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19,875 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures · Negative / Null Result Report. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity

Damian Ruck, R. Alexander Bentley, Alberto Acerbi et al. · 2017 · arXiv

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Causal Stability Selection

Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi, Omar Melikechi · 2026 · arXiv

Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious findings that fail to replicate. We introduce causal stability selection, an algorithm that combines cross-fitted estimation of conditional average treatment effects with integrated path stability selection. The method accommodates arbitrary treatment effect estimators and arbitrary base selectors, and produces a selection set with an explicit, non-asymptotic boun

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Negative / Null Result Report

Failed execution in inferential pragmatics

Francesco Mercadante · 2026 · Pragmatics and Society

Abstract This study proposes a redefinition of the pragmatic foundations of linguistic communication, based on the notion of failed execution as an autonomous analytical category. Drawing on qualitative analysis of a curated illustrative…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Interview-Informed Generative Agents for Product Discovery: A Validation Study

Zichao Wang, Alexa Siu · 2026 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on standardized social science instruments, but their value for product discovery remains unclear. We investigate whether interview-informed generative agents can simulate user responses in concept testing scenarios. Using in-depth workflow interviews with knowledge workers, we created personalized agents and compared their evaluations of novel AI concepts against the same participants' responses. Our results show that agents are distribution-calibrated but identity-imprecise: they fail to replicate the specific individual they are gro

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs

Shintaro Sakai, Jisun An, Migyeong Kang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot

Matthew Rueben, Frank J. Bernieri, Cindy M. Grimm et al. · 2019 · arXiv

Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identit

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Take Caution in Using LLMs as Human Surrogates: Scylla Ex Machina

Yuan Gao, Dokyun Lee, Gordon Burtch et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Recent studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can exhibit human-like reasoning, aligning with human behavior in economic experiments, surveys, and political discourse. This has led many to propose that LLMs can be used as surrogates or simulations for humans in social science research. However, LLMs differ fundamentally from humans, relying on probabilistic patterns, absent the embodied experiences or survival objectives that shape human cognition. We assess the reasoning depth of LLMs using the 11-20 money request game. Nearly all advanced approaches fail to replicate human behavior dis

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Negative / Null Result Report

Patients’ daily reporting of symptoms via mobile application reveals a significant difference between patients’ perceptions and doctors’ interpretations

Cvetka Grašič Kuhar, Nina Privšek, Marjetka Sraka et al. · 2025 · Frontiers in Oncology

Purpose Electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) are gaining importance. The aim of this study was to investigate the difference in the reporting of symptoms between patients via mobile application (m-app) and doctor assessments.…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Markov-modulated on/off processes for long-range dependent internet traffic

Richard G. Clegg · 2006 · arXiv

The aim of this paper is to use a very simple queuing model to compare a number of models from the literature which have been used to replicate the statistical nature of internet traffic and, in particular, the long-range dependence of this traffic. The four models all have the form of discrete time Markov-modulated processes (two other models are introduced for comparison purposes). While it is often stated that long-range dependence has a critical effect on queuing performance, it appears that the models used here do not well replicated the queuing performance of real internet traffic. In pa

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Area is all you need: repeatable elements make stronger adversarial attacks

Dillon Niederhut · 2023 · arXiv

Over the last decade, deep neural networks have achieved state of the art in computer vision tasks. These models, however, are susceptible to unusual inputs, known as adversarial examples, that cause them to misclassify or otherwise fail to detect objects. Here, we provide evidence that the increasing success of adversarial attacks is primarily due to increasing their size. We then demonstrate a method for generating the largest possible adversarial patch by building a adversarial pattern out of repeatable elements. This approach achieves a new state of the art in evading detection by YOLOv2 a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Classical Simulation of Non-Classical Systems: A Large Deviation Analysis

Adam Brandenburger, Pierfrancesco La Mura · 2025 · arXiv

Any quasi-probability representation of a no-signaling system -- including quantum systems -- can be simulated via a purely classical scheme by allowing signed events and a cancellation procedure. This raises a fundamental question: What properties of the non-classical system does such a classical simulation fail to replicate? We answer by using large deviation theory to show that the probability of a large fluctuation under the classical simulation can be strictly greater than under the actual non-classical system. The key finding driving our result is that negativity in probability relaxes t

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Negative / Null Result Report

Heat treatment of laser welded dissimilar Al-Cu-Li joints with significant Li/Cu ratio difference

Igor E. Vitoshkin, Alexander G. Malikov, Alexey P. Zavjalov et al. · 2025 · Труды Санкт-Петербургского государственного морского технического университета

BACKGROUND: Joining dissimilar materials is a complex but important task for industry as dissimilar materials are necessary in complex structures. This paper presents the results of microstructure optimization of a laser welded dissimilar…

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Negative / Null Result Report

Establishment of a Prediction Model to Diagnose the End-stage Knee Osteoarthritis Based on a Significant Difference in Ferroptosis-Related Genes in Chondrocytes

Lingtian Min, Cheng Chen, Weijun Wang · 2026 · Zeitschrift für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgie

Abstract Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a widespread joint disease with no disease-modifying treatments. Chondrocyte damage is a key process in knee OA and ferroptosis is lipid peroxidation-induced iron-dependent cell death that exacerbates…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

CogniPlay: a work-in-progress Human-like model for General Game Playing

Aloïs Rautureau, Éric Piette · 2025 · arXiv

While AI systems have equaled or surpassed human performance in a wide variety of games such as Chess, Go, or Dota 2, describing these systems as truly "human-like" remains far-fetched. Despite their success, they fail to replicate the pattern-based, intuitive decision-making processes observed in human cognition. This paper presents an overview of findings from cognitive psychology and previous efforts to model human-like behavior in artificial agents, discusses their applicability to General Game Playing (GGP) and introduces our work-in-progress model based on these observations: CogniPlay.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Bias and response heterogeneity in an air quality data set

S. Stanley Young, Robert L. Obenchain, Christophe Lambert · 2015 · arXiv

It is well-known that claims coming from observational studies often fail to replicate when rigorously re-tested. The technical problems include multiple testing, multiple modeling and bias. Any or all of these problems can give rise to claims that will fail to replicate. There is a need for statistical methods that are easily applied, are easy to understand, and are likely to give reliable results. In particular, simple ways for reducing the influence of bias are essential. In this paper, the Local Control method developed by Robert Obenchain is explicated using a small air quality/longevity

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Negative / Null Result Report

Evaluation of factor VIII value in normal women and whom encountered recurrent pregnancy loss: is there any significant difference?

Douaa Al Rez, Hasan Naser Eldine, Marwan Alhalabi · 2020 · International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology

Background: Recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) is a serious problem on the women, it defined as two or more consecutive pregnancy losses before the fetus has reached birth. The aim of this study is to evaluate the association between the…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

3D Simulations of Plasma Filaments in the Scrape Off Layer: A Comparison with Models of Reduced Dimensionality

Luke Easy, Fulvio Militello, John Omotani et al. · 2014 · arXiv

This paper presents simulations of isolated 3D filaments in a slab geometry obtained using a 3D reduced fluid code. First, systematic scans were performed to investigate how the dynamics of a filament are affected by its amplitude, perpendicular size and parallel extent. The perpendicular size of the filament was found to have a strong influence on its motions, as it determined the relative importance of parallel currents to polarisation and viscous currents, whilst drift-wave instabilities were observed if the initial amplitude of the blob was increased sufficiently. Next, the 3D simulations

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Negative / Null Result Report

Features of the stress-strain state of the support-ing frame of a residential building in conditions of a significant difference in the stiffness of the elements of the “base – foundation – building” system

Oleksandr LYTVYN, Vitalii RUCHKIVSKYI · 2026 · Bases and foundations

The paper presents the results of numerical modeling of the stress-strain state (SSS) of the foundations of a multi-storey residential building with social and cultural facilities and an underground parking in the Shevchenkivskyi district…

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Negative / Null Result Report

No significant difference in skin contamination during anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with and without preoperative skin cleaning

Benjamin Bartek, Alexandra Völkner, Stephan Oehme et al. · 2024 · Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy

Abstract Purpose This prospective study aimed to assess whether preoperative antiseptic skin cleansing reduces bacterial contamination and surgical site infections (SSI) following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). We…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Resonant amplitude distribution of the Hilda asteroids and the free-floating planet flyby scenario

Jian Li, Zhihong Jeff Xia, Hanlun Lei et al. · 2024 · arXiv

In some recent work, we provided a quantitative explanation for the number asymmetry of Jupiter Trojans by hypothesizing a free-floating planet (FFP) flyby into the Solar System. In support of that explanation, this paper examines the influence of the same FFP flyby on the Hilda asteroids, which orbit stably in the 3:2 mean motion resonance with Jupiter. The observed Hilda population exhibits two distinct resonant patterns: (1) a lack of Hildas with resonant amplitudes < 40 deg. at eccentricities < 0.1; (2) a nearly complete absence of Hildas with amplitudes < 20 deg., regardless of eccentrici

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Negative / Null Result Report

Implementasi Steganografi Video dengan Menggunakan Metode Egypt, Least Significant Bit (LSB) dan Least Significant Bit (LSB) Fibonacci Edge Pixel

Ranida Pradita, Ida Nurhaida · 2020 · InComTech : Jurnal Telekomunikasi dan Komputer

Seiring dengan perkembangan teknologi 5G, penyebaran dengan menggunakan video semakin besar dan mudah. Penyebaran informasi baik yang tersembunyi atau tidak semakin mudah disebarluaskan dengan menggunakan internet. Steganografi adalah cara…

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