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."

Comments

Random Relpy

[extremescholar]

Random Post!

Patents application

[Anonymous Coward]

Their original plan was to do this with a patent application instead... but decided they needed a challenge.

Re:Patents application

[deathcloset]

You know, this random generated article being accepted reminds me of this idea I once had.

I thought it would be rather interesting to create a program the randomly creates musical works. In fact, I would like it to create millions or billions of these works and to submit them for copyright :)

I think it would be possible to create every possible permutation of a 4 bar, or heck up to 16 bar melody, rhythm and harmony.

Then I could sue any new release by any record company 8D

Re:Patents application

[EsbenMoseHansen]

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

[hunterx11]

Looks like Mozart beat you to it. His method is more restricted, but the music you get actually sounds pretty musical.

Re:Patents application

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Patents application

[Crabbyass]

These "random" elements which John Cage used in much of his music are a far cry from the "randomness" that would be generated from a computer program using algorithms to calculate random instances of pitch, duration, tempo, velocity, etc.

The latter would probably end up looking and sounding, ironically, nearly identical to music composed using serialism, set theory, 12-tone music, etc. in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are arranged into a "row", which can then be used in retrograde, inversion, rotation, transposition, among others, all at the compsoer's discretion. The music of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and other serialists tend to be more respected among mathematicians these days.

John Cage's "randomness" stems from his intense studies of Eastern Religions, especially Zen Buddhism. For a large portion of his life, much of his music was derived, at least in part, from quasi-random decisions determined in the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes). Much has been written by and about John Cage on using random (aleatoric, as we musicians refer to it) elements, and of his philosophies on music in general

To give you an example of his aleatoric compositions:

4'33 - in 3 movements, the performer is instructed to sit silently at the keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, closing and opening the lid between each movement. the interpretations are too many to list here.

Imaginary Landscape No.4 - the score calls for the prescribed manipulations of knobs on 12 radios. The aural result is dependent on what happens to be on the airwaves at the instant of performance.

Other works have been "composed" by filling in notes, articulations, etc. wherever tiny imperfections appear on a sheet of manuscript paper.

In other news...

[umrgregg]

In other news a randomly generated story submission was accepted by /. moderators.

Re:In other news...

[peculiarmethod]

In other news a randomly generated story submission was accepted by /. moderators.

no joke. this is not new news.. legislators have been accepting papers without review for years.

Re:In other news...

[Scoria]

Twice.

Re:In other news...

[somethinghollow]

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.

I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[winkydink]

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. :)

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[Guppy06]

Generally speaking, if you ever find yourself asking "Is this bullshit?" you already know the answer.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[bcattwoo]

Now you have to approach each one with, "is this the real deal, or some bs-generated thing?"

If you were refereeing a paper and not at least asking that question you would have no business being a referee to begin with.

The paper in question was accepted as "non-reviewed" so obviously the reviewers did not look at it very closely. I would encourage the students to go through with their plan of giving a random talk though. I bet any future employers, postdoc supervisors, etc., who might be there will be thoroughly amused when these students make complete asses out of themselves.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[R.Caley]

This paper would fail the first rule, if you don't understand it, reject it. Either it is drivel, or it is submitted to the wrong conference/journal/whatever or you should not be a referee for this. Since the last is someone else's decision, you can happily behave as if they know what theya re doing.

Of course, this kind of scam works on the reluctance of accademics to just say they don't understand something.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[hunterx11]

When you're in a discovery-oriented field, a lot of things are going to sound like bullshit but will be totally legitimate.

This is true, but even more things are going to sound like bullshit because they are exactly that. Like Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Besides, many groundbreaking papers (special relativity comes to mind) are not peer reviewed anyway because there really is no one qualified to review them.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When you're in a discovery-oriented field, a lot of things are going to sound like bullshit but will be totally legitimate.

I strongly disagree. Good writing is good writing, no matter what the subject matter; the most revolutionary discoveries can (and should) be presented in a style that is accessible to readers knowledgeable in the field. On the other hand, buzzword-laden crap is pretty much a sure sign that the author has no meaningful contribution to make; and when buzzword-laden crap is what you get in the majority of papers published, which is pretty much where CS is right now, something is seriously wrong. The fact that randomly generated papers look so much like "real" ones is a sign of a field in serious trouble.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[CaChElInKeR]

Actually, I doubt that the graduate students presenting this talk would care to work with anybody that is actually attending SCI! I think people missed the fact that this is to point out the fallacy of for-profit conferences like SCI.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[dierdorf]

Many groundbreaking papers (special relativity comes to mind) are not peer reviewed anyway because there really is no one qualified to review them.

You picked a bad example. Special Relativity was "in the air" in 1905, and if Einstein had decided to take a vacation, any of a half-dozen other Physicists would have published SR within a year or two. Lorentz is a prime example, and the heart of SR is still known as "Lorentz symmetry". FitzGerald probably would have beaten Einstein to the punch except he had the misfortune to die first. Effectively, the combination of Maxwell's Equations of electromagnetic waves plus the result of the Michaelson-Morley experiment showing that the speed of light was invariant made SR inevitable.

Now if you'd said GENERAL Relativity, then I'd have agreed with you.

Re:I'd hate to be a paper referee after this.

[Brighten]

The randomly generated paper did not get into a CS conference... or even a "real" conference for that matter. WMSCI is, as far as I can tell, a money-making operation. Everyone in my department gets spammed from them (and the situation is the same elsewhere, hence Mazieres and Kohler's work).

Actually, if you read WMSCI's mission, it looks randomly generated too:

The purpose of WMSCI 2005 is to promote discussion and interaction between researchers and practitioners focused on disciplines as well as different areas.

So CS might have problems, but you cannot argue that based on WMSCI.

The blind publishing the blind.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Excerpt from the submitted paper:

We question the need for digital-to-analog converters. It should be noted that we allow DHCP to harness homogeneous epistemologies without the evaluation of evolutionary programming [2], [12], [14]. Contrarily,the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea that end-users expected. However, this method is never considered confusing. Our approach turns the knowledge-base communication sledgehammer into a scalpel.

I've received auto-generated spam emails that read a lot like this. Nice to know the WMSCI is on their toes...but judging from the content on their home page, I'm not surprised that they consider this paper conference material.

From the WMSCI's website:

Through WMSCI conferences, we are trying to relate the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions, to the synthetic thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls for multi-focus domain and divergent thinking. We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of the corpus callosum. Then, WMSCI 2005 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum, trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers and focused specialists with non-focused or multi-focused generalists.

What's scary is that the second paragraph was written by humans.

(FYI, the full text of the paper in question can be found here, and the WMSCI website can be found here.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[tehcrazybob]

People who act surprised by things like this don't read Dilbert nearly often enough.

It seems as though corporate America consists of people trying to write as much as possible without actually saying anything. If you don't believe me, go look at the mission statement of any big company. It doesn't read like English. If it did, they might be expected to actually make something concrete.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[markhb]

It gets worse... they submitted another paper that was rejected, they asked why, and got this in reply (several paragraphs, complete with random statistics, to say "it's too much work for us to tell you.")

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[Guppy06]

"If you don't believe me, go look at the mission statement of any big company. It doesn't read like English."

How else do you expect them to stretch "To make money" out to fill up an entire page?

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[kat11v]

This is a problem that plagues most legal documents, user manuals, and scientific papers. I recall being very frustrated (not to mention bored out of my mind) reading published research material for a 3rd year psychology course. Of all the people, you would think at least psychologists would appreciate clear, concise descriptions.

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.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[TripMaster Monkey]

The more obscure your references are and the more complicated your train of thought, the smarter you must be, right?

Seems to work for Dennis Miller.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[maxwell demon]

You are surely informed about the undeniable fact that there are some required statements to be said about the absolute absence of anything resembling content. It enables you to produce large amounts of texts without the need of unnecessary using the central nervous system.

Hmmm ... still too short. Err, I mean, the length still lets something to be desired. Err ... the total number of words is clearly beyond the threshold of acceptability. Ok, that's better, next try: The total number of words the above text actually consists of can easily be seen to clearly be beyond the business-standard threshold of acceptability. Yes, that's it! ;-)

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[s20451]

For one thing, if you visit the site, the paper that got accepted was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper.

Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.

At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.

I attended a recent conference at a major university where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.

You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[Salis]

More likely, the reviewer didn't want to say "It reads like gibberish and, consequently, I think you're an idiot" to the author.

Instead, the reviewer cites some statistics and basically writes, "Because I said so".

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[mikael]

'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

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[speleo]

The founder of what is now a very large software company I used to work for suggested this as the mission statement when they needed one before they went public:

"Whores for money."

Later on in the same company (after it went public) each department needed it's own mission statement. I worked in technical support at the time and our director suggested this:

"Answer phone when ring."

None of us now work there.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[Idarubicin]

At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.

Yes, but did you look at the paper? Figure 6 on "millennium hash tables" (which I admit shows an excellent linear relationship) plots the dependence of "seek time (cylinders)" on "latency (celcius)". Figure 3 measures "time since 1977" in teraflops. Okay--maybe reading the paper is too much to ask, but couldn't they at least have looked at the pictures?

I dare say that the paper is "obviously ridiculous".

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[NoOneInParticular]

I actually thought the reply was brilliant. The guy clearly looked at the paper, looked at it again and decided that he would not insult any reviewer by exposing them to blatant nonsense that was in the paper. Then, after being asked for the reviews, he answers in the same style as the paper, complete with obscure and irrelevant references. Score 1 for the organizer, I thought.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[mithras the prophet]

The references were entirely relevant, in my reading. The students asked for a justification for the rejection, and reviews if available; furthermore they implied that this was normal practice.

The response cited several papers showing that giving reasons for rejection is (a) less common than was implied, (b) frequently non-informative. So it was a justification for giving no justification.

I agree it was a little turgid, but unlike the paper itself, it did make sense.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

1. Ideas that can't be stated with mathematical precision are crap.
2. This statement is not specific enough to make a good programming specification.
3. Therefore, this statement is worthless.

1. If you can't explain something clearly, then you don't underrstand it yourself.
2. This is so unclear as to obscure the existence of a point in the first place.
3. Therefore, you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[shirai]

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. ;)

Re:The blind publishing the blind.

[Stiletto]

Through WMSCI conferences, we are trying to relate (+1, non-action) the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions (+1, vague), to the synthetic thinking (+1, jargon), required for analogies generation (+2, prepositional phrase overload), which calls for multi-focus (+2, oxymoron) domain and divergent (+1, buzzword) thinking (+1, word used three times in one sentence). Sentence bonus (+3 run-on)
We are trying (+1, repeat) to promote (+1, non-action) a synergic (+1, buzzword) relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds (+1, jargon), as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of (+2, prepositional phrase overload) the corpus callosum (+1, jargon). Then, WMSCI 2005 might be perceived (+1, non-action) as a research corpus callosum (+1, jargon), trying to bridge (+1, non-action) analytically (+1, word overuse) with synthetically (+1, word overuse) oriented (+1, buzzword) efforts, convergent (+1, buzzword) with divergent (+1, buzzword) thinkers and focused (+1, word overuse) specialists with non-focused (+2, again?) or multi-focused (+3, AAAGGHH) generalists. Sentence bonus (+3 run-on) Paragraph bonus (+5 meaningless)

TOTAL SCORE: 41 (a new world record)

What's it's username here?

[Rollie Hawk]

n/t

Hmm

[daeley]

Do they accept randomly generated quotes from Linus Torvalds? ;)

Re:Hmm

[garcia]

Only if they're not true.

How Long Before...

[ackthpt]

How long before /. accepts an article randomly generated?

or has it already happened?

downtown Holland, Michigan is in flames as a randomly assembled protest practices their own brand of metamoderation.

the question is..

[ShaniaTwain]

Whats the equivalent monkeys per typewriter power of this software?

Re:the question is..

[Tackhead]

> Whats the equivalent monkeys per typewriter power of this software?

Don't know much 'bout monkeys and typewriter, but I reckon at least 1,000,000 pickup trucks, shotguns, and miles of highway signage, at least if it's written in Braille.

Re:the question is..

[IntelliTubbie]

Whats the equivalent monkeys per typewriter power of this software?

Good thinking! I hereby propose a new unit for measuring intelligence: the MBOTY (monkey-banging-on-typewriter-years). From basic probability theory, this number is certainly always finite -- and in some cases, very much so.

Cheers,
IT

Have a randomly generated comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new randomly generated comment/story overlords from soviet russia where comment posts you.

Not surprising at all

[shoppa]

It's always been well-known that if you can't get your paper published in a refereed journal, you can probably get it published in some conference proceedings. I've even used this trick while I was in academia.

At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.

Re:Not surprising at all

[xyzzy]

Yup, this conference looks like one of those used to buff resumes. If you look at the "Academic and Industry sponsors" page, you will notice that NO major universities or societies are sponsoring this conference. I get a couple invitiations to things like this a month.

Re:Not surprising at all

[xyzzy]

Yea, it's basically like that. Real conferences don't accept unreviewed papers at all, so that's a telltale sign.

On a similar note...

[GillBates0]

check out the Random Slashdot story generator if you haven't done so already. I give it a few weeks before one of these gets accepted by the editors.

No big surprise

[ghoti]

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.

Re:No big surprise

[clem]

From the summary: Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk.

I wonder if they'd accept a randomly generated credit card number?

Re:Review

[sellin'papes]

non-reviewed papers do not mean that they haven't been read. It means that it hasn't been reviewed. In the case of scientific articles, review means that your peers follow the same process and methods and see if they come up with the same conclusions.

Don't forget the great paper by Mazieres & Koh

[nweaver]

Don't forget Mazieres and Kohler's great submission as well, "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List"

I doubt they'll attend the conference now...

[bergeron76]

After this news item, I highly doubt they'll still be able to go to the conference.

It wasn't reviewed

[R.Caley]

So it's hardly supprising it wasn't rejected. That people orgaising conferences will accept papers just because no one can be arsed to read them is, of course, a different matter.

So, this doesn't come close to the sucess of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity which got into a peer reviewed journal.

Re:It wasn't reviewed

[ragnar]

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.

Re:It wasn't reviewed

[Idarubicin]

I know someone who considered citing the paper in a dissertation. Fortunately she noticed the retraction before doing so, but it would have been an embarrassment to say the least. Of course we can say that anyone who cites the paper deserves ridicule, but this sort of thing can cause real harm to people's livelihood.

Well, yes?

What was she doing citing a paper that she didn't understand?

Yes, Sokal was being dishonest, submitting a paper that he could not in good faith claim was legitimate. On the other hand, the intellectual dishonesty also extends to Social Text, for failing in their peer review process to admit that they didn't understand the paper, and to anybody who might cite it, because they either misunderstood or misrepresented its contents--if they read it at all.

If you're not honest enough to admit that you don't understand something in academia, and you're bold enough to cite it anyway, then maybe you deserve real harm to your livelihood.

Re:It wasn't reviewed

[TopSpin]

I know someone who considered citing the paper in a dissertation. Fortunately she noticed the retraction before doing so, but it would have been an embarrassment to say the least. Of course we can say that anyone who cites the paper deserves ridicule, but this sort of thing can cause real harm to people's livelihood.

Our disciplines are so ambiguous that it's practitioners can't distinguish between fraudulent and real material. This is understood and you're wrong to test it in public.

Astonishing.

Maybe this wake up call was necessary

This "wake up call" was inevitable.

but prior to Sokol's publication there was a healthy inter disciplinary effort between the humanities and sciences.

"healthy inter disciplinary effort"... Straight out of a paper generating algorithm. Whatever respect exists between hard science and the "humanities" hasn't been fundamentally shaken, which should provide some incite into how great that level of respect was to begin with.

It isn't hard to see how this publication put a wedge between the camps.

The wedge was already there. Sokol contributed to helping us to stop pretending.

For that reason I consider it intellectually dishonest, but there is no consensus.

We should not, however, consider the "intellectual" honesty of an academic publication with standards this low? Did Social Text not purport to have academic credibility? But this is an equivalence argument.

Sokol made himself some enemies with his prank. During the time between the moments of panic you've felt when thinking about being similarly exposed, has the thought ever occurred that Sokol deserves some credit for his courage?

I didn't think so.

My complaint about slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Click here before you moderate!!!

I, not being one of the many insolent, vicious used-car salesmen of this world, am going to make this short but sweet: In this era of rising sesquipedalianism, we must shine a light on slashdot's efforts to test another formula for silencing serious opposition. That's self-evident, and even slashdot would probably agree with me on that. Even so, I have to wonder where it got the idea that it is my view that my bitterness at it is merely the latent projection of libidinal energy stemming from self-induced anguish. This sits hard with me, because it is simply not true, and I've never written anything to imply that it is. Let's start with my claim that slashdot's inveracities are based on a technique I'm sure you've heard of. It's called "lying". I like to think I'm a reasonable person, but you just can't reason with brutal, disgusting junkies. It's been tried. They don't understand, they can't understand, they don't want to understand, and they will die without understanding why all we want is for them not to keep us perennially behind the eight ball. Now, I don't mean for that to sound pessimistic, although if you're interested in the finagling, double-dealing, chicanery, cheating, cajolery, cunning, rascality, and abject villainy by which slashdot may impose a particular curriculum, vision of history, and method of pedagogy on our school systems one of these days, then you'll want to consider the following very carefully. You'll especially want to consider that I want to give people more information about slashdot, help them digest and assimilate and understand that information, and help them draw responsible conclusions from it. Here's one conclusion I definitely hope people draw: Slashdot's callous, raving beliefs (as I would certainly not call them logically reasoned arguments) condemn innocent people to death. Slashdot then blames us for that. Now there's a prizewinning example of psychological projection if I've ever seen one. I want to make this clear, so that those who do not understand deeper messages embedded within sarcastic irony -- and you know who I'm referring to -- can process my point.

Slashdot prizes wealth and celebrity over and above decent morals and sound judgment. Now, I could go off on that point alone, but it continuously seeks adulation from its bedfellows. If you doubt this, just ask around. I once had a nightmare in which slashdot was free to make widespread accusations and insinuations without having the facts to back them up. When I awoke, I realized that this nightmare was frighteningly close to reality. For instance, slashdot's magic-bullet explanations are thoroughly otiose. Let's remember that. This is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state would be eager to instill distrust and thereby create a need for its dictatorial views. Not yet, at least. But it argues that the most ridiculous pip-squeaks you'll ever see are easily housebroken. I wish I could suggest some incontrovertible chain of apodictic reasoning that would overcome this argument, but the best I can do is the following: It possesses no significant intellectual skills whatsoever and has no interest in erudition. Heck, it can't even spell or define "erudition", much less achieve it. Slashdot says it's going to make a big deal out of nothing faster than you can say "gastrohysterorrhaphy". Is it out of its malign mind? The answer is fairly obvious when you consider that this is kind of a touchy subject to some people. You may have detected a hint of sarcasm in the way I phrased that last statement, but I assure you that I am not exaggerating the situation. This letter has gone on far too long, in my opinion, and probably yours as well. So let me end it by saying merely that slashdot measures the value of a man by the amount of profit it can realize from him.

You're nomenclature is confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

A monkey-typewriter (note: not monkey per typerwirter) is a unit of improbable entropy equal to the decible level of 350 grams of feces hurled at 1 ft per second into a plexiglass barrier.

Re:You're nomenclature is confused.

[evanbd]

1 foot per second is really more of a "smoosh" or "smear" than it is a "hurl". Perhaps your standard should be revised. Also, I suggest you use more standard units, such as football fields per Electronic Arts workday.

EPIC

[Lord_Dweomer]

This story reminded me of the EPIC Flash (yeah yeah) video about the future of news media. Basically google ends up not just aggregating content by computer, but writing it by computer as well. Very interesting.

Random slashdot story generator

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

http://bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/

Admit it. You would swear you're looking at a real slashdot story :)

Shades of Sokal?

[eddy]

Looks like Sokal All Over Again

Random Complaints

[funny-jack]

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.

Profit Motive

[gvc]

These junk conferences are organized for no reason other than profit. Accepting everything that is submitted is consistent with their objective.

The deal is, in an effort to get tenure or grants in a publish-or-perish world, mediocre researchers submit to these things. They are published if and only if they pay the registration fee. For this particular conference, the fee is a mere $US 390.

And there are no quantity discounts. If you have n papers you pay n times the fee.

pit this against the essay autograder

[krunk4ever]

we should pit this against the essay autograder and see what grade we get. then we can refind it so it always generates A+ worthy papers.

Conferences that will accept anything.

[itsNothing]

I remember reading a report about 10 years ago about a group of researchers trying to prove that a given conference was bogus. The group generated 4 papers (including a random one) to see which among them would be accepted. My favorite was entitled:

Ray Tracing in the Absence of Light

It was accepted.

Based on their CV?

[monecky]

From the WMSCI website:

" Acceptance decisions related to the submitted papers will be based on their respective content review and/or on the respective author's CV.
" ...so they may not have even read the paper.

Randomly generated paper accepted

[elgatozorbas]

How do you feel about Randomly generated paper accepted to conference?

I hate to admit it, but I fell for it

[Anita Coney]

I clicked the link and created a random article. Before it appeared I went to the bathroom, got a snack, etc etc etc. A while later I came back and started reading the article.

By then I forgot all about it being randomly generated. I was trying to read it and I asked myself, "Why the fuck did I open this link, it makes no sense?!" A couple seconds later I remembered.

"Serving Canadians"

[crovira]

With fava beans?

How have you been Clarisse?

Re:Review

[the pickle]

Mod parent idiotic.

I used to be an organic chemist, and absolutely every paper for refereed journals was reviewed by a third party in the lab to ensure the results could be duplicated. Our lab did a few, and our lab's papers were done by others.

It is expensive and time-consuming. That's why journals like JACS, JOC, Tetrahedron, etc. are respected so widely: the research in them is rock-solid and proven to work.

p

I urge you to contribute.

[Tjp($)pjT]

Mail you transportation fund donation to a random address.

Overkill. Keep it simple.

[JonTurner]

>>I would like it to create millions or billions of these works...

Billions? Why bother? Based on my listening experience, Clearchannel and the record execs seem to have built empires on no more than three variations.

So keep it simple. Who needs the Circle of Fifths, or any of those pesky black piano keys when C-G-D and some random notes/rap over a drum track (serving as the bridge) will do? Repeat "ad naseum"

1) happy, mindless dance tune by teen-star-du-jour. 90beats per minute minimum, bass drum is primary instrument. May require heavy use of DSP processing to keep singer on pitch.
2) Rap about rapper knocking other rappers off the top of the charts and or "crunk whack party", "bustin' caps" or "dubs." Word "bitches" is mandatory. Threatening violence is a plus. Don't forget shout out to imprisoned/dead homies on extended mix version.
3) Wheezy, whiny country & western tune, mandatory mentions include pickup truck, whiskey. Extra chart-topping potential for use of word "fool".

Re:Overkill. Keep it simple.

[The Good Reverend]

Billions? Why bother? Based on my listening experience, Clearchannel and the record execs seem to have built empires on no more than three variations.

Blah, blah, blah. I wish there was an Onion article like the "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television" one for people like you.

Guess what? Lots of music produced today is made for mass consumption. And guess what else? Even more isn't. While it might not be as popular, it's certainly available, especially online in the last ten years. Just because you're too lazy to go look for it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Hell, some people like pop music.

Past that, remember also that this is by no means a recent trend - it's existed for the entire history of pop music. As long as music's been sold for a profit, there's been someone deciding what sound to sell, and how to create the "next best thing". Your generalizations are old and tired.

Re:Overkill. Keep it simple.

[Le Marteau]

Yeah, I love these guys who come to realize that they like alternative music, then proceed to piss all over other people's likes, cop a superior attitude, and walk around like they friggin' WROTE the music. "Those poor, unenlightened fools have no taste, listening to that banality. Thankfully, my tastes are elevated and I see how weak what they like is."

Re:Overkill. Keep it simple.

[WNight]

It's an appropriate response to Britney fans acting like she's the greatest thing (and to be fair, to most anyone else) - "there's a world of music out there and coincidently your favorite just happens to be the one that's on the radio 20+ times a day! Wow, what are the odds of that?"

By any objective judgement, the top-40 (on average) is poorly performed and mass-market-sanitized versions of better (more skilled artists, better song-writing, etc). That's a fact - record executives are open about it. They "create" groups so that they don't have to deal with older and wider musicians. They have complete editorial control over sound, lyrics, and presentation. They will all, naturally, produce pap that gravitates to the exact midline of every consumer preference they can measure.

In almost every industry you see the true ground-breaking work from the independents - software, music, art. The pros have too much invested to be able to take a year off and explore some neat idea. They're going to have less of the really good products that come from a gifted person exploring their craft.

It's all fact. Does that mean you should rub people's noses in it? No, but explaining it to someone when they, just as tiresomely I assure you, drool over some pop star helps them get a little perspective. If they manage to see past the glitz of the MTV videos it could help them find music they'd really enjoy. To replace britney, buy music from a good musician and porn from a pretty girl. Once you realize that this cool sound you really like in Star X's latest song is like the sound of this genre, which you hadn't heard of, you get exposed to a new world of music.

The problem is with people who don't realize this applies to them as well, and to people who are rude about it. Just like those guys who tell everyone they don't have a TV - I don't, but I don't bring it up in conversation, nor, unless asked once it does come up, my reasons.

I'm brilliant!

[Jakeypants]

Using various probability statistics, I've developed a random /. comment generator that'll always, without fail, get me a +5 Insightful! Let's see how this goes...

Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux Linux

To cancel it out, I also wrote one that guarantees -5 Flamebait, too:

Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft

not moderators, editors

[roman_mir]

random moderation is also very common here though...

The benefit of registration

[tepples]

Those who use "copywritten" to mean "subject to copyright" tend to look like they haven't studied much of copyright law. The adjective is "copyrighted".

What you said is true, that copyright exists from the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, but in the United States. But you can't sue until you've registered the copyright in the Copyright Office, and you can't recover statutory damages or attorney's fees for infringements more than three months after first publication unless you registered the copyright before the infringement occurred. In addition, "intellectual property tax" legislation is under consideration that may make the copyright expire sooner if it isn't registered with taxing authorities.

Not funny, but sad.

[tepples]

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.

Remember that not all the melodies on an album have to match for there to be grounds for a lawsuit. If just one of the two or three melodies in just one of the 10 or 12 songs in just one of the thousands of albums released annually matches your work, then you've got yourself a case.

Further analysis of this issue is in yerricde's journal. It seems to disregard accidentals (notes not in a given diatonic mode) but takes rhythm into account.

Access and Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs

[tepples]

to win a copyright case, you have to prove *copying*. If someone else independently came up with the same tune as you, you'd be unlikely to win unless you could prove they had access to your musical work

If you've heard a musical work even once in a grocery store or on the car radio ten years ago, you are deemed to have had access to the work. And once the plaintiff demonstrates evidence of access and similarity, the judge is likely to rule that copying occurred. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music .

Re:Don't forget the great paper by Mazieres &

[kfg]

I had a hard time trying to figure out what they were trying to say at first, but the graph in fig. 2 finally made it all clear.

The paper really needed more graphics.

KFG

Nigerian WMSCI spam

[tbo]

About a month ago, I got an email from "Prof. Nagib Callaos" inviting me to submit papers to WMSCI. When I first got it, I thought it was another piece of Nigerian Money Fraud spam. It has that blend of apologetic politeness and bad english that is unique to the Nigerian Fraud spams...

Dear Dr. (my name here):

We are sorry to take a bit of your valuable time, but we thought it is good
to inform you that we extended up to March 29th the deadline for submitting
papers to WMSCI ((http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005). The extended deadlines
are as follows:

Paper Submission: March 29th
(http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/website/submi ssion. asp)

Invited Sessions Proposal: March 29th
(http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/invitedsessio n/orga nizer.asp)

Notification of Acceptance: April 19th.

Final Camera Ready Manuscript due: May 3rd.

Consequently, we are sending you again the invitation to participate in
WMSCI, as follows.

On behalf of the WMSCI 2005 Organizing Committee, I would like to invite
you to participate in the 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics,
Cybernetics and Informatics (http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005), which will
take place in Orlando, Florida, USA, on July 10-13, 2005.

You can get the conferences Call for papers in
(http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/website/callfor pape rs.asp).

The best 10% of the papers will be published in Volume 3 of SCI Journal
(http://www.iiisci.org/Journal/SCI/Home.a sp ). 12 issues of the volumes 1
and 2 of the Journal have been sent to about 200 university and research
libraries. Free subscriptions, for 2 years, are being considered for the
organizations of the Journals authors.

We are emphasizing the area of Quantum Information which is related to your
specific area.

Also, we would like to invite you to organize an invited session related to
a topic of your research interest. If you are interested in organizing an
invited session, please, fill the respective form provided in the
conference web page, and we will send you a password, so you can include
and modify papers in your invited session.

Organizers of the invited sessions with the best performance will be
co-editors of the proceeding volume where their sessions' papers were
included and of the CD electronic proceedings. They will also be candidate
for invited editors, or co-editors of a possible WMSCI Journal issue
related to their invited session papers.

You can find information about the suggested steps to organize an invited
session in the Call for Papers and in the conference web page:
http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005 .

If by any reasons you are not able to access the page mentioned above,
please, try the following pages: http://www.iiis.org/sci2005 .

If you need a detailed Call for Papers, don't hesitate in asking us for it.

If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let me know about a
suitable time and I will inform you if it is feasible for us.

Best regards,

Professor Nagib Callaos
SCI 2005 General Chair

My apologies to Professor Callaos if he actually is Nigerian.

They're being silly

[Jane Hackworth]

It must have taken them a really long time to type all that.

A new take on "artificial intelligence"

[jnorden]

Wow - this has given me a whole new perspective on an age-old problem.

The quest for a computer which has the intelligence of a human is going to succeed, and fairly soon.

It won't be accomplished by advances in AI algorithms or hardware, though.

All we have to do is wait for the average level of human intelligence to fall far enough, and the current software will have accomplished the feat!

Re:Similar to the Pomo Generator

[MrHanky]

You know, if you had any education, you would easily notice the difference between sentences like "The premise of predialectic materialism suggests that expression comes from the collective unconscious" and something written by a pomo-head. Both 'dialectical materialism' and 'collective unconcious' are clearly defined (although the latter doesn't seem to exist), and every "scholar" can see that the concepts can't be used like that.

The reason why you can't tell how many such essays you've had to read is, of course, that you've had to read exactly none, and it would totally spoil your joke if you told us.

So basically, you're being a pretentious fucktard by trying to fool people into believing you're smart enough to discover, all by your own hard work, that postmodernism is a bunch of meaningless pseudo-randomly generated junk. It probably is, for the most part, but you don't know anything about it.

Judging from the description of the WMSCI 2005...

[cmacb]

I'd say the conference itself is the product of some random text generator.