MIT students' "random paper generator" dupes an academic conference (IHTFP?)

Here was the clip from the NYT that tipped me off:

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Three M.I.T. graduate students have created a computer program that generates nonsensical scholarly papers. Last month, one of its productions, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," was accepted by the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. The invitation was rescinded after conference organizers learned of the hoax. The program, called SCIgen, is online at: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.

One must understand our network configuration to grasp the genesis of our results. We ran a deployment on the N.S.A.'s planetary-scale overlay network to disprove the mutually large-scale behavior of exhaustive archetypes. First, we halved the effective optical drive space of our mobile telephones to better understand the median latency of our desktop machines. This step flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is instrumental to our results.

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You can get more details about the whole affair at the webpage for "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator"

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

IHTFP?

sounds like "I Hope To Fuck People"

I heard about this either here, or on Slashdot, about 2 months ago.

Really interesting, and I love how they confronted the confrence about it.

who in the hell would bother posting something like this? oh wait......

i could give a rats ass about this, thx.

Great Newspost.

This has to be one of the best Geeky, ivy league, academic pranks of all time.

They should publish thier findings and submit it to REAL computer science and sociology journals.

Thats pretty funny. Dunno why but Ive always been easily entertained by random generators, and this one is just cool.

Yeah, I read about this the other, and there's really nothing remarkable about it, as far as I can tell. Their paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" - so what's the big fucking deal if it wasn't even peer-reviewed??? Basically, they're saying that they didn't have time to review it so it was accepted by default. VERY BIG DEAL.

And who the fuck are the idiots making donations to this worthless shit? It's fucking sad, seriously.


This is one of those things that looks cool on the surface, but when you step into it a little you realize that it's only about 3 mm deep.

I've got to agree strongly with galfordo on this one (eek!). This is pretty much a dud of a story - if the paper wasn't subjected to peer review, then nobody was duped.

This isn't a clear-cut case like the Social Text / Alan Sokal hoax from the mid 90s, in which the offending nutty paper was accepted based on supposed peer review - you can't claim to have deceived a review process that never took place.

There's a self-aggrandizing element to this whole thing: it's not particularly impressive to have nonsense accepted unless a review actually occurred. Being involved in academia (although in the humanities), and hence in the never-ending conference circuit/circus, I can say it's not at all uncommon (in fact, it's almost standard) for papers to be blindly accepted for large conferences without review. Had the proceedings of the conference turned into edited volumes for publication, nonsense like this would likely have been identified as such.

Guess the title of this thread shoud read:

MIT students' "self-aggrandizing article" dupes a Video Game Moderator (neo-geo.com?)

or better title "Article thats funny for non PhD academic lifers" (or complete retards like DashK)

anyone remember when BarfHappy's account posted something like that in News and Rumors, after a few months of BarfHappy being gone that is...

Bobak said:

or better title "Article thats funny for non PhD academic lifers" (or complete retards like DashK)

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YOu could trick people with stuff like:

Mc Donalds' "Big Breakfast" dupes a Wasian Wigger (DashK?)

jeff bogard said:

IHTFP?

sounds like "I Hope To Fuck People"

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Now that's funny shit.