Secret science

We talk about science a lot on this forum. Some scientists are impish and there are always challenges to be had out there so thought I would give you an example.


One challenge was to get a peer-reviewed, academic paper published that contained the phrase

"I Smoke Crack Rocks".

Winner was a Gabriel Parent from Carnegie Mellon University
Organiser's commented quote " Gabriel’s bold writing style seamlessly weaved the special phrase directly into the text in such a way that one cannot help but to think that the paper would be incomplete if it was removed."

Here is the phrase


The inherent complexity of the dataset explains the low accuracy. The signal properties and quality vary from one call to another. Also, since the system is used at night with a wide variety of callers, there are many out-of-domain utterances that the language model does not expect. For example, a caller could yell: “I smoke crack rocks” which isn’t likely to be correctly parsed by the grammar, and for which words are not in the dictionary. However, both static rejection approaches....

Others tried and failed including

Quote " The seams near the volcano emitted significant amounts of fine airborne ash dubbed "Smoke Crack." Several rock samples were taken from this area. (Fig. I) Smoke crack rocks were analyzed to determine their chemical composition.

Others deemed the task too easy and claimed
Quote :

A real challenge would've been to work the phrase "yo mama's on crack rock" into the work in a substantive way.


Others argues the task was biased in favour of those in phonics research, and geology.

Disclaimer:The goal of the challenge to promote good humor in academia and science. It is not meant to be disrespectful to organizations, conferences, or journals.

Ha Ha ha ...Technophobe....now that is good.....you CRACK me up !!!!!