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Failure-mode index

Search what already failed

A searchable index of real negative results, null findings, and replication failures from the published literature — so you can learn what didn't work before repeating it.

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record (title, authors, DOI) compiled from open scholarly databases, with the abstract shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed (e.g. Creative Commons); otherwise a short excerpt is shown for reference under fair use. WASTE classifies each work by failure type; classifications are automated and approximate.

741 results for "aging" · page 20 of 25

Abandoned Hypothesis

Editorial Commentary: Anterolateral Ligament: How Do We Find It?

Nikhil N. Verma · 2016 · Arthroscopy

Abstract There is considerable current interest in the role of the anterolateral ligament in persistent instability after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. The normal ligament may be identified using magnetic resonance imaging or…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.arthro.2015.11.012
Negative / Null Result Report

This is Going to Sound Crazy, But What If We Used Large Language Models to Boost Automatic Database Tuning Algorithms By Leveraging Prior History? We Will Find Better Configurations More Quickly Than Retraining From Scratch!

William Zhang, Wan Shen Lim, Andrew Pavlo · 2026 · Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data

Tuning database management systems (DBMSs) is challenging due to trillions of possible configurations and evolving workloads. Recent advances in tuning have led to breakthroughs in optimizing over the possible configurations. However, due…

View details →DOI: 10.1145/3786704
Negative / Null Result Report

Inflation Management In The Eu: Does The Eurozone Outperform Non-Euro States?

Anna Prucnal · 2025 · International Journal of Business & Management Studies

This study examines the effectiveness of the monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) in managing inflation in the Euro Area compared to the independent monetary policy of seven European Union Member States outside the Economic…

View details →DOI: 10.56734/ijbms.v6n1a7
Negative / Null Result Report

Engaging Education About Risks of Opioid Use With Patients Before Elective Surgery of the Lower Extremity Did Not Reduce Postoperative Opioid Utilization: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Daniel I. Rhon, Tina A. Greenlee, Rachel Mayhew et al. · 2022 · Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons

Introduction: After elective orthopaedic surgery, many individuals go on to become long-term opioid users. Mitigating this risk has become a priority for surgeons, other members of the medical care team, and healthcare systems. The purpose…

View details →DOI: 10.5435/jaaos-d-21-00603
Negative / Null Result Report

“Football Did Not Make Me a World Champion, but It Did Help My Wellbeing”: A Qualitative Study of Study-sport Balance Based on Fung Ka Ki

Bill Cheuk Long Chan, Billy Lee · 2024 · Studia sportiva

Managing the balance of academic and athletic responsibilities at university is a serious challenge for student athletes. This phenomenological case study illuminates how one individual successfully managed his study-sport balance at…

View details →DOI: 10.5817/sts2023-2-6
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Turning Waste into Wealth: Leveraging Low-Quality Samples for Enhancing Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Xin Ding, Yongwei Wang, Zuheng Xu · 2023 · arXiv

Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CcGANs) enable generative modeling conditional on continuous scalar variables (termed regression labels). However, they can produce subpar fake images due to limited training data. Although Negative Data Augmentation (NDA) effectively enhances unconditional and class-conditional GANs by introducing anomalies into real training images, guiding the GANs away from low-quality outputs, its impact on CcGANs is limited, as it fails to replicate negative samples that may occur during the CcGAN sampling. We present a novel NDA approach called Dua

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

AnxietyFaceTrack: A Smartphone-Based Non-Intrusive Approach for Detecting Social Anxiety Using Facial Features

Nilesh Kumar Sahu, Snehil Gupta, Haroon R Lone · 2025 · arXiv

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a widespread mental health condition, yet its lack of objective markers hinders timely detection and intervention. While previous research has focused on behavioral and non-verbal markers of SAD in structured activities (e.g., speeches or interviews), these settings fail to replicate real-world, unstructured social interactions fully. Identifying non-verbal markers in naturalistic, unstaged environments is essential for developing ubiquitous and non-intrusive monitoring solutions. To address this gap, we present AnxietyFaceTrack, a study leveraging facial video

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Significant improvement in planetary system simulations from statistical averaging

David M. Hernandez, Eric Agol, Matthew J. Holman et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Symplectic integrators are widely used for the study of planetary dynamics and other $N$-body problems. In a study of the outer Solar system, we demonstrate that individual symplectic integrations can yield biased errors in the semi-major axes and possibly other orbital elements. The bias is resolved by studying an ensemble of initial conditions of the outer Solar system. Such statistical sampling could significantly improve measurement of planetary system properties like their secular frequencies. We also compared the distributions of action-like variables between high and low accuracy integr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Eye on Clinical BERT: Investigating Language Model Generalization for Diabetic Eye Disease Phenotyping

Keith Harrigian, Tina Tang, Anthony Gonzales et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Diabetic eye disease is a major cause of blindness worldwide. The ability to monitor relevant clinical trajectories and detect lapses in care is critical to managing the disease and preventing blindness. Alas, much of the information necessary to support these goals is found only in the free text of the electronic medical record. To fill this information gap, we introduce a system for extracting evidence from clinical text of 19 clinical concepts related to diabetic eye disease and inferring relevant attributes for each. In developing this ophthalmology phenotyping system, we are also afforded

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Refraction efficiency of Huygens' and bianisotropic terahertz metasurfaces

Michael A. Cole, Aristeidis Lamprianidis, Ilya V. Shadrivov et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Metasurfaces are an enabling technology for complex wave manipulation functions, including in the terahertz frequency range, where they are expected to advance security, imaging, sensing, and communications technology. For operation in transmission, Huygens' metasurfaces are commonly used, since their good impedance match to the surrounding media minimizes reflections and maximizes transmission. Recent theoretical work has shown that Huygens' metasurfaces are non-optimal, particularly for large angles of refraction, and that to eliminate reflections and spurious diffracted beams it is necessar

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Medical Imaging Met Self-Attention: A Love Story That Didn't Quite Work Out

Tristan Piater, Niklas Penzel, Gideon Stein et al. · 2024 · arXiv

A substantial body of research has focused on developing systems that assist medical professionals during labor-intensive early screening processes, many based on convolutional deep-learning architectures. Recently, multiple studies explored the application of so-called self-attention mechanisms in the vision domain. These studies often report empirical improvements over fully convolutional approaches on various datasets and tasks. To evaluate this trend for medical imaging, we extend two widely adopted convolutional architectures with different self-attention variants on two different medical

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

From Co-Design to Metacognitive Laziness: Evaluating Generative AI in Vocational Education

Amir Yunus, Peng Rend Gay, Oon Teng Lee · 2025 · arXiv

This study examines the development and deployment of a Generative AI proof-of-concept (POC) designed to support lecturers in a vocational education setting in Singapore. Employing a user-centred, mixed-methods design process, we co-developed an AI chatbot with lecturers to address recurring instructional challenges during exam preparation, specifically managing repetitive questions and scaling feedback delivery. The POC achieved its primary operational goals: lecturers reported streamlined workflows, reduced cognitive load, and observed improved student confidence in navigating course content

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Sparsity Analysis of a Sonomyographic Muscle-Computer Interface

Nima Akhlaghi, Ananya Dhawan, Amir A. Khan et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Objective: The objectives of this paper are to determine the optimal location for ultrasound transducer placement on the anterior forearm for imaging maximum muscle deformations during different hand motions and to investigate the effect of using a sparse set of ultrasound scanlines for motion classification for ultrasound-based muscle computer interfaces (MCIs). Methods: The optimal placement of the ultrasound transducer along the forearm is identified using freehand 3D reconstructions of the muscle thickness during rest and motion completion. From the ultrasound images acquired from the opti

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Modeling the mobility of living organisms in heterogeneous landscapes: Does memory improve foraging success?

Denis Boyer, Peter D. Walsh · 2010 · arXiv

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on single trajectories offers the possibility of understanding how animals move and of testing basic movement models. Random walks have long represented the main description for micro-organisms and have also been useful to understand the foraging behaviour of large animals. Nevertheless, most vertebrates, in particular humans and other primates, rely on sophistic

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Fusion of Graph Neural Networks via Optimal Transport

Weronika Ormaniec, Michael Vollenweider, Elisa Hoskovec · 2025 · arXiv

In this paper, we explore the idea of combining GCNs into one model. To that end, we align the weights of different models layer-wise using optimal transport (OT). We present and evaluate three types of transportation costs and show that the studied fusion method consistently outperforms the performance of vanilla averaging. Finally, we present results suggesting that model fusion using OT is harder in the case of GCNs than MLPs and that incorporating the graph structure into the process does not improve the performance of the method.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Context-Aware Content Moderation for German Newspaper Comments

Felix Krejca, Tobias Kietreiber, Alexander Buchelt et al. · 2025 · arXiv

The increasing volume of online discussions requires advanced automatic content moderation to maintain responsible discourse. While hate speech detection on social media is well-studied, research on German-language newspaper forums remains limited. Existing studies often neglect platform-specific context, such as user history and article themes. This paper addresses this gap by developing and evaluating binary classification models for automatic content moderation in German newspaper forums, incorporating contextual information. Using LSTM, CNN, and ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo, and leveraging the One Mi

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Optimizing fMRI Data Acquisition for Decoding Natural Speech with Limited Participants

Louis Jalouzot, Alexis Thual, Yair Lakretz et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We investigate optimal strategies for decoding perceived natural speech from fMRI data acquired from a limited number of participants. Leveraging Lebel et al. (2023)'s dataset of 8 participants, we first demonstrate the effectiveness of training deep neural networks to predict LLM-derived text representations from fMRI activity. Then, in this data regime, we observe that multi-subject training does not improve decoding accuracy compared to single-subject approach. Furthermore, training on similar or different stimuli across subjects has a negligible effect on decoding accuracy. Finally, we fin

Negative / Null Result Report

Effect of remote surveillance system on management of diagnostic imaging significant actionable findings.

Jose A. Rivera, Carmen E. Gonzalez, Tonita Bates · 2024 · JCO Oncology Practice

327 Background: Delayed assessment of diagnostic imaging (DI) significant actionable findings (AFs) at an oncological center prompted the creation of a safety net system which used technological advancements to improve communication…

View details →DOI: 10.1200/op.2024.20.10_suppl.327
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Honey, I shrunk the scientist -- Evaluating 2D, 3D, and VR interfaces for navigating samples under the microscope

Jan Tiemann, Matthew McGinity, Ulrik Günther · 2026 · arXiv

In contemporary biology and medicine, 3D microscopy is one of the most widely-used techniques for imaging and manipulation of various kinds of samples. Navigating such a micrometer-sized, 3-dimensional sample under the microscope -- e.g. to find relevant imaging regions -- can pose a tedious challenge for the experimenter. In this paper, we examine whether 2D desktop, 3D desktop, or Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces provide the best user experience and performance for the exploration of 3D samples. We invited 12 skilled microscope operators to perform two different exploration tasks in 2D, 3D an

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

The International Workshop on Osteoarthritis Imaging Knee MRI Segmentation Challenge: A Multi-Institute Evaluation and Analysis Framework on a Standardized Dataset

Arjun D. Desai, Francesco Caliva, Claudia Iriondo et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Purpose: To organize a knee MRI segmentation challenge for characterizing the semantic and clinical efficacy of automatic segmentation methods relevant for monitoring osteoarthritis progression. Methods: A dataset partition consisting of 3D knee MRI from 88 subjects at two timepoints with ground-truth articular (femoral, tibial, patellar) cartilage and meniscus segmentations was standardized. Challenge submissions and a majority-vote ensemble were evaluated using Dice score, average symmetric surface distance, volumetric overlap error, and coefficient of variation on a hold-out test set. Simil

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

MedNet-PVS: A MedNeXt-Based Deep Learning Model for Automated Segmentation of Perivascular Spaces

Zhen Xuen Brandon Low, Rory Zhang, Hang Min et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) are increasingly recognized as biomarkers of cerebral small vessel disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and aging-related neurodegeneration. However, manual segmentation of PVS is time-consuming and subject to moderate inter-rater reliability, while existing automated deep learning models have moderate performance and typically fail to generalize across diverse clinical and research MRI datasets. We adapted MedNeXt-L-k5, a Transformer-inspired 3D encoder-decoder convolutional network, for automated PVS segmentation. Two models were trained: one using a homog

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Effectiveness of Mode Exploration in Bayesian Model Averaging for Neural Networks

John T. Holodnak, Allan B. Wollaber · 2021 · arXiv

Multiple techniques for producing calibrated predictive probabilities using deep neural networks in supervised learning settings have emerged that leverage approaches to ensemble diverse solutions discovered during cyclic training or training from multiple random starting points (deep ensembles). However, only a limited amount of work has investigated the utility of exploring the local region around each diverse solution (posterior mode). Using three well-known deep architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we evaluate several simple methods for exploring local regions of the weight space with re

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Beyond the RPA on the cheap: improved correlation energies with the efficient "Radial Exchange Hole" kernel

Tim Gould · 2012 · arXiv

The "ACFD-RPA" correlation energy functional has been widely applied to a variety of systems to successfully predict energy differences, and less successfully predict absolute correlation energies. Here we present a parameter-free exchange-correlation kernel that systematically improves absolute correlation energies, while maintaining most of the good numerical properties that make the ACFD-RPA numerically tractable. The "RXH" kernel is constructed to approximate the true exchange kernel via a carefully weighted, easily computable radial averaging. Correlation energy errors of atoms with two t

Negative / Null Result Report

Assessing the Effect of Subsidy Removal on Cost- Significant Material and Labour within Anambra State Construction Economy

Uchechi Vanessa Alintah-Abel, Francisca Nkachukwu Okeke, Eucharia Chika Enebe · 2025 · British Journal of Multidisciplinary and Advanced Studies

The goal of most countries is the desire to maintain a stable price level of goods and services. This however, appears to be an uphill task given the incidence of subsidy removal that is presently ravaging the developing economies of the…

View details →DOI: 10.37745/bjmas.2022.04253
Abandoned Hypothesis

Failed in aging? Queering in living with dementia

Valerie Keller · 2023 · Frontiers in Sociology

This article explored the ways in which living with dementia brings potentials to queer the concept of “successful aging” and associated notions of being human. Regarding the progressive development of dementia, it can be assumed that…

View details →DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1139271