Thursday, April 06, 2006

Temporal Dynamics of an Idea and its effect on excitement in a PhD student's life

3 comments:

Rap said...

Sorry: blogger converts every picture to a jpg ... (damn). And jpg makes a mess out of straight line.

Just click on it to see a better image ... really sorry. Just don't think I can afford the time to iron out this difficulty.

ommachi said...

The time scale on the X-axis is unrealistic, even if we give allowance to the general incompetence of all parties involved. The World is yet to become that ridiculous.

All of the process that is graphed in the current picture between 10^5 and 10^7 minutes actually ends somewhere between 10^5 to 10^6 minutes.

And sicne this is your Prof. who is pointing out this blunder of yours (again) to you, we both already know where you stand in this graph for this idea...;)

BTW, do you want me to do a similar graph on the Temporal Dynamics of the Life of a Prof. Associated with an Excited Ph. D. Student. This should give your idea a new lease/approval and put it in a firmly crooked pedestal...;)

Arunn

Rap said...

Quite a nice surprise to see you comment, Prof. Arunn!

I do confess I took a little liberty and kind of exaggerated the X axis a bit. Our experience with IJHMT was way better than that!

The motivation behind the graph was actually an idea I had recently regarding a Turbulence course that I am taking now. I showed some equations to the instructor: and he told me it has already been done. But the consolation was that I was right: at a rather fundamental level.

If you were to draw a graph regarding the performance of a Masters student who has "promised" to work on a paper (after graduating) , then, I have a feeling that you would show it asymptotically going to zero.