MIT students pull prank on conference

[Skinner]

I just saw this on CNN. Pretty funny stuff:

MIT students pull prank on conference
Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted

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.

More...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/index.html

[LynzM]

1. I heard about this yesterday

Wild, isn't it? I can't even imagine creating the program to do that. But then, it is at MIT :) Apparently they'll give a randomly-generated speech, too ;)

[TalkingDog]

2. You too can be a genius geek/god

http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/

Generate your own....

[HereSince1628]

3. I can't speak to computer conferences, but for zoology conferences

The standards of acceptance for presentation are much lower than those employed for publication. The rationales for this are, in part, that conferences are intended to be an open sharing of what participants (typically society members) are working on. Because the critiques are immediate presenters can often get timely assistance with problem areas in their research.

For many academics who have no funded research (and this is a pretty substantial pool of scientists) the only way they can be reimbursed by their institutions for travel and costs of attending a meeting (costs which may easily exceed half a month's pay) is to present in some fashion (in zoology thats typically an oral presentation or poster demonstration). Session chairs and society officers are generally sympathetic with the plight of these individuals.

This in no way excuses the acceptance of gibberish. But the underlying effort to expose low threshold for acceptance may demonstrate a failure of these graduate students to fully appreciate the purpose and importance of conference presentations. It's an awfully easy attack on a straw man.

Because of the low threshold for acceptance in zoology presentations are considered far less important evidence of success as a scholar than publications and successful grants. Some search, and tenure and promotion committees I've served on have largely ignored presentations.

[Viking12]

6. Bingo!

Conference acceptance for grad students is also a means to acculaturate them, therefore consideration of their work often is judged against a lower threshhold than post-grads. Allowing "bad" scholarship to be presented at the conference provides a forum for more experienced researchers to offer feedback and constructive criticism on the process of becoming a good researcher. Being a successful researcher in any field takes practice. Getting exposure to the culture of the field is part of the learning process. Grad students are often unaware of the 'politics' involved in the publication game and involving them in the conferences is a way of socializing them into the culture.

[Lexingtonian]

11. this wasn't like that

WMSCI solicits via spam that annoys a lot of people, I hear via a relative at MIT who isn't in CS and gets their spam anyway- can't get off their list either. And the 'Rooter' "paper" got accepted, the organizers claim, because they accepted all papers their reviewers didn't get back to them on- some academically respectable conference, that.

[moggie]

4. Chicken

Chicken chicken chicken?

http://isotropic.org/uw/papers/chicken.pdf

Chicken!

[On the Road]

5. Where is THAT From?

And what is its purpose?

I printed it out to show my 15YO daughter. She'll love it.

[moggie]

7. Chicken, chicken?

Ahem, sorry. I came across it thanks to the ever-interesting "Language Log":

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002030.html

See the last cartoon on that page, and the "documentation" link below it. Since the cartoon is dated 2000, and the paper won the "best paper on chickens" award at the PoCSci '02 conference, I guess Doug Zongker (then a CS PhD student at the University of Washington) was inspired by the cartoon.

[On the Road]

8. There It Is -- Mystery Solved

Ask and you shall receive. Thank you.

[T_i_B]

9. Making a science out of applied idiocy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1461245,00.html

[Beetwasher]

10. That's Friggin' Brilliant

I get these solicitations all the time.

[Ian David]

12. Related DU Thread

Inside this thread is information on more "generator" pages that use "context-free grammar."

An essay on "Why The Liberals are Wrong"
Topic started by IanDB1 on Mar-03-05 08:51 AM (4 replies)
Last modified by IanDB1 on Mar-03-05 03:12 PM
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=2745212