3. This, btw, is my big beef at AoIR conferences -- not enough refereeing. It's not nice to waste people's time with poorly researched and poorly written papers.
I'm so glad you said this Barry--I agree. It would be easy to fix: we just need to require full papers rather than abstracts, and actually have folks review them. Of course we still have issues to resolve based on the fact that people come from different home disciplines and have different expectations of what a conference paper is and what it counts for. (Does it 'count' for tenure? Can you expand it into a journal article, or does it count as already published?) Those are important to address. But eventually we will become people's home discipline, and I'd rather see the bar set higher for what a conference paper is supposed to be. YMMV, Amy