Slashdot Mirror
Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference
schlangemann writes "Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, 'CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.' Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)"
The last time I checked, there were more than half a million papers on arxiv. The number of scientific papers in the world is increasing with the rate of increase in researchers looking for jobs, not with the rate at which problems are being discovered or solved.
Since the currency of the research community is number of publications, and since administrative sections of universities have little or no competence in judging an academic's competence save statistics on papers published, why is it surprising to find that people publish low-quality work?
I am reminded of the joke about string theory, `The number of papers in string theory is increasing faster than the speed of light. This is not a problem, though, since no information is actually transferred.'
This is not especially like the Sokal affair. Its pretty obvious here that no-one read the paper.
Consider, the first paragraph from the paper:
The synthesis of ïber-optic cables is a natural quagmire. While such a hypothesis is entirely a theoretical ambition, it rarely conïicts with the need to provide operating systems to computational biologists. Similarly,for example, many methodologies measure vacuum tubes. The notion that hackers worldwide interfere with context-free grammar is largely bad. The synthesis of checksums would tremendously improve mobile information.
or this:
"We performed a quantized emulation on Intelâ(TM)s mobile telephones to prove the work of Italian mad scientist J. Dongarra."
This sounds like a good way to filter journals which are lax with their standards. It might also weed out peers who are too lazy (or stupid) to contribute to the process.
So I for one welcome our new document-producing computer overlords, which is just as well as they already seem to be used as part of Slashdot's editorial process.