Is Elsevier suffocating yet another stuttering conference?

Earlybird* member of IFA	€574.08
Earlybird* non-member	€693.68
Earlybird* consumer*	€418.60
Student**	€358.80
Conference dinner	€83.72

Have a look at the IFA Congress 2012 page, and see yet again what happens when the organisers are not doing the work themselves but outsource to Elsevier. Let me make a quick calculation: cheapest possible with early bird. The student fee is the cheapest with 360 € plus 80 € conference dinner. So 440 € plus 4 days accommodation (lets say cheapest 50€). So we are at 640 € plus travelling. Let's say from Britain: 150 €. So we end up with roughly 800 €. And that is the very cheapest! Which student can pay that, except if it comes from a research grant.

If you are a consumer (i.e. stutterer) or a therapist, you must pay at least 1000€. If you come from overseas, probably 1500 or more. That pretty much excludes all except the richest countries.

The key is that Elsevier is taking a profit and you have to pay VAT. And they would claim that they have to pay staff and website. But that is a semi-lie as their staff probably handle 10+ conferences each, and most admin is done by the website.

1.5 years to write four pages!

The luxembourgish audiophonological institute has finally managed to produce a leaflet for stuttering kids. It took them about 1.5 years for four pages, even though I have given them a corrected version of their old leaflet.
It's in German and French, and I have to say that at least I cannot disagree with what they wrote, only the infantile font they used. They used to write that stuttering can be due to psychological stress from their social environment but not anymore. Progress has arrived in Luxembourg. See here.

(Thanks to Lukas for telling me about stuff happening in my own country!)

Happy New Year!

I wish you all a Happy New Year. I know I have not been keeping up with my regular posts. The next months will be a bit stressful because I have to read 3000 pages for an exam (CFA Level 3) and I need to get my book published.

But I do have plenty of material for posts and try to make more time for the blog.You can find my prediction for 2012 on StutterTalk. As usual, I am not very happy with my StutterTalk performance. I keep on making grammatical mistakes, phrase my ideas in strange ways, or just have strange ideas. I am just not good at on the spot performance. I also see that at Toastmasters. I really need to work on that part more... The only type of short-term performance I am good at is making jokes on the spot. Or at least, I think I am. But trying to say something intelligent usually fails to be so...

Oh, and if you want to be a guest blogger, just email me!