In the last month, I’ve been published, twice. Which is nice.
The first paper is result of the work I’d been doing for six months: a system and set of algorithms to further the state of the art, and novel research around them. A further month was spent conducting rigorous evaluation of this system, and writing a paper to present this work back to the scientific community, once patents had been filed. The result of this was that our work has been accepted for publication, as a full paper, at CIKM 2011, where only 15% of 917 submissions made it this year.
Contrast this with one wild night spent running around the New York Public Library, which has resulted in a book already being published. I’m now one of the hundred-some authors of One Hundred Ways to Make History, a beautiful hand-bound volume (below) which is now available for public consumption.
This book isn’t just hidden away in some academic conference and being presented in a rainy Glasgow auditorium. This resides, and will continue to reside “For as long as the New York Public Library stands” in the Rare Books Collection within the library, alongside such greats as Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the (unilateral) Declaration of Independence and the first Gutenberg Bible.
The paper, on the other hand, will be handed out to any conference attendees that want it, and from there made available as a pdf to academics and students willing to pay a small fee. The academics will recommend the PhD students read it, and they will in turn diligently print it out, add it to the pile of documents that’s burying their original thesis proposal, and get back to playing Minecraft.
So, you can see, I’m starting to wonder if the day-job is really worth the effort. Maybe I should just talk about doing things instead of actually doing them. The results look a lot nicer and involve far less effort.
Anyone know of any jobs opening up in marketing?
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