Last night, I submitted a paper on which I’m the second author, after computer vision ninja Kenji. The way it works in academic paper writing is that the first author is usually the instigator and main researcher, and the co-authors either help out with the idea (if they’re senior to the first author), or work on one section of the paper, usually relating to their previous research. Sometimes, the co-author doesn’t do anything more that provide some equations and code. For instance, my academic sibling (same supervisor) and sometimes boss, Mike, has this publication:
Yin Jian-jun, Zhang Jian-qiu, Mike Klaas. æ··åˆçº¿æ€§/éžçº¿æ€§çŠ¶æ€ç©ºé—´æ¨¡åž‹çš„边缘Rao-Blackwellizedç²’å滤波法. 航空å¦æŠ¥ (Chinese Journal of Aeronautics). 2007.
And he doesn’t even know Chinese. I don’t think he knows much about aeronautics, either. Pretty sweet.
The interesting thing about co-authorship is that if you’re the second- or third-listed author, nobody really knows how much you did. You did enough to get credited, but not enough to be the first author. That’s it. You might have spent weeks working on the paper, or taken a few minutes to email some equations. In the absolute worst case, a co-author might not do any research at all, and just be head of the lab or department, though that’s pretty rare in my field. Perhaps not the biggest concern for some folks in the real world, but in academia, publications equals prestige. And prestige equals precious, precious ego-fuel.
Though I admit I cheated on the US geography question.
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| What American accent do you have?
“North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
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| The West |
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| The Midland |
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| Boston |
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| The Inland North |
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| The South |
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| Philadelphia |
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| The Northeast |
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What American accent do you have?
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It’s always a little jarring to even be reminded that I have an accent. Surely, it’s everybody else? No?
When I saw Fargo, I really did feel that the accents were only a slightly-exaggerated version of the accents I grew up with in Saskatchewan. That’s probably the first time I actually heard someone in a movie doing that accent.
When I moved to Toronto, I noticed immediately that everybody was taking like the actors on Degrassi High and The Kids in the Hall, even though until that moment, I had never even thought of them as having any accent at all. And now, living in Vancouver, I almost never notice the local accent, though I noticed it when I moved here (they say their short-as and long-os funny here). When I meet someone from the Prairies, though, I can usually pick up on it, especially if they’re from a small town. And then once they start talking about a whack of bunny hugs and gautch in the slough, the jig is up.
On my international adventures, I always get called out on my Canadian pronunciation of “aboot”, which I simply cannot hear. This annoys me to no end, since I was always convinced it was a myth, and I really can’t tell the difference between the way I say “about” and the way Americans say it.
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I haven’t written in a while, mostly because nothing particularly worth telling y’all about has come up. Though at some point, I have to give some thought to whether I might follow my supervisor, Nando, when he goes to Montreal for his sabbatical this fall. A year in la belle province would be pretty cool, but moving to a new city is always such a huge pain in the ass. And plus, I do kinda really dig Vancouver.
The more immediate concern for me right now, though, is working on my PhD thesis proposal. This is a bit of a hoop-jumping exercise: I have to formally write up what I intend to do my thesis on and present it to a committee who will evaluate it and tell me if it’s acceptable or not. I was hoping to already be done by now, but these things have a tendency to take a lot longer that you expect. Frankly, I’d much rather be doing research than writing about the research I plan to do a year from now. On the plus side, once it’s done, I get to call myself a PhD candidate instead of a mere student.
But now… it’s the weekend! And that means it’s time for wild hedonism! I updated my CV! Wanna see?
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Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Adventures in Asia will continue, but not until after the paper submission deadline for the 2007 International Conference on Machine Learning this Friday.
No, you suck.
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