#algorithmic writing

first time in my life I applied polynomial regression to fix an actual coding problem.

— Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez) March 31, 2014

The above tweet (https://twitter.com/antirez/status/450630772257738752), written by a programmer, is a remark about more complex algorithms that I've often heard by professionals/practitioners. Namely, that rarely do programmers outside of academia utilize and write complex algs such as "polynomial regression to fix an actual coding problem."

This observation runs parallel in some ways with my own experiences teaching writing students rhetorical principles. In many ways rhetoric is the mutable set of quasi-stable means/algorithms to approach a situated problem. Algorithms and rhetorical principles seek some form of abstraction to describe/respond to a situation, but must be adapted to meet it properly.

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers. Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).