An Incomplete List of Designs for Nonessential Scientific Studies
An ongoing project

1: Study to investigate the newly-grown connotations of the word “boi”
Background
The word “boi” has grown to greater and greater importance and popularity on the internet; indeed, it seems to be one of the most versatile and preferred baseis for goofy neologisms (e.g. “thicc boi” “sad boi” “leggy boi” (the last in reference to silverfish, which are awful)). Such a burgeoning phenomena deserves at the very least some kind of study.
Design
The study would take the form of a semantic priming experiment, and be based around a simple lexical decision task — i.e., a task in which participants are presented with a string of letters and are then asked to judge whether the string is an actual English word or not. Before the task begins participants will be primed with either the word “boy” or “boi”. Words semantically related to the priming word (in the lexicon of the participant) will be reacted to faster than semantically unrelated words. This will allow us to study the semantic web of each respective version of the word “boy”.
The words for the lexical decision task (N=92) will consist of 23 words identified as being in the semantic web of “boy” (via the Princeton WordNet project) and 23 words not directly within “boy”s semantic web; the remaining words will be nonwords constructed according to the phonological rules of English. There will be roughly the same number of adjectives, nouns, and verbs in the set of actual words.
Null hypothesis: there is no difference between the semantic web of either word; “boy” and “boi” will display priming effects for roughly the same number of words, and will also mostly prime the same words.
Directional hypothesis: there is a difference between the semantic web of the words: “boi” will have a larger semantic web than “boy,” and the web will be more heterogeneous — i.e. the words that are primed by “boy” will not form a subset of the words primed by “boi”.
2: Study to investigate long-term trends in English paragraph lengths
Background
Earlier English writers — from the Early Modern Era onward — seemed to have no qualms about writing paragraphs thicker than a Scooby-Doo sandwich:

Most contemporary English writers, on the other hand, usually seem to want to keep things down to a brisk five or six sentences. Is this the result of lowering attention spans? A diversification of media? (With books being some of the only at-home entertainment, perhaps it just meant more bang-for-your-buck to have more, more, yet more words?) While researchers may speculate at any potential cause, it remains necessary to establish, first, that this phenomena truly exists in the first place.
Design
A Literary Lab style big data analysis of popular fiction and non-fiction books in English from 1700 onward. Numerous corpus databases exist and should allow for easy machine-reading and tallying of individual paragraph sizes. Average paragraph lengths for each year will be calculated and displayed along a graph with time on the x axis. A simple linear regression of time on average paragraph length will then be calculated.
Null hypothesis: there is no long-term trend in English paragraph length; time will not be a moderate or even weak predictor of average paragraph length.
Directional hypothesis: there is a long-term trend in English paragraph length; linear regression will show a weak to moderate negative correlation between time and average paragraph length.

