[lbo-talk] Suck it, Sokal

Robert D. Day robertdd at gmail.com
Wed Apr 20 19:48:25 PDT 2005


MIT students pull prank on conference Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted Thursday, April 14, 2005

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.

FULL: <http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut>



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