Gender Genie

I came across this new thing called the Gender Genie - a website that tells with 80% accuracy whether an article was written by a man or a woman. In fact, I wanted to test it and I tried my last post on it. The result was - the male score dominated the female score by more than 100%. the algorithm is based on the fact that men and women can be categorised under certain styles of using words. women use more personal pronouns whereas men are inclined towards using words that quantify nouns. in fact the whole paper is available on the website.

at work - we have a local version of Toastmasters. There is a meeting every fortnight, late afternoon, and people are invited to talk on prepared topics. there are table topics as well. anyway, i had the chance to attend one. with great expectations i walked into the hall and i found less than 5 people in the audience. out of 5000 plus people in the office, there are just 5 who want to test or work on their communication skills. i wonder if so many are busy with work. im quite sure that its not the case. just that they are too lazy to move their butt from the seat they have been warming for the whole day.

at this juncture, i must also tell you that generally, the communication level inside the organization is extremely poor. people know to code well. they might even enter the limca book of records for maybe coding so many thousand lines in a day but they are extremely bad at writing even two lines for an email. most of the english that people write is verbatim of what they talk over the phone or to their friends. i mean - the thought just falls into words. it doesnt get any flavor of grammar. and i dont understand why people are not bothered. is this a lack of interest from within? i do see organizational initiatives once in a while, but i have a general feeling that in all this struggle, the aim is just to make sure that ends meet ( i mean, to make sure that business happens. like we had this concept called JIT - Just In Time and later when I was doing in-plant training with a renowned manufacturing firm, the production manager told me that there was new term called SHIT - SomeHow In Time).

Food for thought - George Orwell listed four writers' motives: sheer egotism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse (the desire to record things as they are, for posterity) and political purpose (the desire to push the world in a certain direction).