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Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference
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."
It's a thankless job to begin with. Now you have to approach each one with, "is this the real deal, or some bs-generated thing?"
:)
Oh, and a collection of my as-yet unpublished white papers will be available soon. Cheap.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
This paper was recently accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper!
So... no-one organising the conference has actually read it? Anything would've gotten through in that case. Even slashdot trolls.
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.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Sometimes you think that most of the /. posts are randomly generated, seedrf with the Wikipedia page on Slashdot subculture...
The organizers of this stupid conference (and also some "WSEAS conference on all and everything") keep spamming me with emails about how their deadlines have been extended and how I am invited to submit a paper. This just confirms that those conferences are total crap - if not outright scams.
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.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
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.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to create something actually interesting using a genetic algorithm operating on initally random data. I wonder if a genetic algorithm could be used to re-hash all of those random statements into something that actually has an intelligent flow to it. Maybe I should patent it. :)
http://nerdfortress.com/
I wonder if it might prove useful as a brainstorming substitute to read randomly generated papers in one's field looking for occasional insights in their sentences?
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....
Here's when something similar when nonsense physics fooled a humanities journal...
s
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#paper
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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, " 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.
Looks like Sokal All Over Again
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I've always been a fan of Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator. When I was in college, we used this all the time, including for submitting letters to the editor of our school paper. Letters that were actually printed. (Guess which one).
This post was brought to you by a shameless plug.
You probably shouldn't click this.
For those unfamiliar with the situation, the should read the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
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.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Yea, it's basically like that. Real conferences don't accept unreviewed papers at all, so that's a telltale sign.
've received auto-generated spam emails that read a lot like this.
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
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
So it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of random garbage got through a selection committee.
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.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Looks like Mozart beat you to it. His method is more restricted, but the music you get actually sounds pretty musical.
English is easier said than done.
Not many people bitch about the legislators not reviewing papers. So, why does everybody on /. bitch when Taco doesn't review a submission? If we could move /. administrator criteria to legislators, and get /. folks to care, we could maybe inact change in our government system.
Or not.
If you just start combining random tones together you won't make anything that sounds like music. Once you've played the first couple of notes in a piece there are only certain notes that follow that will "sound right" to someone who is used to hearing (for example) typical Western harmonic music. It has been estimated (An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise by J. Pierce) that basic melodies contain about 2.8 bits of information per note. Applying this, the first eight notes would have about (2^2.8)^7, or roughly 800,000 combinations of notes. So it would be no problem for well-written software to generate every "musical" 8-note melody.
"Where is the dishonesty in not saying anything? Sokal's paper was vacuous, so he was really doing no more than encouraging Social Text to publish some blank sheets of paper."
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.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of plain English and I love the idea behind the "Plain English Campaign," but their guides are poor for a website that is advocating Plain English.
;)
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 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.
Sunny
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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.
from Richard Feynman's immortal book:
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!"
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
It's not uncommon for some conferences to intentionally accept any submissions. They typically cost quite a bit, are in attractive vacation locations, and will accept anyone. The "researcher" gets a free vacation (on the research institute's dime) and the "conference" gets the conference fees. Another variant involves fake conferences that exist solely to generate dues and allow their international attendees to get visas to the U.S. Once in the U.S. the attendees are often never heard from again.
I'd say the conference itself is the product of some random text generator.
How can I know? Maybe due to lazyness, incompetence (especially in the field of quantum mechanics), or fear of seeming stupid when encountering something one doesn't understand (á la The Emperor's New Clothes). Or perhaps they accepted anything that looked dense and complicated, since no bugger would read it anyway. I don't know.
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.