Opportunistically Pipelined Extensions

There I was in Grad School, puzzling through what seemed journal after journal for a lengthy paper on Systematic Desensitization using journals from around the world for a course in Behavioral Therapy. I remember falling asleep night after night with phrases dancing in my head such as:

"The model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."

No doubt the paper, submitted by Jeremy Stribling and two other MIT graduate students sounds learned, erudite, or even titillating to some. Unfortunately for the powers that be for the WMSCI, the paper is a total fake.

The paper was generated by a computer program that generates "research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams." In other words, gobbledygook. Oh, wait, not in other words, in that word EXACTLY. Gobbledygook!!!

Stribling and his co-conspirators believed (accurately it turns out) that the standards for papers called for by the powers that be for WMSCI seemed a little loose and left something to be desired. They used their program to cobble together a number of "papers" for submission and were surprised to find "Rooter" was accepted.

This confirms what I have often thought, some folk are so in love with high powered words, that it really doesn't matter what the words mean or even imply.

Good on you Mr. Stribling. You made me smile.

A tip of the GM Chapeaux to Eugine Volokh.