【正文】 s spontaneous use. But since much web content is written by nonprofessional writers, it more clearly represents informal and spoken English than a corpus such as the North American News Text Corpus does. Despite the problems, linguists are gradually warming to the web as a corpus for formal research. An early paper on the subject, written in 2003 by Frank Keller and Mirella Lapata, of Edinburgh and Sheffield Universities, showed that web searches for rare twoword phrases correlated well with the frequency found in traditional corpora, as well as with human judgments of whether those phrases were natural. What problems the web throws up are seemingly outweighed by the advantages of its huge size. Such evidence, along with tools such as Dr Resnik39。 results. Originally, such sites would contain these words as lists, so the makers of Google, the biggest search engine, fitted their product with a list filter that would exclude hits without a correct syntactical context. In response, as Dr Liberman notes, many offending websites have hired putational linguists to churn out syntactically correct but meaningless verbiage including mon search terms. “When some sandbank over a superslots hibernates, a directness toward a progressive jackpot earns frequent flier miles” is a typical example. Such pages are not filtered by Google, and thus create noise inresearch data.There are other problems as well. Search engines, unlike the tools linguists use to analyse standard corpora, do not allow searching for a particular linguistic structure, such as “[Noun phrase] far from [verb phrase]”. This requires indirect searching via samples like “He far from succeeded”. But Philip Resnik, of the University of Maryland, has created a “Linguist39。t succeed—far from it”. A search of the blogitself shows that 354 Language Log pages use the word “Google”. The blog39。s misunderstandings of what they do. Their job is not to be experts in “correct” grammar, ready at any moment to smack your wrist for a split infinitive. What they seek are the underlying rules of how language works in the minds and mouths of its users. In the mon shorthand, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. What actually sounds right and wrong to people, what they actually write and say, is the linguist39。s Barn researchers, however, felt that this problem might be overe by changing the way the glyphosate was applied. They tried four different treatment “regimes”, which varied the timing and method of herbicide spraying, and pared them with conventional crop management regimes such as those used in the FSEs.The best results came from a single earlyseason application of glyphosate. This increased crop yields by 9% while enhancing weedseed production up to sixteenfold. And, as a bonus, it required 43% less herbicide than normal. Genetic modification, it seems, can be good for the environment, as well as for farmers39。s weeds group. The team was studying GM sugar beet. This was one of the species examined in the British government39。s landscape. Whether Huygens has collected enough data to tell the difference remains to be seen.Passage 5Greener than you thoughtGenetically modified sugar beet is good for the environmentThough often conflated in the public mind, arguments against the planting of genetically modified (GM) crops fall into two distinct groups. One, which applies only to food crops, is that they might, for some as yet undemonstrated reason, be harmful to those who eat them. The other, which applies to them all, is that they might be bad for the environment.Proponents of the technology counter that in at least some cases GM crops should actually be good for the environment. Crops that are modified to produce their own insecticides should require smaller applications of synthetic pesticides of the sort that Greens generally object to. But in the case of those modified to resist herbicides the argument is less clearcut. If farmers do not have to worry about poisoning their own crops, environmentalists fear, they will be more gungho about killing the wild plants that sit at the bottom of the food chain and keep rural ecosystems going—orweeds, as they are more monly known.Research just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society suggests, however, that it may be possible for all to have prizes. Get the dose and timing right and you can have a higher crop yield and a higher weed yield at the same time—and also use less herbicide.The research was done at Broom39。s scientists were quick to point out that any movement seen was likely to be an artefact that owed its existence to nothing more than the fact that the images had not been put together correctly. Whether that interpretation is correct should be clear