The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in company.
—Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
✏️ A Waltz for Chet
Escaping the old world in the old world.
A subtle, orange glow over the éshoppes;
His name is enough.
It rises like the wind,
Taking no baggage with it.
Everything grows by its nourishment.
The worst looms above —
what if it isn’t nothing,
what if it isn’t a small thing:
these thoughts permeate the air and the noise
is a constant reminder.
Ease makes the day more facile.
Organization is the facade.
What makes them different from I?
Surely this is a sign.
Each rising day,
Glistening over the éshoppes,
is a petite rappel.
un à la fois.
one at a time.
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas. (Issac Newton)
💡 Food for Thought
Goals for direction, systems for results.
🧬 Paper of the Week — What’s Creative About Sentences? A Computational Approach to Assessing Creativity in a Sentence Generation Task
Citation: Theresa J. Weinstein, Simon Majed Ceh, Christoph Meinel & Mathias Benedek (2022) What’s Creative About Sentences? A Computational Approach to Assessing Creativity in a Sentence Generation Task, Creativity Research Journal, 34(4): 419-430.
Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to 1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by human raters and 2) further advance the developments toward automating creativity evaluations. Over the course of two prior studies, participants generated 989 four-word sentences based on a four-letter prompt with the instruction to be creative. We developed an algorithm that scores each sentence on eight different metrics including 1) general word infrequency, 2) word combination infrequency, 3) context-specific word uniqueness, 4) syntax uniqueness, 5) rhyme, 6) phonetic similarity, and similarity of 7) sequence spelling and 8) semantic meaning to the cue. The text metrics were then used to explain the averaged creativity ratings of eight human raters. We found six metrics to be significantly correlated with the human ratings, explaining a total of 16% of their variance. We conclude that the creative impression of sentences is partly driven by different aspects of novelty in word choice and syntax, as well as rhythm and sound, which are amenable to objective assessment.
If your good deeds make you happy and your bad deeds make you sad, then you are a Believer.
—Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ)
Caio,
AT