Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long

An anonymous reader writes "Can computers pick up your age and gender from your tweets? If you want to give it a try, here's your chance: 'To develop your software for age and gender identification, we provide you with a training data set that consists of blog posts, Twitter tweets, social media texts, as well as hotel reviews.' Well, at least my paid Amazon reviews are safe for the time being..."

Comments

assuming too much

[roman_mir]

I am sure you can pick up on general mood of a person, I am sure you can pick up various clues, but if somebody is set on hiding themselves by providing false information, I don't think you'll be able to identify them without what NSA calls 'meta data', as in pattern of your behaviour. I don't think it will be possible to do a better job than guessing at about 50/50 chance ratio about a person's age and gender if the person in question is actively trying to portray something he or she is not in a single conversation. From a pattern of behaviour? Yes. From a single conversation? ... this assumes too much about people. It assumes that 16 y.o. girls are also not pretending to be something they are not as well...

Re: assuming too much

[lucm]

Gotcha, you're a dude. Girls never use "btw": they use "fyi" with a whiny, self-righteous sarcastic undertone.

Thinking of that, this applies to flamboyant gay males as well.

So you are either an overweight straight guy in his early 30s or a Perl script written by an overweight straight guy in his early 30s.

Re:assuming too much

[canadiannomad]

Even if someone got a program that was "pretty good" at figuring out age and gender, I strongly doubt they could make it accurate enough not to be a huge civil liberties problem.
IF someone were to make a program that was 99% accurate, that would still be some 3million 16 year old girls in the US getting their houses raided in case they are a perv. (ok they aren't likely to raid on evidence like that alone, but they might use it as probable cause to 'dig deeper' into who she is... and if she caused the false flag then she is likely an outlier who the gov't wants to know more about anyway, for retraining... I'll go don my tinfoil hat now.)

If you want to read a summary that makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

here's your chance to write one.

Wow, what a great racket

[EmagGeek]

I wish I could shell out 300 euro to have my next million-euro commercial product crowdsourced

This is a software contest

[mbone]

For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :

An award of 300 euros for the best performing approach to author profiling (age and gender identification) is sponsored by Atribus (Corex).

Broken Slashadvert Yet again

[danknight48]

I'am sick of descriptions and subjects written in gibberish. Reminds me of spam emails.

Do you have a big cock, how big can your cock get?
Win £xxx pounds if your cock can be bigger than their cock.
Is your cock hidden? can people see your cock? CLICK HERE NOW!

How the fuck did this get authed? Not only is it the worst subject and description i've seen in a while, its an insult to the readers here. Seriously we are here for a reason, we dont have an attention span of a fish.
Oh yeah thats right, its a Slashadvert supplied by Corex.

No offence, but if this shit carries on, i may as well start reading my spam emails. Target your audience, not Facebook muppets ffs.

What about the following sites?

[knorthern knight]

The "dialectizer" http://www.rinkworks.com/diale... "translates" English to Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. And there's an English to Ebonics translator at http://joel.net/EBONICS/Transl... so it won't be that difficult to get a translator that outputs 16-year-old-girl talk.

Just what I need ...

[MacTO]

Now both people and computers will call me a girl.