The Gender Genie is an online tool, based on an algorithm, based on a study, that claims to be able to tell whether or not you’re male or female based on just your language patterns. Paste some text into The Gender Genie, click submit and it will tell you (with 80% accuracy) whether or not you’re a man or a woman.
I’ve seen similar question & answer tests that guessed whether or not you were male or female (but it’s unfortunately lost now to the vast sea of sites I visited before I del.icio.us existed).
Play with: The Gender Genie
Utterly fascinating article about the use & abuse of power, disproportionate access to resources based on chance, rules, and individual will. All told through the eyes of 3rd graders playing with Lego.
Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought “cool pieces,” and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.
After nearly two months of observing the children’s Legotown construction, we decided to ban the Legos.
Read: Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online
This is one of the coolest optical illusions I’ve seen. Cooler even than the Big Spanish Castle. Stare at the center of the screen for 20 seconds and then look away.
Watch: Neave Strobe
Read the explanation: Motion aftereffect
Via: Omni Brain
This is interesting. People have more confidence in small business owners than in anyone else from politicians to doctors to the religious leaders. Combine that with the fact that more students are or want to be entrepreneurs than any time in recent history & it really looks like this century is going to be the century of the small business owner.
Looking at specific institutions, we have a change at the top this year. Small business was added to the list of institutions in 2005 and tied with the military at the top of the list that first year. Last year, it was a close second to the military, but in 2007, over half of U.S. adults (54%) express a great deal of confidence in leaders of small business.
Read: Harris Interactive | The Harris Poll - Confidence in Leaders of Major Institutions: Small Business Tops the List this Year
Via: Small Business Trends
This is really cool. Similar to How Happiness is Reflected in Blogs, this website creates a map of human feelings from blogs. It can be sorted by age group, gender, geographic region & weather on that day. And the UI is cute too, though I wish it were more useful. Check out the Findings.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
Read: We Feel Fine
More about how Gen X will change work, or in this case, Generation Y, many of whom already own or are planing to own businesses by the time they reach college & they’re already planning for retirement. Go Gen Y!
Studies show that about 50% of today’s college students have business ownership as a primary career goal.
Read: Profile of the Entrepreneurial Generation » Small Business Trends
This is a cool article about how LiveJournal bloggers, who can tag their posts with various moods, are happier at some times of day & on some days of the week than others. Happiest time? 9pm. Happiest day of the week? Saturday.
Read: Google Operating System: How Happiness Is Reflected in Blogs
The old axiom is “there is no blood test for mental illness.” Psychology has been considered a bit of a soft science, dominated by crackpots, wild theories and half truths - and that’s not entirely untrue. But now some scientists believe they’re on the verge of discovering a blood test for panic disorder.
“The ability to test for panic disorder is a quantum leap in psychiatry,” said the study’s lead author, Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.
“Panic disorder will no longer be a purely descriptive diagnosis, but, as with cystic fibrosis, Down syndrome and other conditions, a diagnosis based on genetic information,” he said. “In addition, the finding could help us better understand the pathways that initiate, promote and maintain panic disorder.”
Read: Mental Health Conditions Could Be Detected By Blood Tests
This is interesting. Use of a drug can change a learned behavior - old fears can be wiped out.
When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats’ memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.
Read: news @ nature.com - Wipe out a single memory - Drug can clear away one fearful memory while leaving another intact.
Clicking on the little fast forward button on TiVo and paying attention to when it actually stops, and finageling back and forth until you get the actual start of the show takes mental effort & couch potatoes don’t, you know, like mental effort. (I know I don’t when I watch TV.) Who would have guessed.
“People are actually playing back more of the commercials than we thought,” said Steve Sternberg, executive vice president and director of audience analysis at Magna Global Media Research, an ad-buying agency. “People are buying DVRs not because they want to time-shift all of their viewing and skip all commercials, but because they want to time-shift some of their viewing.”
Read: Viewers Fast-Forwarding Past Ads? Not Always - New York Times