• (cs) in reply to jo42

    Yeah, who needs that pesky honesty anyway?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to stinky

    "Thesis" and "dissertation" are synonymous in the scholarly vernacular.

    If you show me a US university that doesn't require the defense of a thesis as part of a PhD program, I'll show you one that lacks accreditation.

  • StressBomb (unregistered)

    I can't believe exactly the writers and commenters of worsethanfailure.com will laugh at that guy.

    The commenters, which frequently respond to the captcha word, as if some sort of actual intelligence picked the word especially for them:

    captcha: riaa. Yea, RIAA sucked! how fitting! captcha: smart. I'm really smart, thank you very much. ...

    Or the site creators, which it seems spend too much time mocking other people to learn how to code.

    Remember the sticker form which checked the time limit on show, but not after post? Imagine the myriad of "WTF" stories hidden in Derick's and Alex's own work.

    Or even the basics: how about checking what Turing Test is, if they'll use it as a title (the article is an example of SCIGen Passing the Turing test, not Failing it, the "expert" isn't the subject of study in the Turing test).

  • (cs)

    Odd choice of noun. Usually the academic blowhards like to be known as The Authority, and the IT ones The Guru or The Wizard. I guess Expert could be a catchall for the lightweights in both teams.

  • (cs) in reply to Cornered
    Cornered:
    Mikademus:
    ...do not commit the fallacy of positing a causal (or any kind of) link between E perceiving gibberish as inspiring and E's writings to necessarily be gibberish.
    E. didn't "perceiv[e] gibberish as inspiring". He said that the gibberish was "...the natural progression of all the ideas I presented in my incredibly insightful PhD thesis!" -- which, if anything, is a suggestion that the gibberish was inspired by him.

    You really ought to think an idea through yourself before you start advising people about how to interpret it.

    Just a thought...I wonder if the source phrases for the bogus paper were coincidentally lifted from E's thesis?

  • Peter Hosey (unregistered)
    Jeffrey's coworker, who we'll call "Dr. Ebenezer E. Expert Esquire, PhD," …

    Did he refer to himself as “I, E.E.E., …”?

  • (cs) in reply to StressBomb

    Front page articles' comments are generally below 75 IQ*, if you want smart comments check the forums**.

    *)I don't acknowledge IQ tests, it's just a metaphor. **)No guarantees.

  • Goran (unregistered) in reply to Mikademus

    Dr. Ebenezer E. Expert Esquire, PhD... Is that you? ;-)

  • csrster (unregistered) in reply to CDarklock
    CDarklock:
    Similar situation - several years ago, a magazine editor invited poetry submissions from a particular community. "I write sonnets," I said. "Would you consider those?"

    "Well, of course," he said. "I'm an EXPERT on poetry. I ESPECIALLY appreciate the obscure and historical forms." So I submitted a few sonnets.

    Petrarchan or Shakespearean?

  • Jim (unregistered)

    PhD? Reminds me of a job I took with a consulting company a while back that was run by a PhD whose big thing was SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

    He asked me to review a white paper of his, and I found it hard to tell him that it was sophomoric and pitched far too low (at the programming/implementation level) for his audience (senior management).

    It was also tripe but not much worse than what Gartner would come up with on a bad day, so never mind.

    So I asked him about a spectacularly bad paragraph in the executive summary that was literally incomprehensible and found he couldn't fake the slightest explanation for what he was thinking.

    B-a-a-a--ad idea. Never show up a newly minted CIO with a PhD, they don't take it well. I quit two days later.

  • (cs) in reply to StressBomb
    StressBomb:
    I can't believe exactly the writers and commenters of worsethanfailure.com will laugh at that guy.

    I can't believe you're going to critisize the whole forum/site and then not even doing it gramatically (not to mention that you fall under the critisized).

    StressBomb:
    The commenters, which frequently respond to the captcha word, as if some sort of actual intelligence picked the word especially for them:

    The program doing it may be a (pseudo)random function, but there is a higher power that directs it. Much discussion exists whether this is the FSM or the IPU.

    StressBomb:
    Or the site creators, which it seems spend too much time mocking other people to learn how to code.

    nobodies perfect, and I would say it's perfectly legit to mock the site maintainers for bad code/design. So go ahead.

    StressBomb:
    Or even the basics: how about checking what Turing Test is, if they'll use it as a title (the article is an example of SCIGen *Passing* the Turing test, not *Failing* it, the "expert" isn't the subject of study in the Turing test).

    Obviously the turing test was failed. Dr. E obviously failed it and proved that he wasn't inteligent.

    The real WTF is that you didn't start your complaint with the real WTF is.

    As someone commented earlier, the fact that it is randomly generated giberish doesn't make the paper worthless. After all we can all be replaced by an infinite amount of monkeys.

    Oh, and I can't resist. In Soviet Russia the programs generate you.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    I cannot believe this story is true.

  • (cs)

    An expert is a former drip under pressure.

    ("ex-spurt", ha ha)

    Sorry, that's a really old one.

  • sol (unregistered)

    I really hate the ones were I can't tell which side of the line I fall on... Being an uneducated/self educated self proclaimed expert in training... I just don't know...

    what do you guys think?

  • TuxGirl (unregistered) in reply to morry
    morry:
    I think I need to add a few "white papers" to my resume.

    captcha: doom (are you trying to tell me something?)

    I dunno... if the people who hire you are dense enough to not recognize these "white papers" for what they are, do you really want to work for them?

  • igitur (unregistered)

    Anybody know of a similar generator for medical papers? I know of a few professors who need to be taught a lesson. :)

  • (cs) in reply to TheJasper
    TheJasper:
    StressBomb:
    Or the site creators, which it seems spend too much time mocking other people to learn how to code.

    nobodies perfect, and I would say it's perfectly legit to mock the site maintainers for bad code/design. So go ahead.

    And also a long, hallowed tradition, from the first day Community Server came to life here.

  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered)

    It might be interesting to create an automated comment generator for Worse Than Failure. It would randomly use words and phrases such as:

    • There is no WTF here
    • The real WTF is...
    • Second
    • CAPTCHA
    • Typical Visual Basic programmer
    • NaN
    • He should have used [insert favourite programming language]
    • This site is really lame since the name change
  • Doug (unregistered) in reply to TuxGirl
    TuxGirl:
    morry:
    I think I need to add a few "white papers" to my resume.

    captcha: doom (are you trying to tell me something?)

    I dunno... if the people who hire you are dense enough to not recognize these "white papers" for what they are, do you really want to work for them?

    Sometimes it's nice to have a job where you know they'll never be able to discover that you're not really doing any work, just using your work hours to edit the family website, etc, and getting paid for it.

  • AndrewO (unregistered)

    Man, I'd never thought of measuring block size in celcius before. Figure 2 is nothing short of visionary!

  • natasha (unregistered)
    IT is a field that is full of "experts." An "expert" is any old IT guy (or gal (ok, fine, guy))...

    excuse me?

    captcha: yummy. yes, i am.

  • muttonchop (unregistered) in reply to Sgt. Preston
    Sgt. Preston:
    It might be interesting to create an automated comment generator for Worse Than Failure. It would randomly use words and phrases such as: - There is no WTF here - The real WTF is... - Second - CAPTCHA - Typical Visual Basic programmer - NaN - He should have used [insert favourite programming language] - This site is really lame since the name change

    Maybe somebody already did - I mean, how would we tell?

  • Kraeloc (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    You know, I have absolutely *no* idea how to reply to the original post. An invisible button, maybe? Alas and alack, I am never going to be "Frist..."
    At the bottom, hit the "add comment" button. You're welcome.

    Captcha: yummy

  • (cs)

    he got his PhD from WTF University, right?

  • Collin (unregistered)
  • Maserati (unregistered) in reply to Collin

    That's the right kind of brilliant.

  • Reader (unregistered) in reply to Mikademus

    I bet you failed the test, since your response makes absolutely no sense either, even though it is an attempt to sound "smart"

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to natasha

    No, there are no women in IT. You can't argue that you are a woman in IT, because you don't exist, thereby robbing you of the ability to argue.

    It's simple logic. Quit pretending, Frank.

  • Leo (unregistered)

    At my university (Technical University Vienna) some AI / logic profs coded a paper generator for multi-valued logics, which would spew out a fresh multi-valued logic along with a calculus, a kind of paper which, according to them, was quite popular at that time. They sent a paper to a conference and got accepted. It's not really that WTF because the paper was actually correct, but funny nevertheless.

    btw, I'm drunk and I'm writing in a foreign language, so keep that in mind while counting my typos. I feel the need to mention this here, because the atmosphere is kinda overcritical.

  • Lemmiwinks (unregistered) in reply to TheJasper
    TheJasper:
    Oh, and I can't resist. In Soviet Russia the programs generate you.

    J.M. Pescado? Is that you?

  • rp (unregistered) in reply to StressBomb
    StressBomb:
    Or even the basics: how about checking what Turing Test is, if they'll use it as a title (the article is an example of SCIGen *Passing* the Turing test, not *Failing* it, the "expert" isn't the subject of study in the Turing test).

    Please apply your own advice - you're wrong. See, e.g.

    http://cogprints.org/499/00/turing.html

  • huoyangao (unregistered) in reply to StressBomb

    ... In Turing Test Two, two players A and B are again being questioned by a human interrogator C. Before A gave out his answer (labeled as aa) to a question, he would also be required to guess how the other player B will answer the same question and this guess is labeled as ab. Similarly B will give her answer (labeled as bb) and her guess of A's answer, ba. The answers aa and ba will be grouped together as group a and similarly bb and ab will be grouped together as group b. The interrogator will be given first the answers as two separate groups and with only the group label (a and b) and without the individual labels (aa, ab, ba and bb). If C cannot tell correctly which of the aa and ba is from player A and which is from player B, B will get a score of one. If C cannot tell which of the bb and ab is from player B and which is from player A, A will get a score of one. All answers (with the individual labels) are then made available to all parties (A, B and C) and then the game continues. At the end of the game, the player who scored more is considered had won the game and is more "intelligent". ...

    http://turing-test-two.com/ttt/TTT.pdf

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