refereeing

[Margo]

At the risk of reopening a dead thread and painfully mixing a
metaphor, I've been asked to publicly declare my support for
the refereeing of AATSEEL papers and the reasons for it.
Here's my story.

Last year I submitted a literature paper to one panel only to
regret not having submitted it to my second choice panel.  The
two panels ran at the same time, and the other included more
and better-known panelists.  Most of my potential audience
either attended or spoke on the other panel, which I had to
miss most of.  My paper had an audience of four, three of whom
were friends of mine.

Refereeing won't fix the scheduling problem.  However, if the papers
had been refereed, perhaps I would have been grouped with some of
the people on the other panel, which had 5 panelists; and just
maybe the others on my poorly attended panel would have gotten
a panelist who could have drawn an audience for them.

Of course that's all speculation, but this year my refereed linguistics
paper has been placed on a panel with well-known professors, and
I expect a good audience and discussion.  This makes me very
nervous, but overall I find it the preferable position to be in.

I also like the idea of the conference actually requiring people
to read my abstract and provide me with comments.  Normally I
have to _ask_ people to do that.

Thus, provisionally at least, I am that oxymoron, a happy graduate
student.

Sincerely,
Margo Ballou
Brown University