letters to the editor
DOI: 10.1145/2347736.2347738
When harm to Conference Reputation
is Self-inflicted

Citing cOnferences spOnsOred by the World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society, Moshe Y. Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Predatory Scholarly Publishing” (July 2012) reminded me of my own participation in the WSEAS flagship summer conference (the International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers) several years ago, contributing papers, tutorials, and even a plenary lecture, as an ad hoc replacement for a missing speaker. I recall WSEAS adopting a new policy saying papers would not be accepted for publication unless they included at least two references pointing to previous WSEAS proceedings or transactions. At first, I thought it odd that a scientific association would mandate self-citation to deliberately and artificially increase its citation impact but imagined it was simply common practice among conference organizers.

Visiting the Scholarly Open Access Web site ( http://scholarlyoa.com) Vardi recommended, I realized that such a policy should indeed be viewed as harmful to an academic publisher’s credibility and reputation. I would therefore like to thank Vardi for pointing out such publisher behavior contrary to the interests of all scholarly publishing. It is particularly important for those of us whose conference travel is not sponsored by governments and other institutions.

miroslav Skoric, novi Sad, Serbia

Don’t Blame
modular Programming

In “Large-Scale Complex IT Systems” (July 2012) Ian Sommerville et al.

reached unwarranted conclusions,
blaming project failures on modu-
lar programming: “Current soft-
ware engineering is simply not good
enough.” Moreover, they did so large-
ly because they missed something
about large-scale systems. Their term,
“coalition,” implies alliance and joint
action that does not exist among real-
world competitors. They said large-
scale systems “coalitions” have dif-
ferent owners with possibly divergent
interests (such as in the 2010 Flash
Crash mentioned in the article) and
then expect the software “coalition”
used by the owners to work coopera-
tively and well, which makes no sense
to me. Even if the owners, along with
their best minds and sophisticated
software, did cooperate to some ex-
tent, they would in fact be attempting
to deal with some of the most diffi-
cult problems on earth (such as earn-
ing zillions of dollars in competitive
global markets). Expecting software
to solve these problems in economics
makes no sense when even the most
expert humans lack solutions.

 

Reading Ian Sommerville et al. (July 2012), I could not help but wonder whether new initiatives and institutions are really needed to study and create ultra/large-scale complex artificial systems. We should instead ponder how the behavior and consequences of such systems might be beyond our control and so should not exist in the first place. I am not referring to grand-challenge projects in science and engineering like space exploration and genomics with clear goals and benefits but the ill-con-ceived, arbitrary, self-interest-driven monstrosities that risk unpredictable behavior and harmful consequences. Wishful thinking, hubris, irresponsible tinkering, greed, and the quest for power drive them, so they should be seen not as a grand challenge but as a grand warning.

Why invent new, ultimately waste-
ful/destructive “interesting” problems
when we could instead focus on the
chronic “boring” deadly ones? From
war, polluting transportation, and pre-
ventable disease to lack of clean water
and air. These are real, not contrived,
with unglamorous solutions that are
infinitely more beneficial for all.

Konrad Zuse and
Floating-Point numbers

In his news story “Lost and Found” (July 2012), Paul Hyman characterized Konrad Zuse’s Z9 as “the world’s first program-controlled binary relay calculator using floating-point arithmetic.” This description is not correct but should indeed be the other way round; the Z9/M9 was the only one of Zuse’s computers to use binary-coded-deci-mal fixed-point arithmetic.

Zuse used binary floating point from the time of his earliest computer designs, because his own thorough analysis showed binary representation reduced the complexity of the arithmetic unit and that floating point is adequate for engineering calculations, which, as a civil engineer, is what he primarily had in mind.

Among the pioneers of early computing, from Babbage to Aiken to Wilkes, Zuse alone used floating-point arithmetic; his general-purpose computers Z1 (1938), Z3 (1941), Z4 (1945), Z5 (1953), and Z11 (1955) all used binary floating-point arithmetic. Beginning with the Z22 (1958), the computers developed by the Zuse Company used binary fixed-point arithmetic, implementing floating-point arithmetic through microprograms.

Zuse invented a format for binary floating-point numbers similar to that of IEEE 754, using it in his very first machine, the Z1; Donald Knuth attributes the invention of normalized floating-point numbers to Zuse. The Z3 included representations for 0 (zero) and ∞ (infinity). Operations involving these “exceptional” numbers were performed as usual, as in 0 − 0 = 0 and ∞ + 5 = ∞. Operations with an undefined result (such as 0/0, ∞ − ∞, and ∞/∞) were detected automatically,