Philip M. Parker
Born (1960-06-20) June 20, 1960
U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Academic career
InstitutionINSEAD
Alma materWharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) is an American economist and academic, currently the INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science at INSEAD in 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] He claims that his programs have written more than 200,000 books.[2][3]

Early life

Born dyslexic, Parker early on developed a passion for dictionaries.[3] He gained undergraduate degrees in finance and economics. He received a Ph.D. in business economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has master's degrees in finance and banking from Aix-Marseille University and managerial economics from Wharton.[4]

Work

He was a professor of economics and business at University of California, San Diego before moving to INSEAD, where he has been a professor of marketing since 1988. His work focuses primarily on macroeconomics.[4] He introduced the idea that physical sciences (physics and physiology) should be directly integrated into microeconomices.

Books on economics

Parker has written six books on national economic development and economic divergence. His books argue that consumer utility and consumption functions should be bounded by physical laws and against economic axioms which violate laws of physics such as conservation of energy.

  • 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. He provides an explanation of why distance from the equator matters in economic development. His explanation of the equatorial paradox is based on the following:
    1. humans are tropical mammals, most adapted to live in a climate with temperature around 25 °C (77 °F);
    2. as the distance from the equator increases, the angle of the sun is smaller and the average temperature goes down, and one's exposure to natural sunlight diminishes;
    3. to survive in places distant from the equator, people had to learn and master how to produce clothes, food, etc., to survive, not for luxury;
    4. from this point of view, GDP is heavily weighted as an indicator of natural misery of the environment one lives in;
    5. by mastering methods to survive over centuries humans in the higher latitudes accumulated more knowledge and physical technologies to produce goods;
    6. as populations increased, social technologies (institutions, law, etc.) developed as adaptive mechanisms;
    7. these social technologies and cultural traits enabled reproduction of social and physical technologies over centuries of increasing cumulative social, cultural, and physical capital.

Online reference works

Parker is also involved—as entrepreneur publisher and editor—in new media reference work projects. He is the creator of Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition, a multilingual online dictionary created in 1999.[5][6][7] It uses the "Webster's" name, which is now in the public domain. This site compiles different online dictionaries and encyclopedia including the Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), Wiktionary, and Wikipedia.[8]

In 2021, Parker was reported to be working on a multilingual "content engine" project named Botipedia, designed to use natural language learning and algorithmic search engine sifting to fill the translation gap for web content. This would enable speakers of minority languages to view web content in their own language.[9]

Automatically generated books

Most of Parker's automatically generated books target niche markets (the "long tail" concept). Examples include:

  • Books series on medical subjects published by Icon Health Publications and coauthored with James N. Parker. The Official Patient's Sourcebook series deals with classic diseases like spinal stenosis or autoimmune hepatitis.[10][11] The 3-in-1 Medical Reference series deals with general medical topics like hemoglobin.[12]
  • 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. One book, The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, won the 2008 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.[13]
  • A series on cross-language crossword puzzle books, e.g. Webster's English to Italian Crossword Puzzles: Level 1, and thesauri, e.g. Webster's Quechua – English Thesaurus Dictionary published by Icon Group International, Inc. Some of these titles raised concerns with linguists who claimed inaccuracies and ownership/citation rights in certain languages covered in these volumes. Parker removed the concerned titles from print stating that he had not known that anyone claimed intellectual property rights over languages.[14]
  • A series of quotation collections subtitled Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases, each volume assembling quotations which feature a specific English word. Excerpts are drawn from public domain literary sources and reference works, and from Wikipedia articles (identified as "WP" after a quotation).[15] The English professor Nicholas Royle noted that Veering: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases contained quotations unrelated to the word "veering" or using "Veer" only as a proper name; he described the book as "quite bizarre" and "absurdly expensive".[16]

All books are self-published paperbacks. Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically; the rest are printed on demand.[3] Parker plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.[2]

Digital poetry

Using a collection of automation programs called "Eve", Parker has applied his techniques within his dictionary project to digital poetry; he reports posting over 1.3 million poems, aspiring to reach one poem for each word found in the English language.[17] He refers to these as "graph theoretic poems" since they are generated using graph theory, where "graph" refers to mathematical values that relate words to each other in a semantic web. He has posted in the thesaurus section of his online dictionary the values used in these algorithms. The poems are in a wide variety of styles, including some invented by Parker himself. His poems are didactic in nature, and either define the entry word in question, or highlight its antonyms. He has stated plans to expand these to many languages and is experimenting with other poetic forms.[18]

See also

References

Notes
  1. ↑ Method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing Archived 2018-01-19 at the Wayback Machine', U.S. Patent 7,266,767, 4 September 2007.
  2. 1 2 Cohen, Noam (2008-04-14). "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2010-08-04. Retrieved 2010-08-03.
  3. 1 2 3 Ein Mann sieht Code Archived 2013-02-11 at archive.today, Financial Times Deutschland, 9 May 2008. (in German).
  4. 1 2 "Philip M Parker". INSEAD.edu. 17 September 2015. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
  5. ↑ "The Editor – Philip M. Parker is the instigator behind Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition (www.websters-online-dictionary.org)". websters-online-dictionary.org. Icon Group International, Inc. Archived from the original on 2010-08-02. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
  6. ↑ "EdgeMaven Media – Case Studies – Web Site Creation – World's largest multilingual dictionary: Webster's Online Dictionary (www.websters-online-dictionary.org)". Edgemaven.com. San Diego: Icon Group International, Inc. 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-07-05. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  7. ↑ "Fascinating facts about Philip Parker inventor of the W-O-D Project in 1999". Ideafinder.com. Vaunt Design Group. 2006-11-01. Archived from the original on 2010-08-25. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  8. ↑ "Webster's Online Dictionary. Definition: dictionary". websters-online-dictionary.org. Icon Group International, Inc. Archived from the original on 2011-01-10. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
  9. ↑ Heather Zeiger, "Search engines: Closing the gap for minority languages", Mind Matters News, November 17, 2021
  10. ↑ James N. Parker; Philip M. Parker, eds. (2002). The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Spinal Stenosis. ISBN 978-0597831942.
  11. ↑ Heneghan, Michael A.; McFarlane, Ian G. (March 2004). "Book review. The Official Patient's Sourcebook on autoimmune hepatitis: Edited by James N. Parker and Philip M. Parker. 192 pp. $28.95. Icon Health Publications, San Diego, California, 2002. ISBN 0-597-83418-0" (PDF). Gastroenterology. 126 (3): 929. doi:10.1053/j.gastro.2004.01.050. ISSN 0016-5085. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2010-08-28. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
  12. ↑ Parker, James N.; Parker, Philip M., eds. (2004). Hemoglobin – A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide to Internet References (PDF). The 3-in-1 Medical Reference. San Diego: Icon Health Publications. ISBN 0-597-83977-8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-08-28. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
  13. ↑ "Fromage Frais wins odd title prize". Thebookseller.com. London: The Bookseller Media Group. 2009-03-27. Archived from the original on 2010-03-27. Retrieved 2009-03-27.
  14. ↑ Gibson, Joel (2008-12-19). "Puzzled publisher at a loss for words". smh.com.au. The Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on 2010-08-07. Retrieved 2010-08-06. And: "Publisher at a loss for words". Brisbane Times. 2008-12-19. Archived from the original on 2008-12-19. Retrieved 2008-12-19.
  15. ↑ Icon Group International, Inc (2008-11-26). Ducking: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Icon Group International, Inc. p. ii. ISBN 978-0-546-69470-3. Retrieved 2009-11-27.
  16. ↑ Royle, Nicholas (2011). Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-7486-3654-9. Retrieved 2014-10-19.
  17. ↑ An Introduction to "graph theoretic poetry" Archived 2015-06-01 at the Wayback Machine. websters-online-dictionary.org. Icon Group International, Inc.
  18. ↑ "Graph theoretic" Poetic Forms Archived 2015-06-01 at the Wayback Machine. websters-online-dictionary.org. Icon Group International, Inc.
Further reading
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