Sunday, September 21, 2008

Visualizing Expert Systems and Public-Private Key Pairs with Muntin

In our readings and discussion of maximal entropy going along with maximal information (but not necessarily maximal meaning or value), I couldn't help but think of Alan Sokal's hoax in 1996 and the more recent MIT Computer Science graduate student hoax of 2005.

Alan Sokal, an NYU physics professor, submitted a mostly-gibberish essay to a cultural studies publication in a bald-faced mockery of a perceived ideological split between the "hard" sciences and the social sciences.

Three MIT graduate students, in a similar but droller attack on arbitrary academic interests, programmed a script to generate a random and grammatically-correct pseudo-computer-scientific research paper to submit to scholarly conferences. They infiltrated the non-peer-reviewed World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics with their nonsense essay, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.

Both examples suggest that these publications and conferences either accept submissions based on how much information (and not necessarily meaning) they contain (as discussed in Hayles 33-34), or that their board members have a sharper, subtler sense of humor than the men submitting work.

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