Wednesday, March 24, 2010

ANTEC Bound, I think

So apparently I am going to be presenting a paper at the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) ANTEC Conference this year. I don't have details on timing yet, as I haven't even received a formal letter of acceptance despite my paper being submitted in early January. (I only have been told of the acceptance because a colleague called to find out what was going on.)

The sloppy organization doesn't surprise me as I have had a slew of bad experiences with the SPE. The last time I went (2005, Boston), I had submitted two papers. One was accepted and one was rejected. Imagine my surprise upon finding out at registration that the rejected paper had been rejected as an oral presentation but had been then been accepted as a poster without anyone notifying me. That meant I had to scramble to put a poster together - getting a colleague back home to find and email me a copy of the submitted paper, converting it to a poster, find a print shop that could make the poster and then getting it printed. This fiasco caused me to miss a number of talks that I had been looking forward to.

After I got back from the conference, I wrote an email to the organizers about the problems. They were sympathetic and promised a CD of the proceedings, which I never received. For group that has been hurting for membership, they certainly make it difficult to continue as a member. Anyone else had similar problems?

When I find out more details, I'll post them. Maybe we can have a meet-the-blogger session at a watering hole some evening.

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