Ah, Wordiness

[jackofallgeeks]

Councilor: Now, what seems to be the problem?
Patient: Well, Doc, I have trouble with taking too many words to say things.
Councilor: (Nodding) Ah, wordiness.
Patient: (Distressed) See!?

This week my thesis adviser asked me to give her an explanation of how data fusion works. Again. I should have just printed off the same report that I gave her last time, but it occurred to me that (1) my work ethic wouldn't be satisfied with such a half-fast job, (2) if she didn't understand it the first time she wouldn't understand it a second, and (3) assuming she hadn't just forgotten that we've been through this she might be upset with me for being pretentious.

So this time I tried to step through it a bit more clearly and, on top of that, I decided to give an "executive summary" at the top, so she could see from the start what my main points were. I am aware, as are many of you I presume, that I have a way of going on and on (and on and on) when I write.

In the end I had my summary to four lines, but I kept having to restart my summary as my previous attempt spiraled off into a full-blown report!  O.o

*sigh* I hope she's satisfied with this. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm not an academic.

Comments

[otakulk.livejournal.com]

Something I have discovered about advisers is that sometimes they need to spend as much time reading as you have, which they don't have enough time to do, so they may never understand it as much as you do.

Do tell what is data fusion?

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Between you and me, I don't really know. And I don't really care. And I hate that I don't care. To me, this is just a graduation requirement; I have to produce some amount of research before they give me my degree, fine. I'd kind of decided that back when I wrote my proposal for a Multi-level PKI; it was cemented as such when, after returning from internship, they scrapped the PKI thing and gave me this data fusion thing, because it was "out of favor." In retrospect, I shouldn't have let them do that, I should've stuck to my original topic, said 'fsck your sponsors, this is my topic.' Hindsight is 20/20.

From my executive summary: Data fusion solves the problem of querying many, inconsistent, separately-maintained data sources.

From my report: The problem that data fusion is meant to solve is this: information is contained in many data sources. These data sources are each owned an maintained by separate entities, be they agencies, departments, or something other. We can not alter these data bases, we are not the maintainers, but it is useful to be able to query the data in all these sources to get a more-complete picture. As stated this might be a simple Join query, but it is complicated by the fact that data may be duplicated, overlap, contradict, or otherwise be inconsistent across data sources.