Unacknowledgements

The Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is one of the top venues in computer science. In this year's edition SODA'10, there is a paper by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi and Alessandro Panconesi: "Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance".

In the paper, there is a very interesting footnote in the front page:

For the role of the Italian Ministry of University and Research please see the Unacknowledgements.

This is what you find at the end of the paper (emphasis added):

Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.

I hope the Ministry will pay now!