philosophysmoker-Mstarz

As anon 11:41 notes, there's another email out from the APA containing more good news.

Online registration will be available on or about September 15, and will be considerably more flexible than registration (online or not) has been in the past. You will be able to register online up to and including the time of the meeting itself, and advance registration rates will remain in effect up to December 26, the day before the meeting. (Advance registration by fax or mail will have an earlier deadline.)

Note how quickly Amy Ferrer made these changes. I just want to say, first, that she rocks.

You probably already heard about this, but the APA has agreed to try moving the Eastern APA meeting to the end of the first full week in January for the 2015/16 academic year. I think this is good news, whether or not it ultimately works out. It's good to try new things.

One question I have is, what are they going to do for the 2016/17 academic year? Suppose the first full week in January doesn't work out. Suppose that's a really bad time to have the meeting. Since Eastern APA meetings have to be scheduled years in advance, does that mean we'll be stuck with the early January meeting time until 2018 or 2019? Or are they going to try a range of dates over the next several years? I think they should try a range of dates.

In a related note, our old friend Chris Alen Sula sent me an email last night, saying,

You may have seen the recent APA announcement about the Eastern APA date effective 2015/16. When I looked at the crosstab results at http://www.apaonline.org/APAOnline/Eastern_Division/Eastern_Division_Meeting_Survey_Results.aspx, I noticed there was also data about the question of whether in-person interviews should be a primary function of the Eastern APA meeting, with responses broken out between regular, student, and international members. With that question, more than all the others, I noticed a difference in the pattern of responses among these three groups.

I re-expressed the values as percentages for each group and visualized them [in the chart below]:

Spiros asks:

I was just getting my APA receipts organized. I'll submit them next week to my University, and in due course I'll get reimbursed for nearly every dollar I spent on the APA Eastern. But I have to say that the grand sum is pretty staggering, considering what one gets in return.

Unless one happens to live close enough to DC to not need to fly, the cost for most of getting to the conference and staying in the conference hotel has to be roughly $1000. How do graduate students and non-TT slave-wage earners who don't live on the East Coast afford it?

Prof Kate recently asked,

I cannot seem to figure out how to register for the Eastern APA. I log on to apaonline. I click on the bright red "Register" link on the homepage, and it takes me to an 'events' page with this sort of calendar interface, as if I'm searching for flights, you know? So I enter the appropriate date range, and it prompts me for the city, and I type Washington. Then... then what? I click 'filter' but nothing happens. Friends, Smokers, frokers, please tell me what I'm doing wrong. (And DON'T say "you're using apaonline, is what you're doing wrong." Cuz I know, I know... I blame myself.)

I was composing a comment for the comment thread here in which I propose an argument for keeping the E-APA meeting between Christmas and New Years. I was trying to explain why professional inconveniences should trump personal ones. The argument was that because the E-APA meeting is a meeting of our professional organization, it should be held in a way that does not conflict with our professional activities. That is, I was going to allege that the fact that the APA is a professional organization gives us reason to hold the meeting while we're supposed to be on vacation.

But then I read the sentences over again, and I thought, What? No it doesn't. If it's a professional meeting, it should cut into professional time, not vacation time--not family time. This, in conjunction with some of the other points people have made, has caused me to reconsider. Maybe we should try to hold it during the first week or so in January. I'll be damned.

How's that grab you?

--Mr. Zero

From Leiter:

In light of the on-going labor dispute at the hotel hosting the Pacific APA, the University of San Francisco is offering alternative conference and lodging facilities for interested participants. See the website for details about how to move sessions to the USF facilities.

Submissions for this year's meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association are due on February 15th.

Now, there's probably a well-known, rational reason for this that totally makes perfect sense. But why is the submission deadline the day after Valentine's when the conference starts two days after Christmas? Why is the deadline almost 10 months before the conference?

--Mr. Zero

The upshot is, they're not moving the conference. The survey revealed that a plurality of the conference participants preferred to keep the conference at the St. Francis. More information here.

I'm pretty glad they decided not to move to Las Vegas. I don't know why that was mentioned at all. I'm disappointed that they're not moving to another Bay-area hotel, but I appreciate that this would be a logistical nightmare at this point. But because the union is not actually on strike, I am not outraged or anything. Just disappointed.

But maybe you're going and you don't want to stay at the St. Francis. Here is a list of hotels you might want to stay at instead.

--Mr. Zero

Something that occurred in a comment thread at Philosophers Anonymous got me thinking. Dr. Killjoy says,

What actually may hurt the candidate is if I spy several years-old conference presentations ("Qualia Can Suck it" Main Program Eastern APA 2007, "Girthy Concepts" Main Program Pacific APA 2007) but notice a lack of transition to publication. Just because something's interesting enough to make on to a conference program doesn't mean that it's good enough to get published. And there are some folks out there who are quite adept at coming up with projects of the former sort but are terrible at turning those into works of the latter sort.

Like a lot of people, I periodically comment on the work of others at conferences. At a recent conference, I noticed an odd pattern. At a typical conference, the talks consist of four main parts: A) the main presenter presents her work; B) the commenter presents some comments, criticisms, or suggestions; C) the main presenter responds to the comments; D) the audience members discuss the paper with the main presenter.

The odd pattern was that part (D) often proceeds as if parts (B) and (C) never happened. Nobody asks the commenter any questions. Nobody mentions anything the commenter said in questions addressed to the main presenter.* If somebody confides that he's nervous about giving comments, I tell him not to worry because nobody pays any attention to the comments.^† This seems weird, since standard operating procedure is to employ commentators, and almost every conference does it. I started to wonder, though, what the point was. Would we lose anything if we got rid of comments at conferences altogether?

As it happens, I recently attended a conference that did not make use of prepared commentary--that did away with parts (B) and (C) of the standard formula. It seemed to me that the quality of the discussions were not harmed by this fact; the absence of commentators seemed to make no difference in the overall discussion whatsoever. What did seem to be affected was the number of people at the conference. It had the feel of a really small, 1-day conference, even though it was a multi-day several-concurrent-sessions kind of a deal. Maybe that's not bad: there's something to be said for intimacy. But usually you want a lot of people at your session if you're a main presenter. So one nice thing about having commentators is that it doubles the amount of people who attend the conference without doubling the amount of sessions.^‡

--Mr. Zero

*There are exceptions. This typically indicates a problem with the main paper. I've seen this occur only in cases in which the main presenter was responding in a specific and narrow way to some other paper, the author of the other paper served as commentator, and the commentator's paper was way better or more interesting than the main presenter's paper.

^†This was an exaggeration, but was not hyperbole.

^‡Having poster sessions is also an efficient way of increasing attendance. And I suspect that posters, though less efficient, are better than commentary, since posters are intrinsically more interesting. When I did a poster, I had lots of good discussions about it outside of the poster session itself; I've never really had a discussion about some commentary I was giving.