"Blind" reviews are impossible

[Trevor Darrell]

   Delivery-Date: Thu, 22 Dec 94 10:24:24 -0500
   Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 09:52:27 -0500
   From: ted at spencer.ctan.yale.edu

   Even a nonexpert reviewer can figure out who wrote a paper simply by
   looking for citations of prior work.  The only way to guarantee a
   "blind" review is to forbid authors from citing anything they've done
   before, or insist on silly euphemisms when citing such publications.

In computer vision papers have been reviewed blind at the major
conferences for the past several years. Authors are encouraged to
reference themselves in the third person. There seem to be
few complaints about the system. 

While it is sometimes possible to discern that a paper comes from a
particular school or group, it is usually impossible to know who was
the first author. And one can never be sure that the paper is not from
some other (unknown) person who has written the paper building
directly on the tradition of another group, and thus uses their
terminology but does not actually work there. In any case, can there
really be a disadvantage to blind reviewing? (It seems a weak point
indeed to say the correctness of papers in NIPS is assurred by their
authorship!)

Papers are not blind at the program committee level, so any agregious
mistakes brought on by blind reviewing (?) can be still corrected there. 

Just my $0.02 from the CV perspective...
--trevor