Laughable But Kinda Scary

As if we needed more proof that we've all thrown in the towel when it comes to trying to understand professional writing and speaking...

In a project that sounds like something too absurd even for us, three MIT graduate students submitted a computer-generated, nonsensical paper full of bull-speak to a conference. Astonishingly, or maybe not, it was accepted.

From the Boston Globe editorial:

Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo call their paper ''Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- which might have been seen as a tip-off that scientific beaks were being tweaked. After all, why would anyone want to unify redundancy?

But the four-page send-up, laced with confounding graphs, was accepted by an international conference that itself sounds like a spoof: ''The Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics."

So, the moral to all of this is either that we have all been right about everyone tuning out all the obscure prose, or that you can get through MIT and present at prestigious conferences without anyone knowing what you've said.

We could have cited dozens of other articles, but on the advice of our PR team (well OK, PR person) we're using the link here because of the Globe's extremely sensible recommendation at the end:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/04/20/say_what/