Whose note?
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A 7/29/2023 article by Elaine Mendonça in the online periodical The Best Stocks ("Anticipating Positive Results: Brookfield Renewable Partners to Release Q2 Earnings Data") starts like this:
July 28, 2023 – Brookfield Renewable Partners (NYSE:BEP) (TSE:BEP), a leading utilities provider, is set to announce its second-quarter earnings on Friday, August 4th.
And after a few more paragraphs of similar information, it ends like this:
With the upcoming release of Brookfield Renewable Partners’ earnings data, investors are eagerly awaiting the results. The solid performance and positive expectations set by analysts, along with the company’s dividend policy, indicate that Brookfield Renewable Partners is positioned for success in the second quarter of 2023. As investors tune in to the conference call, they will be seeking valuable insights into the company’s growth strategies, financial outlook, and overall market trends that may impact its future performance.
NB- The references to “perplexity” and “bustiness” were not utilized as they do not align with a formal writing style.
I know what "NB" means — it's short for Latin nota bene.
And I know what "perplexity" and "burstiness" mean, at least in my world. As Wikipedia explains,
In information theory, perplexity is a measurement of how well a probability distribution or probability model predicts a sample. It may be used to compare probability models. A low perplexity indicates the probability distribution is good at predicting the sample.
And according to Wikipedia again,
In statistics, burstiness is the intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event. One measure of burstiness is the Fano factor—a ratio between the variance and mean of counts.
These terms have been ubiquitous in the world of "language modeling" as I've experienced it since the 1970s. But they have no obvious connection with Brookfield Renewable Partners' utilities business, its financial performance, its dividend payments, its investors, or anything else about the cited article.
I'm also puzzled about why using those technical terms "do not align with a formal writing style".
But mostly, I'm puzzled about who wrote that note. Was it the author? An editor? Or has GPT-4 snuck as a ghost-writer or ghost-editor?
Update — as AntC observes, my internal language model autocorrected "bustiness" to "burstiness". Which explains a formality problem, I guess, depending on the sense intended — but doesn't explain either why the two words might have been used in that article, or who wrote the NB…
nonny said,
August 2, 2023 @ 8:34 pm
@Mark – Is "bustiness" their typo or yours?
AntC said,
August 2, 2023 @ 8:49 pm
Mark, your quote/the original actually says "bustiness" (no 'r'). I'll spare your readers' blushes as to what that means. But yes, such a word doesn't align with formal writing style.
Perhaps the N.B. was written by some publicity department with no knowledge of the applicable statistics?
Mark Liberman said,
August 2, 2023 @ 9:00 pm
@nonny: Is "bustiness" their typo or yours?
Good question. The NB note doesn't make any sense either way, but I clearly misread it in an unconscious attempt to make it mean something.
Dick Margulis said,
August 2, 2023 @ 9:04 pm
Company sends news release. Editor passes it to Elaine Mendonça, who massages into a neutral report in publication's house style and returns it to editor with comment explaining that parts of the original release were intentionally ignored. Side comment is accidentally entrained in the text of the article. That's my guess.
AntC said,
August 2, 2023 @ 9:11 pm
The note is on a stock-tipping site. I guess they're parotting a press release from Brookfield. I can see an applicable announcement on Brookfield's website, but not that full wording you quote.
I would have thought a "utilities provider" would be very concerned with 'burstiness' — that is the volatility of demand in response to sudden weather events.
Utilities— I beg your pardon — sustainable solutions providers usually need to carry capacity for 'peak load', which eats into their profits because it spends a lot of time idle. Except U.S. utilities, being privatised, seem able to just discontinue service without warning. And Global Warming seems to mean utilities running at (/beyond) peak load nearly all the time.JPL said,
August 3, 2023 @ 12:34 am
If as you say those are known technical terms, the NB might make sense to me if they had phrased it as follows: "The sentences referring to "perplexity" and "burstiness", while they unexpectedly provide us with the nerds' point of view, were not utilized, as they do not align with formal writing style." So the writing-style problem would be with the sentences (as opposed to the "references" or what the the terms refer to), but I suspect the problem is less about formality than about the nerdview, if that's what is behind the use of those terms. The writing style of the included text could be described as robotic and mindless, so the referentially vague NB is maybe an editor's comment. (I'm assuming, maybe mistakenly, that the nerds involved with this issue would find the use of those terms appropriate.)
John Swindle said,
August 3, 2023 @ 3:55 am
The term "boom-and-bustiness" occurs here and there on the Web. Nothing to do with large breasts. I don't know whether it "align[s] with a formal writing style."
Seth said,
August 3, 2023 @ 4:44 am
That comes from a very weird site. It looks to be some sort of clickbait project. The word really does seem to be "bustiness", not "burstiness" or a typo for "business". There's a whole paragraph:
" In conclusion, &GPS Wealth Strategies Group LLC has undoubtedly
positioned itself as a faithful patron of Brookfield Renewable Co.,
infusing trust and zest into their investment endeavors. As they embark
on this transcendental financial journey together, it is with great
anticipation and wonderment that we observe the unfolding chapters of
their enthralling narrative—a narrative enriched with bewildering
perplexity and tantalizing bustiness that forever engraves these
moments within our collective memory.
"
Maybe it's a chatGPT rewrite trying to generate content that won't immediately be flagged as spam. And the note is a rewrite of the chatGPT rewrite.
AntC said,
August 3, 2023 @ 6:17 am
Well-spotted @Seth. To be clear
GPS Wealth Strategies seems to be a legitimate Investment Adviser. (Disclaimer: I am no sort of adviser; this is not a recommendation nor investment advice.)
The verbal bilge you've found is indeed a weird site. For some reason it is prefixing GPS with ampersand — some sort of spam-trap evasion? AFAICT it is not a mouthpiece for GPS. Looks like 'beststocks' has got hold of the press release we're positing, added the purported authorship by Elaine Mendonça by scraping from the web, and otherwise garbled the text. Yes it looks very chatGPT-ified.
the note is a rewrite of the chatGPT rewrite.
No, both the legit note that myl links to and this garbage are rewrites of a company-issued press release, I guess. The drivel has also scraped from other sources about other investors' stakes. (Because a company-authored press release wrt an earnings report for a publicly-traded company can't talk about holdings/acquisitions of its own stock.) That the typo appears in both suggests it was also in the original press release.
I think @DickM is right on the money as to what's happened. I also suspect autocorrect: my spell-checker doesn't like 'burstiness'. OTOH neither does it like the version without the 'r'. YMMV.
I would ask why they bother: anybody with money to invest would surely do enough due diligence to realise this text is gibberish. But then I am so unworldly as to think they'd do the same before punting millions on Sam Bankman-Fried or Theranos.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 3, 2023 @ 8:10 am
I would think a company whose "narrative" features "bewildering perplexity" is one which many more cautious investors would wish to avoid investing in; thus editing that out (assuming purely arguendo that it was meaningful information in the first place and not simply random chatbot noise) does readers a disservice. I suppose a company offering "tantalizing bustiness" might be a high-risk-but-high-potential-reward proposition which some investors would be willing to roll the dice on?
Daniel Barkalow said,
August 3, 2023 @ 11:03 am
I remember hearing that articles about upcoming or recent earnings reports have generally been automatically generated for about a decade now, on account of the fact that there ought to be 8 of them a year about every company, and the information content is always: (a) now is a time to pay attention to this stock; (b) some numbers that are generally available; (c) encyclopedic information that usually doesn't change. There's nothing for a writer to contribute unless the call with investors gets new answers to interesting questions, but having the information formatted as an article reached people that a chart and wikipedia link don't, so they make articles. Also, these are times when it's useful to make a snapshot that reflects knowledge at that time for future reference.
I'd guess that they're experimenting with finding and paraphrasing the encyclopedic information section automatically, and got the full output of telling a LLM to paraphrase a text rather than excluding the part of the response that is commentary on the paraphrase.
(FWIW, I think Brookfield is not a utility in the same way that commodities markets aren't grocery stores; they arrange deals between energy producers and utilities rather than being either of them, and the value of the work they're doing comes from the fact that it's too hard for buyers and sellers to negotiate directly.)
JPL said,
August 3, 2023 @ 5:45 pm
The link provided by AntC gives us an earlier article (June 30, 2023) on the same website (BestStocks) as the link in the OP, but its writing style is not like any of the author's other articles listed on her author's page (as far as I checked). The earlier article is full of purple prose in a style more appropriate to a Mills and Boon romance novel than to the insipid business genre that the NB might be calling "formal writing style". (E.g., "As our pulsating hearts attempt to regain composure from these breathtaking successes, …"; "the hallowed day of Friday, May 5th"; "a figure that widens our eyes with mesmerizing suspense"; etc.) So it looks like the "bustiness" was intentional , and the terms noted in the OP were not intended as the technical terms myl is familiar with. I don't think this earlier text was AI generated, but may have been "enriched" from one by a bored author playing a joke. "bewildering perplexity" instead of the more expected "complexity" is a nice touch. (The later article makes no mention of "&GPS Wealth Strategies Group LLC".) I would encourage Ms Mendonca to do more of that every once in a while, and I would encourage others writing in the business genre to take up that style in the future..
,
John Swindle said,
August 4, 2023 @ 1:04 am
If the reviews were written by an AI, the AI was probably swishing the stocks around in its mouth to get the full flavor before spitting them out and commenting on them.
Dara Connolly said,
August 4, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
(FWIW, I think Brookfield is not a utility in the same way that commodities markets aren't grocery stores; they arrange deals between energy producers and utilities rather than being either of them, and the value of the work they're doing comes from the fact that it's too hard for buyers and sellers to negotiate directly.)
Brookfield owns lots of wind farms and other renewable generating assets. They are primarily a generator of electricity.
I notice you seem to use "utility" here to mean what we would refer to as "supplier". This may be a regional difference in usage. In European usage a utility company may generate, distribute and supply electricity (a "vertically integrated utility") but the defining activity is the ownership and/or operation of the transmission or distribution networks. An electricity supplier (of which there are many in our deregulated markets) would not normally be referred to as a utility.
a s said,
August 5, 2023 @ 5:47 pm
This sounds like an AI generated article – since text generating AIs just generate a stream of text, there's no differentiation between "text" and "metatext", so they just like to leave commentary on their own output in the output.
It's also not uncommon for them to misread words they don't know like bustiness/burstiness, for basically the same reason they can deal with misspellings.