Manly Blogging

A couple of professors have come up with a program that supposedly can ascertain the gender of the author of a piece of text. It's based on word usage, and the fact that guys talk about facts, and women talk about relationships. Brilliant.

I plugged my last post into the "Gender Genie", a website inspired by the profs. It told me my gender accurately (in case I wasn't sure, after DJN's shenanigan), but it's own published statistics show that it's wrong 50% of the time, based on 60,000 uses. Now, I could write an algorithm that was right 50% of the time; it's called guessing! Thanks for the link to Azeem Redux, and for more info on the algorithm, check out this article in Nature. Azeem also has some worthwhile thoughts on the death penalty in western society.