Talk:Super Crunchers

Puff sentence structure
With examples such as predicting gestation period more precisely than Naegele's rule, predicting the box office success of films, Orley Ashenfelter's work predicting the price of Bordeaux wine based on weather data, collecting data on the effectiveness of teaching methods such as DISTAR, choosing baseball players based on statistics (Sabermetrics), and A/B testing to determine the most effective advertisements, Ayres explains how statistical evidence can be used as a supplement or substitute for human intuition.

The is classic puff language: Puff, puff, BREATH IN, puff, puff, puff, SUBJECT VERB pertinent abstruse detail quickly jettisoned by the already overburdened mind—leaving only the brag residue.

I just tried to hunt this down, linguistically. If "with" had instead been "providing examples such as" the construct would be called a participle cause, and the implied subject of "providing" would have been "Ayres" (rule of the shared subject), but should actually be "Ayres' book", so that the sentence begins, conceptually, "[Ayres' book] providing examples such as ..."

But this one has been even more chiselled off by use of a preposition to front the preamble. Enough linguistics dumpster-diving for today. There are many of these on Wikipedia; I'll have many more chances, no doubt.

In any case, for my money this is an example of compressing information so as to govern attentional processes in manner broadly unsuitable for an encyclopedia. &mdash; MaxEnt 21:00, 30 April 2018 (UTC)