Conferences Are Like Swans

International conferences: are they any use?

Are medical conferences useful? And for whom?

CONFERENCES ORGANIZED BY MEDICAL SOCIETIES and related organizations are a dominant feature of the academic, professional, and social life of all health-related disciplines. These events come in all sizes, from relatively small, local gatherings, workshops, and symposia to large international megacongresses that mobilize tens of thousands of clinicians, researchers, exhibitors, and staff to bui...

How healthy are software engineering conferences?

In this article we study the health of software engineering conferences by means of a suite of metrics created for this purpose. The metrics measure stability of the community, openness to new authors, introversion, representativeness of the PC with respect to the authors’ community, availability of PC candidates, and scientific prestige. Using this metrics suite, we assess the health of 11 sof...

Yield of Black Swans

h EXCEPT FOR GETTING your chip to market on time, optimizing yield is perhaps the most important thing we can do to improve IC profitability. We address this problem in several ways: design for manufacturability (DFM) through layout rules, process control, and increasingly clean cleanrooms. In an ideal world, this would solve our yield problems. We know it doesn’t, so we build a diagnostic capa...

Are you a SCEPTIC? SoCial mEdia Precision & uTility In Conferences.

We analysed Twitter feeds at an emergency medicine scientific conference to determine the (1) accuracy of disseminated educational messages and the (2) use in providing rapid feedback to speakers. Most speakers were happy for key messages to be tweeted, and the majority of tweets (34/37) represented these accurately. It is important that speakers and conference organisers consider Twitter use a...