Winnowing Wheat from Chaff: The Chunking GA

Winnowing the Chaff of Charlatanism from the Wheat of Science

Experts and lay people alike can sometimes find it difficult to demarcate the absurd. Here I propose a set of criteria that may be helpful in achieving this in the realm of healthcare: falsifiability, plausibility and some hallmarks of pseudoscience. Applying this method is unlikely to be fool-proof but it might be a valuable aid in discriminating credible from incredible health claims.

A Study of "Wheat" and "Chaff" in Source Code

Natural language is robust against noise. The meaning of many sentences survives the loss of words, sometimes many of them. Some words in a sentence, however, cannot be lost without changing the meaning of the sentence. We call these words “wheat” and the rest “chaff”. The word “not” in the sentence “I do not like rain” is wheat and “do” is chaff. For human understanding of the purpose and beha...

Plants as highly diverse sources of construction wood, handicrafts and fibre in the Heihe valley (Qinling Mountains, Shaanxi, China): the importance of minor forest products

BACKGROUND Chinese rural communities living among species-rich forests have little documentation on species used to make handicrafts and construction materials originating from the surrounding vegetation. Our research aimed at recording minor wood uses in the Heihe valley in the Qinling mountains. METHODS We carried out 37 semi-structured interviews in seven villages. RESULTS We documented ...

Mental health coverage parity: separating wheat from chaff.

Separating the wheat from the chaff with machine learning