OFF CAMPUS

MIT Students successfully submit bogus paper

Three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology submitted a nonsensical research paper to the ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to be held in Orlando, FL, in July – and it was accepted.

The paper, titled “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by the conference organizers last month. A computer program, created by the students in about three weeks to churn out phoney computer-science language, had randomly generated the four-page paper.

The conclusion says, “Here we motivated Rooter, an analysis of rasterization. We leave out a more thorough discussion due to resource constraints.” Rasterization is a real computer-science term, but it is meaningless in the context of the paper’s gibberish.

The students submitted a second randomly generated paper, “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking,” which was rejected.

—Chronicle of Higher Education

Egyptian professors stage rare protests

Faculty members at two Egyptian universities staged silent demonstrations this month, publicly joining an anti-government protest movement that has been gaining momentum across the country.
At Cairo University, the nation’s largest, more than 100 faculty members gathered silently in front of the main administrative building, some carrying signs with pro-democracy slogans. They called for an end to interference by Egypt’s state-security services in many aspects of academic life, including hiring decisions by individual departments and the content of lectures.

A day earlier, according to Cairo professors, about 30 faculty members held a similar protest at Menia University. The university is located in a religiously conservative town about 150 miles south of Cairo.

Mustapha Kamel El-Sayed, a professor of political science at Cairo University, said the protests were organized by an informal faculty organization known as the 9th of March group. It holds a ceremony each year on March 9 to reassert the autonomy of Egyptian universities.

Protests that are organized by academics and are explicitly critical of the state are a startlingly new phenomenon in Egypt, where universities have long been essentially politics-free zones. Students are forbidden from distributing information about political parties, for example, and student-council elections are monitored by state-security officers to ensure that national politics aren’t being discussed on campus.

—Chronicle of Higher Education

E-mail vs. intellect

Think before you click “reply.” E-mail is a threat to your IQ, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of London. The average computer user’s IQ drops an average of 10 points during testing when he or she is interrupted regularly by incoming e-mail messages, the study found. It also concluded that women are better at such multi-tasking than men.

— Bloomberg News

Internet link gives African universities access to MIT labs

Students and researchers at three African universities will soon be able to perform sophisticated science and engineering experiments using Internet links to laboratory equipment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The collaboration with Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, and Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, is part of a larger project.

Students and researchers at MIT and universities in Britain, Greece, Singapore, Sweden and Taiwan have used the iLabs, but this is the first time that African universities will have access.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York provided $800,000 for the African project. The grant will also pay for six MIT students to travel to Africa for the project, and for six African students to study at MIT.

Lawrence Kehinde, a computer scientist who is coordinator of the iLab project at Obafemi Awolowo, says the cross-cultural project will give students access to important experiments.

So far researchers have identified online-experimentation topics in microelectronics, earthquake engineering, chemical and mechanical engineering and physics.

— Chronicle of Higher Education