Strange… I had been following the Semantic Compositions blog , along with a few others of the linguistics/AI ilk, for a good number of months now.
I’d never given a second thought to who was behind SC’s anonymity until I came across this post this morning. It was quite strange to read about Laurie’s mixer and realize “Wait, this party the guy was talking about, I was there! Who is this guy?”.
It’s a disconcerting thing to suddenly not be able to treat the online world and the “real” world as so distinct. It’s like finding out two acquaintances of yours are the same person.
With regards to what SC’s take on the evening, though I must say that my experiences differ from his. Perhaps it’s because i’m thoroughly entrenched in academia (and will be for the next couple of years at least), but I didn’t catch any “oh no, nlp jobs are so hard to find” vibe from the night, nor did i overhear any begging/schmoozing for jobs. In fact, most of the recent CL grads from our school were able to find jobs pretty easily. But, then, the plural of “annecdote” is not “data”, so I can’t say if this actually means anything…