Monday, April 18, 2005

Wanna go to a conference? (Sure you want!)

You might know about the God of conferences from David Lodge's novel "Small World": you sacrifice some of your time, and neurons and then you get rewarded (by this God) with a conference participation (meaning free travelling, and drinking). Well, naturally, people really want just the free travelling, and drinking, so what they do is finding money so that they can organize lots of conferences. A new conference being organized, you want some other people submitting papers (so that your conference looks real), so you start spreading the word/spamming other people about your brand knew opporunity to travel and drink. It seems not everybody is happy about this, especially those weird students from M.I.T. who really sacrificed many of their neurons to get in there. What happens next? Read in this story.

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