We all know (or should) about Physicist Alan Sokal's groundbreaking paper: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" published in peer-reviewed Journal Social Text.
The thing we need to remember is that it was a fake, a joke and was intended entirely to see if a "paper" created with a meaningless stream of buzz-words would pass muster.
Sokal's website outlines the thought that went into it, the paper itself and the aftermath when he revealed in another journal that the paper was a joke and the readers of Social Text were the butt of it.
In a blissful recursive-onanistic excursion, there are now "legitimate" philosophy papers that were written about this event and someone has written a delightful Postmodernism Essay Generator -- reload the page for a new essay...
Well, it has happened again -- this time from MIT and it's not a person, it's a computer program and the paper: "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
From the CNN article:
MIT students pull prank on conferenceThe software they used is running publicly at this site: "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator." I think I'm going to cut and paste and buff up my resume a little bit...
Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted
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.
