Academic Haiku Contest

i-d5d0af21ff041db268d4c0fbf137dc5c-m417_2.gifFrom Jim Gibbon:

"How succinct can you be in describing your research? Most of us have probably tried to whittle our work down to a 2-minute or 30-second "elevator speech" we can use while mingling at conferences. Doing this not only helps us clarify our work to ourselves, but also smooths out a lot of the interactions we're bound to have down the road while chatting about our projects. I'd say it's pretty GTD: you invest time in thinking up front so you don't have to while you're in the middle of networking, interviewing, etc.

Well, I wondered how far we could push this, and to that end, I'm sponsoring an academic haiku contest on my site. A $10 iTunes gift certificate will go to the person who submits the best haiku based on original research. How much can you communicate in 17 syllables?"

What's your Haiku?

Here's my friend Jason's Entry:

Wield your mind better:
offload thinking, and improve
metacognition.

Enter the Contest Here (but make sure you share your Haiku's on the comments thread!).

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Jim Gibbon has opened voting on his academic haiku contest. I urge you to check out all the 17-syllable distillations of scholarly works, but especially those in the physical sciences category. Two of those haikus are mine. (Technically, one of them ought to be in the humanities category, but I…

I worked on half a dozen Space Shuttle Safety contracts at Rockwell International, all of which had actual fraud in them. I testified to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and NASA Inspector General. If that counts as research:

EIGHT HAIKU for CHALLENGER
by JONATHAN V. POST
March 1986

The Commander
--------------
"My kind of weather,
What a great day for flying!"
Clear cold winter dawn.

The Last Breakfast
-----------------
Breakfast for seven
followed by white-frosted cake
names drawn in icing

The Launch
----------
Cape Canaveral
icicles melt: sudden dawn
of "Rocket Summer"

The Shuttle
----------
Painted bird rising,
rolling upside down, so bright
against the blue sky

The Last Words
--------------
"... go at throttle up."
"Roger, go at throttle up."
And then: explosion!

The Fireball
-----------
Scorpion of smoke
Two flame-tipped claws, shrapnel legs
above the ocean

The Promise
-----------
After silence, tears.
One right way to honor them:
We will reach the stars.

The Crew
---------
Smith, Onizuka,
McAuliffe, Scobee, Resnik,
McNair, and Jarvis.

Copyright 1996, 1997 by Emerald City Publishing.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without permission.
May be posted electronically provided that
it is transmitted unaltered, in its
entirety, and without charge.

General Description of my digital human modeling research...

Simulate Humans
Model Both Mind and Body
Cog. Sci. Not A.I.

Another one related to some work in the lab looking at the impact of armor and equipment on law enforcement officer performance. Reads like a bad commercial. :)

Armor weighing you down?
Making performance trade-offs?
How much is too much?

By Daniel Carruth (not verified) on 18 Feb 2007 #permalink

The line is a world.
The black count remains the same.
So, what can you say?

(Preparing a review on conservative cellular automata. Alas, I can't submit chez Jim, since the rule asks for "original research".)