I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster?
Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
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Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
They were vague about it, but they said something about converting it to computer code. I would guess they just wrote it out as ASCII text and counted how many bits of ASCII equivalent they transmitted. (Of course this ignores intonation and emphasis, but I'd guess they did ignore those.)
If that’s really what they did, it’s stupid. First, you need to find a translation for every language to ASCII, which will wildly skew the results. Second, there are many ways to express the same concept, which all vary wildly in length. Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.
It's similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it's not a perfect method. But, there probably isn't a perfect method. How would you decide what "1 unit of information" is?
I wouldn’t, because I have no knowledge in the field. But since the paper hinges upon that exact definition, and “They were vague about it”, this raises the biggest red flag I’ve seen in science yet.