They Did It Again: Hoaxes, Computers and Academia.

Yes folks it happened again, and for the fact the fact that the graduate students involved were sick and tired of receiving computer generated spam soliciting entries to what they felt were questionable academic conferences.

Jeremy Stribling, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said yesterday 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 graduate students randomly and somewhat wickedly basically compiled a bunch of nonsensical papers and submitted two of them to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

One of the papers, -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

�Rooter� is full of intellectually overwhelming jewels: "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, is a mere sampling.

According to Stribling they chose WMSCI because within the field of computer science they are notorious perpetrators of the aforementioned conference spam.

As of this time the conference organizers had not rescinded their invitation to present the paper but one of the conference organizers, Nagib Callaos, said that there were a small number of papers accepted prior to review ; the papers were being reviewed but the feedback had not been given as of the acceptance date. Evidently as the paper had not yet been rejected by any of the three reviewers prior to the acceptance deadline they felt it was unfair to reject the paper. The conference itself takes no responsibility for a non reviewed paper, that responsibility lies with the author (s) if the paper.The conference organizers are actively reviewing their acceptance procedures following this hoax. There was no absolute answer as to if the MIT students invitation would be rescinded but Callaos said �Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."

Some might remember several years ago a hoax was accomplished when 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.

More on the Social Text affair as it was called can be found at: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/. A nifty little post modernism generator, which will churn you out a nifty little paper whenever you click on the link, can be found here at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Stribling and his partners in this little experiment were unaware of the � Social Text Affair� until after their papers were submitted.

You can also find my article at Blogger News Network . Like anyone really wants to read it twice. LOL I think they edited it as they did not like my verbage. secret: I write all my papers with a random generator of some kind or another.