August 30, 2003

Get ye back to the drawing board!

OK, although I had seen blurbs pointing to this one several blogs, I ran across another one at Dean's World, and what with today being a slow blogging day,* I decided to run a few passages of my own through The Gender Genie. It states that this program is "[i]nspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author."

I ran three fairly large blocks of my writing from the last couple of days, and in each instance, it identified the author as being female. The last block I ran was this:

I have not really posted much about that California recall mess as I live in Texas and we are pretty much of the opinion here that anything that occurs in California is weird. That recall thing is proving us right by the moment. Still, if I was in California, I would vote for Georgy. I admit I might just be voting with my willie. She is hot!

On my blogging rounds, I have read snippets of stuff about that recall crap here and there. I have found some of the stuff about Arnold to be funny, but lately there has been a lot of talk about Bustamante and this MEChA gang who claims to have some ties to the Aztecs or something. Now I have always thought the Aztecs did have a fascinating culture, but didn't they sacrifice virgins to the Gods? Damn, but that is a horrible waste of virgins.

George, people, I said something about my willie. What kind of a female has a willie? Either whoever developed the program reversed the algorithm or the algorithm has no validity. In my opinion, they need to work on this a bit longer before making it public.

Posted by Tiger at August 30, 2003 09:25 AM
Comments

The stats on the site show that it has an almost exactly 50% success rate. Yay for algorithms that work as well as pure chance.

I'm two-thirds female, if it makes you feel better. Though I must admit that I didn't mention my willie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 1, 2003 09:56 AM

It said I was male...I think the stupid thing is broken....

Posted by: Susie at September 1, 2003 09:25 PM

I tried three blog entries of my own, and was told each time that I was a woman. Then I fed it the line "I'm a man, you idiot!" and was told it couldn't tell whether I was a man or a woman.

Posted by: Xrlq at September 3, 2003 07:45 PM