Randomly generated scientific paper accepted at conference

Randomly generated scientific paper accepted at conference ››: Amusing, but a bit of a squib. The abstract:

Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public-private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

I note the the conference, entitled "The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics" is, while no doubt well-motivated, not exactly, er, hard science is it? It's mission is encapsulated in a metaphor on the conference's homepage (emphases are theirs):

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

In other words, they're expecting to be mystified a bit and anyway the paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed paper". Reminds me of the Alan Sokal/Social Text thing, which was amusing but probably didn't deserve quite so much of the gleeful gloating that Dawkins and others gave it ("brilliant hoax" indeed!). This latest prank is staggeringly and with the usual attendant breathlessness hyped on boingboing as "nearly the funniest thing EVAR". (Hm. I sincerely hope I was foolishly blind to a subtly ironic tone there.) Actually I think it deserves a smile and a rueful, slightly patronizing nod and that's it. Only when a fake paper is accepted for a Keystone symposium or an AAAS annual meeting then I will be shocked, impressed, worried for science, galvanized, all that. But Sokal and SciGEN seem to me to be picking low-hanging fruit in their effort to expose distracting ascientific gobbledygook and to be producing something akin to a highbrow, slightly sterile April Fool gag. C'mon, people…haven't we got any actual science to get done and get talking about? You certainly win debates by showing the other person to be an idiot but this isn't a debate: science will overcome obfuscation and woolliness by overtaking and outlasting it sans engagement with it. /.; [Permalink…14-Apr-05…Deserving memes……Comments (0)]

Randomly generated scientific paper accepted at conference

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