[mfidelman]

All well and good. Then again, I've found the Computer Science literature to be abysmal - for pretty much forever. IMHO, there isn't a single journal that comes close to the quality of papers published in "Science," or "J. of the AMA." I turned off my ACM & IEEE journal subscriptions, years ago.

The good stuff used to be in things like MIT AI Lab Memos, BBN Technical Reports, RFCs, theses, and such. The good presentations are at trade shows - and more likely to be in exhibitor booths, and part of show floor demonstrations (the old INTEROP shownets, the LVC demonstrations at I/ITSEC conferences).

Personally, I'm a lot more concerned with the review processes for grant & contract proposals - where there's real money on the table, and achieving solid results can be mission- and sometimes life-critical.