
We are sorry to inform you - iamabhi9
http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html
======
wicknicks
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/

------
munin
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 ...

~~~
kamaal
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.

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

~~~
mechanical_fish
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
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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that great papers are always recognized.
There's a lot more variety than that.

Some great papers are recognized in manuscript. Some are hailed within the
year of their publication. Some are rejected because the reviewer is an
archrival of the chairman of the author's department. Some are rejected
because the author is of the wrong religion or ethnic group. Some are
published to moderate applause and then forgotten about for thirty years, at
which point someone accidentally finds them and realizes that the authors were
decades ahead of their time. Some would have been immediately given prizes if
their authors were half as good at writing as they were at thinking. Some are
recognized as interesting, but people with a vested interest in a different
viewpoint try to pretend they're not interesting for as long as possible. Some
are universally recognized as true but the authors are burnt at the stake
anyway...

History is more interesting than fiction. Fiction which doesn't find an
audience simply disappears, so it must generally be believable, and it must
not make its audience too uncomfortable. History is under no such constraints.

------
HerrMonnezza
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...](http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic/)

------
matt4711
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
Any citation?

~~~
yahelc
"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&#...</a>

~~~
denzil_correa
Cool! Thanks.

------
grout
"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

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

~~~
smokinn
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?

~~~
ChristianMarks
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.

------
mathattack
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.

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kamaal
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.

------
nzmsv
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).

------
kd0amg
Similar:

<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/3240>

------
loup-vaillant
(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
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.".

------
kingkilr
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 :)

------
tsotha
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.

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

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doorty
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.

------
dlitz
Reminds me of Slashdot comments.

------
kasra
Similar story about Kalman.

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

------
earl
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
err 20th century?

~~~
maratd
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.

~~~
mahmud
Do you even know when the 19th century was? How can he be the most influential
Economist of the 19th century if was only born in 1912?

~~~
fferen
The two centuries mentioned are the 20th and 21st.

~~~
mahmud
people edited their posts without signing their changes.

~~~
maratd
Actually, they didn't.

