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Technobilge - Part III (The Proof) v2.01
Coming from Australia is Michael Bloch who has this to say:
It seems that many of the new words introduced into the English language as a direct result of new technology and the commercialization of the Internet have made their way into web marketing… unfortunately. This phenomenon isn’t just occurring between programmers and web marketers but in the way that they carry out promotion of their clients and companies to others.
Here’s a slightly exaggerated example, altered to prevent a law suit being taken out against me..:
“through an inverted dynamic and proactive CRM process, we are a best of breed online company - a goal-directed, innovative digital firm which fast tracks cyber stickiness through turnkey solutions that guarantee targeted eyeballs using multiple streaming channels and viral e-services, providing the best ROI on your investment”
huh? Translation:
We are good and we know how to assemble impressive words into a paragraph that serves to inflate our own egos and of other pretentious clients while alienating everyone else. Oh yeah, did we mention that we can send you visitors who would be interested in your web site, real cheap?
This mind-numbing technobilge still prevails on thousands of websites and in brochures. I have begun recently to think that use of such claptrap could related to some form of insecurity or nervousness. This is another topic to investigate. Meanwhile the search for examples continues.
……..to be continued
Technobilge - Part III (The Proof Part I)
This article proves to me that manipulation of words into meaningless soundbites creates pointless conversation. Do all marketers, IT tekkies and finance management use acronyms and meaningless words to simply try to impress or deliberately confuse the audience?
Read this and see what can happen. You could be a victim of a nonsensical conversation next!
How gibberish put scientists to shame
PAGES of computer-generated gibberish, containing such gems as “contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea”, have been accepted as an academic paper at a scientific conference in the United States in a victory for hoaxers.
Convinced that many scientific conferences would accept almost any research for the right fee, three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated yesterday the submission of their gobbledegook masterpiece, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.
Jeremy Stribling, one of the students, said that he and two graduates were convinced that many academic conferences had few or no minimum standards because their sole purpose was to make money. “We decided to test the limits,” he said.
They wrote a computer program to generate nonsensical research papers, complete with “context-free grammar”, charts and diagrams. The program randomly selects and assembles sentences, then drops in impressive-sounding verbs and nouns. “Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred,” the paper asserts in its introduction.
“Certainly, the usual methods for the emulation of Smalltalk that paved the way for the investigation of rasterization do not apply in this area.” The students submitted Rooter, and a second paper, to the ninth World Multi-Conference on Systematics, Cybernetics and Informatics.
Mr Stribling said that they targeted the conference because it is notorious for sending e-mails to solicit admissions. An accepted paper usually attracts a fee. Nagib Callaos, a conference organiser, said that the paper was taken on a “non-reviewed” basis — meaning that there had been no feedback .
The students have raised more than $2,000 (£1,060) over the internet so they can attend the conference and give, as Mr Stribling said, “a completely randomly generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face”.
An exercise in academic deceit
We ran four novel experiments:
(1) we dogfooded our method on our own desktop machines, paying particular attention to USB key throughput
(2) we compared throughput on the Microsoft Windows Longhorn, Ultrix and Microsoft Windows 2000 operating systems
(3) we deployed 64 PDP 11s across the Internet network, and tested our Byzantine fault tolerance accordingly and
(4) we ran 18 trials with a simulated WHOIS workload, and compared results to our courseware simulation
From Tim Reid in Washington
Read the report in full here at iScatterlings page called ROOTER
Technobilge Part II v2.45a
What does this mean?:
Deep, opulent orange hue. A nose of caramel, pastry, spiced oranges and apples. There is certainly some botrytis here, both colour and nose confirming this. The palate has quite a savoury structure to it, with firm acidity cutting through the mouthfeel. But there is plenty of flavour too, of burnt toast, stewed apples, caramel and honey. Takes on a greater sweet intensity with time in the glass, and has a good length. More reminiscent of Tokaji than anything else. Just scrapes very good
Where do these okies come from? It describes how savoury a palate is. Sis! Who wants to eat a palate? Ag puke man! In which country are palates considered a delicacy? This is a wine being described for crissakes. Check, it’s nogal got a ‘mouthfeel’ en jislaaik it ’scrapes very good’!
So is it me or is there a disconnect somewhere that I seem to have missed or is there a special school where you are taught to write viticultural technobilge like the above?
