Thoughts on Conferences at Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
The second case was a conference where the only requirement for approval was an abstract. I realize that some of the more “cutting edge” conferences proceed this way so that people can present their latest results. I don’t like them, however, because many people seem to have worked up to the last minute on the project and not seem to have give much thought to the actual talk.
There’s another option? I thought all data for talks were obtained in the last few days before the conference.
This was brought on by a list of things not to do while speaking in public (which, if a strict grammarian I know had her way, would include “Not starting a sentence with the word ‘hopefully.'”
Being creepy
Uncle Al is givng an hour talk at a Mensa Regional Gathering, “Cutting Things in Half.” The boffo ending, cutting a string of paper dolls, will make eyes bleed. Largest room is SRO.
Being boring
You’ve never been to a conference where you had to submit the completed paper first? People still do try to throw in an extra slide or two if they’ve extended the results beyond what’s in the paper, but they seem far more organized than the “abstract only” conferences.
But perhaps you’re just being facetious and I’m wasting healthy electrons here.
No, seriously, all I can recall are conferences where only an abstract is required — I do not recall any where a paper is required in the call for papers. I guess I go to the “cutting edge”-type conferences. Some of these conferences want the proceedings submission (if they publish a proceedings) at the start of the conference, but most have it due a few weeks later.
Perhaps it’s a matter of discpline. The engineering conferences I’ve gone to require submissions 2-6 mos. ahead of the conference. The larger the time lag, the more likely you’ll be able to put some fluff about expecting to have such and such results…and then you could have required changes before submitting. As you get closer, they often want final papers. But they want full papers so that when people show up at the conference, they get their CD with the conference proceedings. Inevitably, half the people in a talk will have their laptops and will be paging through the paper as the speaker is talking.
When I’ve gone to AGU, though, they only require abstracts. And that’s where I’ve seen people get nasty. 🙂