Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy

How often have you been given an article or whatever to read, having been assured by your lecturer that is will be useful, only to discover (several hours and coffees later) that - much to your disappointment - it amounts to total gibberish ?

Surprisingly enough this phenomenon isn't unknown at the LSE...gibberish writing is now even spreading beyond the confines of the International Relations dept.

So it was with considerable happiness that I recently read about three guys from MIT who decided to submit a nonsense paper to an academic conference. The paper was entirely computer generated. They also designed the program which was specially designed to put complicated sounding polysyllabic words together in a way which looked impressive - but, obviously, made no intelligent sense whatsoever...and, surprise, surprise, the paper (which was full to brimming with bogus references - as anyone writing a dissertation will tell you, convincing looking referencing will save all but the most bullshitty of comments) was actually accepted by the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, due to be held in Orlando this summer.

The paper was entitled : "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"..this, while clearly nonsense, is not (I suggest) a million miles away from some of the shit I've been reading over the past several days. I am thus writing this post as an open invitation to our Director Howard Davies to IMMEDIATELY invite these men to the LSE, where they should be given an academic post in a suitiable subject area...in addition to research they would be instantly qualified to teach a wide variety of undergraduate subjects in their spare time (sociology and legal theory to name but two)...

You can read the full text of their groundbreaking "paper" here...they've even developed a website enabling students to create their own gibberish academic paper, complete with graphs and diagrams...this can be accessed here.

At the moment it only writes computer science papers - so will be unsuitable for jurisprudence essays - unless of course you happen to be doing Foucault in which case you can probably get away with it.

And in a few years, who knows : we might even see : "Dissertation Writer for Windows" on our screens.