Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank
- From: "MrPepper11" <MrPepper11@xxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Apr 2005 10:04:39 -0700
April 15, 2005
Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank
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.
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