From The Guardian: How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia More and more academic papers that are essentially gobbledegook are being written by computer programs â and accepted at conferences Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees. It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science. But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers. Hoaxes in academia are nothing new. In 1996, mathematician Alan Sokal riled postmodernists by publishing a nonsense paper in the leading US journal, Social Text. It was laden with meaningless phrases but, as Sokal said, it sounded good to them. Other fields have not been immune. In 1964, critics of modern art were wowed by the work of Pierre Brassau, who turned out to be a four-year-old chimpanzee. In a more convoluted case, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France's best-known philosophers, was left to ponder his own expertise after quoting the lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul as evidence that Kant was a fake, only to find out that Botul was the fake, an invention of a French reporter. Just as the students wrote a quick and dirty program to churn out nonsense papers, so Labbé has written one to spot the papers. He has made it freely available, so publishers and conference organisers have no excuse for accepting nonsense work in future. Krohn, who has now founded a startup called Keybase.io in New York that provides encryption to programmers, said Labbé's detective work revealed how deep the problem ran. Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff." Krohn sees an arms race brewing, in which computers churn out ever more convincing papers, while other programs are designed to sniff them out. Does he regret the beast he helped unleash, or is he proud that it is still exposing weaknesses in the world of science? "I'm psyched, it's so great. These papers are so funny, you read them and can't help but laugh. They are total bullshit. And I don't see this going away."
And guys like me get lamb basted for having some questions and healthy skepticism of unproven scientific theories?
You're all losers and morons with your heads stuck so far up your asses you couldn't feel the warning if your ass was on fire. F'n deniers. 96.5% of science teachers are not wrong. There, beat FC to it.
Don't get too concerned over this. It is all a big joke. And the Guardian -- it's a newspaper after all -- like conference abstracts and proceedings, will publish almost anything. What the guardian article and this Krohn character fail to mention is that these fake computer generated papers are not making it into the mainstream Journals, which are rigorously peer reviewed. They made no effort to distinguish peer reviewed work from non-peer reviewed published conference proceedings and abstracts. You can publish pretty much anything you care to in proceedings, but what is the point? If it is silly or obviously nonsense it will be immediately recognized as such, and if it appears to be serious, the perpetrators reputation will be damaged. This is not a smart thing to do. Who is he greater fool here? Yes, in the history of recorded time there have been a handful of papers published in peer reviewed journals that contained faked data. The careers of the sometimes amazingly clever perpetrators came to an abrupt end. There is, however, a serious problem with declining quality of science papers, but that has nothing to do with this silly business reported in the Guardian.
Eventually...probably. In the mean time though some are basing their opinions arguments and decisions on...nonsense. Seems like a contradictory view to me.
Luke, just take satisfaction in KNOWING trash like pinhead will perish first when We The People revolt.... He relies on big gubment. I rely on God, my training, and smith & Wesson...
I love how you stay in character all the time. Great stuff, good acting, very amusing. You have the red-neck, ignorant, paranoid, "Christian", righty wingnut thing down to a "T".