writing
Entries tagged with “writing”.
- Currently Listening to:
- Travis — Writing to Reach You
Academic paper titles have a tendency to be a bit staid, cautious and flat. Admittedly, this is a pattern I haven’t yet broken out of myself. Perhaps it’s because many non-English speakers are forced to publish in English (as English is the lingua franca of science). Or perhaps it is just prudent: since other researchers will often only cast a cursory glance over paper titles to decide which papers to read, or which sessions to attend at a conference, it generally pays to write clear titles.
In any case, I’ve been on the lookout for some creatively-named papers. Because they are rare, papers with clever and/or funny titles stand out easily among the deluge of stuffier titles. Here are some of my favourites:
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“Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events” By Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris
In Perception, 1999 volume 28(9) pages 1059–1074.
Presented the results of the classic experiment in perception and selective attention involving people passing a basketball around (which you may have seen used for a road safety awareness ad). The title is a play on Gorillas in the Mist.
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“A Very Modal Model of a Modern, Major, General Type System” By Andrew W. Appel, Paul-Andre Mellies, Christopher D. Richards, and Jerome Vouillon. In POPL 2007, pages 109–122.
(Say three times fast.) This title is based on a similarly tongue-twisting song from the musical The Pirates of Penzance.
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“Secret Ninja Formal Methods” By Joe Kiniry and Dan Zimmerman. In Formal Methods 2008, pages 214–228.
Joe and Dan report on their experience with trying to make formal methods invisible to students while they learn good programming practices. Extra marks for giving their presentation in full ninja getup.
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“The television will be revolutionized: effects of PVRs and filesharing on television watching.” By Barry Brown and Louise Barkhuus. In Proceedings of CHI ‘06, pp. 663–666.
A reversal of the title of Gil Scott-Heron’s poem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
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“HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead.” By Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd and Marc Davis.
In HYPERTEXT ‘06, pages 31–40).
The writers themselves suggest this might be the “least memorable title in ACM history”, but I disagree — this immediately jumped out at me as a sly nod to how people use tags.
I might never reach you
Only want to teach you
Writing is harder than hacking. They’re both hard to do well, but writing has an additonal element of panic that isn’t there in hacking.
With hacking, you never have to worry how something is going to come out.
Working on my thesis proposal this week; my thoughts exactly.
- Currently Listening to:
- Queen & David Bowie — Under Pressure
Of course, in the time it took me to colour this in, I could’ve written ten papers…
- The Wesley - Television Tropes & Idioms
There are certain characters who receive a lot of hatred from the majority of the fanbase for one reason or another. Most often, when their creators pick up on the hate, it's either ignored or, sometimes, played into (as eventually happened to Scrappy-Doo in the first Scooby Doo movie).
There are times, however, when it becomes obvious that at least one writer has become attached to a hated character, writing them into more and more scenes, giving them more — and more important — things to do, having the other characters rave about how awesome they are and sometimes even making them the proxy voice of the author, all while blithely ignoring the fact that the fans absolutely goddamned hate this character.
- | insert credit | feature | Journalism: the Videogame |
- Detexify LaTeX handwritten symbol recognition
- CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job? - Charlie's Diary
So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American). You don't have to be a complete loner, but it helps to have a solitary streak (or a bad talking-to-cats habit). It also helps to be an inveterate optimist, because you'll probably need to supplement your income (about 70% of the mean for someone in a skilled trade, never mind a professional job) by taking on other work such as teaching, journalism, or consultancy. As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands. And then, finally, when you go out in public and people ask you what you do for a living and you tell them, they look at you as if you've just sprouted a second head because they know tha
- Darlton is Influential DocArzt's LOST Blog
Today, Time released it’s annual list of the 100 most influential people. They break the list down by Leaders, Heroes, Artists, and thinkers. There’s no particular ranking system anymore, the list is just compiled and broken down by the four categories. To Lost fans, it may come as no surprise that Lost heads Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof both occupy a spot on the list.
Outsiders who aren’t familiar with the show may feel like the two don’t belong on the list, but I couldn’t agree more. The two certainly belong on the list. They’ve been influencing us for the past six years in more ways than we can possibly list here. They’ve helped revolutionize story-telling and character development. Lost has arguably been one of the best shows on TV for the past six years, and it’s hardcore fan base proves this. What other show out there has fans scouring the Internet for any small spoiler snippet or filming report, just to get the smallest shred of an answer to the show’s big mysteries?
- How to write a good research paper and give a good research talk
Writing papers, giving research talks, and writing research proposals are key skills, but they aren't easy. This page describes how I approach each of these three challenges, in the hope that they may be useful to you.
- Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com
- kung fu grippe
So, maybe, at least in some small way, this stupid thing will help remind me that finishing shit means first getting off your ass and then working really hard until you know you’ve earned your keep.
- Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard - Lapham’s Quarterly
Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.
- Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
Don't research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.
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