[LAF] Fwd: [labofii] Interesting prank!

[justin]

--- Mr Vannen <david at vannen.com> wrote:
> From: "Mr Vannen" 
> To: <labofii at lists.riseup.net>
> Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 13:57:22 +0100
> Subject: [labofii] Interesting prank!
> 
> Just got this through.. very interesting idea, I thought...
> 
> 
> 
> Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted 
> 
> Thursday, April 14, 2005 Posted: 7:29 PM EDT (2329 GMT) 
> 
> *CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- 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. 
> 
> 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 quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke 
> University Press. 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> The idea of a fake submission was to counter "fake conferences...which 
> exist only to make money," explained Stribling and his cohorts' website, 
> "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator." 
> 
> "Our aim is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence," it said. The 
> website allows users to "Generate a Random Paper" themselves, with 
> fields for inserting "optional author names." 
> 
> 
> "Contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea..." 
> 
> 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, Callos 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 "completely 
> randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face." 
> 
> They exceeded their goal, with $2,311.09 cents from 165 donors. 
> 
> http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/index.html > lab of ii e-list
> http://www.labofii.net
> 
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