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Tuesday, May 03, 2005

A Few Holes in the Peer Review Process

Published papers, especially those presented at scientific conferences, are supposed to go through a rigorous peer review process. Unfortunately, there are a few holes in the process:
An MIT student has had a paper consisting of computer-generated gibberish accepted by technology conference WMSCI. The pretentious gathering bills itself as "an international forum where researchers and practitioners examine Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics key issues" [...]

Stribling's paper consisted of randomly generated buzzwords munged into complete English sentences by a madlib-like program, so they were grammatically correct but meaningless [...]

The paper, entitled Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, and contained such wonderful claims as -

"We can disconfirm that expert systems can be made amphibious, highly-available, and linear-time."

And -

"One must understand our network configuration to grasp the genesis of our results. We ran a deployment on the NSA’s planetary-scale overlay network to disprove the mutually largescale behavior of exhaustive archetypes. First, we halved the effective optical drive space of our mobile telephones to better understand the median latency of our desktop machines. This step flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is instrumental to our results."

You can probably guess the moral of the story: don't believe everything you read.

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