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Research versus Teaching versus Development versus Blogging versus Consulting
I’m working rather intensively on a new course (Information Retrieval and Filtering) which should be offered in 2006 or 2007. This course is really a pleasure. Normally, teaching is something you do seriously, while you either do as much consulting or as much research as you can. You won’t see many university professors spending 60 hours a week preparing a single course. However, sometimes, teaching is something that you can really become passionate about. While I have published work in Information Retrieval, I never paid much attention to the field. Being too busy in my research to stop and start fiddling with more elementary concepts such as the Zipf law: where it comes from and what you can do with it. Thanks to Will Fitzgerald, I now know how to use n-grams and Shannon’s information value to determine the language a text is written in. As a researcher, this is highly enjoyable and likely to help my research.