Me? An Invited Speaker? Oh, never mind

There isn't much to report yet on the job search front yet, other than this invite I received via LinkedIn:

The email was entitled Plenary Speaker Invitation: Green Chemistry-2015. Gee, that's nice, but then I read the body of the email:

"Dear John S,

We certainly don’t know each other; still, I would like to contacts [sic] you and open a dialogue about, "2nd International Conference on Past and Present Research Systems of Green Chemistry" (Green Chemistry-2015), scheduled on September 14-16, 2015 at [sic] Florida, USA.

The main theme of the conference is “Foster Advancements in Globalization of Green Chemistry". The Organizing committee would like to invite you as a Speaker/Delegate for the conference."

There were some links and then it was signed by a person with an Anglo-Saxon name.

Of course, alarm bells immediately went off. When are spammers going to learn that grammatical errors in "professional" communications are a huge tipoff? First there is the subject/verb disagreement in a simple sentence, and then there's the misused preposition (always guaranteed to trip up non-native English speakers). There was also the nice sleight of hand, demoting me from "Plenary Speaker" to speaker/delegate in just a few lines.

Now I know English is a tough language to learn and I am more than willing to forgive errors (I need plenty of forgiveness myself) but the errors were enough to make me question everything. A little bit of digging and I found the conference to be organized by the infamous OMICS group, which was recently accused of running predatory conferences. You can read more of their tactics here and here.

So while it is is flattering to receive an invite, I will decline. As in ignore it. All of this further supports why I really don't put a lot of time and effort into LinkedIn.

Previous Years

November 24, 2010 - Corporate Cultures

November 24, 2010 - That's all for this week