ElMaestro
★★★

Denmark,
2017-04-17 00:00
(2537 d 19:12 ago)

Posting: # 17243
Views: 4,801
 

 An almost painful invitation [Off Topic]

Hi all,

I received an invitation today which was really painfully dumb.

Here is a little exerpt of the email which was otherwise worded nicely:

"It is our great pleasure and privilege to welcome you to join the 8th World Gene Convention-2017, which will take place in Macao, China during November 13-15, 2017. We would like to welcome you to be the chair/speaker in Theme 801: Next Generation Sequencing while presenting about Reference Datasets for 2-Treatment, 2-Sequence, 2-Period Bioequivalence Studies

(...)

WGC-2017 features a very strong technical program, mainly focused on: breakthroughs in gene, advances genomics & genetics, new research of DNA and RNA (...)"

The conference is real, I believe.

You can imagine how they have been parsing abstracts from all sorts of journals and scanning for select terms that are common in the DNA world such as "sequence". There must be a ton of people receiving such rubbish.

I don't know if I should laugh or cry. This is an example of informatics gone totally wrong. Brave new world...:PCchaos:

Pass or fail!
ElMaestro
ElMaestro
★★★

Denmark,
2017-04-18 12:01
(2536 d 07:11 ago)

@ ElMaestro
Posting: # 17245
Views: 4,033
 

 Follow-up: It gets worse!

Hi all,

surely I am going to burn in hell for this but given how completely hopeless that invitation was I sent this response to the organisers:

Dear Ms. [name],

I would like to humbly thank you for your invitation to WGC-2017.

Would you be interested if I give a talk in Theme 801 with the title: "Genomics in the new millenium: The apparent inability of Sequential Bioequivalence Designs to address important contemporary DNA-related topics such as recombination rate in transposon-rich regions of Chromosome VI of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera)" ?

I look forward to receiving your response.


This morning their answer was in my inbox:

I appreciate your feedback and welcome you give an oral presentation in this conference. The organizing committee is very interested in your lecture title.

Secondly, at this moment, may I ask if you could give your lecture abstract along with biography to me? Please be sure that both of abstract & biography should be limited in One Page. (Follow the format I attached).Since these materials will be included in our meeting proceeding in the future, please be aware that total amount of the characters should not exceed 2500.
Since speech solts are limited, please register on http://www.bitcongress.com/wgc2017/OnlineRegistration.asp to confirm your participation firstly and send the abstract to me a little later.


This little story is in a sense a good image of the sad state of affairs science sometimes finds itself in. Money talks. Facts and reason don't.

Pass or fail!
ElMaestro
nobody
nothing

2017-04-18 16:24
(2536 d 02:49 ago)

@ ElMaestro
Posting: # 17248
Views: 3,979
 

 Follow-up: It gets worse!

...ask them for 1000 bugs upfront and free flight+accommodation. Otherwise you are sorry you can not deliver this high-value lecture on recent break-trough scientific results obtained by your group at the University of Spitzbergen...

Kindest regards, nobody
Astea
★★  

Russia,
2017-04-18 21:41
(2535 d 21:32 ago)

@ ElMaestro
Posting: # 17249
Views: 3,947
 

 Follow-up: It gets worse!

❝ Would you be interested if I give a talk in Theme 801 with the title: "Genomics in the new millenium: The apparent inability of Sequential Bioequivalence Designs to address important contemporary DNA-related topics such as recombination rate in transposon-rich regions of Chromosome VI of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera)" ?


Never seen more interesting topic! :rotfl:
You can use SCIgen to answer their invitation letters. In Russia it became famous after the story about the Rooter (when the rating journal accepted an automatically generated text with positive rewiews).

"Being in minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad"
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