CoNEXT is a joint conference series having its roots in QoFIS, NGC andAnd I thought media mergers were hard to keep track of...
MIPS. QoFIS and NGC are highly successful international workshops initiated
by two European COST Actions, namely COST263 on Quality of Future Internet
Services and COST264 on Networked Group Communications. MIPS resulted from
the merging of two other major workshops, namely IDMS (concentrated on
interactive and distributed multimedia services) and PROMS (focusing on
protocols for networked multimedia systems); also the associated ICQT
(Internet Charging and QoS Technology) workshop is integrated into CoNEXT 2005.
Suresh, maybe you are being too hard on the guy. Maybe Professor Callos was afraid of being murdered by the author of a rejected paper?What appears to be the source of this story, from the alumni magazine of Winona State University:
Think I'm joking? The American Physical Society NEVER rejects an abstract submission to their conference. Why? Well, they used to, but some crazy guy who was "misunderstood" and had some great new theory of everything killed the APS president and his secretary because of multiple rejections. After that, they instituted an open door policy to the conference. Of course, there are special sessions for kooks....
At the 50th anniversary of the murder of his friend and co-worker, Winona State University alumnus Tom Baab, '48, of Park Ridge, Ill., established the Eileen Fahey Memorial Scholarship. Fahey, a secretary at Columbia University, was shot and killed at her desk on July 14, 1952.
While earning his master's degree in American letters at Columbia, Tom worked part-time for the American Physical Society (APS), headquartered at the Pupin Physics Laboratory on the Columbia campus in New York City. Fahey, a 20-year-old secretary, was sitting at her desk reading a letter from her fiancé, a Marine serving in Korea, when Bayard Peakes entered the office and emptied a clip of .22 caliber pistol shots into Fahey, killing her. Peakes then fled the campus.
In the weeks that followed, Tom was among those questioned by police for possible leads and motives. Peakes was finally traced through a letter written to him by Karl K. Darrow, head of Bell Labs and secretary of the APS. Darrow had declined to accept a paper Peakes wanted to present at the next APS meeting. Peakes's paper proposed the non-existence of the electron and Darrow rejected it, suggesting that Peakes might ruin his career in physics with such a theory.
At his arrest, Peakes said he wanted to kill a man at the APS since his rejection letter had come from a male. Fahey was the only person in the office and the shots were directed at her instead. Peakes was tried and sentenced to the Rockland County Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
STARs are survey papers that cover hot topics in contemporary computer graphics research. Their goal is to give a comprehensive overview of all relevant work in the respective field and to explain in depth the techniques and algorithms involved. Potential STARs may be based on a recent tutorial or course given by the authors.Apparently, this has been going on for the last few years. It's an interesting idea:
For submission, a 6-10 page STAR-let is sufficient, which should contain the author(s) name(s), institution, short biography and contact details, along with a detailed outline of the STAR, including the main bibliographical entries. All submitted manuscripts undergo a formal review process. Authors of conditionally accepted proposals must subsequently submit a final 15-25-page STAR, that incorporates constructive reviewer feedback and acceptance of the STAR is contingent on this requirement.(Emphasis mine). Sounds almost like the review process is intermediate between a conference review and a journal review (because of the contingent acceptance mode). It's always interesting to hear about new ways of talking about, and disseminating, new research.
Accepted STAR papers will be invited to be submitted as regular contributions to Computer Graphics Forum.
At EG'05, STAR authors will be given 90 minutes to present the state-of-the-art of their respective field. For one author, the conference registration fee will be waived.
The Geomblog was the subject of much speculation when analysts at several firms were heard to be very positive about it's recent performance. It's share price rose from B$1,065.48 to B$1,502.33. Much of the hype was said to originate from kakngah whose Star Spangled Banner (artefact) was said to be involved.I wish someone could explain to me how this whole thing works.
kakngah declined to comment on the recent speculation.
kakngah : http://blogshares.com/user.php?id=18697
We just found out that the reviewer had made a mistake with regard to my review and it was intended not for my paper but for some other "lucky" candidate - they are re-evaluating our paper and it may still get in:-) This joker had shuffled up all his four reviews such that none of them matched the actual paper!!As any computer scientist worth his salt knows, this bizarre event is a derangement: a permutation of n items so that no item is matched to itself. It's often used as the canonical application of the principle of inclusion-exclusion in combinatorics. The likelihood of such an event is not that low; the probability of a derangement (uniformly over the space of all permutations) is 1/e ~= 0.37...
-- Comments to the author(s):
The paper is technically poor and also the results.
The authors did not refer appropriately the past work.
The author addressed the topic in irrelevant way.
The paper is not clearly written.
No technical or engineering contribution.
-- Summary:
The paper does not describe the problems and the
solutions synthetically and the technical options are
badly explained. The authors must follow common rules
for writing articles in the domain.
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public-private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.The paper was accepted ! As an aside, their 'acceptance notification' provides a novel solution to the problem of reviewer loads at conferences (FOCS commitee, are you reading this ?):
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to inform you
that, up to the present, we have not received any reviews yet for you
paper entitled: "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of
Access Points and Redundancy". So, your paper has been accepted, as a
non-reviewed paper, for presentation at the 9th World Multiconference
on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI 2005) to be held in
Orlando, USA, on July 10-13, 2005.
if you need a lot of cash to do your research, you’ve got to justify the use of the money. Justify it to whom? To the people who give you the money. This seems only fair. If you want to do research for its own sake, and you also want a lot of money, well, tough.But this is the point I am lamenting. The very idea that you justify research by drawing a direct lline between that research and some promised benefit in the near future is problematic. Of course research needs to have direction. If I am going to study the higher moment properties of the distribution formed by the length of the hind legs of ring-tailed wallabies, I should presumably have some reason why this is relevant. But I cannot draw a direct line between this distribution and (say) a cure for cancer, and nor should I be expected to. I would argue that the point of government funding is precisely to fund projects that have no near term monetary value, but fit into a long term research agenda as perceived by a jury of one's peers (like say a grant review panel).
Crouched today in a defensive posture, we are suffering from a lack of confidence and a shriveled sense of the optimism that once urged us to reach boldly into the unknown. Equally important, we seem to have forgotten that many good things come just from being open to them, without a formed idea of what they are or how they should come out. We are losing, in short, one of the oldest traditions in science: to simply observe, almost monk-like, with an open mind and without a plan.The desire for knowledge for its own sake seems almost quaint in these days of interdisciplinary research, justifying one's bottom line, monetizing one's research, and so on and so forth. I remember back in the heady days of the late 90s that doing a Ph.D had become something distinctly unfashionable; only the poor sods who didn't have an idea for seed funding were plodding away at their degrees.
Last night I had dinner with more than a dozen presidents of private and state universities, and it became one of the most frustrating and disappointing evenings of my professional life. It gave me reason to question the leadership to be expected from the universities on one of the most significant issues of science education in the U.S.Scientists are too busy doing science to step up and defend the field, and political organizations are attempting to view science through the tired left-right polarized lenses that pass for public discourse. If university presidents can't step up to the plate, who will ?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.Others have already commented on this article: it is interesting to read it in conjunction with the latest David Patterson letter in CACM. One of the most fascinating tables in this letter is a chart outlining the evolution (in terms of money, and where the research was done) of many of the most important technologies available today. Technology transfer is a rather overused buzzword, but this chart really shows how technology moves between academia and industrial research labs (in both directions), and then to commercial settings. If ever one wanted proof of the value of academic "blue-sky" research, this is it.
devoting more attention to "quick reaction" projects that draw on the fruits of earlier science and technology to produce useful prototypes as soon as possible.then they don't need to fund university research (and in fact academic researchers wouldn't want to work on these problems). Their mistake of course is not seeing the value of long-term fundamental research even now, but you have to ask: when the flagship magazine of the most well known computer science organization cannot be distinguished from a random trade magazine, who's to tell the difference between academic research and corporate software efforts ?
Todd Ogasawara went to Japan for business and discovered that unlike in the US, where hotels are tripping over themselves to offer WiFi, over there it’s mighty rough trying to find a hotel with any sort of broadband access (whether or wired or wireless) for guests. Not that there isn’t WiFi in Japan or anything like that, but apparently most hotels assume that you’ll have some sort of high-speed access via your cellphone and so don’t feel compelled to offer WiFi.Looks like blogging will be greatly reduced on my upcoming trip :)
It is possible that mathematicians will trust computer-based results more if they are backed up by transparent logical steps, rather than the arcane workings of computer code, which could more easily contain bugs that go undetected.I am skeptical whether mathematicians will be willing to trust a computer over their own intuition. The dark secret at the heart of mathematics is that most proofs are established by ultimately appealing to the reader's intuition. In fact, it is more likely that I can convince a listener of my proof by intuitive arguments than by pure formal methods. This is a sliding scale of course; my intuitively obvious claim is another person's completely nontrivial lemma, and it is through the give and take among mathematicians in the community that a proof is 'stabilized' or 'confirmed'.
Why should the non-mathematician care about things of this nature? The foremost reason is that mathematics is beautiful, even if it is, sadly, more inaccessible than other forms of art. The second is that it is useful, and that its utility depends in part on its certainty, and that that certainty cannot come without a notion of proof.
