We are in the stone age...

Those who read my blog for a long time might know that I work in Natural Language Processing. To publish in this area is not simple. There are few conferences, which mean they become top-conferences. Specially, when we want to publish in Portuguese, we just have one choice: to publish in the Encontro APL (Associação Portuguesa de Linguística - Portuguese Linguistic Association meeting) every year.

APL is organized by linguists, normally teachers from universities who have linguistic courses. They rarely accept papers on language processing as they can't understand them, and preffer to discuss the "gender of the angel".

This year we got a paper accepted as a Poster. We sent it, presented it, and now its time to publish the proceedings (yes, they are quite strange, and publish the proceedings after the conference). Received a mail from the organization asking to send the paper in Word (oh dear) in paper and in a diskette by standard mail for publication.
Yes, you read it correctly: in paper AND diskette, and no e-mail reference at all.

More: this conference is organized by linguists, right? That might explain why the email, with just one paragraph, if full of errors: spaces missing, words missing, word accents missing or in excess...

And more regarding this conference that I forgot before... they select the papers, but don't send the reviews to the authors. I think they might just chose them randomly. We asked for those reviews two times, and we didn't get any answer. Maybe that's because they don't know how to read email...