This one's just too good.

Three graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put together two randomly generated academic papers consisting entirely of high-brow vocabulary and "context-free grammar," including charts and diagrams. They submitted both papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), to be held in Orlando this July. As reported at CNN:

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

On their website, grad students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo explain why they did it:

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money.

That is a noble goal, in our opinion. Scientific and technological conferences are supposed to be about the science — new discoveries, new innovations, new ways of thinking and solving problems. As with any endeavor, of course, some jump in the shallow end where the only motivation they have is financial gain. Such as, apparently, the people behind WMSCI. From CNN:

Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.

Okay, so the reviewers missed the deadline — hey, it happens. Looks like "a small number" of submissions simply won't be seen at the conference, right? Nope:

"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an e-mail.

Oh, how silly of us! Science is, after all, just about being "fair." Who cares about all that pesky review and confirmation, after all? You know, other than scientists. Who will be attending the conference. Callaos also makes the claim:

"The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper."

That's right, because who would expect the people running the conference to take responsibility for its content? They are just in it for the money, after all — don't bother them with whether or not the papers they accept have any real value. Apparently, what Callaos and WMSCI really care about is quantity, not quality:

Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference.

So these WMSCI folks send out mass e-mail solicitations looking for submissions. You know, that's the mark of a really important scientific conference. We can just picture the subject line:

Dying to know all about "Rooter"? You can read the actual paper over on the authors' website. You can even make your own randomly generated paper! We tried it ourselves — here's the abstract from "A Case for the Turing Machine":

Cache coherence and Scheme, while unproven in theory, have not until recently been considered practical. Given the current status of scalable communication, scholars famously desire the improvement of the transistor. LOG, our new algorithm for permutable modalities, is the solution to all of these grand challenges.

That sounds science-y enough for the folks over at the WMSCI. Maybe we should submit it.

I love the last sentence of the Introduction: "In the end, we conclude." Oh, do you, now?