Nuclear physics conference accepts nonsensical 'autocomplete' study

[YeOldeOke]

Nuclear physics conference accepts nonsensical 'autocomplete' study



Next month, Dr. Iris Pear will present her groundbreaking new study at the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics.

Or at least she would, if she were a real person.

Iris Pear – a play on “Siri Apple” – is the invention of Christophe Bartneck, an associate professor of computer science at New Zealand's University of Canterbury. The study in question is completely nonsensical, procedurally generated by iOS’s autocomplete function. Why, then, did a conference for “leading academic scientists” select it for presentation?

On Thursday, Dr. Bartneck received an invitation to submit research for an upcoming conference on nuclear physics. With virtually no background in the subject, he decided to use autocomplete to help write his facetious submission.

“I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions,” Bartneck wrote in a blog post. “The text really does not make any sense.”

Aside from a sprinkling of scientific buzzwords, Bartneck’s abstract is both off-topic and unreadable. One passage reads:

Nuclear energy is not a nuclear nuclear power to the nuclear nuclear program he added and the nuclear nuclear program is a good united state of the nuclear nuclear power program and the united way nuclear nuclear program nuclear.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/1023/Nuclear-physics-conference-accepts-nonsensical-autocomplete-study

 

[YeOldeOke]

In this case it's probably a scam - the conference. But too often 'studies' are jumped on and quoted before they've gone through the scientific mill. I see many, many studies quoted from news articles long before they should be taken seriously. People tend to think if someone puts out a scientific paper it is valid. It isn't till it has been attacked properly by the scientific community with their pitchforks.

 

[Arthur]

Reminds me of Alan Sokal and his famous piece in Social Text showing that gravity is a social construct.

 

[Nirv]

Can confirm the conference is a scam. I get emails for it referring to me as a doctor (while still a student) and in an unrelated subject.

 

[Cray]

More info...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference

The nonsensical paper was accepted only three hours later, in an email asking Bartneck to confirm his slot for the “oral presentation” at the international conference.

“an amalgamation of Open Access Publications and worldwide international science conferences and events”, established in 2007.

A bogus research paper reading only “Get me off Your ****ing Mailing List” repeated over and over again was accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, an open-access academic journal, in November 2014.

So about what you would expect...