Thread by @NAChristakis

Want to find an appealing (or irritating) four-letter or five-letter arbitrary word for use as a character name for your game or novel, or as a place name, or as a medicine or product name, or any other use? 1/

Want to tell if there is a difference between similar arbitrary names, whether nice-sounding or off-putting? Want to improve audit studies of possible bias by judges? 2/

Want an empirical test of Phonological Cue Theory, which predicts that word terminal fricatives should be preferred, word terminal stops should be dispreferred, nasals early in word should be preferred, and voiced obstruent in the word terminal position should dispreferred? 3/

Want to understand a cool new (modified) methodology of ranking items or all sorts, quite apart from the appeal of arbitrary words?

We call it CurmElo. 4/

CurmElo is a forced-choice approach to producing a preference ranking of objects that combines Elo algorithm with new techniques for detecting & correcting (1) preference-heterogeneity-induced polarization in preferences in raters, & (2) intransitivity in preference rankings. 5/

So: here is a nifty new @PLOS paper by @jacob_derechin & @sohamsankaran from #HNL that is full of insights, IMHO. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… 6/

Ejon Mavey seems like a nice guy, but Ifof Nafug seems villainous. 7/

Another possible use for our work, which we had not thought of? 8/

https://twitter.com/alistaircoleman/status/1398613108621557760