Start your day right

Once in a while you get such a wonderful start on your day that you almost want to go buy lottery tickets. Today was such a day for me. One of the first articles I read today reported on a prank by three MIT students. They developed a computer program that produces academic gibberish. The program generates sentences taken from real papers but it leaves many words out and replaces them randomly with buzzwords common in computer sciences. It then adds meaningless charts and graphs. This in itself is just delightful, but these students actually got such a paper accepted at the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systematics, Cybernetics and Infomatics scheduled to be held in Orlando in July. The title of the 4 page paper was "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy".
The conference has been the victim before. An Australian computer scientist described 3 papers which were accepted in 2002. One submission juxtaposed lines from two different papers and another tried to sabotage itself by stating the proposed method "does not work at all".
When word of the hoax reached the symposium organizers they refunded the $390 fee the students paid to attend the meeting and have the paper published in the proceedings. One of the organizers stated that he doubted the paper fooled anyone who actually read it. I love it.