> (1) logistics: if you want a plaque, you can't wait until after all the presentations;
>
Henning, I am not sure if I understood the point above. If you meant
about a conference board making decision on award recipients, I do not
see any reason why a conference could not finish with, say, a half an
hour 'award & closing' session (I suggest it to be, well, after the last
afternoon's coffee break, so to allow conference management to fill-in
diplomas). When it comes to plaques with engraved author names or
similar, they could be given the next morning or so. You know what: If I
were a 'golden' plaque recipient, be sure that I'd stay another day in
the area just to get my plaque, no problem at all :-)
In addition, I do not see any reason why conference banquets (and award
ceremonies) happen so often in the middle of an event. Wouldn't it
better to finish with all presentations and perform conference dinner
the last day? Everybody would be fully relaxed and not only those who
have spoken until then :-)
> (2) timing: often, the best-paper awardee is scheduled early in the conference, to avoid accidentally scheduling it as the last paper on Friday afternoon;
>
Here I also missed the idea. Why the best paper awardee should be
scheduled to speak early? Just to give him/her a chance to speak in
front of the full audience? Why? That kind of treatment may suggest that
"the last paper on Friday afternoon" is the worst one, that does not
deserve to be even heard :-) Ok, I joked here. But I am serious when
think that the best paper award should not have any special scheduling.
(If it is awarded for the quality of content, it does not matter when it
is presented in the conference. Otherwise, that may implicitly suggest
that the most important presentations are early in the conference, so
that might lead to less and less populated rooms the 2nd, 3rd day or so.)
Question: How to prevent empty rooms the last conference day? Answer:
Put the awarded papers there, accompanied with one of the plenaries.
(Why on earth all the plenaries must go in a row at the very beginning?)
> (3) impact: the legitimate reason - if the best paper award is meant to recognize the paper most likely to have a long-term impact, presentation is not really a criterion. Just because the presenter was a nervous PhD student who mumbled the presentation read off a sheet word-by-word (has happened...), this doesn't diminish the technical impact or elegance.
>
Ok on that. I know what is a nervous presenter. It is nobody's fault to
be nervous on stage or so, but my initial idea was that a presenting
*author* should be capable to 'guard' his/her statements written in a
paper, by provocative discussion or debate or questions that continue
after the presentation. My point was that a presenter should give a
clear 'proof' of knowing what he/she has written about, and not just
read the text from the slides, as many presenters do.
Unfortunately, so many PhD students (not to mention undergraduates) are
not advised by their mentors to avoid "presenting" their papers by
reading the text from the proceedings or so! In that case, for me it is
least important the 'quality of the paper content', but such material
should not have been sent to a conference but rather to a journal editor
instead.
In addition, so many times I saw paper presenters (professors!) who did
not address to the audience at all, but have read their slides (I could
read their slides by myself, if I wanted to). When I listen to a
speaker, I want him/her to persuade me that a described area is really
of significant interest and motivate me to study his/her paper in the
proceedings (later, at home) more thoroughly than the others. That I see
as one of the most important features of the conferences.
Miroslav
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