Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
Not affiliated with ACM. They have their own crap.

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Entries Tagged as 'Rants'

Why facebook is crap

October 1st, 2007 ·

Over the years we’ve all seen technological trends come and go (I’m old so I’ve seen more come and go than some others). I regard Facebook as one of these fads that will fade quickly. As a mathematician I have been interested in the study of random graphs that arise from social phenomena. Examples include [...]

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Tags: Rants · The internet

Religion is evil

March 18th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Some people are shocked when they hear me say this. That’s because they don’t like to have something they believe in called evil. When I say that religion is evil, I don’t mean that religion has no value whatsoever. I mean that the net world effect from religion is to promote evil. That’s odd, given [...]

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Tags: Politics · Rants

Worst paper awards

February 25th, 2007 ·

Having been on many program committees in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a worst paper award in addition to a best paper award. Let’s think about this – if a conference has a 10% acceptance rate, it doesn’t mean that these 10% papers are necessarily important papers. It simply means [...]

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Tags: Rants

Why sigcrap?

February 23rd, 2007 ·

You’re probably wondering what SIGCRAP is. It’s not a special interest group of ACM. It’s a play on words that was motivated by my recent thoughts on the nature of academic publishing, and the role of professional societies. I’m a researcher in computer science, and I’ve been a member of several professional societies during my [...]

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Tags: Rants