This is a supposedly reputable “scientific society” whose sole purpose seems to be to lock up publications behind a pay firewall and spam potential members to encourage them to join. These clowns even throw in a “Free World Clock Calculator”. Is that the kind of professional society you want to belong to?

Here is the latest spam. I am posting it in the hope that it will encourage spammers to spam them.

We have an important chance for you to join ACM, including a world clock calculator, if you respond at:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

As a member of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, you will have access to a host of career-enhancing benefits including the newly re-launched “Communications of the ACM” magazine, the most trusted source on advanced computing.

Essential reasons to read “Communications” each and every month:

* News, analysis and insights from the computing world’s leading authorities on the cutting edge of technology
* Balanced and accessible coverage
* Broad and in-depth technical analysis
* Serious and insightful commentary
* Access to an active global community of computing professionals
* Full, real-time, website access to additional content, tools and resources

ACM members are raving about the fully redesigned publication:

“A must-read from cover to cover”
“More articles relevant to my work and interests”
“A top scientific journal”
“Quality technical content”
“More engaging”
“An exciting layout”
“A vastly better magazine”

Learn more about all of the additional benefits of ACM membership, including access to thousands of online books and courses, by visiting:

https://campus.acm.org/public/qjstuwithbook/joinacm2.cfm?client_no=%27%2B%3C%27%2FPL7%2B3%20%20%20%0A&promo=PSAP28SVL

Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

I hope you will take a moment to consider how valuable an ACM membership and “Communications of the ACM” magazine can be to your career!

Sincerely,
Lillian Israel
Director of Membership
ACM
acmhelp@acm.org

ACM Member Services Department
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As science has evolved, we have adopted an informal tradition of putting our research papers on the web, often using free services to do so (e.g., our employer). It’s good to see that Larry’s old page on www.almaden.ibm.com is still around, but Larry also put many of his papers up on a geocities site as well. I remember at the time he died that his geocities page probably wouldn’t last forever, so I quietly made a copy of it on my own site, just to preserve his legacy a bit longer. Now that geocities is finally going away, it reminds me that science (particularly theoretical work) is destined to outlive almost all technology, and it is only through a community of scientists that we will properly curate our work. As my small part of it, I’ve exposed Larry’s original home page on the cstheory.com site.

Followup: the query [site:geocities.com "theoretical computer science"] on google reveals that there are quite a few pages on geocities that are concerned with theoretical computer science. I doubt that many of them are very important, but only history gets to decide what is important in science.

Dear friend,

Thank you and regards,
Jason Lim
Marketing Executive
World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd
5 Toh Tuck Link
Singapore 596224
Tel. +65 6466 5775 ext. 247
Fax. +65 6467 7667
Email: cjlim@wspc.com

1. The fact that they use direct mail marketing in the first place. The email address they used is the one I used to register for SIGIR 2006, so at least they are using the “existing business relationship” loophole.
2. They are still a dead tree society, mailing the CACM to all members. No matter what you think of this periodical, it’s silly for ACM to cling to the old publishing model like grim death.
3. The message is cleverly worded to avoid discussion about the ACM digital library. In fact, ACM membership does not include access to the ACM digital library, so apparently they think membership is orthogonal to science. ACM members still have to pay $5 per article to download from there (nonmembers pay $10). If ACM membership included this instead of the CACM, then I would consider joining.
4. The organization is now using preferential pricing. To quote:
   

   Join ACM today and receive a 15% discount plus an ACM Free World Clock Calculator!

   They included a link “just for me”. What justification is there for me to be offered a lower price than a new PhD in CS? And WTF is ACM doing giving away World Clock Calculators? Did they buy too many of those in the 80s? Do they offer toasters next month?

Can you imagine a world with an ACM that organized as a professional society? As a start, I want them to do the following:

1. put science first by supporting open access to publications (like Usenix)
2. treat their members on an equal footing without preferential pricing
3. didn’t waste resources on useless trinkets
4. didn’t use email to spam potential “customers” (I can’t really call them “members”).

They invited me to “… consider how valuable an ACM membership and Communications of the ACM magazine can be to your career”. I have. They are CRAP.

• Admission to main conference sessions
• Electronic Proceedings
• Lunches: Monday and Wednesday
• Refreshments for all breaks
• Welcoming Reception (live music and some great wine)
• Banquet at a leading Napa Valley vineyard (Details to be announced shortly; possibly fancy dress since it is Halloween afterall)

So basically they give us a CD (total cost of production under $1), lunches (you can get two good lunches for $30, even in Napa), refreshments (maybe another $30 if you eat like a horse), wine ($20/person in Napa for good wine), music (am I at a scientific conference or what?), and a banquet (let’s say $100). I get a grand total of under $200 for that – I assume they pay a fair amount for the lecture hall, but that’s usually subsidized by the overpriced hotel rooms, so the question is

WHY DOES ACM HAVE SUCH A HIGH COST STRUCTURE FOR CONFERENCES?

I guess I won’t see you at the conference. I can’t justify wasting my company’s money that much. It’s another reminder of why I chose the name SIGCRAP for my blog.

A long time ago a banker explained to me that bankers didn’t hold money – they were in the business of managing trust. They conveyed trust to their depositors and investors, and they held trust in their borrowers. In order to make a business out of this, they had to be shrewd in estimating the value of risk. In the old days they were able to apply their knowledge of social relationships and markets in order to come up with reasonable values. Bankers in a community generally knew who was a good risk for a loan, either because of their relationship in business or through their track record in fulfilling previous commitments.

Unfortunately, the mortgage business was taken over by a set of people who had no way to accurately quantify trust. This is one of those areas where sound human judgement was replaced by algorithmic quantitative analysis, and the results have not been pretty. I always looked suspiciously at the “science” of risk assessment. I’m amused by the fact that the wikipedia entry on risk assessment contains an automatically generated message saying that it contains “weasel words”.

The underlying problem in risk assessment is trying to estimate the probability of an extremely rare event – perhaps an event that has never even been observed to happen. Such estimates are by their very nature wild speculations, with variances that are larger than the mean. Any estimate of the probability of such an event has to be taken with a grain of salt the size of a dump truck.

The application of unsound algorithmic practices and gut instincts has resulted in a massive erosion of trust in our society. In the pursuit of profits, mortgage lenders through out sound predictive methods and substituted unsound analytic techniques instead. When Bush stands up and says that our economy is in a crisis, everyone remembers that he used the same argument for going to war in Iraq. When banks start to question whether borrowers will pay back their loans, they start to hoard their assets and financial liquidity evaporates. When investors (including myself) see a rapid and unpredictable erosion of value in the stock market, they pull out rapidly, further eroding the value of the stock market.

The question is – what will restore this vacuum of trust? Trust is something that is easily lost, but hard to gain. What can be lost in moments will sometimes take years to recover. The U.S. currency is imprinted with the slogan “In God we trust”. That may be true for some, but I think the correct slogan would be “In experience we trust”. We need some better experiences in order to regain our trust.

One great advantage of open access publishing is the lack of backlog – journal articles could become available on the web the moment they are accepted, there would be no practical limit on the number of papers accepted. When the flow of high quality articles gets too high, you publish more papers. When the flow of sufficient quality papers dries up, you publish fewer papers. There would also be no practical limit on the size of articles. Moreover, it would make it easy to maintain links to backing evidence for scientific literature, including demos, data, code to process the data, designs of experimental apparatus, etc. This would enhance overall quality, by removing the artificial constraints of page limits and focusing exclusively on quality.

There are numerous advantages, and as far as I can tell, few disadvantages. The only significant barrier is lack of vision.