As was reported by many, a group of graduate students created a randomly generated computer science paper, and submitted it to a conference, where it was accepted to be presented (the invitation was hastily rescinded after it was posted on slashdot). After some discussion on slashdot, it seems the general consensus is that while it may have looked bad, admittedly the conference has accepted it without having it reviewed, and were relying on the presenters to verify the paper (similar to the defense Social Text used in the Sokal affair). The MIT students original site. The reuters report of it can be found here
Of course, the real fun will be when such a paper is accepted even after having been peer reviewed. As it is, the grammar the paper generates isn’t all that atrocious, and is certainly superior to some of the CS papers I’ve been reading lately.
Hahahaha…not exactly coherent, but amusing. So now I’ll just, uh, enter some author’s
names from this course, and uh, see what it comes up with…
It’s also funny to look at why the other paper as been rejected.
Although the paper is complete non-sense
they give some pretty precise reasons and numbers:
“As you know there are more perspectives and opinions on this issue. Willis &
Bobys (1983, Perishing in Publishing: An analysis of rejection letters.
Wisconsin sociologist, 20(2-3), 84-91), for example, found that 54% of the
rejection letters provided some justification for the rejection, and the
most frequent reason (19%) was that the manuscript was “inappropriate for
the journal”. They also found that comments of the reviewers had been
included in the 57% of the letters.”
ah yes! this is exactly what i was talking about in the human cloning post. this is even more extreme… using computers to actually write whole articles far outweighs using them to check our grammar!!
I found out there is actually a random blog post generator on Slashdot.
Try it here
Hmm. I can see it now. A flood of posts to comply with course requirements!
How about the random Alanis Morissette lyrics generator?