Yeah, personally I also score around .16 to .18 on my internet texts. Long papers get around 0.2, so I'm probably losing momentum after the fourth page :-/
High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3
* Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0?
This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits.
* What is the highest index value?
Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even.
* Does Google use a similar algorithm?
We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values.
* How does BlaBla Meter work?
BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;)
[1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject.
* Why does my scientific text have such a high index?
Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue.
* My mindless text gets a good score, why?
BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise.
* My text is wrongly devalued!
As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices.
* But humans read texts completely differently ...
When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't!
* What happens with entered texts?
Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.
I had the impression that the whole "control" room was nothing but show. Estimating the travelling times of a radio wave, nobody on earth could have had any control about the spacecraft, and none of the engineers in the control room could have done anything other than watch.
So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these people could have decided upon?
Yeah, personally I also score around .16 to .18 on my internet texts. Long papers get around 0.2, so I'm probably losing momentum after the fourth page :-/