It just seems to me that the editors have walked away from their desks. Here is a few of my favorites:
"The RosettaNet consortium aligns its diffusion strategies with its development processes while adapting them to the local conditions in the home countries of its member organizations." -- "A Case Study of RosettaNet", Standards Development and Diffusion, Communications of the ACM, Dec 2007
That's the opening of the entire article! What the fuck does any of that nonsense mean?
"This step ignores small subtrees, thus implementing the mass threshold in a way that further reduces the number of comparisons required considerably, as the vast majority of the trees are small." -- Clone Detection Using Abstract Syntax Trees, Baxter, Yahin, Moura, Sant'Anna, Bier.
(I should point out that this one was IEEE, but really, does that make a difference?)
and to sum it all up (eloquently), David Parnas:
"As a senior researcher, I am saddened to see funding agencies, department heads, deans, and promotion committees encouraging younger researchers to do shallow research. As a reader of what should be serious scientific journals, I am annoyed to see the computer science literature being polluted by more and more papers of less and less scientific value. [...] Other readers of scientific journals should be similarly outraged and demand change" -- David Parnas, Viewpoint, Communications of the ACM, Nov 2007
I completely and totally agree with Parnas. Yet, when I did leave the ACM and told them why, did I get any response to my feedback? No...
Maybe someday they'll figure out that they're not doing the excellent job they used to do and clean up their act.
I'm am a member of both ACM and IEEE. I agree with you. What are the other alternatives? Please let me know.
-A learner
I don't have any alternatives... at this point I think nothing is a better alternative than wasting my time and money on them.
This deterioration has been going on for some time. The two events that impressed me were an in-person comment by a visible member of the ACM that "technical societies were not primarily about technical exchange" in the 1980s, and the hollowing out of CACM to be a "trade journal" or even a tabloid rather than a famous, refereed journal of short and significant technical papers.
There's been a deterioration in the SIGs, too. I recently found serious instances of historical ignorance in published papers, where the authors obviously did not bother with the library and find ACM-published articles reporting on the same material years earlier (**). I've found misperceptions of mathematics and statistics which took subsequent papers to correct. Astonishingly, the authors got away with it, and published.
Still, I remain an ACM member, if only to have access to their online digital library. I have been a member of the IEEE before, and occasionally have wished I still had access to their online library, but my departure there was in protest of an editorial in one IEEE Computer Society issue, where the then president was arguing that if software folks or engineers could not accomplish a project on the schedule it was needed no matter what the circumstances, it meant they didn't know how to do their jobs. It's a balance. It's more important for me, professionally, to remain subscribed to journals of the American Statistical Association, so I have to give up something.
Yeah, the world is getting crazy, and we may be in for a deeper darkening of scholarship and technique. Heck, I find fewer and fewer folks know C well enough to deal with pointers!
(*) This is put kindly. In fact, the predecessor publication did significantly *more than the more recent one.