I stumbled onto Bullfighter--a neat little program you can run Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents through to make sure they're not stuffed with meaningless corporate-speak--a while back, then lost it when it moved off its original site. I just found it again here. Bummer of bummers, it still doesn't come in a Mac version, so I can't run my articles through it. But I love the concept.
Anyway, they now have a blog, where I found this post: A quick snip:
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?
Butthe 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."
If I were a conference organizer, I'd make it a requirement that all speakers had to run their notes and PowerPoint presentations through Bullfighter. Your attendees would thank you, take it from someone who not only has to sit through all that yadda-yadda, but also take notes and try to write articles about it later. In the meantime, I'm anxiously awaiting the Web version, which they say is coming "early in 2005." Coming from these guys, I'm sure hope that's not just bull.
Thanks to B or not 2B for reconnecting me to this fine service to humanity!