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Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) is an American economist and academic, currently the INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science at
INSEAD INSEAD, a contraction of "Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires" () is a non-profit business school that maintains campuses in Europe (Fontainebleau, France), Asia (Singapore), the Middle East (Abu Dhabi, UAE), and North America (San ...
in
Fontainebleau Fontainebleau (; ) is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the ''arrondissemen ...
, France. He has
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
ed a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...
and Internet searches. He claims that his programs have written more than 200,000 books.Ein Mann sieht Code
, ''Financial Times Deutschland'', 9 May 2008. .


Early life

Born
dyslexic Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...
, Parker early on developed a passion for dictionaries. He gained undergraduate degrees in finance and economics. He received a Ph.D. in
business economics Business economics is a field in applied economics which uses economic theory and quantitative methods to analyze business enterprises and the factors contributing to the diversity of organizational structures and the relationships of firms with ...
from the
Wharton School The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in ...
of the
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...
and has
master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.
s in finance and banking from
Aix-Marseille University Aix-Marseille University (AMU; french: Aix-Marseille Université; formally incorporated as ''Université d'Aix-Marseille'') is a public research university located in the Provence region of southern France. It was founded in 1409 when Louis II o ...
and
managerial economics Managerial economics is a branch of economics involving the application of economic methods in the managerial decision-making process.• Trefor Jones (2004). ''Business Economics and Managerial Decision Making'', WileyDescriptionand chapter-pre ...
from Wharton.


Work

He was a professor of economics and business at
University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is ...
before moving to INSEAD, where he has been a professor of marketing since 1988. His work focuses primarily on
macroeconomics Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and ...
.


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 In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be ''conserved'' over time. This law, first proposed and tested by Émilie du Châtelet, means tha ...
. * ''Climatic Effects on Individual, Social and Economic Behavior'',
Greenwood Press Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...
, 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 Physioeconomics (or physio-economics) is an extension of experimental economics research that collects physiological parameters in addition to recording behavior. These measures can include skin conductance, blood pressure and the pulse of the su ...
: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth''.
MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...
, 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 The equator is a circle of latitude, about in circumference, that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, halfway between the North and South poles. The term can also ...
matters in economic development. His explanation of the
equatorial paradox Environmental determinism (also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism) is the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories. Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, ...
is based on the following: *# humans are tropical mammals, most adapted to live in a climate with temperature around ; *#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; *# 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; *# from this point of view, GDP is heavily weighted as an indicator of natural misery of the environment one lives in; *# by mastering methods to survive over centuries humans in the higher latitudes accumulated more knowledge and physical technologies to produce goods; *# as populations increased, social technologies (institutions, law, etc.) developed as adaptive mechanisms; *# 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. It uses the "
Webster's ''Webster's Dictionary'' is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843), as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's n ...
" name, which is now in the
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...
. This site compiles different online dictionaries and
encyclopedia An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
including the ''Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary'' (1913),
Wiktionary Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a num ...
, and Wikipedia. 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.


Automatically generated books

Most of Parker's automatically generated books target niche markets (the "
long tail In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random nu ...
" 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 Autoimmune hepatitis, formerly known as lupoid hepatitis, plasma cell hepatitis, or autoimmune chronic active hepatitis, is a chronic, autoimmune disease of the liver that occurs when the body's immune system attacks liver cells, causing the live ...
. ''The 3-in-1 Medical Reference'' series deals with general medical topics like
hemoglobin Hemoglobin (haemoglobin BrE) (from the Greek word αἷμα, ''haîma'' 'blood' + Latin ''globus'' 'ball, sphere' + ''-in'') (), abbreviated Hb or Hgb, is the iron-containing oxygen-transport metalloprotein present in red blood cells (erythroc ...
. *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 The ''Bookseller''/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, originally known as the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title and commonly known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award that is given annually to a book with an unusu ...
. *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 Quechua may refer to: *Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru *Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language **So ...
– 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 Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...
rights over languages. *A series of
quotation A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by ...
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 Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
articles (identified as "WP" after a quotation). 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 A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', ''Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
; he described the book as "quite bizarre" and "absurdly expensive". All books are self-published paperbacks. Ninety-five percent of the ordered books are sent out electronically; the rest are printed on demand. Parker plans to extend the programs to produce romance novels.


Digital poetry

Using a collection of automation programs called "Eve", Parker has applied his techniques within his dictionary project to
digital poetry Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in cert ...
; he reports posting over 1.3 million poems, aspiring to reach one poem for each word found in the English language. He refers to these as "graph theoretic poems" since they are generated using
graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of '' graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...
, 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."Graph theoretic" Poetic Forms
. websters-online-dictionary.org. Icon Group International, Inc.


See also

*
Books LLC Books LLC is an American publisher and a book sales club based in Memphis, Tennessee. Its primary work is collecting Wikipedia and Wikia articles and selling them as printed and downloadable books. Print-on-demand and electronic products Books ...
*
Racter ''Racter'' is an artificial intelligence computer program that generates English language prose at random. It was published in 1984 by Mindscape. History Racter, short for ''raconteur'', was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. Th ...
* VDM Publishing


References

;Notes ;Further reading * Abrahams, Marc (January 29, 2008).
"Speed WritingTake a Leaf Out of Philip M Parker's Book"
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
''. Retrieved February 24, 2012. * Abrahams, Marc (February 4, 2008).
"Automatic WritingFurther Volumes of Philip M Parker"
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
''. Retrieved February 24, 2012.


External links


Faculty page at INSEAD
* *
Video of Phil Parker explaining his softwarePhilip M. Parker's poetry site written using computer algorithmsPhilip M. Parker's anagram site with anagrams found in natural language strings
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parker, Philip M. Place of birth missing (living people) 1960 births Living people American non-fiction writers 21st-century American economists American expatriates in France American publishers (people) Academic staff of INSEAD Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni Electronic literature writers