So Does This Mean Science Is Bullshit?

Via Plastic comes this CNN report of an incoherent, computer-generated paper being accepted for presentation at an academic conference.

[A trio of] MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers--"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"--was accepted for presentation.

The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press.

Whole thing here.

The MIT pranksters' site is here.

Stuff about the Sokal hoax here.