Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference 658
mldqj writes "Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What's amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk."
I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and a collection of my as-yet unpublished white papers will be available soon. Cheap.
Review (Score:3, Interesting)
So... no-one organising the conference has actually read it? Anything would've gotten through in that case. Even slashdot trolls.
Lack of peer review (Score:2, Interesting)
On a similar note, I feel that this is where /. is successful, although it puts articles on which are sometimes bogus, the peer review puts those articles to shame.
Slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
No big surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a former professor of mine once did something similar. They submitted a paper that they had written by hand, but that didn't make any sense (something about evaluating footprints in dark rooms) to a conference that was known for its crap quality, and it was accepted. This broke that conference's neck, however.
With some luck, this thing will have a similar result.
Automatic paper generation to save time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if only they could modify this thing to produce papers on selected subjects, using a writing style "learned" by analyzing some of the user's own writing, so that students won't have to waste all their time writing stupid papers, and would have time for more important matters, like actually learning the material, hanging out, drinking booze, and having unsafe sex.
Combined with a genetic algorithm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Research by reading random paper productive? (Score:1, Interesting)
It might be very close to how the brain performs research currently: randomly connect things, and then notice if they are useful to connect.
I post anonymously because I am a well known computer scientist....
History repeating (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#paper
EPIC (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I think the problem is cultural and affects people who are intelligent and know it, but not intelligent enough that they feel they don't have to prove themselves. The more obscure your references are and the more complicated your train of thought, the smarter you must be, right?
Luckly there are folks like the Plain English Campaign [plainenglish.co.uk], " fighting for public information to be written in plain English." If you ever have to write a public document, I recommend reading through their Examples and Free Tutorials sections.
Re:No big surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember that one. It was two papers, one about "radiosity in an enclosed space with no internal light sources" or some such thing. (of course, the problem is trivial). The other was about footprints and actually sounded kind of interesting, though entirely silly. Both were accepted.
Here's a link:
Fake VIDEA papers [uni-dortmund.de]
Shades of Sokal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like Sokal [nyu.edu] All Over Again
Random Complaints (Score:4, Interesting)
This post was brought to you by a shameless plug [blogspot.com].
Grammatical errors (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this. (Score:2, Interesting)
No, not just scientific fraud. It is a paper with no real content been marked as science.
It is a fraud, but the fraudulent people are not the ones who wrote and submitted the paper (there is not rule against writting crap). The fraudulent people are the ones that accepted it for a conference whitout revewing.
Re:It wasn't reviewed (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair [wikipedia.org]
It may sound like a nice prank, but it was (and still is) considered intellectually dishonest to permit the thing to go to publication, even if Social Text failed in their peer review process.
Re:Not surprising at all (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, I did a keyword search for the strings used in these E-mails. They pull out batches of 14 words (or around 70 characters) at random from several different online book websites. An example includes US General history books [onlinebooks4free.com]
I've been saying this for years (Score:2, Interesting)
So it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of random garbage got through a selection committee.
Re:Patents application (Score:5, Interesting)
You would need quite a few. Just the combination of the first 8 notes is 26^7=8,031,810,176, assuming the first note's placement is irrelevant, and assuming up to an octave's jump in value either way. That is discounting rythmic variations, which would add quite a few extra combos.
The outcome space for a melody is astoundingly large.
Re:Patents application (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or not.
Re:Patents application (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It wasn't reviewed (Score:1, Interesting)
It is dishonest in the sense that the content (or "content") of the paper was not offered in good faith. It did not represent ideas that the author sincerely believed would advance that discipline in any way - quite the opposite, in fact.
Furthermore, the journal in question could argue that, since they had made a decision to abandon peer review and chose to put faith in the authors, Sokal was in fact, abusing the journal's trust by submitting something he knew had no value. The rejection of peer review may have been a bad decision on their part, but the academically kosher way to argue this would have been a sincere article arguing against the new policy.
Re:The blind publishing the blind. (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider these lines from their guide "How to Write Plain English."
Most experts would agree that clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words.
Should read:
Make your sentences about 15 to 20 words long.
And...
However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. But most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Should read...
If you find yourself writing a long sentence to explain a complicated point, try breaking your sentence up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, try breaking it up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, break it up.
And...
To explain the difference between active and passive verbs, we need to look briefly at how a sentence fits together. Almost every sentence has three important parts. There are three main parts to almost every sentence:
Should be:
Well, whatever it is, it shouldn't say the same sentence twice at the end.
These are just a few examples and I'm sure one could advocate the use of the original in some situations. But read the entire article [plainenglish.co.uk] and you will see useful information and perhaps "better-than-average use of plain English" but it won't be as great as it must be for a site of this kind.
My test for well written in English is that my mind doesn't wander. I knew this wasn't great English because I sometimes found it hard to concentrate on the material. This is especially bad when I'm interested in it. IMHO, the "Elements of Style" is a better introduction to good writing.
Before you jump all over me for any badly constructed sentences in this post, remember that the standard for a "teaching plain english" article has to be much higher than a SlashDot post.
Figures... (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, what are the acceptance rates? From their homepage: "grown from 55 papers to 2904 papers in Orlando WMSCI 2004". Who are the organizers? A web search for the PC chair, general chair, and organizing chair reveals no homepages. What professional societies are associated with it? None.
Personally, I'd run from anyone claiming a publication in this or any of its affiliated conferences. Paying $$ to get a paper in print doesn't count as research.
Surely you are joking (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read--something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."
So I stopped--at random--and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics--science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean--what the question is, and what you're saying--so I thought you can't be a professor!"
vacation conferences (Score:3, Interesting)
Judging from the description of the WMSCI 2005... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:every scholar? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are lots of crap articles getting published, just like any popular opinion can get a +5, insightful on Slashdot if it's posted early in the discussion. And much like Slashdot, cultural studies and its like will accept lower standards than theoretical physics because it allows -- and needs -- wider participation. But the fact that some junk is published doesn't mean everything that is published is junk. Some people that try to make others believe they are scientifically minded (Richard Dawkins is one of them) think it does, though. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone that pretends to think scientifically lacks elementary sense of logic.