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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Oh, and a collection of my as-yet unpublished white papers will be available soon.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
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
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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).
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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
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.
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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I'd say the conference itself is the product of some random text generator.