Acme Continental: Fill & Download for Free

There are some academic settings in which this is standard practice. The introduction to a PhD thesis is most often a critical survey of the subject area of the dissertation. This is certainly also the case for habilitation theses within the Continental European tradition.Grant applications often contain a similar (though substantially shorter) survey to motivate the application.And finally, there are academic journals that specialize in survey papers. In computer science a well-known such journal is ACM Computing Surveys.So yes, it makes sense - but only if you know why you set out to write a survey.

I would have to say Graham Taylor defines the low water mark of England managers since England won the World Cup in 1966.Indeed looking back now, Graham Taylor was so out of step with the wider football world that he was literally an anachronism in his own lifetime - and that takes some doing.In the final analysis Graham Taylor was a nice, well-meaning man, an above average analyst and a very poor elite level manager or leader of men.History shows that he and the FA’s Director of Coaching Charles Hughes took English football into a cul-de-sac that its still trying to get out off.This was the mid 90s remember, a time within living memory. Yet Liverpool, Ipswich, Nottingham Forest, Spurs, Aberdeen and Dundee United to name just a few teams, were playing more modern football in 1979 than Taylor sought to impose on England between 1990–1993.There’s a famous Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary on Graham Taylor’s tenure entitled An Impossible Job. It is a car crash of a film, a project born of hubris and naivety it contains some scenes of extreme black comedy interspersed with moments of genuine pathos. It is compelling viewing and not just as a period piece.Taylor’s assistant, Phil Neal, for example, really confirms an impression that he is one of the most underrated English comic characters of any era. As Taylor’s sidekick, Neal is cast as the acme of corporate circumspection and sycophancy. Meanwhile, Taylor’s exchanges with Paul Ince and Nigel Clough captured in the film suggest that this was a manager of great human qualities promoted beyond his true level. A nice man out of his depth.The Impossible Job (linked below) plays like football’s equivalent of Ricky Gervais’ mockumentary series The Office. Taylor is its David Brent, ‘a provincial buffoon’ caricature of the man himself.Posterity should remember Graham Taylor the man rather more fondly than it will as a national team boss, because as England managers during my lifetime go, he has to rate as by far the worst. Not for his results in isolation, or even for specific performances in Norway, Rotterdam or Boston, but because of the backward looking football that he had his teams (and some very good players) play.The Taylor era is hard to contextualise now precisely because it came at a point in time (post Italia 90 and at the dawn of the Premier League) when English football should have been embracing a brave new world of enlightened, ‘continental’ football - but didn’t. At least not straightaway.What we got instead was a step back in time to a kind of pre-Brexit football, a middle management version of the national game that was suburban, nostalgic in tone, distrustful of foreigners and ugly as sin. The English game of 4–4–2, 3–5–2, second balls, setpieces and direct balls into the channels or lumped forwards.Luckily salvation was around the corner, but who knows what might have happened but for the timely intervention of Sir Alex Ferguson, Ruud Gullit and Arsene Wenger? The ultimate irony is that, after the nadir ofTaylor (this most English of English managers), that it took three foreigners to re-imagine English football as a modern, compelling spectacle. And you’d have to say that England’s national games owes these three an inestimable debt as a result.

Namaste Nishchal bhai,I am honored to receive a request to answer this question.Well, it depends on what kind of choices do you want to make or restrict yourself to as well as how much resources do you have.Bear in mind that certain CS Ph.D. programs, such as those in Europe (especially in continental Europe) would require at least a Masters (usually lasting 2 years). So, going to work prior to getting a Masters so that you can do a Ph.D. in Europe would extend your expected year of graduation from a CS Ph.D. program.---If you work in industry, what kind of position would that be? If you get to develop high quality software with rockstar developers, sure, that would help you develop your software development skills.Plus, you can use your free time at home to do your own research. That is, after work and on the weekends, you can work on your own research projects. This may be difficult if you are looking at problems in theoretical computer science. However, for systems CS or AI, you can develop software to implement your ideas (read techniques, methodologies, algorithms, and what not). If your experimental results are good, say your SAT solver is 10-100X better than any other, you can publish your work at the SAT conference. This will help you get into a CS graduate program with funding.[An aside: See How does one become a "rockstar" developer?]Better yet, if you can get a position at Microsoft Research in India, or with another corporate research lab, as a developer/RA, that would work too. The main goal for pursuing this is to publish a few papers while you are working, so that you can have some research experience to discuss in your statement of purpose.See Are there any employment opportunities for fresh undergraduates at Microsoft Research?However, if you end up as a code monkey for Infosys Limited, Wipro (Indian company) (or Wipro Technologies), or Satyam Computer Services (company), forget about it. Just go to grad school.Why would I say that? Unless you have chosen to work on a bunch of challenging software projects (either as part of your class projects or as your pet projects in your free time), such as developing a compiler and a SAT solver, you would probably be lacking in your software development skills anyway. If you went to a no-so-good IIT, such as IIT Patna, well, your classes are probably lacking in terms of the quantity and quality of software that you have to develop. Bottom line: going to a competitive CS graduate program in a US research university will help you pick up a lot more advance software development skills and methodologies than being a code monkey.Otherwise, in many places around the world, the financial reward of working is unlikely to keep you from pursuing a Ph.D. later. If you work in investment banking or as a software developer in the U.S., that argument has little validity. Else, it does not matter.However, losing the habit of slogging for your classes and projects may hinder your ability to do well in a Ph.D. program. After all, what really matters for Ph.D. students is not their G.P.A., but their research output (measured by research publications and patents filed, or startups created)... And, perhaps, some decent (teaching) experience and co-writing research grant applications (you wanna help your Ph.D. advisor out, don't you?).---Advantages of going to a CS graduate program (including a Ph.D. program in a US research university) now include the following.You can ace the CS Ph.D. preliminary examination (also known as the CS Ph.D. comprehensive examination, or round #1 of the CS Ph.D. qualifying examination/Quals) fairly early, since it is based on intermediate classes for upperclassmen (juniors + seniors) or junior graduate students. If you are preparing for the GRE CS subject test, this would make more sense, since you would have prepared for something similar.While working on ridiculously long problem sets (or assignments) and challenging class projects, you may come across ideas that interest you. You can delve further into those ideas as initial research projects that can lead to your Ph.D. research project(s). Or you can extend your class project into a research project. Or, conversations with other students (grad students or undergrads) on campus or elsewhere (say at an ACM student event, such as the ACM SIGDA Design Automation Summer School), alumni, postdocs, faculty members, and guest speakers at departmental seminars can lead to interesting ideas for research.Disadvantage. If you are burned out from your CS program at your IIT, you may want to take a break and have time off between college and grad school. Else, stressing yourself further in grad school may cause you to burn out and drop out.--Think about other goals that you may have in life, such as creating a startup or getting married and having a family. You can do these before, during, or after grad school. How you pick your choices and trade-offs would depend on things that are important to you.Good luck!P/S: Please kindly read the following awesome book about being a CS Ph.D. student at Stanford.Philip J. Guo, "The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir." Available online at: http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm ; July 16, 2012 was the last accessed date.