Mark's Notebook


	And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. - Soren Kierkegaard

Syntax Error

Washington Post, Associated Press

Thursday 21 April 2005, 10:43 am
Keywords: Humor , News Articles

By Robert MacMillan, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Associated Press reported that three graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a computer program that generates fake research papers loaded with ridiculous gobbledygook -- and got one of the resulting papers accepted at a conference.

"The program, developed by Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo, generated a paper with the dumbfounding title: 'Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,'" the AP reported. "Its introduction begins: 'Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred.'"

The program takes its cue from the Mad Libs books that some of us grew up with. It uses sentences from real papers, but fills in blank spots with random gems stolen from academia.

Stribling told the AP that the idea was to expose the conference "as being willing to publish any paper regardless of whether it's been peer-reviewed, which is kind of a dangerous precedent to set."

Here's a sample of what got by the conference reviewers, as posted at Blogcritics.org: "Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public-private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable."

MIT prankster Stribling told the AP that the episode highlights a continuing problem in the scientific world: "conferences with low standards that pander to academics looking to pad their resumes [and] harm the reputations of more reputable gatherings."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6622-2005Apr21.html