[Marxism] Technobabble wows organizers of academic confab

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

'All Greek' tech babble fools academics 

April 15 2005 at 10:36AM        

By Greg Frost

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.

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."

(full story at:
<http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=qw1113541383392B
232>


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