Philip M. Parker
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Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 85,000 books that his program created[2][3] and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[4][5]
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[edit] Biography
Born dyslexic, he early on developed a passion for dictionaries.[5] He gained undergraduate degrees in mathematics, biology and economics. He received a Ph.D. in Business Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has Masters degrees in Finance and Banking (University of Aix-Marseille) and Managerial Economics (Wharton). He was a senior consultant at EMCI, and an economist for Nathan Associates in Washington, DC, before moving to INSEAD.[6]
[edit] Work
[edit] Books in economics
As well as co-authoring some technical economic articles, Parker has written six books on national economic development and economic divergence. These insist that consumer utility and consumption functions must be bounded by physical laws, against economic axioms which violate laws of physics such as energy conservation.
- Climatic Effects on Individual, Social and Economic Behavior, Greenwood Press, 1995
- Cross-Cultural Statistical Encyclopedia of the World, Greenwood Press, 1997. A four-volume encyclopedia, which recasts international national economic statistics of the world into linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups.
- Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth. MIT Press, 2000. This forecasts global economic and demographic trends to the year 2100: he concludes that long-run economic convergence between different cultural groups is unlikely.
[edit] Online dictionary
Parker is also involved - as entrepreneur publisher and editor - in new media reference work projects. He is the instigator of Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition, a multilingual online dictionary.
[edit] Automatically generated books
Most of his automatically generated books target niche markets (the Long Tail). Examples include:
- a series on rare diseases published by Icon Health Publications and coauthored with James N. Parker. A typical title of this series is The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Spinal Stenosis [1]
- a series on the future demand for certain products in certain regions in the world, largely consisting of tables and graphs, published by his company ICON Group International, Inc. A typical title is The 2007-2012 Outlook for Bathroom Toilet Brushes and Holders in Greater China which retails for $495. [2]
- a series on cross-language crossword puzzle books, e.g. Webster's English to Italian Crossword Puzzles: Level 1, published by ICON Group International, Inc. The clues are in the foreign language but the words to be filled in are in English.
- a series of cross-language dictionaries and thesauri, e.g. Webster's Quechua - English Thesaurus Dictionary
All books are self-published paperbacks and are printed only when an order arrives; Parker estimates that production of a book costs him 12 pence.[3] Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically.[5]
Parker's programs can also produce rudimentary poetry as well as scripts for animated game shows intended to teach English to non-native speakers and available on YouTube. He plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.[4]
[edit] References
- ^ 'Method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing', U.S. Patent 7,266,767, 4 September 2007
- ^ Marc Abrahams. Speed Writing, The Guardian, 29 January 2008
- ^ a b Marc Abrahams. Automatic Writing, The Guardian, 5 February 2008
- ^ a b He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work), The New York Times, April 14, 2008
- ^ a b c Ein Mann sieht Code, Financial Times Deutschland, 9 May 2008. (German)
- ^ Parker's INSEAD web page
