Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Today I am a man

Will Murray discovers "an interesting gizmo that purports to be able to guess the gender of a writer based on a sample of text" and learns that he writes like a man, which is appropriate, in that he is one. He then notes the following:

"To further test this I took a few passages from Phoebe’s blog and fed them in. Having looked at her passport, I can verify that she is, in fact, female. The gizmo however pegged her as male with a high degree of confidence. Thus, I conclude its methods are malarkey."

The question remains: Does this gizmo assume, with a high degree of confidence, that I am male, or does it assume that I am a highly confident male?

2 comments:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Uh, thanks.

Man's Perdition said...

If it's any comfort, I analyzed one of my big philosophical essays on abortion (which, like everything I write, is slightly arrogant, so I thought I'd surely be termed a male), but I just barely made the cutoff.