MIT Pranking

[lederhosen]

Story here:

A bunch of 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 (MIT).

Jeremy Stribling said 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...

Comments

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(evil grin) Hee.

What kind of bloody excuse is accepting the paper without review?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

A while back, I read somewhere, a paleontology conference accepted a poster submission claiming to show that Stegosaurus walked upright. Naturally, this attracted a great deal of interest from all who read the list of topics in advance. The big day dawned, everybody trooped in to look at the posters... and the one everybody was waiting for turned out to be a photocopied picture of a stegosaurus, rotated ninety degrees so it was in an upright position.

At this stage, some of the other attendees were very eager to talk to the author, but he was mysteriously absent. Further enquiry showed that there was nobody by that name on the staff of the university listed in his application. Suspicion ended up on the shoulders of one academic who'd repeatedly complained about the poor standards of scrutiny applied to submissions to said conference...