Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: First impressions
Message-ID: <1989Jul6.155519.29686@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <444@warlock.UUCP> <1815@ucsd.EDU> <11755@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 89 15:55:19 GMT

In article <11755@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> kpv@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Phong Vo[drew]) writes:
>A reasonable approach that could have been taken for the Baltimore conference
>was to re-invite some of the papers rejected in the San Diego conference
>because of lack of space or because they did not meet the themes of the time.
>Come to think of it, it's probably not a bad idea to keep a list of submitted
>papers that were considered good quality but not meeting some criteria
>specific to a particular conference...

There is a small problem with this:  you are assuming that good papers get
rejected for such reasons.  This certainly wasn't true of San Diego (I was
on the SD Program Committee); the only really good paper we rejected was
one that simply had absolutely nothing to do with Unix.  Other than that,
we didn't reject *anything* we considered really good -- we couldn't
afford to.  We had no lack of space:  we could have found room for twice
as many papers.  We had no conference-specific criteria, either.  Your pool
of good-but-rejected papers simply doesn't exist.
-- 
$10 million equals 18 PM       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
(Pentagon-Minutes). -Tom Neff  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu