Story Archive

Nuclear Winner

“The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place,” Professor Christoph Bartneck, of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, wrote in his paper for the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics. If it doesn’t make sense, perhaps that’s because Bartneck has “practically no knowledge of nuclear physics” — he works in the Human Interface Technology lab — so “I resorted to [my smartphone’s] iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper.” How? “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions,” he explained on his blog. Nevertheless, his paper was accepted, and he was invited to register for the conference — and to pay US$1,099 to do so. (AC/London Guardian) ...By accepting the paper, the conference proved it’s not worth $1,099.