Sokal Hoax

Hoax paper accepted at academic conference ; MIT grad students' computer 
program creates gobbledygook; [Chicago Final Edition]

Justin Pope, Associated Press. 
Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill.: Apr 21, 2005. pg. 13

Three MIT graduate students set out to show what kind of gobbledygook can pass 
muster at an academic conference, writing a computer program that generates 
fake, nonsensical papers. And sure enough, a Florida conference took the bait.

The program, developed by students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo, 
generated a paper with the dumbfounding title, "Rooter: A Methodology for the 
Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Its introduction begins: 
"Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the 
simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred."

The program works like the old "Mad Libs" books, generating sentences taken 
from real papers but leaving many words blank. It fills the blanks with random 
buzzwords common in computer science. And it adds to the verisimilitude with 
meaningless charts and graphs.

Earlier this month, the students received word that the 9th World 
Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to take 
place in July in Orlando, accepted the four-page "Rooter" paper. A second 
bogus submission, "The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking,"
was rejected.

The offer accepting a paper and inviting the students to present it in Orlando 
was rescinded after word of the hoax got out, and the students were refunded 
the $390 fee to attend the conference and have the paper published in its 
proceedings.

But they still hope to go, using the more than $2,000 raised in contributions 
to their prank, much of it from admirers who tested the program on the 
students' Web site.

"We wanted to go down there and give a randomly generated talk," Stribling said.

E-mails to a conference address and to organizer Nagib Callaos were not 
immediately returned Wednesday, and there was no answer at the Orlando 
telephone number listed under Callaos' name.

According to e-mails sent to the students and information posted by Callaos on 
the conference Web site (www.iiisci.org/sci2005), reviewers detected several 
bogus submissions. But the reviewers provided no "formal feedback" on one of 
the papers, so it was accepted as a "non-reviewed paper." Callaos said it would
have been unfair to reject a paper because there had been no feedback.

Stribling doubts the paper fooled anyone who actually read it, which keeps the 
hoax a notch below a famous 1996 prank in which physicist Alan Sokal persuaded 
a Duke University journal called Social Text to publish a bogus article titled 
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of 
Quantum Gravity."

But in addition to mocking academic jargon, the prank sheds light on what 
Stribling sees as a problem: conferences with low standards that pander to 
academics looking to pad their resumes, but that harm the reputations of more 
reputable gatherings.

"We certainly exposed this conference as being willing to publish any paper 
regardless of whether it's been peer-reviewed, which is kind of a dangerous 
precedent to set," Stribling said. "It's kind of dangerous to be able to pass 
anything off as scientifically valid."

According to its Web site, the conference featured more than 2,900 papers last 
year, and a preliminary program for this year's event lists presentations by 
researchers from numerous universities, including highly respected ones like 
Northwestern and the University of Texas, as well as companies such as Intel 
Corp.

But the conference allegedly has been targeted by pranksters before.

An Australian computer scientist, Justin Zobel, describes on his Web site 
three papers that were accepted without comment for the 2002 conference.

One submission was purposefully nonsensical, another submission juxtaposed 
lines from two papers, and the third tried unsuccessfully to sabotage itself 
by claiming, for instance, that the method proposed "does not work at all."

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