Conference Styles

Mus­ings on the con­fer­ence busi­ness and what makes con­fer­ences work.

I’m in the middle of last-minute details for the XML Con­fer­ence 2004, things like check­ing the PDF of the sched­ule before it gets sent to the print­er, fig­ur­ing out the chair­ing sched­ule for the ses­sions, etc. There’s a lot more to run­ning a con­fer­ence of this size and com­plex­ity than I thought before I got involved. Once the con­fer­ence starts a lot of the work has been done. I ima­gine the dir­ect­or of a stage play must feel the same when it finally opens to the pub­lic. You’ve done a lot of pre­par­a­tion work, and now it’s up to the act­ors (in the case of the con­fer­ence, the speak­ers) to do their part. And if one of them fluffs their lines or turns out to have stage fright, that’s as much part of the exper­i­ence as those speak­ers who have a gift for com­mu­nic­at­ing with the audi­ence that is a joy to see.

There are so many dif­fer­ent types of con­fer­ence, ran­ging from the tech­nic­al more form­al bent of the XML con­fer­ence, com­plete with pro­ceed­ings papers and (new this year!) a prize for the best speak­er, to the delib­er­ately inform­al nature of the North­ern Voice blog­ging con­fer­ence. The lat­ter is aimed at per­son­al uses of blog­ging rather than cor­por­ate, there are no exhib­its and a min­im­al entry fee. (BTW, the dead­line for speak­er sub­mis­sions to North­ern Voice is Novem­ber 15 at Speak­er Inform­a­tion.) And then there’s the FOO camp, which I’ve writ­ten about before.

What makes a con­fer­ence worth­while is always the speak­ers, I’ve decided. Speak­ers who care about what they’re talk­ing about and want you to care. Speak­ers who know what they’re talk­ing about is a nice bonus, of course ;-). At the XML Con­fer­ence I’ve found that speak­ers who are asked to speak are gen­er­ally less motiv­ated and do a worse job than those who have the motiv­a­tion to put in the abstracts them­selves. If you care about some­thing, you will put in the work to do a good job, and this applies to speak­ing as much as to writ­ing code.

I’m look­ing for­ward to both these con­fer­ences, Novem­ber for XML, and Feb­ru­ary for blog­ging. They’re dif­fer­ent in style, and they will have dif­fer­ent audi­ences. But they will both have some great speakers.

More Scams

My pre­vi­ous post on scams was writ­ten without tak­ing into account a rather more dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment in the spam/scam scene. I recently received spam that claimed to have lots of cred­it card num­bers for sale, prices vary­ing accord­ing to the issu­ing coun­try and how many card num­bers you wanted. I went to the web site and there were lots of cards there (middle digits miss­ing). I checked for my card num­ber, which was­n’t there. There was no list­ing of Cana­dian cred­it card num­bers, so there is some­thing to be said for not liv­ing in the neigh­bour­hood’s biggest country.

This is so blatant, and, unlike the phish­ing scams, is some­thing the cred­it card com­pan­ies should be dir­ectly inter­ested in stop­ping since the money to cov­er fraud­u­lent card use comes out of their profits. Unless… maybe the email was a scam, and some­body is fish­ing to find people who want to buy such num­bers. Lots of scope for con­spir­acy the­or­ies there! 

Phishing for Jurisdiction

Tim has a post and won­ders why the crim­in­als are so blatant when it should be easy to track them down. 

I think the answer is simple — nobody feels that they’re responsible. 

We live in Canada, the phish­ing attempt was about a US com­pany, and the phish­ing script is run­ning on a Thai web site. That’s a min­im­um of three police forces that would need to agree a) that it’s a prob­lem, b) that it’s a prob­lem they should do some­thing about, c) that it’s a prob­lem they can do some­thing about and d) that it’s a prob­lem they should work togeth­er to solve. Point a) sounds trivi­al, but depends on the pre­cise laws in three coun­tries (as an inter­est­ing aside, in the dim recesses of my memory I remem­ber read­ing some­where that for some years it was not illeg­al to coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cies in Aus­tralia as long as you did­n’t coun­ter­feit the Aus­trali­an cur­rency). Point b) depends on wheth­er the vari­ous police forces think it’s a worse prob­lem than many oth­ers they have to solve. And I would think that rip­ping rich-world people off for some money is way below people traf­fick­ing (to give just one example) in terms of inter­na­tion­al police priorities.

Of course, the Thai gov­ern­ment could decide that such phish­ing attempts occur­ring on Thai web sites were dis­turb­ing poten­tial investors in Thai­l­and and do some­thing about it on their own, much as I gath­er the Nigeri­an gov­ern­ment is tak­ing steps to clean up the Nigeri­an spam prob­lem. That does assume the prob­lem is per­ceived as being big enough to be worth solv­ing. In this case, you nev­er know. thaiedresearch.org is registered to the “Office of the Edu­ca­tion Coun­cil” which sounds at least semi-offi­cial; do they know about the phish­ing script? If they know, do they care?

XML Art

Found in my inbox this morning:

Hello,

I found your web­site http://www.xmlconference.org on Google. 

Your web­site has con­tent related to our’s at www.the-gallery-of-china.com.
This is a very high qual­ity web­site and is very well ranked on Google (PR7).

We are happy to upload a link onto this web­site in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appre­ci­ate that this would be of great bene­fit to us both.

fol­lowed by instruc­tions as to what inform­a­tion the XML con­fer­ence should put on its web site and how to send them the link inform­a­tion we want on their web site. 

The “Gal­lery of China” has some clas­sic­al-look­ing Chinese art; I’m not sure how suit­able it really is for the XML Art­work dis­play we’re hav­ing at XML 2004. So I guess we won’t link to it… 

Electoral Sadness

The Elect­or­al Vote Pre­dict­or 2004 web site has some sad­den­ing com­ments about the US elect­or­al sys­tem today. The sad­dest is a point­er to the BBC story of ex-Pres­id­ent Carter­’s con­ten­tion that Flor­ida does not ful­fill inter­na­tion­al require­ments for a fair elec­tion. Since Flor­ida has so many votes asso­ci­ated with it, it is a determ­in­ing factor in the US elec­tion, and any wor­ries that it is not going to fairly reflect the will of the elect­or­ate there will cause con­cerns about the fair­ness of the elec­tion overall.

The oth­er issue is that it appears that polling organ­iz­a­tions are no longer com­ing up with num­bers that can be trus­ted. When two polls in the same state come up with com­pletely dif­fer­ent num­bers, neither poll can be trus­ted. Although this is bad news for the trust­wor­thi­ness of the polling agen­cies, per­haps over­all it’s good news? If instant polls don’t work, and polls in gen­er­al are dis­cred­ited, one can always hope that one out­come will be politi­cians who do what they think is right for the major­ity of the people, rather than what will earn them a short-term blip in the polls. Of course, people will always dis­agree over what is “right”, but a little time for thought and per­haps even focus­sing on con­sist­ency with long-term goals can­’t hurt.

Palace Walk

A small book­club meet­ing with mixed feel­ings about Naguib Mah­fouz’ “Palace Walk”

Is it a bad sign when half the book­club does­n’t even show up to dis­cuss the book, and only two of us had fin­ished read­ing it? I thought so. 

Naguib Mah­fouz won the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­at­ure for his tri­logy of books set in Cairo around 1919. The cent­ral fig­ure of the book Palace Walk (Cairo Tri­logy) is al-Sayy­id Ahmad, a mer­chant who does whatever he wants while for­bid­ding his reli­gious wife (and his chil­dren) any­thing that might be deemed even slightly immor­al. The book opens with his wife get­ting up at mid­night to pre­pare for his return from the bars and cur­rent mis­tress. This theme is con­tin­ued through­out the book; when the hus­band goes away on busi­ness the wife lets her male chil­dren talk her into vis­it­ing a shrine. On the way home she is hit by a car, so there is no chance of hid­ing the fact that she left the house. As soon as she is well, the hus­band throws her out of the house and not until almost the entire neigh­bour­hood peti­tions him on her behalf does he take her back again.

The book evokes dusty streets and images of pass­ive Egyp­tians wait­ing for the storm of Eng­lish and Aus­trali­an occu­pa­tion to pass while try­ing to carry on their lives. The nov­el­ist uses the mem­bers of the fam­ily to show the dif­fer­ences in reac­tions to the sol­diers: the middle son is involved in demon­stra­tions (without the father­’s know­ledge, and cer­tainly against his will) while the eld­est cares only for women and wine and money. 

I found it a hard book to grasp. With many books you find your­self sym­path­iz­ing with one or more of the char­ac­ters. Here I either felt annoyed (e.g., with the father/husband, des­pite the obvi­ous attempts by the nov­el­ist towards the end of the book to make him more sym­path­et­ic) or sorry for them (the mother/wife and the eld­est daugh­ter). In the end I found I was read­ing as a neut­ral observ­er, rather than almost a par­ti­cipant, and so the book was not as envel­op­ing as I expec­ted. Per­haps some of this was due to the trans­la­tion; it seemed rather uneven in patches and at times I caught myself won­der­ing if some phrase had been trans­lated correctly.

One thing that is inter­est­ing in the light of the cur­rent Middle East­ern polit­ics and reli­gious dis­cus­sions is the tone of passiv­ity. There is little of the jihad tone that we hear about today, although the middle son does take part in demon­stra­tions. The fam­ily in gen­er­al tries to avoid danger and all the reli­gious lead­ers coun­sel its avoid­ance as well. From that point of view, the book is inter­est­ing as a snap­shot of an age and a way of life that prob­ably does­n’t exist any more, but that has an effect on present-day atti­tudes towards women and foreigners.

In sum­mary, I think the book is worth read­ing for the pic­ture it paints of a dif­fer­ent world. I may even read the rest of the trilogy.