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Sesquipedalian #23

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				       Volume V, No. 23
/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\
Blame Someone Else Day				         April 13, 1995


			     BEWARE OF VIDEA!

[Editor's note: The following item was sent in to us in all
seriousness, but we decided it would be appropriate to run here
anyway...]

Abstract
	This paper illustrates that there are conferences which will
destroy confidence in scientific life if the community does not forbid
them. The Wessex Institute of Technology (UK) [1] organizes a whole
series of regular conferences on various topics [2]. Our experiences
are only with one of these, "VIDEA", but one should probably also be
careful with the others. It is an offense against honorable scientists
to offer false publication possibilities under a scientifically
serious disguise for high fees. Our conclusion is: VIDEA accepts
EVERYTHING! And we conclude from that that a publication in the VIDEA
proceedings is worth NOTHING AT ALL! And to organize such a conference
is simply a fraud. Conferences like VIDEA are a morally dispisable
[sic] scheme to allow people to buy themselves publications without
having to undergo any type of reviewing. It simply increases the flow
of worthless data and makes it more difficult for scientists to
extract really useful information

Introduction
	Serious conferences usually introduce themselves by
distributing a "Call for Papers" including a submission deadline.
After having received contributions a technical program committee
reviews and evaluates these to come to a decision which of the
submitted paper proposals shall be accepted for the conference. Some
conferences ask for abstracts first to be able to decide whether a
topic is appropriate for their event, and ask for full papers (to be
reviewed again) only thereafter.
	This holds also for a conference called "Visualization and
Intelligent Design in Engineering and Architecture" (VIDEA'93). Having
accepted to become a member of the program committee for VIDEA'93, one
of the authors made two suspicious observations. Firstly, he received
exactly zero abstracts and zero papers to review, and was never
informed about any program committee meetings nor of any reviewing
results. The program for the conference was finished apparently
without involvement of the scientific advisory committee. We
recognized this by receiving the printed advance program. Secondly, we
submitted three papers to this conference, and they were all accepted
without any comments, grades, or whatsoever.  Meaningless to say that
the visit to this conference was very disappointing both in the sense
of contents and in the sense of organization.
	When two of the authors were asked to become members of the
program committee for VIDEA'95 (to take place in La Coruna, Spain), we
planned to test if any reviews take place at all. We would send them
four abstracts that are obviously plain nonsense, that no excuse for
accepting them could be taken seriously. This paper reports about this
activity.

The submitted abstracts
	We decided to write more than one crazy abstract to make sure
that an acceptance cannot be interpreted as accident and so we tried
different types of weird papers proposals. The first of four abstracts
we produced was simply a completely irrelevant topic, namely how to
create footprints on the walls of public rooms. It includes several
statements that every reviewer must recognize as joke. The complete
text is given in abstract 1:

Extended abstract 1: The Footprint Function for the Realistic
Texturing of Public Room Walls
ABSTRACT: Today's radiosity methods are able to produce nearly perfect
light distributions for interior rooms. Unrealistic appearance now
mainly is due to missing texturing of the walls. One important feature
of public room walls are footprints in the lower areas. This paper
presents a set of simple functions to easily generate a class of
footprint textures for such applications. Different randomization
techniques ensure the realistic appearance of the results. This
technique is of increasing importance for the visualization of
architectural objects in the future.
KEYWORDS: realism, rendering, textures, footprints
Introduction: Today's radiosity methods are able to produce nearly
perfect light distributions of interior rooms. Unrealistic appearance
now mainly is due to missing texturing of the walls. One important
feature of public room walls are footprints in the lower areas.
The Footprint Function: The basic footprint function is a combination
of trivial, i.e. easy to implement, parametric functions. The
footprint is divided into a ball and a heel which can have independent
sole textures. The sizes are chosen such that a simulation of shoe
sizes 35 to 42 for women profiles and 39 to 46 for men profiles is
performed.
RANDOMIZATION TECHNIQUES: Distribution techniques will be presented
that ensure that the lower part of the wall contains significantly
more footprints than the higher parts.  Especially, no footprints must
occur above a certain threshold height, due to physiological
limitations of the human being. Additionally, random functions will
take care that most footprints remain incomplete and vary in color and
shape.
RESULTS: Preliminary investigations are encouraging. As we have not
implemented the new method yet, there are no concrete results, yet.
The final paper might include images.
Conclusion: A footprint function for the realistic imaging of walls is
presented.  Details of all functions are given to ensure an easy
implementation for the reader.
REFERENCES: to be included in the final paper.
---------------------------------------------------------
(end extended abstract 1)

The second abstract describes a correct method which makes no sense at all,
that is how to render interior rooms without light. Obviously, the
resulting image will be completely black. This was written as an abstract.

Extended abstract 2: Efficient Radiosity for Daylight Simulation in
Closed Environments
INTRODUCTION: Radiosity is a useful tool for architects and lighting
engineers to simulate illumination in the interior of buildings.
Unfortunately, the computation time for radiosity is very high.
However, radiosity algorithms can take advantage of special scene
properties of specific classes of environments. Exploiting the
additional information about the scene structure of a particular class
can decrease the computation time significantly. The aim of this paper
is to speed up the radiosity computation for the class of closed
environments without artificial light sources.
Two Restrictions on the Scene Structure: The first restriction on the
scene is that it is closed. The reason for this restriction is the
fact that radiosity is based upon the energy conservation principle,
that means that at any time the amount of emitted energy equals the
amount of absorbed energy plus the amount of energy leaving the scene.
In closed scenes no energy leaves the scene, thus simplifying the
radiosity computation. However, this restriction does not impose
problems, because radiosity is mostly used for interior scenes.  The
second restriction is that only daylight can be considered. Radiosity
algorithms solve a set of equations, where the radiosities of patches
are the unknowns and the emissions are the constant terms. In
conventional radiosity all patches are allowed to emit light, i.e. to
be an artificial light source. If we assume that no patch has
emission, we only have to consider daylight. This allows the use of
very efficient solution methods known in numerical mathematics for the
set of equations. The second restriction does not limit the range of
applications too much as well, because in most cases architects are
interested in visualizing their design with daylight conditions.
Mathematical Foundation of the New Method: Details will be described
in the final paper.
Benefits: The new method reduces the computation time of both the
radiosity evaluation and of image generation. Images can be generated
at interactive rates even for very complex scenes, making the method
suitable for walk-throughs and VR-applications. Since numerical
techniques are mainly replaced by analytical formulas, no aliasing
effects appear.
Conclusion and Future Work: The development of radiosity algorithms
for special classes of scenes is a promising field of future research.
Such algorithms are significantly faster and possibly more accurate
than non-specialized algorithms.
--------------------------------------------------------- 
(end extended abstract 2)

These first two productions have at least a little bit the structure
of a scientific paper abstract. What we also wanted to try was, if
VIDEA would accept its own text as abstract. So we copied the complete
introduction from the "Call for Papers" and gave this abstract the
title of the conference. Minor changes were only made like changing
the word "conference" to "paper". The result is given in abstract 3.

Extended abstract 3: Visualization and Intelligent Design in
Engineering and Architecture
ABSTRACT: In recent years, remarkable advances in computer
visualization of objects and physical phenomena have been made.
Computer images can now represent real objects very accurately. These
techniques can be enhanced by defining any desired path, creating
animation, moving computer views and real world video models, as well
as sound tracks, resulting in multimedia representations. The
development of these techniques has been possible because of the
improvements in computer graphic devices, better algorithms and faster
processors, which allow workstations and high speed PCs to be suitable
platforms for visualization and have greatly improved the ability of
high-performance computers to produce computer images, in animated
forms, of complex engineering and architecture problems allowing a
dynamic analysis of their behavior.  Visualization has been essential
for the development of new design techniques in engineering and
architecture. The integration of computer visualization with other
advances in computer computational sciences, such as knowledge based
support systems, object bases, advance numerical methods, etc. provide
the basis for intelligent design systems.  The objective of this paper
is to discuss advances in visualization as a tool for intelligent
design in engineering and architecture. The paper aims to bring
together research in computational mathematics and industrial hardware
and software, as well as science, engineering and architecture for
developing practical applications in these various fields. A
presentation of our results on workstations with graphic peripherals
and personal computers will be available to the audience. 
--------------------------------------------------------- 
(end extended abstract 3)

Last but not least we decided to produce an abstract without any content,
just complete nonsense. So we took a dictionary of information processing
words and selected randomly some 40 phrases from there and joined them
together to a fantastically technical sounding text. The given reference
is, of course, the utilized dictionary! We had much fun with abstract 4.

Extended abstract 4: Distributed Multiprogramming System for Pen
Selectors with Error Probability
EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Controllable connections for input/output
supervisor channel adapters with line frequency scanning are often
used for unavailable time. This paper describes the use of disturbance
voltage with equivalent junction temperature as OP-trade-in for zone
packed print.
	The main advantage over previous methods are the data
transmission lines and routine conversion. Addressing, relative to
preferred characters, uses a magnetic disk machine to enable
incremental programming. The identifier transmission group correlates
to non transmitting typewriters.
	Statistically spoken, manufacturing control and messages are
mixed so that the primary supervisor may be located in different
physical records. A collection of data is defined as the unit of
transfer between the program and format management.
	The theory is based on arithmetic overflow, qualified names,
and axial lead resistors. Using the Sparbuchdrucker-theorem [1]
modified by ledger adjustment sales in combination with a secondary
operator control station allows the number of single machines to roll
over the keyboard. The basic origin coordinates ensure a diminished
radix complement. In the future this generalized sequential access
method will be the source for forced control field lines.

References
[1] Fachausdr=FCcke der Informationsverarbeitung, IBM Deutschland GmbH,
1985
 - ---------------------------------------------------------
(end extended abstract 4)

Results
	All abstracts were sent to the conference in November 1994 and
on January 14th, 1995 we received the results. All four abstract have
been "reviewed and provisionally accepted"! This means, that the VIDEA
conference organizers [3] claim someone has reviewed these abstracts
and has found them suitable for the conference! As members of the
program committee two of us had nothing to do with reviewing.
	The acceptance letter also contains information from which can
be concluded that final papers will only be printed in the proceedings
if the registration fee is paid together with the final paper.
Additionally, the letter states "Due to the success of the conference
and to be fair, we can only allow each participant to present one
paper at the meeting which will be published in the proceedings" which
makes sure that every published paper is paid for by a registration
fee. The publisher (Elsevier) probably doesn't have the slightest idea
that they are printing non-reviewed material as high-quality books.

Conclusions
	We believe that Wessex Institute of Technology (or at least
some people there) profit in a very dirty way from the international
pressure on scientists to have long publication lists. They pretend to
organize scientific conferences by giving them the look of such
events. They use the names of the program committee members for
economical purposes only. They "sell" publication possibilities to
less experienced or naive members of our community and in this way
ruin their work by producing a worthless publication. It is very
dangerous to tolerate such developments. This would ruin the
seriousness of our scientific culture.
	The effects of this little test definitely must be that this
conference of the Wessex Institute of Technology is abandoned and
ignored in the future and that the names of its organizers [3] are
watched very carefully for their future actions. We will resign from
the program committee immediately and try to warn all other program
committee members and authors of accepted papers.
	Another effect of such scandals should be that the length of
the publication lists of scientists must not become so important.
Rather than that, other evaluation measures that emphasize quality
instead of quantity should be internationally further encouraged. Only
by reducing the pressure to produce lots of papers can the danger of
such unmoral events be reduced.  One positive side-effect would be a
reduced intellectual pollution in some fields.
	A third aspect is how scientifically serios institutions can
find support in the organization of local conferences. We want to
strongly recommend to contact the established scientific associations
of your field to ensure serious support, e.g. the national computer
societies, or specialized associations for specific fields. They
usually can help with publicity, financing, and high quality
publications.

Important Note: We believe that Wessex Institute of Technology is
fully responsible for this affair, and that both the university site
where VIDEA shall take place and the publisher who will produce the
proceedings are fooled in the same way as the participants.

References
[1] Wessex Institute of Technology
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK.
Tel +44(703)293223, Fax +44(703)292853, email CMI@ib.rl.ac.uk

[2] WIT-conferences in 1995:
SQM 95 (Software Quality Management), Seville, Spain
COMPUTATIONAL ACOUSTICS, Southampton, UK
WATER POLLUTION 95, Porto Carras, Greece
MARINA 95 (Planning Design and Operation) St Raphael, France
CMEN 95 (Comp. Methods & Experimental Measurements), Capri, Italy
STREMA 95 (Structural Repairs & Maintenance of Hist.Buildungs), Crete,
Greece
SDDE 95 (Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Eng.), Crete, Greece
SURFACE TREATMENT 95, Milan, Italy
VIDEA 95 (Visualization & Intell. Design in Eng. & Architecture), La
Coruna, Spain
ASE 95 (Appl. of High Performance Computers in Eng.), Milan, Italy
BIOMED 95 (Simulation in Biomedicine), Milan, Italy
MOVING BOUNDARIES 95, Ljubljana, Slovenia
URBAN TRANSPORT 95, Southampton, UK
AIENG 95 (Appl.of Artificial Intelligence in Eng.), Udine, Italy
CONTACT MECHANICS 95, Ferrara, Italy
BEM 17 (Boundary Element Method), Madison-Wisconsin, USA
MARINE TRANSPORT 95, Plymouth, UK
COASTAL ENGINEERING 95, Cancun, Mexico
BETECH 95 (Boundary Element Technology), Liege, Belgium
OPTI 95 (Computer Aided Optimum Design of Structures), Miama, USA
MARINE TECHNOLOGY 95, Szczecin, Poland
AIR POLLUTION 95, Porto Carras, Greece
MICROSIM 95 (Sim.&Design of Microsystems & Microstructures), Southampton, UK
CMT 95 (Comp.Methods & Testing for Eng. Integrity), Kualar Lumpur, Malaysia

[3] Director: Professor C.A. Brebbia, Wessex Institute of Technology
- ---------------------------------------------------------

[Editor's note: The preceeding was prefaced with the following: 
'Dear colleague,
enclosed we send you very shocking information on the "scientific"
conference VIDEA'95 organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology. To
prevent such cases in the future, please take time and read the enclosed
paper. We promise, that you will not be only shocked, but that you will
also have much fun! All given information is absolutely true and can be
proven by us.
Please, forward this mail to all colleagues in technological fields who
could be affected by these activities of the Wessex Institute of Technology
(can be reached via CMI@ib.rl.ac.uk).'
Werner Purgathofer, Eduard Groeller, Martin Feda
Institute of Computer Graphics, Technical University of Vienna
Karlsplatz 13 / 186                 email:   wpu@cg.tuwien.ac.at
A-1040 Wien / Austria               WWW: http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at ]

		    ^\^\^\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /^/^/^

-- When Hinrich Schuetze presented his paper 'Distributional
Part-of-speech Tagging' at the European Association for Computational
Linguistics meeting in Dublin, Ireland, over spring break, it
garnered the prize for best paper of the conference (over some 150
others)! 

-- At the UC Davis Conference on Morphology and its Relation to Syntax
and Phonology, Peter Sells will present 'The Functions of Voice
Markers in the Phillipine Languages.' (5 May)

-- Stanley Peters and Joan Bresnan are both giving invited talks at
the Workshop on Optimality in Syntax (Is the Best Good Enough?) at
MIT, May 19-21.  For conference schedule e-mail good-enough@mit.edu

-- Shirley Brice Heath, Professor in English and Linguistics, and
recently Visiting Professor in the Applied English Language Studies
Department at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South
Africa, will be presenting 'Youth in the Townships: Waiting for
Nothing' at the Spring Quarter Africa Table on May 31 (sponsored by
the Center for African Studies).

 	          ^/^/^/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \^\^\^

Friday, April 14, 3:30 PM, Cordura 100, CSLI.  Reception follows.

                               Martin Kay
                   Stanford Linguistics and Xerox PARC

      SO WHAT GOOD ARE LINGUISTS ANYWAY IF THEY CAN'T MAKE COMPUTERS
	   		       TRANSLATE?

Machine translation gave the initial inspiration to computational
linguistics and continues to motivate much of the work.  That is
surely fair enough since the problem is clearly computational and
obviously linguistic.  But forty years of money and effort has brought
us hardly any closer to the answer.  Some people think think linguists
are part of the problem when they should be part of the answer.
Jelinek, of IBM speech and machine translation fame at IBM, said his
project took a step forward whenever he fired a linguist.  The world
continues to pour money down the same rat hole with little discernable
progress, with or without the linguists.  The German government is
giving it a new twist: "Notice how we never seem to get anywhere on
machine translation? And, notice how we never seem to get anywhere on
speech recognition?  Well.  Tell you what ..."  You guessed it.
Verbmobil was born---speech to speech translation research at a cost
of $10,000,000 per annum.  Mark my words: before you know it, they
will be bad mouthing us again.

So I think we should get together and organize against the oppressor.
Lest you may be in any doubt, I will tell you why they could not make
the machines translate and why it is not our fault.

------------------------
The schedule for this year's scheduled colloquiums is available on the
WWW at the following URL:
http://bhasha.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/colloq.html

 	           ^/^/^/ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP \^\^\^


The next meeting of the Phonology Workshop will be:
	Date: Thursday April 20th, 7:30pm
	Place: Seminar Room, Linguistics Dept, Margaret Jacks Hall
		
	  Rule Ordering, and Constraint Interaction in OT
			Young-Mee Yu Cho
		      Stanford University 
Rule ordering was one of the most powerful tools for phonological
analysis prior to the introduction of OT. In particular, numerous
cases have been reported of dialects or historical stages of a
language that contain the same underlying representations and the same
rules, but differ simply by virtue of the ordering of the rules.  I
argue that when equipped with two further assumptions involving
markedness and association of structure, OT has not only the same kind
of descriptive coverage in dealing with dialectal variation as
derivational theories but it also handles cases where the latter make
incorrect predictions. Two cases of where the constraint interaction
of OT diverges from the rule ordering of operational theories (Korean
and Klamath) will be discussed in depth.

 	              ^\^\^\ TRUE LINGUISTICS /^/^/^

A worried reader writes:
'Dear Sesquipedalian,
	Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the
words Fish and and and and and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign' have
been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and
between Fish and and and and and and and and and and and and and
and and and and and and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
			-- Nim Chimpsky (age 3 1/2)

Dear Nim: Maybe so, but wouldn't YOUR sentence have been clearer if
you had written, 'Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen
between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips
sign" have been more clear if quotation marks had been placed before
Fish, and between Fish and And, and and and And, and And and and, and
and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after
Chips?"'

		     ^/^/^/ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS \^\^\^

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

-- ACADEMIA SINICA: Post-doctoral Position (Chinese Language
Processing and Computational Linguistics), Academia Sinica, Taipei,
Taiwan, ROC.  Research Projects: Lexical Knowledge Base, Modern and
Classical Chinese Corpora, Chinese Parser.  Primary Fields: I.
Linguistics (Syntax/Semantics/Morphology); II. Computer Science (NLP).
Subfields: Corpus Linguistics, Information Retrieval, Lexicography,
Classical Chinese Grammar.  Openings:  1 Or 2 [pending approval].
Term: July/August 1995 to June 1997 (renewable pending budgetary
approval and performance).  Requirements: (1) Ph. D. in
Linguistics/C.S. (before August 1995 and after August 1991); (2)
(near) Native Fluency in Mandarin Chinese.  BY May 6 (Saturday): Email
(1) cover letter (2) C.V. (including list of publications), and (3)
research interests and proposed research areas to: churen@iis.sinica.edu.tw

-- UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY: Department of Linguistics, University of
Sydney, Sydney, Australia.  Lectureship (Level B) in Language and
Cognition (Tenurable) Reference No: D11/04 Available starting February
1996.  To participate in research and teaching in both the
undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the Department.
Specialisations can include any field within linguistics and wider
cognitive domains: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, cognitive grammar, computational linguistics, etc.
A research interest in the languages of the Asian, Australasian, or
Pacific area is desirable.  A PhD is required.  Preference will be
given to applicants with substantial publications.  Membership of a
University approved superannuation scheme is a condition of employment
for new appointees. For further information, including how to apply
for the position, contact
Professor William Foley 61+2-3514348, fax  61+2-5521683 or
e-mail:  william.foley@linguistics.su.edu.au
post: Linguistics F12, University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA
Salary:   Level B $42,198 - $50,111 p.a.
Closing date for applications:  31 July 1995.

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

		        ^/^/^/ INSTA-PRIZE \^\^\^

PARTING SHOT: What do these pairs of letters represent?

			    ST   ND   RD   TH

Solution to THE LION SLEEPS...: Ms Kleene's procedure: Dr Smith wears
both pairs of gloves as before.  Sides W1 and B2 may become
contaminated, while W2 and B1 remaine sterile.  Dr Jones wears the
blue pair with sides B1 against his hands.  Dr Livingstone turns the
white pair inside out and puts them on with sides W2 against his
hands, the he puts the blue pair on, over the white, with sides B2 on
the outside.  In all three cases only sides B2 touch the chief,
therefore he runs no risk from catching anything from the surgeons.

\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/

                    ^\^\^\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /^/^/^

So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
online at Stanford (in directory /user/linguistics/Sesquip/93-94), and
at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.)  The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.

Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information,
disclosed, in this publication, or represents that its use would not
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coincidental.  The views and opinions expressed herein do not
necessarily reflect those of Stanford University or the Linguistics
Department, or their employees, and shall not be used for advertising
or product endorsement purposes.

'If anyone finds this offensive, I am prepared not only to retract my
words, but also to deny under oath that I ever said them.' -- Tom Lehrer

/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\