Expectations, Tasks and assignments (was: Assembly vs. Everything

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
Date: Tue Aug 21 07:42:48 2001

At 05:16 PM 8/19/01 -0400, R.D. Davis wrote:
>Aye, FoxPro, the database software of choice for clueless luzers. ;-)

One way that I supported myself through the master's program was to
help my advisor carry out the paper submission/peer review/conference
program process for a major conference in the U.S. We were given
a database of authors from previous conferences (dbaseIV). We were
expected to enter all paper titles, author info (trying to maintain
the existing database), send the papers to reviewers (each with
an accompanying letter), enter the results when the reviews came
back, sort everything by review grade, assign a cut-off based on
available rooms/times at the conference center, assemble the
program (i.e., group papers by general topic and assign them to
rooms/presentation times such that no two rooms had presentations
on the same topic in the same time slot), and then send a big
mailing; the simple letters were the "paper refused" type; for
the papers that were in, the acceptance letters had to include
room number and presentation time. We used dbaseIV for the
handling of the databases. But being picky about the choice
of word processing software for the letters, I wrote a dbase
script that would output a LaTeX source file with all of the
letters, even including TeX commands to draw the appropriate letterhead.
I don't think many people have used LaTeX as a filter
for a dbase report :-) . The final program for the conference
was produced in a similar way. 1400+ papers submitted, 600+ accepted,
very few errors.

carlos.


--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Tue Aug 21 2001 - 07:42:48 BST