Comments on: The lookaside buffer might not be the panacea.

The lookaside buffer might not be the panacea.

adrober — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:17:54 -0800

MIT students pull prank on conference. "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." The paper's title? "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy."

By: simra

simra — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:36:42 -0800

OMG. This is *sooo* yesterday's news.. Sorry to be snarky, but I've never seen so much 'friendly spam' about the same meme. As if I didn't already get excessive spam from WMSCI itself....

By: sninky-chan

sninky-chan — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:44:18 -0800

Seems like just the day before yesterday I read about this on Boing Boing. How time flies! I'm happy to see the story about that bogus conference land on CNN, though, if it makes the WMSCI conference people look bad. *reads article* Oh, damn. No, it busts the hoax and makes it look like a tiny loophole at WMSCI. DAMMIT

By: sninky-chan

sninky-chan — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:47:29 -0800

On preview: what preview button? *oops*

By: PenDevil

PenDevil — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 00:27:21 -0800

It's the Sokal affair all over again...

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 00:38:52 -0800

The Bogdanoff Affair is another Sokal type incident, in which a physics journal published a gibberish paper.

By: trinarian

trinarian — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 02:19:43 -0800

worth a read, extract on the Sokal hoax on Wiki for those unfamiliar, and an interesting rebuttal by Steve Fuller

By: sohcahtoa

sohcahtoa — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 04:46:20 -0800

Maybe this explains what giblish is!

By: Plutor

Plutor — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:08:15 -0800

I hate that this became such a huge meme. Their plan was "...to go [to WMSCI] and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face." But all you email-forwarders and double-posters ruined the joke, and they'll probably be uninvited.

By: exlotuseater

exlotuseater — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:14:04 -0800

Also related: How to Deconstruct almost anything. Combining the Literary and the Technical.

By: exlotuseater

exlotuseater — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:18:21 -0800

By: procrastination

procrastination — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 05:43:31 -0800

This was talked about a couple of days ago. http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/41143

By: spazzm

spazzm — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:00:41 -0800

Post-Postmodernism.

By: spazzm

spazzm — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:13:51 -0800

But all you email-forwarders and double-posters ruined the joke, and they'll probably be uninvited. Trying to keep a secret on the internet? Surely you jest.

By: jnthnjng

jnthnjng — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 07:05:06 -0800

Didn't anybody notice the fact that this paper was accepted without review? That means it wasn't read, so there's frankly not too much to crow about here, is there? All this means is that the paper looked vaguely academic at first glance. They didn't fool anybody if nobody actually read it. And reading the paper itself, i can promise you that it wouldn't fool anybody that actually read it. The paper seemed fairly substandard as far as MIT pranks go.

By: spazzm

spazzm — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 07:30:13 -0800

jnthnjng: The point is that a conference that accepts papers without reviewing them is not a real scientific conference. For all practical purposes scientific == peer-reviewed. It's not a matter of fooling anyone, it's a matter of showing that nobody read the paper before it was accepted.

By: bardic

bardic — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:02:49 -0800

Are people still surprised that academics are full of shit?

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:20:31 -0800

The point is that a conference that accepts papers without reviewing them is not a real scientific conference Varies by field. In political science, papers are accepted or rejected to conferences on the basis of their abstract, and are only very rarely completed when the abstract is submitted. "Reviewing" happens to bad papers when the discussants rip them to pieces. On the other hand, a conference presentation does not normally count as a publication with us. Conference presentations are a way to get feedback on an early draft, and provide an excuse to get funding to get to the conference for more schmoozular purposes. I gather that econ works similarly. At least, Public Choice meetings do.

By: edgeways

edgeways — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:23:54 -0800

Are people still surprised that academics are full of shit?. I doubt it, but I'd also wager they are less full of shit then a majority of other fields.

By: bonehead

bonehead — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:38:07 -0800

Ditti ROU_X: Almost every scientific conference I've ever been to ---chemical, physical, environmental---has operated by abstract aceptance only. Papers aren't often collected until after the conference is over. The talks are far more important than the paper at a conference---you expect the author to be floating an idea at a conference, then six months later, after they've had some feed back, they submit the work to a journal, to go on record, as it were. I'd be very surprised is the students would get away with submitting this to one of the ACM journals, for instance.

By: mondo dentro

mondo dentro — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:46:22 -0800

This is not like the Sokol affair. When the clever boys and girls at MIT get a fake paper published in Physical Review Letters or Nature, give me a call. The standard of acceptance at conferences is much lower than for journals, and for the most part it probably shold be. The idea is that one should be less strict with conference presentations, since people are coming to pitch their new ideas/research--stuff that is not yet ready for prime time--to a wider audience and get feedback. It's more inclusive than the journal review process.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:31:04 -0800

Papers aren't often collected until after the conference is over In my world, papers aren't even collected formally. There's no Proceedings of the Umpty-Fourth Meeting of the American Political Science Association or other conferences that I'm aware of, and if there are any exceptions they're Proceedingses that nobody in their right mind gives a damn about. The most you'll see in that regard are small "conferences" where the participants are putting together an edited volume, and the papers morph into the chapters.

By: transona5

transona5 — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:09:20 -0800

The standard of acceptance at conferences is much lower than for journals, and for the most part it probably shold be. That's not usually true in computer science. Conference publications can be even more prestigious than many journals. It seems like their prank was an attempt to discredit a conference in the field that doesn't live up to the usual standards, unlike the Sokol hoax, which was an attempt to discredit a whole field.

By: sergeant sandwich

sergeant sandwich — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 22:57:10 -0800

this sort of thing has been going on since the 1940's.

By: Aknaton

Aknaton — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 11:26:02 -0800

Many posters here don't seem to realize the basic point of this particular conference, which is to obtain registration fees from the gullible. That's why this "prank" sucks, but will suck much much more if these students pay to go deliver this paper at the conference. "Oh dear, I guess the joke's on me" says the organizer, crying on his way to the bank. (The vast majority of academic conferences are not of this type, and don't resort to spam to solicit speakers.) In that way it's quite incomparable to the Alan Sokal affair, in which he performed a valid experiment, the results of which proved something about the journal "Social Text". The experiment above proves nothing of any surprise.