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http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html

by iamabhi9 • 15 years ago

185 52 15 years ago

fang.ece.ufl.edu

matt4711• 15 years ago

As far as I know the page/brin pagerank paper was also rejected by SIGIR (the main information retrieval conference) before being published in WWW.

denzil_correa• 15 years ago

Any citation?

yahelc• 15 years ago

"In early 1998, Page submitted his first paper, an overview of the PageRank algorithm, to the Special Interest Group on Information Retriviel of the Association for Computing Machinery (SIGIR-ACM). But the paper was rejected. One peer reviewer wrote of the paper, "I found the overall presentation disjointed…. This needs to focus more on the IR issues and less on web analysis."

http://books.google.com/books?id=G4KfbOt7OYcC&lpg=PT81&#...

arjunnarayan• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure this isn't actual rejection notices for these papers, but made up ones in jest.

Nrsolis• 15 years ago

It would be VERY interesting to know if that's the case.

The meme of what seems to be a brilliant idea being pooh-pooh'ed by the then-current intelligentsia is almost as common as funny cat pictures with silly quotes.

"In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests that he received a C for this paper, although in a later interview he claims that he told a reporter, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C", while other tales suggest that his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be feasible. The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale)."

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

dlitz2• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure that nobody would have rejected the RSA paper with a note that argued that there was some 32-bit limit. If I've got my history correct, the Diffie-Hellman _New Directions in Cryptography_ paper had already been published, and it already used the same basic mathematical operation (exponentiation modulo a large number). Everyone knew that, sooner or later, a full public-key encryption algorithm would be found.

_delirium• 15 years ago

Yeah, a few of them are a bit too un-subtle on the satire, referencing future events in a wink-wink sort of way, which gives it away imo.

saber_taylor623• 15 years ago

With only 4 comments, no one is winking back.

With respect to the RSA "rejection," I would add the impracticality in hindsight is known to be, why the hell would you want pretty good signatures on your email? A few moments thought, provides examples where one would rather that the bits at the end were not present.

kd0amg2• 15 years ago

I really hope so. The notion that someone might be serious about the first one is rather depressing.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Yes, and as a result I'm afraid I find the whole joke rather uninteresting.

Historical irony is only fun if it's historical. Otherwise it's just fiction. It's easy to imagine a bunch of philistines who unfairly reject a piece of brilliant work. Indeed, plenty of academics imagine that every day. It's a cliché.

balloot• 15 years ago

Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.

tptacek• 15 years ago

Plus, the reviewer is right about Codd. ;)

mikebike• 15 years ago

It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.

mathattack• 15 years ago

Although this is satire, let's not confuse the quality of the idea or it's implementation, with how well the paper is written. Those are very different criteria.

kd0amg2• 15 years ago

ivan_ah• 15 years ago

Are those real, or should I hold back my AMAZEMENT?

ChristianMarks2• 15 years ago

As an uncompensated journal reviewer, I have to say that these look like genuine reviews to me.

smokinn• 15 years ago

If the journal you work for is behind a paywall, why do you do it?

I mean it as an honest question, I've always wanted to know why someone would work for free for an organization that works for profit. I understand why the academics submit their papers; it's necessary for career advancement, but why do people review for free?

ChristianMarks2• 15 years ago

Good question. There are some institutional pressures--the person who lobbied for your appointment happens to be an editor of a paywalled scientific journal publisher. It's also a way to learn about the literature. But increasingly I'm turning down requests to referee for such publishers, in favor of open access journals and conferences. The opportunity cost in refereeing a paper is a subsidy to publishing companies--one I can't afford to pay.

earl• 15 years ago

There is a famous rejection, not in CS but in econ, that I know of: Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the 21st century, winner of the John Bates Clark ('51) and Nobel ('76), and preeminent monetarist was fired by the econ department at the University of Wisconsin Madison for being jewish and too data driven. They did not advertise this fact at the department when I was there =P He went 90 minutes south to Chicago and it seemed to work out for him. It would be nice of UW econ apologized though, even if a bit late.

throwaway64• 15 years ago

err 20th century?

maratd3• 15 years ago

I'd say he will be the most influential economist of both centuries. For those who don't who he is, the man is a fantastic public speaker on top of everything and there are a ton of videos on YouTube to get you familiarized.

seanlinmt• 15 years ago

It would be more interesting to point out who rejected them.

wicknicks• 15 years ago

This article is taken from Simone Santini[0]'s paper "We are Sorry to Inform You..."[1]. Simone is a major critic of the Semantic Web. Watch this talk by him regarding his opinions on the matter[2].

Also, as some of you might know, Larry and Sergey's paper on the architecture of the Google Search Engine was rejected. It is one of most highly cited tech reports today.

  [0] http://arantxa.ii.uam.es/~ssantini/
  [1] https://noppa.aalto.fi/noppa/kurssi/mat-1.2991/materiaali/Mat-1_2991_6._rsa-kommentteja.pdf
  [2] http://videolectures.net/samt08_santini_cnod/

HerrMonnezza• 15 years ago

The link is the text of an article [1] by Simone Santini that appeared in: Computer, Volume 38 Issue 12, December 2005

It's a parody piece, although the author declared that "Many of the sentences that I use in the article are from actual reviews." (quoted by B. Meyer review in [2])

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1106763 [2]: http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic...

nzmsv• 15 years ago

I don't think these reviews are real, but similar things have happened. One example: Stephen Cook was denied tenure at Berkeley (before the NP-completeness paper). Another: Svante Arrhenius barely passed his PhD defence (before getting a Nobel prize for the same work).

munin• 15 years ago

there is a dangerous tendency to say "someone told me my idea is dumb, but lots of smart people have had their ideas ridiculed and later gone on to success".

it's true, many good ideas have been ridiculed by simple minds. however, you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere", and that has (probably) happened far more than the ridicule of world-changing ideas ...

so while it is probably useful to your ego and mental health to respond to negative criticism with "they just don't understand", you should probably be prepared to accept that your idea is just not that good ...

kamaal2• 15 years ago

That might happen once or twice, but if you are stubborn, you don't give up and keep trying.

Someday you would have run through sufficient iterations of failure/success and internal feedback loops. After some time by the virtue of all this the person will succeed.

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

* you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere"*

Silent evidence.

dkarl• 15 years ago

It pays to consider your audience and how well you've presented it to them. Gödel mentioned his first incompleteness theorem in the presence of a bunch of mathematicians at a conference, and nobody present paid any attention to him, except John Von Neumann, who caught on immediately. Everybody else required a little more time (and a fuller presentation of the idea) before they understood what he was working on.

Whether we are Kurt Gödel or just some schmuck, I think it's fair to say that we all are surrounded by a fair share of idiots but know at least one person who is capable of understanding anything we understand, assuming we understand it well enough to explain it to them.

kamaal2• 15 years ago

Most of these rejection would have happened because there a lot of people who randomly take a decision and then try to justify it backwards with whatever reason they can come up with.

This happens for a lot of reasons eg : Bias, partiality, over confidence in self, under estimating the candidates ability.

kingkilr2• 15 years ago

In the same spirit (but not the same), one reviewer wrote on a conference paper about PyPy (paraphrased), "this covers some exceptional engineering results, but we wish there was more novel conceptual work". We were very proud of that paper :)

kasra• 15 years ago

Similar story about Kalman.

tsotha• 15 years ago

Meh. Some of the criticisms are related to the paper itself and are probably valid. "You need to show why we would care" is a rejection of the way the paper is written, and not of the concepts it contains.

grout• 15 years ago

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Saint Carl Sagan

doorty• 15 years ago

This is one of the reasons I didn't pursue a PhD after getting a Masters. Getting published is about very incremental work. Really breaking the mold for revolutionary stuff is actually shunned. Not the kind of reward system worth pursing.

loup-vaillant• 15 years ago

(Edit: I thought those rejections were genuine. Nevertheless, my point stands. Kudos to the author for the vivid illustration of this infuriating bias.)

> Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for small examples, but I doubt that any real-world program will ever be written in such a style.

This is not the first time I recall hearing this fallacious argument. If something works better than the "standard" approach for toy examples, the correct answer is to investigate, especially if you can't explain how the new approach would break down when actually used in the "real world".

Sure, an intuition that it wouldn't work is evidence against the new approach, but (i) this intuition may be motivated by the refusal to change habits, and (ii) toy examples that work is a stronger evidence in favour of the new approach anyway. Not definite, just stronger than intuition.

lamby• 15 years ago

Orwell's "Animal Farm" was rejected by one publishing house on the grounds that it was "impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.".

dlitz2• 15 years ago

Reminds me of Slashdot comments.

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