wrap up

The fervor of the past month ended today as I tidied up the references. Though this last work barely squeeze into the maximum page count, it seems seriously lacking in content and contribution. A cursory glance shows a decent work with a variety of graphs that decorated the work and hid the incompleteness of the arguments. Flowcharts, box plots, scatter plots, spy plots, time series trace, 3D bar graphs and drawings are strategically placed to distract the reader from the main content.

The literature review follows a structured well developed formula with just enough descriptions to give some hint of understanding without depth of the subject matter and a long list of citations to show scope and extensiveness of prior investigation. In the citations list, make sure the who's who of the field are all promptly cited. Thumbs up are given to cool catchy acronyms as they help to mark up the sexiness and modernity of the technique proposed in the work. i.e. Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm - Recombined (SPEAR) sounds much more attractive than Pareto Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PIEA). Acronyms served other objectives. Make sure you do not use the word 'fuzzy' in your work, it's over used and no longer cool.

My final work was uninhibitedly peppered with acronyms and annotations such as NSGAII, REDS, DM, K, SPEA2, MOEA, ITEI, FC and etc and reference. Acronyms filter out the experts from the newbies. The untrained readers bombarded with the array of acronyms tend to question their own expertise as they face the unfamiliarity of the acronyms used in this area. Busy inexperienced reviewers tend to not check out the reference work to obtain a more in depth understanding of the algorithm behind the acronyms. Keep your fingers crossed for their pride might give you the benefit of the doubt. Sexy abbreviations and nice pictures.. this fields is all about marketing your work correctly. People like myself who place more emphasis on the number of works published rather than the journey of discovery do not belong rightfully in academia. So why am I even considering a Phd?

because I can.. and at a relatively low opportunity cost.