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Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

github.com

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Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#11

Post by MartinCron »

te_platt wrote: post #3

As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well. As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have some benefits. For example my wife can ha…

I just checked the data file behind this project and Tracy shows up as both a male and female name. If I were to use this, I would only ever let the analysis "leak" to the end-user if it were extremely confident that it's a strong match.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#15

Post by noblethrasher »

heelhook wrote: post #8

Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project description but not on the project name, weird.

'Male', 'female', and 'androgynous' are sex designations while 'masculine', 'feminine', and 'neuter' are terms of gender.

The code is using the gender of a reference to determine the sex of the referent.

So you could say that they're both right.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#16

Post by rabidonrails »

te_platt wrote: post #3

As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well. As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have some benefits. For example my wife can ha…

Reading the last two sentence made me smile. Of course, the following must be mentioned: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/its-pat/n10133/

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#17

Post by mbell »

ig1 wrote: post #2

Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name. The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities. As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any…

> Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use.

Literally the very first line of the README has a link to the source data. It contains name frequency data for a number of countries and the README clearly indicates you can provide a country of origin when doing lookups.

> As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any non-GPL product.

The source data is GPL, there wasn't much option.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#18

Post by chriseppstein »

Gender identity is actually a quite tricky topic and should be approached carefully. I would discourage anyone from trying to use this library, the real world doesn't fit neatly in your multiple-choice view of gender. For more information, please watch this great talk: http://vimeo.com/61172068.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#19

Post by chimeracoder »

heelhook wrote: post #8

Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project description but not on the project name, weird.

On the one hand, gender corresponds to identification and behavior, which this predicts (more so than biology). On the other hand, this produces binary output[0], and sex is more generally accepted to be binary than gender.

So, I think 'sex machine' is appropriate.

[0] Okay, three options, but 'andy' really corresponds to 'unknown', not 'person of androgynous gender'.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#20

Post by jghrng »

ig1 wrote: post #2

Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name. The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities. As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any…

> As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any non-GPL product.

Well you can always simply ask the author -- if he has got the copyright, he can grant you permission.

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