Improbable Research

Why does some prose flow smoothly, while other prose does not? The answer (or at least the key to this mystery) may lie in Dr. Masaru Emoto’s concept of “Water and how it is influenced by positive and negative words.” The concept is reported in the November 2005 issue of Vibration magazine.

(Thanks to investigator John Hoyland for bringing this to our attention.)

“I find earwigs just repugnant,”

confides the author of “The Ultimate Crevice Bug,” who seems shy about confiding her or his name.

How authentic is the Indiana University School of Informatics’ Inauthentic Paper Detector? Is it (as scoffers scoff) an inauthentic detector of paper or (as some detectives detect) an authentic detector of inauthentic paper or papers?

The inventors make a claim that some may find cryptic:

We are trying to detect new, machine written texts that are simply generated not to have any meaning, yet appear to have meaning on the surface.

(Thanks to Investigator Kristine Danoski for bringing this to our attention.)

—-

UPDATE later in the day:

Investigator Tuomas R?s?nen writes:

I tried the inauthenthic paper detector by applying it to some example texts found from Project Gutenberg.

The results were staggering: It turns out that Hamilton Wright Mabie, and Thomas Babington Macauley were not human!

The beginning of the first chapter of Mabie’s Books and Culture, as well as the beginning of chapter Hallam’s History from the Critical & Historical Essays were both found fakes.

I wonder if anyone has even suspected before.

—-

FURTHER UPDATE, still later in the day:

Investigator Arun Giridhar writes:

As a follow-up to your blog post on the Inauthentic Paper Detector, I tried a few further tests on different machine-generated texts:

1. The SciGen-generated paper on Rooter was rated Inauthentic with a 21% chance of being authentic.

2. Alan Sokal’s paper on quantum gravity, itself the reason for a previous Ig Nobel Prize, scored Inauthentic, with a 21% chance on being authentic.

3. Several randomly generated essays from the Postmodernism Essay Generator scored Authentic, with the ratings being 94.7%, 84.8%, 86.6%, 95.4% and 95.8%.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Essential nutrients such as vitamins can act as pheromones to attract the opposite sex — at least in lizards.

Such is the carefully worded conclusion in a July 19, 2006 BBC News report about research by Jose Martin of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

[NOTE: the image at right is from the Museum. Yes, it otherwise has little connection to the substance of the sexiness report.]

(Thanks to investigator Jane Kohner for bringing this to our attention.)

January 1995 was a signal month for the understanding of cheese. Maria N Charalambides and two colleagues, JG Williams and S Chakrabarti, published their master work: A Study of the Influence of Ageing on the Mechanical Properties of Cheddar Cheese. It showed a refined way to do mathematical calculations about cheese….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.