We also have funny stories to tell. Since Vex went international we have a rule that all important emails should be written in three languages, English, Portuguese and Spanish. But of course not all of our employees speak all of them.
So with the time people found good translators and started working well with them. With the time, become so easy, almost mechanical.
One day, one of our employees was exchanging emails with a guy in Spain, actually by that time they had already exchanged around three or four. So he wrote a reply in his language, pasted in the translator, pushed the button to translate to spanish and voila. Translated! Sent!
The guy never replied the email within one hour, which was strange, because it was a urgent matter. He goes to the sent items to check if it was really sent, analyzing the email he sees something wrong. He forgot something.
He forgot to change the selection from Catalan to Spanish.
“Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, ‘CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.’ Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)”
Quality is not important anymore, money is talking louder then anything, this amazing piece of software showed us, not how advanced artificial intelligence is reaching, but how stupid we are for accepting a fragile revision and acceptance system of the scientific community.
