From the Editor: Of latency and lateness

Steven Pemberton

In the UK (at least it was so when I still lived there), the charts (you know, the hit parade) come out on Tuesdays. Selected record shops keep records of their sales, and on Monday morning each week send the details of their previous week's sales by courier to the compilers, who then compile the charts and issue them.

Now one year, in order to try and reduce costs, the compilers of the charts told the shops to post the returns rather than use a courier as they had been doing. And all of a sudden it seemed as if the buying public had adopted crazy buying habits: records would enter the charts one week, fall out the next week, only to reappear the week after that.

The problem turned out to be this: after the charts come out, the BBC has two days to decide on, book, and film the groups who will appear on Top of the Pops, the national charts TV program which is aired on Thursday evening (Thursday is the latest they can broadcast it, because the sort of people who watch Top of the Pops don't watch TV on Fridays and Saturdays). Then on Saturday, people go out and buy the records that they have heard on Thursday, and these sales have an effect on the returns for the following week's chart. Only now that the returns were being posted instead of taken by courier, they were arriving too late to be included in the charts for that Tuesday, so were used for the charts a week after that. "So what?" the compilers had thought, "the charts will be a little later, that's all".

But in fact what happened was that if a record had entered the charts, and thus appeared on Top of the Pops, it would sell well that Saturday, but that result would only show up two weeks later. Consequently the record would then be played again on Top of the Pops, which would have another effect two weeks later again. They quickly restored the old method of using couriers.

Well, I feel a little like the compilers of those charts then. Here I am writing the editorial to my second issue, while no one - least of all me - has seen the finished, printed, first issue. What does it look like? What could do with improvement? What will people think of it? Were there any blunders? Will there be any reactions to the content?

In fact the delay is even worse than I had realised. If you live outside North America you can save a lot of money by getting ACM to send the publications you subscribe to by standard mail rather than airmail. Some colleagues of mine here (The Netherlands) don't even receive their SIGCHI Bulletins until more than a month after the cover date (and I guess it's even worse in some other parts of the world), which means that I have already sent the camera-ready copy of the following issue off to ACM HQ before they have even seen an issue. Any responses from them to an issue can consequently only be published in the second issue following.

Well, alas, there is no solution to this problem, except perhaps electronic publishing (which we are looking into - see this month's From the Chairs column): it takes me about a month to get an issue together and reducing this by much is unlikely since it is a part-time activity for me alongside my other work, and frankly it is a lot of work. Once ACM has the camera-ready copy, it takes about seven weeks to get checked, adverts added, printed, packed and to the post. And on top of that is the time it takes to reach people via the mail.

So we can never hope to have the lively ping-pong style of interaction that readers of dailies and weeklies enjoy, where each issue contains reponses to items in the previous issue. People who get their copy of the Bulletin very quickly (North Americans, and people who subscribe via airmail, I suppose), and who respond very quickly via email, may have a window of opportunity to squeeze in to the following issue, but the rest of us will have to make do with the luxury of having plenty of time to compose submissions before sending them in.

However, if you are planning to submit anything, it always helps to get in contact early. Deadlines are the first of the month 3 months preceding the cover date: 1st April for the July issue, 1st July for the October issue, and so on, though in exceptional cases I can allow a little leaway if you contact me first.

This month there is a new section: Views and Feelings on the back page. Let me know if you think it's a worthwhile addition, and maybe even contribute!

Steven Pemberton
http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/
Email: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl

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Vol.26 No.2, April 1994
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