Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Irksome

Reaching out and communicating with others is important to me, and I suppose, it is, to many others. But most communication is typically intrusive. Telephones for instance. A tel call may intrude in the middle of a conversation, meal, or a moment. And I feel guilty when I miss a call and see the voice mail indicator. In some ways, emails are intrusive as well. You can't resist peeking at them at night before going to sleep or first thing when you wake up, and an email in the inbox that excites or irks, can spoil the night's sleep or the waking workday. Still, phones and emails are what I live by.

What truly irks are the email requests for reviewing some paper that point one to some website where one needs to type in some information, just in order to decline!

This is an example of what Martin Farach-Colton coined and called as an exigency: it is an emergency exogenously thrust upon us by an act of others, interrupting our life that is going on in its normal course; as a result, we are forced to take an action, though we did not really initiate the event. Alas.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Exigency is an existing word, perhaps exogency was the suggested word?

7:14 AM  
Blogger artoo said...

Don't we cause the ex(i/o)gencies by submitting papers and expecting them to be reviewed by PCMs who usually have neither the time nor the expertise to review all papers assigned to them.

Manuscript handling systems tend to benefit nobody except the EinCs / PC chairs.

8:38 AM  
Blogger metoo said...

My bad (never blog after a 20 hr work day):
the word was "impingency": an action that others do that impinges on you, even though you did nothing to initiate it.

We do irk PCMs with our paper submissions, but they chose to accept to be on the PC? So, let us impinge them. :)

11:45 AM  

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