Philip M. Parker

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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 in Fontainebleau, France. He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template that is filled with data from databases and Internet searches.^[1] He claims that his programs have written more than 200,000 books.^[2][3]

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. He has master's degrees in finance and banking from Aix-Marseille University and managerial economics from Wharton.^[4]

He was a professor of economics and business at the 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 microeconomics.

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 that violate laws of physics, such as the conservation of energy.^{[clarification needed]}

• 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 that 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 explains 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.

Parker is also involved—as an 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 encyclopedias including 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]

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 some areas of the world, mainly 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 of 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 specific 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 that 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]

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]

• Books LLC
• Racter
• VDM Publishing

Notes

Further reading

• Abrahams, Marc (January 29, 2008). "Speed Writing – Take a Leaf Out of Philip M Parker's Book", The Guardian. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
• Abrahams, Marc (February 4, 2008). "Automatic Writing – Further Volumes of Philip M Parker". The Guardian. Retrieved February 24, 2012.

• Faculty page at INSEAD
• Video of Phil Parker explaining his software
• Philip M. Parker's poetry site written using computer algorithms
• Philip M. Parker's anagram site with anagrams found in natural language strings