Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!gatech!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!bill
From: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Third public review of X3J11 C
Message-ID: <637@proxftl.UUCP>
Date: 27 Aug 88 16:02:54 GMT
References: <8365@smoke.ARPA> <225800053@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <8374@smoke.ARPA> <509@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> <891@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <891@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
: It is important not just that it appear in a journal, but prominently.  If
: you want input, go out and loudly proclaim it.  As a researcher, I find it
: necessary to glance at more than 200 journals.  I certainly missed the
: announcement in CACM (one of my lower priority journals).
:
: I do not believe it appeared in _Science_, the journal of AAAS.  Now most
: mathematicians and statisticians do not read any of the above named journals.
: How about including the _Notices_ of the AMS, the _Bulletin_ of the IMS,
: and the appropriate information journals of SIAM and ASA?  How about asking
: the physicists and chemists and astronomers and geologists and biologists?
: (Apologies to the groups left out are in order.)
: --
: Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
: Phone: (317)494-6054
: hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)

Hind-sight is wonderful.  You shoulda looked in those journals.
If only you knew.  Now you do.  This is not intended as
condemnation, but rather just observing that humans are not
omnicient.  And to emphasize what you already know: that if you
want to keep on top of things, you must read the relevant
publications.

I do not think that it is the business of standard committees
(and, by extension, lots of other groups) to make exceptional
effort to be known about by people outside their fields.  To put
it bluntly, it is damn near impossible to do this even half right
and certainly a waste of effort; it is the job of those who have
an interest in the field to look in the right places and not the
job of the standards committees to shout their business from the
rooftops.  (Think of the information pollution we already have!)

---
Bill
novavax!proxftl!bill