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ROOTER
Three MIT grad students have pulled off a prank that recalls Alan Sokal’s celebrated Social Text hoaxing:
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.
To their surprise, one of the papers - “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” - was accepted for presentation.
“Rooter” features such mind-bending gems as: “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”.
I want a scatter/gather server.
A scatter/gather server…
Ah! You mean a croupier!
Posted by Joe Geoghegan on 2005 04 14 at 11:10 PM • permalinkYou probably have one, Tim. Scatter/gather is a common technique in a number of fields in computing, and I expect it’s used on the server hosting this blog.
Parts of those “gems” actually make sense - simulated annealing, active networks and reinforcement learning go together, for example, though “flexible modalities” is just marketing speak, and “opportunistically pipelined extensions” doesn’t mean anything.
It’s cute, but not as good as Alan Sokal’s Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity - which is still getting cited as a serious paper.
You’ll go far in life with flexible modalities, young man…
cuckoo — Not machinegunning the dove? Has the left completely forgotten Stapledon’s The Shape of Things to Come?
Shoot! Shoot! You’ve never shot enough!
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 04 14 at 11:58 PM • permalinkNagib Callaos, a conference organiser, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a “non-reviewed” basis - meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.
“We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers,” Mr Callaos wrote in an email.
“The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper.”
However, Mr Callaos said conference organisers were reviewing their acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.
Good Idea. By not reviewing submitted papers, they’re asking for this.
For many years, in my work as a structural dynamics engineer in the aerospace/defense industry, I always tried to work the word “modality” into my reports and documents (much like the old Groucho Marx tv quiz show and its “secret word”). Usually, “modality” had only peripheral relevance to my subject matter, but I just liked the sound of it, and the unabashed pretentiousness of it all.
Posted by Bruce Lagasse on 2005 04 15 at 12:25 AM • permalinkSo professional journals meticulously review the articles they publish.
Except when they don’t.
So these guys couldn’t run a blog.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 04 15 at 12:57 AM • permalinkBruce
Here are a few of my favourites I always throw in reports to Government:
. paradigm
. semiotics
. milestones
. measuring/evaluating outcomes
. summative assessments
. cognitive responses
. experiential learningSprinlkle liberally through turgid text, with occasional highlights and italics. Always impresses.
Mr Magoo, I like to jot down the wanky management terms my boss uses (it certainly makes a meeting more interesting and they’re fun to add to conversation later). Some of my recent faves:
- underpinning
- buttress
- leverage off
- bedding it down
- press ahead
- ebb and flow over time
- suck it and see
- collegiate approach
- fine tuning
- catalysts
- clustersThe winner last week was:
“we need to jump through the various hurdles”
sounds painful…
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 04 15 at 02:00 AM • permalink>I want a scatter/gather server.
I’ve got a nice one that will fit neatly on your desk Tim, which will impress your Arts degree colleagues at the Bulletin.
How much do I want for it? $199.99? No! $159.99? No! $129.99? No! It’s yours for just $99.99, and I’ll also throw in a Simula-67 machine with pipelined extensions.
(Just publish your bank account details on your front page, and I’ll extract the money.)
Posted by Blithering Bunny on 2005 04 15 at 04:49 AM • permalink>So professional journals meticulously review the articles they publish.
>Except when they don’t.Well, it wasn’t a journal, just a conference.
Alan Brain said:
>Good Idea. By not reviewing submitted papers, they’re asking for this.
Alan comes from a serious discipline. I should point out that in less serious disciplines there are conferences where the submitted papers are not reviewed at all beforehand.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. These are conferences where hundreds of papers are given, most at the same time as many others (but in different rooms, of course). It isn’t practical to review them all. Rather, people turn up to what they think looks interesting. Some can be very bad, but you get more of a range of views.
In a way, this fits better with the Hayekian views often expressed by right-wing bloggers. But most academics would like to see some quality control in most cases.
Posted by Blithering Bunny on 2005 04 15 at 04:58 AM • permalinkBased on the spam I get, I could probably use an opportunistic pipeline extension.
Posted by Hucklebuck on 2005 04 15 at 09:53 AM • permalinkrhhardin — Spellchecker for Word is not a peer review.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 04 15 at 10:36 AM • permalinkScott Campbell — If that’s anything like that DVD Rewinder you sold me, Tim should hold on to his money…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 04 15 at 10:38 AM • permalinkPersonally, I found it as lucid and easy to follow as anything written by Ward Churchill. I mean that.
Posted by wronwright on 2005 04 15 at 03:40 PM • permalinkrichard mcenroe: I just got back from the Midwest Political Science Association meeting, and let me inform you that, for some of my “colleagues” at least, Spellchecker for Word is too peer review.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2005 04 16 at 12:41 AM • permalinkDamn!
Why did I not spot the connection before?
Just as Anthony Wedgewood-Benn shortened his name to Tony Benn, I suspect that Jeremy Stribling may in fact be related to the infamous Sir Arthur Strebe-Griebling (interviewed in a Pete & Dud sketch many years ago). Sir Arthur was engaged in a very dubious research project - teaching Ravens to fly underwater.
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Tim: totally OT, but as long as you’re out there posting, I’m surprised you haven’t picked up on today’s hot story about Aidan Bruford, the young ‘environment adviser’ to the ACT Chief Minister, caught spraying a graffiti mural on a Canberra wall. The mural apparently showed Howard holding a machine gun and shaking his fist at a peace dove. We want pictures!