(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

This story was forwarded via e-mail to Dave, so I'm not sure where it was published. Google would probably tell me if I wanted to take the nanoseconds it would take to find out.
In the meantime, I post it here, as an amusing little anecdote about academia.
It's about a group of MIT students that made a program to randomly generate an academic paper. Which was then accepted at a scientific conference.

Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank
Apr 15, 8:32 AM (ET)
By Greg Frost
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A bunch of computer-generated gibberish
masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific
conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate
students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they
wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with
nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World
Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled
to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the
Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for
presentation.

The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan
Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods,
non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal
Social Text.

Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text
affair after submitting their paper.

"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic
consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active
networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and
"We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with
opportunistically pipelined extensions."

Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the
field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit
admissions to the conference.

"We were tired of the spam," Stribling told Reuters in a telephone
interview, adding that his team wanted to challenge the standards of the
conference's peer review process.

Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small
number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had not
yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.

"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused
by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an e-mail. "The
author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of
their paper."

However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptance
procedures in light of the hoax. Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT
students, he replied: "Bogus papers should not be included in the conference
program."

Stribling said conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded their
invitation to present the paper.

The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the
conference and give what Stribling billed as a "randomly generated talk." So
far, they have raised more than $2,000 over the Internet.

---

So really, in the end, the story reveals that the problem's just with that specific conference which is kind of a stupid one anyway, apparently. But whatever. It's still funny.
Also, the paper in question is here: http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf


Dave has amused himself with this sort of thing before. Have I linked, before, to the North Jersey Suburb Name Generator on his Web Toys page (the best thing about that page, btw, is the javascript banner at the top. Mouse over it and see what happens.)? So he thinks this is totally awesome.

Comments

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's several conferences like that one. There's even conferences where you pay to get your paper published--rather like self-publishing, really. But stuff like this happens all the time. My old French officemate told me that in France they had a physicist write a gibberish paper for a (fairly respected) philosophy conference, and then a few philosophers published a gibberish physics paper in retaliation. Heh.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of a family friend who works for the New York State Museum And Archives. He has to write up a weekly report of his work, and after a while he realized they weren't reading the reports. So he wrote a report wherein he discovered, engraved upon golden tablets, the original of the Book of Mormon, as it had been delivered unto Brigham Young by the Angel Moroni, and also there was an engraving of Elvis upon them...

And like ten years later he still hasn't heard anything about it, so it's safe to say nobody read it.