The Tomfoolery of Bogus Methodology

From Fox News via the AP comes a fantastic story of academia and academic conferences at their best:

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

The program... ...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 academic buzzwords. And it adds to the verisimilitude with meaningless charts and graphs.

This is excellent.

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

Once the conference was alerted to the bogus paper, they refunded the three MIT students' attendance fee - the students were planning on presenting their research during the conference.

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