he said, she said

I found this link at the Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan) over at the Atlantic. The design is by a couple of university types and is intended to predict the gender of a writer. I can’t help giving something like this a go so I loaded up four of my longer blog entries; four times it predicted male. Well, that’s too easy, isn’t it? I pasted six entries from the Wonder Twins (two from Twin 1 and four from Twin 2) into the machine and it came back predicting six of six were male writers. What? Clearly what I’d found was a design issue: maybe a few words that are tagged as male that shouldn’t be, could there be something wrong in the algorithm?, maybe it’s operator error. I was about to put pen to paper when I decided to give it one more shot. I loaded three entries from Wife in the North to see if her style of writing was more suited to forcing a female result. Sure enough, two out of three were female predictions and the third fell just a few words toward male. What have I learned? What did I already know? I know this, if the Twins are heading down the escalator, hurrying to catch a train, and you find yourself between point A (them) and point B (the train doors) you better being doing one of two things: either getting a move on, or getting ready for a beat down. It’s the guy in them coming out. The Wife would probably be a bit more gracious – she’s probably also get offered a seat. Aren’t they sweet?