections were negotiating for clarity.
- Mount Everest: A Case Study in Deference & the Decision Nobody Stopped
Both expedition leaders talked constantly about a turnaround time. Neither ever named one. A rule with no threshold in it cannot be broken, so nobody broke it.
- Normal Is Not the Same as Precise: The Histogram I Misread for Three Years
Simulating 1,000 samples finally made the central limit theorem click — and then showed me I'd spent three years misreading my own histogram.
- Shared Vulnerability: The Model, the Audit & the Studies They Both Point At
Carson cites Andreasen and Jamison as warrant. Schlesinger goes back to those originals. One number sits in both papers, meaning different things.
- The Opposing Processes Model Explains Why Competition Helps and Hurts at Once
I wrote that people thrive under competition, then scored full marks on a quiz saying the opposite. Same evening, same student, same model.
- Systems Don't Have Intentions: A Response to the Framework I Kept Resisting
I argued for weeks with a framework that locates harm in structures, not intent. My own class notes contained the diagnostic I refused to run on myself.
- The POP Model: Three Questions & the One I Was Always Skipping
Purpose, Outcomes, Process — asked before you start. A seven-page tool that showed me my agenda was only ever answering the third question.
- Conscious Capitalism as an Acceptance Criterion: Reading the Deck Skeptically
Conscious capitalism sounds unobjectionable until you ask what would count as failing it. Rewriting it as acceptance criteria is how I read a values deck now.
- The Pew Question I Found in Roper's Archive
A workshop had me pick a construct, then sent me into three survey archives. I found the keywords everywhere and the construct nowhere.
- Chetna Gala Sinha Is My Power Pose
I was asked to name a superhero. I picked a banker in a yellow saree who keeps one hand still for fourteen minutes — and learned why it works.
- How Not to Suck as a Manager: The Case Packet & the Self-Check That Cannot Fail
A case study tells two bad-manager stories from the employee's chair. Part C turns the chair around, with a self-check that cannot come out clean.
- Mental Health in Tech: The Stakes I Named, and the Sample That Couldn't Carry Them
Before touching the data I named stigma, geography, and legal stakes. The country breakdown then showed which of the three this sample could not carry.
- Criterion A: The Trauma Definition I Defended & the Clause Written to Exclude It
I argued trauma should stay objectively defined. The revision I praised for being tighter was written specifically to exclude losses like mine.
- DORA Quick Check - A Critique
A benchmark that scores your team's delivery performance in under a minute. The speed is the product — and why two developers score it differently.
- Building the Catastrophizing Scale: Construction Log & Honest Audit
Three of us built a psychometric scale from nothing — construct, items, peer review, analysis. The honest log: strong reliability, weak validity, an N of 7.
- Lost in Conversion
A number is only as honest as its unit, currency, scale, and sample. I'd converted units for a decade — and still shipped the mistake in my own paper.
- Striving for Equity in Marriage: The Talk, & the Marriage Still in Discovery Mode
A TEDx talk arguing people can transform marriage from within — then an audit of that tidy framework against the messy, unfinished marriage I built it from.
- "Fix Broken Systems, Not Broken People": My Equity Creed & the Audit I Ran on It
I wrote a confident equity creed, then ran QA on it using its own citations — and found the gap between a value you can recite and one you actually practice.
- The LGBTQ+ Panic Defense Prohibition Act & the Question I'd Rewrite
A 25-minute policy presentation taught me the difference between inviting a room to think and demanding that it agree.
- Industry Was a Costume: Seventy of Us Described the Same Tool and Thought It Was Ours
Seventy classmates described AI tools by industry. Underneath the costumes, we had all reached for the same few tools.
- No Root Cause: What Coincidence Analysis Taught Me About Organizational Interventions
Coincidence Analysis taught me that organizational change may not have one root cause — just different sufficient recipes for the same outcome.
- From Needs Assessment to Recommendation: The Belonging Fund Project
My team designed a fund to help students feel they belonged. Our biggest limitation was that we never spoke to a single student.
- Religiosity vs. GDP: A Regression That Passed Every Check — and a Causal Story It Can't Tell
A clean regression linked religiosity and GDP. That statistical cleanliness is exactly why the causal story needs more caution.
- Precise About Forty, Silent About the Rest
A selection-law discussion post showed me how precisely the law can draw one boundary while staying silent about another.
- MGNREGA: The Regression That Held — and the State Where the Budget Line Goes to Zero
A regression linked MGNREGA labor budgets to women’s paid workdays. Then West Bengal’s frozen funds tested what the chart could honestly say.
- The QA Manager, Part IV: Rating the Raters — and Who Never Got a Vote
Designing a QA Manager appraisal showed me that a rating system is a value statement before it is a measurement tool.
- The Personality Score I Didn't Pay For: A Big Five Snapshot & the Textbook Page That Found Me
A Big Five test and a textbook page gave me an accurate, uncomfortable read. Here is what I did with the pattern instead of hiding it.
- The QA Manager, Part III: The Satisfaction Survey I Built — and Every Way It Could Mislead Me
I built a six-question satisfaction survey for a QA manager role, then audited every way my own instrument could mislead me.
- Catching False Passes in a QA Selection Plan
I designed a QA selection funnel with validity coefficients and cutoff scores, then found the statistical error and bias I had built in.
- Shipping Defects in a QA Manager Job Description
Writing a QA Manager job description taught me that job posts and software requirements fail the same way: unclear specs ship defects.
- Brave Spaces vs. Safe Spaces: What Group Coaching Taught Me About Holding a Room
Two group-coaching reflections became an audit of overthinking, silence, and the word that caught me off guard.
- What My Career Anchors Said About the Work I Actually Want
My top two career anchors tied for first place. In Schein's model, they aren't supposed to be roommates.
- What My Cultural Intelligence Assessment Said — and Whether It Was Right
A self-scored culture test labeled me a 'Chameleon.' The honest part was where my own scores disagreed with each other.
- Exploring Psychopathology: Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
A film assignment taught me that addiction is rarely a single event — it's the cumulative result of pressure, pain, and lost connection.
- Looking Inward: What a BuzzFeed Quiz Taught Me About Myself
My professor assigned us a BuzzFeed quiz. I took it twice. I got 'underprivileged' twice. Here is what I found when I stopped pretending otherwise.
- My Power Audit: What I Found When I Examined My Own Influence at Work
A one-page assignment asked me to audit my workplace power. What I found was mostly a map of my own anxiety.
- Can articles be password protected?
An experiment in keeping some writing private.
- Launching surojito.com: Setup Log & Honest Audit
Publishing a personal site taught me that every blocked step is just a negotiation — with a tool, a credential, or a UI that wasn't designed with you in mind.
- Persuasive Speech: Outline & Self-Evaluation
A persuasive speech assignment taught me to build an outline that does the heavy lifting — and that mid-speech corrections are just negotiating for clarity.
- Writing in my own space
Why I'm publishing my course work and self-audits here, in my own words.