[This is brilliant genius actually Many years ago, a friend of mine was on a course where she was given a table of words which
if you put them together randomly, they sounded like they made sense. To this day, I wish I had photocopied some of those pages
from her course and I still wish I could find such a thing.

Part of the course mocked “blinding people with science” (sort of) and it showed that if you threw a bunch of fancy words into text or a talk people would think you are saying something deep and intellectual when in fact you’re just talking cr*p.

These guys must have written a whole program to generate this and I think its brilliant I wish I had one.

Once in the early 1990’s. when I contracted at a mining house, I once wrote something along these lines for a boss of mine My boss actually thought I was being serious when in fact I was pulling her leg

I am quite certain that a lot of complete *JUNK* masquerades as intellectual works Of that, there is no doubt in my mind. Hence I also question many things that are regarded as: HALLOWED in the world of science Some of these academics are actually morons I’m sure there are certain subjects too where being a complete numbskull will not stand in the way of your progress and promotion. You can be a total idiot and nobody will notice as long as you make the right sort of monkey noises to go along with it. I would guess that subjects like: Philosophy, Psychology or Political Science are open to such “fraud”.

For the others, here is the brilliant piece – this is genius really these guys should get a Nobel Prize or two, plus an Oscar thrown in for good measure for this. They have real talent!!!! Jan]

Cambridge – 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 programme 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 between July 10 and 13 in Orlando, Florida.

The text of the paper was nonsensical
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 emails that solicit admissions to the conference.

‘Bogus papers shouldn’t be included in the conference’
“We were tired of the spam,” Stribling said in a telephone interview, adding that his team wanted to challenge the standards of the conference’s peer review process.

Nagib Callaos, a conference organiser, 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 email. “The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper.”

However, Callaos said conference organisers 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 programme.”

Stribling said conference organisers 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 (about R13 000) over the Internet.

Source: IOL
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>