It sounded like a joke, but to our surprised the programmers behind it were 2 MIT students. It should be serious, right?
Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree are MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students who conducted a research on facebook and claimed that Homosexual men can be identified just by looking at their Facebook friends. The result is Gaydar.
Tell me who your friends are…
Remember the old sayings, “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are” and “Birds of the same feathers flock together”. We guessed that these are the principles these MIT students followed.
According to their study, one can predict the sexual orientation of a man by the analysis of his friend’s gender and sexuality.
The experiment
As part of their research, Jernigan and Mistree, scanned the facebook profile of some 1,500 fellow students who clearly indicated that they are – straight, gay or bisexuals.
Analysis of the data gathered revealed that homosexual men had proportionally “more” gay friends than straight men. Based from these observations and data, they created a program to “predict” the sexual orientation of other Facebook users.
As a trial run, they ran the program on 10 men, who were known to be homosexuals but didn’t reveal it on their profiles. The software, the students claimed, 100% determined that these dudes were really gays.
Is this the next big thing?
Apparently, the study was still unpublished and the students were planning to name it Gaydar (maybe an abbreviation for Gay Radar). Their MIT computer science professor were even surprised on what these 2 “geniuses” did, saying:
When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that?
The program however has its limitations, currently, it cannot accurately point if the sexuality of the facebook users are bisexuals or lesbians.
Flaws and disadvantages:
Aside from the fact that the software cannot determine if a user is lesbian or bisexuals, we list the flaws of the Project: Gaydar. Let’s find out the painstaking work and the “ingenius” creation these two produced.
1. How would the software determine if a user is actually gay but is using a girl’s identity. Commonly known as identity theft? This is currently rampant not only at facebook but on other social networking sites as well. These gays have malicious intentions of hooking up with “innocent” guys.
2. According to the report, your sexual orientation solely depends on your “list of friends”. What if you’re a real straight guy and have more “gay” friends? This is possible, but the program would interpret it wrongly.
3. Those users who “secretly” hide their profile, if they are real homo, probably or obviously are protecting something, someone or their own reputation. This software would probably only do them more harm.
4. The software can be done via normal observations (it doesn’t take a genius to determine if someone is gay or not). It also seems to lack other technical stuff. The research should have gone deeper, and should even check/process what do homosexuals write on their profiles i.e. gay lingo, conversations and even examining of their photo uploads.
Wrap up
We still cannot find the reason why in the world these MIT students focused on proving that a person is gay or not? Who cares? Also, their study and program’s backbone was based on “observation” and was short on other technical details. We regarded MIT students as geniuses who bring “wonders” to our world but these research likely shows the opposite.
(source: Mashable,Telegraph.co.uk)
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Tags: applications, bisexual, facebook, gay indicator, gaydar, homsexual, lesbians, MIT students, program, programme, software
