A Tale of Dual, Interconnected yet Disparate Modalities

It's easy to do fake art criticism; stream together enough pretentious cliches, and you can get published.

It's not much harder in the soft-sciences; I'm sure most any education or psychology department could be suckered by a paper full of double-talk.

But not the hard sciences. Nossirre, they're too serious and rational.

Right?

In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

Jeremy Stribling said 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 "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference 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.

If you love the English Language but fear its gatekeepers, read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at April 15, 2005 07:33 AM | TrackBack