The word factoid is now sometimes also used to mean a small piece of true but valueless or insignificant information, in contrast to the original definition.

A factoid is not a snippet of information but an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact ).

Mailer described a factoid as " facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper ", and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending-oid to mean " similar but not the same ".

This has been popularized by the CNN Headline News TV channel, which, during the 1980s and 1990s, used to frequently include such a fact under the heading " factoid " during newscasts.

However, Farley utters the sole Brasky factoid in the episode: " Did you know that he once took a bubble bath with Bruce Jenner?

A commonly cited but erroneous factoid in the 1990 Guinness Book of Records listed it as the world's most common surname, but no comprehensive information from China was available at the time and more recent editions have not repeated the claim.

As a result of confusion over the meaning of factoid, some English-language style and usage guides recommend against its use.

The widespread North American factoid that news anchors were called cronkiters in Swedish has been debunked by linguist Ben Zimmer.

This gave rise to the factoid that encyclopedias and runs of periodicals were divided by volume between the two universities, but actually such series bear single shelfmarks.

Each Snapple cap features a random factoid, some of which have been dismissed as list of common misconceptions | misconceptions.

By 2003, Voronoff's efforts in the 1920s reached trivia factoid status for newspapers.

* Question Answering Track-Goal: to achieve more information retrieval than just document retrieval by answering factoid, list and definition-style questions.

That is questionable, to say the least.

Suffice it to say that the usefulness of the latter apportionment is questionable.

Sprinkel strongly refuted the current neo-stagnationist thesis that we are facing a future of limited and slow growth, declaring that this pessimism `` is based on very limited and questionable evidence ''.

Although letting the Countess escape is morally questionable, that impulse to take the law into his own hands was far from unique.

Furthermore, the primary testimony to the commission that connected baseball to Doubleday was that of Abner Graves, whose credibility is questionable ; a few years later, he shot his wife to death and was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life.

The term apocrypha is used with various meanings, including " hidden ", " esoteric ", " spurious ", " of questionable authenticity ", ancient Chinese " revealed texts and objects " and " Christian texts that are not canonical ".

Whether he also did in the case of the Mediterranean with the kingdom of Kaptara ( possibly Cyprus ), as claimed in later documents, is more questionable.

The legal status in the United States of DMT-containing plants is somewhat questionable.

It is questionable that the results would be different if cases were conducted under the differing approaches ; in fact no statistics exist that can show whether or not these systems would come to the same results.

It is questionable whether this child was Hosea's, for God commands that his name be Lo-ammi ; Not My People, or more simply, Not Mine.

However this account is questionable as Bill Haley never performed in the United States in 1980.

The assumption of differentiability or even continuity is questionable since the Boolean algebra of statements may only be finite.

Therefore its status as a species is still questionable.

There are some who say that there are objective variants of the Copenhagen Interpretation that allow for a " real " wave function, but it is questionable whether that view is really consistent with some of Bohr's statements.

The likelihood of a 1st century tomb being built to the west of the city is questionable, as according to the late 1st century Rabbinic leader, Akiva ben Joseph, quoted in the Mishnah, tombs should not built to the west of the city, as the wind in Jerusalem generally blows from the west, and would blow the smell of the corpses and their impurity over the city, and the Temple Mount.

The reliability of field sobriety tests is somewhat questionable, although they are commonly used in various jurisdictions.

Dhrystone remains remarkably resilient as a simple benchmark, but its continuing value in establishing true performance is questionable.

However, it is more questionable if he indeed was carrying the " original " flag.

In addition, the " royal road " anecdote is questionable since it is similar to a story told about Menaechmus and Alexander the Great.

Despite often objecting, Emma is usually party to ethically questionable practices and occasionally finds them amusing.

* It has Jesus sailing across the Sea of Galilee to Nazareth – which is actually inland ; and from thence going " up " to Capernaum – which is actually on the lakeside ( chapters 20-21 ); though this is contested by Blackhirst, who says that the traditional location of Nazareth is itself questionable.

We possess two declamations under his name: On Sophists, directed against Isocrates and setting forth the superiority of extempore over written speeches ( a more recently discovered fragment of another speech against Isocrates is probably of later date ); Odysseus ( perhaps spurious ) in which Odysseus accuses Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy

The commentary on the Sophistical Refutations is deemed spurious, as is the commentary on the final nine books of the Metaphysics.

Thompson, it is likely that Sidonius, whose purpose was to write a panegyric and not a history, simply added some spurious names to his list, including the Bastarnae.

" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful ; but he proposed to replace all such questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the Turing test.

However, it should be noted that is a somewhat spurious argument, in that speed of light limitations applies to all information, not to what can or can not be subsequently done with the information.

This is totally spurious, since no matter who measured first the other will measure the opposite spin despite the fact that ( in theory ) the other has a 50 % ' probability ' ( 50: 50 chance ) of measuring the same spin, unless data about the first spin measurement has somehow passed faster than light ( of course TI gets around the light speed limit by having information travel backwards in time instead ).

An interesting case is made by that Bach's " Eight Little Preludes and Fugues ", now thought to be spurious, may actually be authentic.

* Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda – author of a spurious sequel to Don Quixote, which in turn is referenced in the actual sequel

The harmony does not include Jesus ' encounter with the adulteress ( John 7: 53 – 8: 11 ), a passage that is generally considered to be a spurious late addition to the Gospel of John, with the Diatessaron itself often used as an early textual witness to support this.

One of the most important requirements of experimental research designs is the necessity of eliminating the effects of spurious, intervening, and antecedent variables.

Z is said to be a spurious variable and must be controlled for.

He is not always to be trusted in his discrimination of genuine and spurious documents.

It is currently the most comprehensive and accessible existing language catalog, though some information is dated or spurious.

He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling, praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a " good bad poet " whose work is " spurious " and " morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting ," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors.

However, there is a reference in Galen's treatise " On Theriac to Piso " ( which may however be spurious ) to events of 204.

However the Shield of Heracles is now known to be spurious and probably was written in the sixth century BC.

By the 5th century, this authentic collection had been enlarged by spurious letters, and some of the original letters had been changed with interpolations, created to posthumously enlist Ignatius as an unwitting witness in theological disputes of that age, while the purported eye-witness account of his martyrdom is also thought to be a forgery from around the same time.

A detailed but spurious account of Ignatius ' arrest and his travails and martyrdom is the material of the Martyrium Ignatii which is presented as being an eyewitness account for the church of Antioch, and as if written by Ignatius ' companions, Philo of Cilicia, deacon at Tarsus, and Rheus Agathopus, a Syrian.

Junk science is a term used in U. S. political and legal disputes that brands an advocate's claims about scientific data, research, or analyses as spurious.

The so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum is spurious ; it was apparently composed by a western monk toward the end of the 6th or beginning of the 7th century, with reference to an expression of Jerome's in the opening chapter of the Vita Malchi, where he speaks of intending to write a history of the saints and martyrs from the apostolic times.