WSEAS Conferences @ MIT: Holocaust service in Thessaloniki

Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Holocaust service in Thessaloniki

A memorial service was held at Thessaloniki's Holocaust Monument on Sunday in memory of the approximately 50,000 Greek Jews of the city that were exterminated in Nazi death camps during WWII.

The event was organised by the Thessaloniki prefecture authority and the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.

Representing the government, Deputy Sports Minister Yiannis Ioannidis, a Thessaloniki-area MP and well-known professional basketball coach in the country, reminded that "peoples without historical memory have no future".

On his part, Israel's ambassador to Greece, Ali Yahia, referred to an "international coalition of extremists that disputes the Holocaust and which cultivates anti-Semitism and racism."

Yahia added that even countries are included in this coalition, citing Iran and the country's president, in fact.

Local Parliament deputies, local government and prefecture officials, foreign diplomats (US, Russia, Germany, Romania and France) as well as the presidents of the Central Jewish Council of Greece (KIS), Moses Constantines, and Thessaloniki's Jewish Community, David Saltiel, attended the event.

Thessaloniki was the most important centre of Sephardic Jewry in the world from the 16th century until the early 20th century.

Caption: School children lay flowers on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008, at a monument in the northern Greek port city of Thessaloniki

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BOGUS SOFTWARE?

BOGUS SITES?

BOGUS COMPANIES?

JUNK WEB PAGES?

FAKE WEB SITES?

BOGUS PROFESSORS?

ANOTHER ACADEMIC FRAUD?

Yes! Read this story

The software awards scam

Published 16 August 2007 Tags: WSEASTags: SoftareTags: ConferenceTags: ConferencesTags: BogusTags: JunkTags: FakeTags: Fraud
Tags: ScamTags: spam

software award I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ’software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software contains the description “This program does nothing at all”. The screenshot I submitted (below) was similarly blunt and to the point:

Even the name of the software, “awardmestars”, was a bit of a giveaway. And yet it still won 16 ‘awards’. Here they are:

Some of them look quite impressive, but none of them are worth the electrons it takes to display them.

The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.

This practise is blatantly misleading and dishonest. It makes no distinction between high quality software and any old rubbish that someone was prepared to submit to a download site. The download sites that practise this deceit should be ashamed of themselves. Similarly, any author or company, that displays one of these ‘awards’ is either being naive (at best) or knowingly colluding in the scam (at worst).

My suspicions were first aroused by the number of five star awards I received for my PerfectTablePlan software. When I went to these sites all the other programs on them seemed to have five star awards as well. I also noticed that some of my weaker competitors were proudly displaying pages full of five star awards. I saw very few three or four star awards. Something smelled fishy. Being a scientist by original training, I decided to run a little experiment to see if a completely worthless piece of software would win any awards.

Having seen various recommendations for the rundenko.com submit-everywhere.com submission service on the ASP forums I emailed the owner, Mykola Rudenko, to ask if he could help with my little experiment. To my surprise, he generously agreed to help by submitting “awardmestars” to all 1033 sites on their database, free of charge.

According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars” is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet. Many of the rejections were on the grounds of “The site does not accept products of this genre” (it was listed as a utility) rather than quality grounds.

The truth is that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these bottom-feeders will be put out of business by the continually improving search engines, leaving only the better sites. I think there is still a role for good quality download sites. But there needs to be more emphasis on quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. reviews). Whether it is possible for such a business to be profitable, I don’t know. However, it seems to work in the MacOSX world where the download sites are much fewer in number, but with much higher quality and more user interaction.

Some download site owners did email me to say either “very funny” or “stop wasting my time”. Kudos to them for taking the time to check every submission. I recommend you put their sites high on your list next time you are looking for software:

www.filecart.com

www.freshmeat.net

www.download-tipp.de (German)

This is the response I got from Lothar Jung of download-tipp.de when I showed him a draft of this article:

“The other side for me as a website publisher is that if you do not give each software 5 stars, you don’t get so many back links and some authors are not very pleased with this and your website. When I started download-tipp.de, I wanted to create a site where users can find good software. So I decided the visitor is important, and not the number of backlinks. Only 10% of all programs submitted get the 5 Suns Award.”

Another important issue for download sites is trust. I want to know that the software I am downloading doesn’t contain spyware, trojans or other malware. Some of the download sites have cunningly exploited this by awarding “100% clean” logos. I currently use the Softpedia one on the PerfectTablePlan download page. It shouldn’t be too difficult in principal to scan software for known malware. But now I am beginning to wonder if these 100% clean logos have any more substance than the “five star”awards. The only way to find out for sure would be to submit a download with malware, which would be unethical. If anyone has any information about whether these sites really check for malware, I would be interested to know.

My thanks to submit-everywhere.com for making this experiment possible. I was favourably impressed by the thoroughness of their service. At only $70 I think it is excellent value compared to the time and hassle of trying to do it yourself. I expect to be a paying customer in future.

** Addendum 1 **

This little experiment has been featured on reddit.com, digg.com, slashdot.com, stumbleupon.com and a number of other popular sites and blogs. Consequently there have been hundreds of comments on this blog and on other sites. I am very flattered by the interest. But I also feel like Dr Frankenstein, looking on as my experiment gains a life of its own. If I had known the article was going to be read by so many people I would have taken a bit more time to clarify the following points:

I have no commercial interest in, or prior relationship with, the three download sites mentioned. I singled them out because I infer from emails received that they have a human-in-the-loop, checking all submissions (or a script that passes the Turing test, which is even more praiseworthy). I offered all three a chance to be quoted in the article. Today I received a similar email from tucows.com, but they were too late to make the article. I don’t know if they read the article before they emailed me.
I have no commercial interest in, or prior relationship with, the automatic submission service mentioned. I approached them for help, which they generously provided, free of charge.
The only business mentioned in which I have a commercial interest is my own table planning software, PerfectTablePlan.

** Addendum 2 **

23 awards ‘won’ at the latest count.

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AMERICAN COMPUTING CONFERENCE 2008

LOCATION: The AMERICAN COMPUTING CONFERENCE 2008 will be held at MIT, Cambridge, USA.

Cambridge is a city in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. It was named in honor of Cambridge, England. Cambridge is most famous for the two prominent universities that call it home: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 101,355. It is the fifth most populous city in the state. Cambridge is noted for its diverse population, both racially and economically. Residents, known as Cantabrigians, range from affluent MIT and Harvard professors to working-class families to immigrants. Today, Cambridge is home to a culturally diverse population of over 95,000. Over fifty languages may be heard on the streets of the city, including Spanish, Creole, Portuguese, Chinese, Amharic, and Korean. Children from 82 different countries of origin attend the public schools. College students from around the world study at Harvard, Radcliffe, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lesley College. The heavy industries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been replaced by technology-based enterprises, including electronics, self-developing film and cameras, software and biotechnology research. Top of the Page

The AMERICAN COMPUTING CONFERENCE was initiated by the WSEAS US Branch which is the Sponsor and the Organizer of the event and will endeavor to be the premier international scientific forum on the computing and computer science promising to bring together Academic Pioneers on Computing and Computer Research, Industry Experts and Theoretical Engineers. URL: http://acc2008.wseas.org Plenary Lecture 1:

Error-Tolerance, by Prof. Melvin A. Breuer, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Plenary Lecture 2: Genetically inspired random guided optimization in the quest of flawless wireless communications by Prof. Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK.

Plenary Lecture 3:

Local Deformations and Singular Linear System Theory. Bifurcation Diagrams by Prof. Maria I. Garcia-Planas, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain.

Plenary Lecture 4:

An Agent and Virtual Reality Based Online Course Delivery System by Prof. M. Nasseh Tabrizi, UEast Carolina University, USA.

Plenary Lecture 5:

MALLIAVIN CALCULUS OF BISMUT TYPE IN SEMI-GROUP THEORY. by Prof. Remi Leandre, Universite de Bourgogne, France.

Plenary Lecture 6:

Complex Adaptive Signal Processing Employing Independent and Optimal Convergence Factors with Applications in Time-Varying Environments by Prof. Wasfy B Mikhael, University of Central Florida, U.S.A.

Plenary Lecture 7:

KM and Organizational Learning: Where Technology and Socialization Meet by Prof. Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Florida International University, U.S.A.

INVITED SPEAKERS: The WSEAS US Branch is going to invite top academic personalities to present breakthrough results as Invited Lectures within the normal conference program. Meanwhile you could contact the organizers by email Top of the Page

CHAIR-COMMITTEE: RONALD YAGER, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, USA (honorary) AMAURI CABALLERO, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA GEORGE VACHTSEVANOS, Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA, USA ROBERT FINKEL, Physics Dept., St. John's University, USA DEMETRIOS KAZAKOS, Texas Southern University, USA THEODORE TRAFALIS, University of Oklahoma, USA TAKIS KASPARIS, University of Central Florida, USA ZHIQIANG GAO, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, USA YAN WU, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA SPYROS TRAGOUDAS, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL, USA ARKADY KHOLODENKO, Clemson University, USA GREGORY BAKER, Ohio State Univ, Columbus, Ohio, USA GALIGEKERE DATTATREYA, University of Texas at Dallas, TX, USA CAROLINE SWEEZY, New Mexico State University, USA ASAD SALEM, Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi, USA DIAN ZHOU, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA METIN DEMIRALP, Istanbul Technical University, TURKEY OLGA MARTIN, University Politehnica of Bucharest, ROMANIA PANOS PARDALOS, University of Florida, USA CONSTANTIN UDRISTE, University Politehnica of Bucharest, ROMANIA KLEANTHIS PSARRIS, The University of Texas at San Antonio, TX, USA ANDREW D. JONES, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL, USA VALERI MLADENOV, Technical University of Sofia, BULGARIA NERI F., University of Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, ITALY CHEN S. Y., Zhejiang University of Technology, P. R. CHINA SHYI-MING CHEN, Nat.Taiwan Univ. of Science & Techn, Taipei, R.O.C. YEN K., Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA RONG-JYUE FANG, Southern Taiwan University of Technology, TAIWAN ARGYRIOS VARONIDES, University of Scranton, USA NIKOLAI KOBASKO, R&D of “IQ Technologies Inc”, Akron, Ohio, USA XU ANPING, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300130, P. R. CHINA ZHU H., Hiroshima Kokusai Gakuin University, JAPAN Top of the Page

TOPICS: The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Data Bases, Expert Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering, Industrial systems, Autonomic and autonomous systems, Knowledge data systems, Knowledge Mining, Web-based education, E-Activities (E-Commerce, E-Education, E-Health, E-Goverment), Security, Cryptology, Computer Vision, Intelligent Techniques, Computer Logic, Multimedia, Video Systems, Internet Technologies, Signal Processing, Image Processing, Language-Speech processing, Digital Systems Design, Remote Sensing, Quantum Computing, Nano-Computing, DNA Computing and Biologically Inspired Algorithms, Robotics, Computer Vision, Visualization and Virtualization, Computational Intelligence (Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic, Evolutionary Computing), Cognitive Systems, Systems performance, Networking and Telecommunications, Digital Communications, Applied Electromagnetics (Microwaves, Antennas, Radar, Scattering), Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computation, Algorithms and Complexity, Graph Theory, Pattern Recognition, Parallel and Distributed Systems, Supercomputing, Computers in Education. Top of the Page

DEADLINES: Deadline for Papers' Submission: MARCH 15, 2008 Top of the Page SUBMIT A SESSION: The WSEAS US Branch can accept proposal for Special Sessions from qualified scientists that want to contribute to this event. Special sessions have the prestige of a really targeted audience. Many successful WSEAS Conferences started in the beginning as Special Sessions or Workshops in some previous WSEAS conference.You could submit by email the title of your session, the topics of the session and a preliminary list of potential authors that could contribute to the session as authors and/or reviewers of papers. Attached to your email you must have a short CV or a link to your web page. Top of the Page

CONFERENCE PROGRAM: The AMERICAN COMPUTING CONFERENCE's program will include Plenary Lectures, Invited Lectures and Normal Papers (Oral Presentation, Posters). The Conference Program will be announced after February 29 of 2008. Top of the Page

COLLABORATORS: If your Laboratory, University, Research Center etc... wants to be a partner in the AMERICAN COMPUTING CONFERENCE, then you have to contact the Organizers by email. Please, include the word WSEAS somewhere in the Subject of your message. If you do not write the word WSEAS, somewhere in the Subject of your message, your message will be deleted from our Servers. This policy protects our Servers from unsolicited email (spam). If you click in the following link, the word WSEAS in the Subject will appear automatically. Do not delete it. If you want to send other email to WSEAS in the future, please, have also WSEAS in the Subject of your email.)

acc2008@worldses.org

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CONTACT US by email: Please, include the word WSEAS somewhere in the Subject of your message. If you do not write the word WSEAS, somewhere in the Subject of your message, your message will be deleted from our Servers. This policy protects our Servers from unsolicited email (spam). If you click in the following link, the word WSEAS in the Subject will appear automatically. Do not delete it. If you want to send other email to WSEAS in the future, please, have also WSEAS in the Subject of your email.)

acc2008@worldses.org

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WSEAS Conferences @ MIT

Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Holocaust service in Thessaloniki

The software awards scam

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