Crowdsource your verbs

1) Read the following reports.
2) Flag any and all individuals/objects exerting force

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Troublesome from a physics perspective… if A exerts a force on B, then so too the converse.

The rules clearly state action, not reaction.

4) If the action can be performed without exerting any force on another person or object, allow the action.

One of my favourite sorts of typo, Dave, because I know I’m paying proper attention when I spot them: “but the the info you give”.

Thanks. It took me a moment to spot that one. I kept thinking, “but that’s correct.”

Dave Wilton - 23 May 2013 02:41 AM

Thanks. It took me a moment to spot that one. I kept thinking, “but that’s correct.”

Great example of the futility of proofreading your own work.

Having now played the game, I found, as I’m sure others will have done/will do, that some of the sentences don’t fit any of the options given. For example,

The gink broke. Is anyone or anything exerting force?
[choices]
The gink
No force applied. Allow.
Can’t tell because in this context ‘break’ has more than one meaning.
Can’t tell because the sentence is ungrammatical.
Can’t tell because I don’t know that verb.

here something must have exerted force on the gink to break it, even it it was a sudden rise in temperature, so force was applied. But the given answers don’t have the “something else applied force” option

The ambiguity inherent in the use of using nonsense words is part of the experimental design and is certainly factored. I suspect that sentences like this one produce statistically interesting results that point out just the sort of issues these guys are looking for.

In this case I believe the ambiguity is a result of the limits of the multiple-choice format. Here “broke” is intransitive. It has not direct object, so nothing on which force can be applied. At least grammatically; in the “real world” obviously something did apply force. There’s a breakdown between the grammatical and the logical here, with the grammar not expressing the full logical range, which must be assumed. (Even if you take “broke” to mean “fail,” as in a machine broke, logically something caused that failure, be it electrical spike, friction wearing away a gear, drying of lubricant, etc.)

You could include choices for such things, but the range would be so large as to be unworkable.

I suppose you could say “the weather broke” or “the silence broke”.

Atomic nuclei can break (undergo alpha decay or spontaneous fission; beta decay might also be considered the “breaking” of a neutron) without any external force or influence.

Some of the time, none of the options applied.

The A
The B
No force applied. Allow.
Can’t tell because in this context BLAH has more than one meaning.
Can’t tell because the sentence is ungrammatical.
Can’t tell because I don’t know that verb.

Should have been another option, Can’t tell because we don’t have enough information.

From the site: ...each task is asking about a specific component of meaning…

The tasks are designed to test for a specific component of meaning, not all components of meaning. If a verb doesn’t fit a task, that’s valuable information, not a shortcoming of the experiment. In other words, it isn’t the job of the questions to fit the meanings of the verbs, it’s testing to see if it works the other way around. Sometimes the answer will be no… and some of the questions may even be designed to learn something about your participants and not your verbs.