Academic Nonsense
Now, if you go on over to Waste, you can find the links to the entries in the Bad Essay Contest, and then vote for your favorite. I gather you have to vote today. So if it's not today, you're too late! Ha!
Yesterday's bad essay has brought us some gems in the comment section, though, which I will now bump up to entry level.
First, there's the lovely Magna Carta essay, written by Henchminion, after being inspired by the horrible fake essays with which I've been salting the plagiarism sites. I am humbled and gratified to have inspired this, let me tell you, cause the Magna Carta essay is a piece of brilliant work.
An excerpt:
Nevertheless, just as the Magna Carta seemed to be in eclipse, John's elder brother Richard III returned from his crusade to Persia and seized back the throne of England from his younger brother. Now was the winter of the barons' discontent made glorious summer by the true king's return. [9] Richard confiscated all of his brother's lands, so that John was thenceforth known as John Lackland. The former tyrant was driven into exile, and spent the rest of his days in a monastery on the island of Thanet amusing himself by writing poetry about the virtues of agricultural labour. Some of that poetry has even come down to the present day. [10]
This poetry, one finds out from the "works cited" section, was Piers Plowman! Right! How I wish I taught medieval history, just so that I could someday receive this absolutely darling bit of trash.
Second, the legendary June Oshiro has pointed us to this bit of news: some MIT grad students have gotten computer-generated gibberish -- a "paper" titled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- accepted to a conference, and have gotten money together so that they can go deliver it. Now, to be fair, it turns out that the paper was accepted without having been reviewed. (Is that because the conference papers are in general not reviewed? No! It's because the reviewers didn't get the reviews in on time! Please, God, let this not ever happen to me. Please cause me to observe ALL DEADLINES for reviewing things sent to me. Cause those reviewers are dying now, doncha think?)
Anyway, it's gibberish. We're told:
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems 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."
Sounds good to me, though. Will the price of scatter/gather I/O servers be down next year, do you think?
Yesterday's bad essay has brought us some gems in the comment section, though, which I will now bump up to entry level.
First, there's the lovely Magna Carta essay, written by Henchminion, after being inspired by the horrible fake essays with which I've been salting the plagiarism sites. I am humbled and gratified to have inspired this, let me tell you, cause the Magna Carta essay is a piece of brilliant work.
An excerpt:
Nevertheless, just as the Magna Carta seemed to be in eclipse, John's elder brother Richard III returned from his crusade to Persia and seized back the throne of England from his younger brother. Now was the winter of the barons' discontent made glorious summer by the true king's return. [9] Richard confiscated all of his brother's lands, so that John was thenceforth known as John Lackland. The former tyrant was driven into exile, and spent the rest of his days in a monastery on the island of Thanet amusing himself by writing poetry about the virtues of agricultural labour. Some of that poetry has even come down to the present day. [10]
This poetry, one finds out from the "works cited" section, was Piers Plowman! Right! How I wish I taught medieval history, just so that I could someday receive this absolutely darling bit of trash.
Second, the legendary June Oshiro has pointed us to this bit of news: some MIT grad students have gotten computer-generated gibberish -- a "paper" titled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- accepted to a conference, and have gotten money together so that they can go deliver it. Now, to be fair, it turns out that the paper was accepted without having been reviewed. (Is that because the conference papers are in general not reviewed? No! It's because the reviewers didn't get the reviews in on time! Please, God, let this not ever happen to me. Please cause me to observe ALL DEADLINES for reviewing things sent to me. Cause those reviewers are dying now, doncha think?)
Anyway, it's gibberish. We're told:
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems 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."
Sounds good to me, though. Will the price of scatter/gather I/O servers be down next year, do you think?
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