Thursday, August 23, 2007

Academese

You have to love some of the sentences found in the more esoteric realms of academia. I'm considering applying to some jobs in technology transfer offices at various universities. Check out this whopper of a sentence from a book I'm reading on technology transfer. "These empirical chapters build on the theoretical analysis of Jensen and Thursby (2001), who demonstrate that inventor involvement in university technology transfer potentially attenuates the deleterious effects of informational asymmetries that naturally arise in technological diffusion from universities to firms." Do you think there might have been a clearer way to say that? I can write some pretty opaque stuff myself, but I think they have me beat.

5 comments:

  1. Well, where else are you going to use those ridiculous vocabulary words you learned while studying for the GRE?

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  2. Wow. And I thought some of my business books had ridiculous stuff in them. You've got them beat for sure.

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  3. I love business buzz-words. A lot of them seem so absurd. So did I see somewhere that you are working on an MBA Ginna? What are your plans?

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  4. I feel ya. Check out my blog entry on a related situation, only the law school version:

    http://smashgfunk.blogspot.com/2007/05/do-you-know-why-im-going-to-fail.html

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  5. Wow Smash, that stuff is rough. See, the sentence I posted is understandable, just over-the-top because it uses too many attenuates and deleteriouses together. That property law stuff is just undecipherable.

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