Friday, April 27, 2007

Write like a real man!

I've just discovered this, and I think it rather incredible. It may even have some profound implications:

http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

My posts indicate that I'm a man; trying it out on my sister's blog it says that she is a woman. I've tried it out on two physics papers by women and one by a man (not very scientific) and these give "male" results. I'm not motivated enough to do a "statistically significant" sample but I'd guess that since all scientific papers sound the same - at least at 11pm - this could be a more robust feature of the technical "voice".

I wonder if there is any preference between the sexes for reading passages of a certain gender?

Of course, there is an alternative, and that is that this is just an exercise in finding correlations in large data sets using statistics. Certainly, the gender analysis is not foolproof, and the algorithm used is only a simplified version of the original one proposed by the Israeli scientists who discovered this effect. So is this just another silly internet test, or does it really add something useful to the ongoing debate about inherent cognitive differences between the sexes?

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