newest jay mathews column

here.
It's an okay column. A bit contradictory in some places, maybe. (colleges should let the kids know that admissions is a crapshoot, but shouldn't mention that in the rejection letter?) anyway, it's mostly notable because I'm (pseudonymously) quoted.

And he got my gender wrong.

Whatever, though. Still very exciting!

p.s. the Gender Genie is kind of fun. I found it or something like it a couple years ago and pasted in a bunch of my academic papers. yeah, it thought I was male too.

I haven't read a lot about the algorithm, but it does seem like the differences could be due to the disparate topic choice rather than style differences when writing about the same topic. For example, using the pronoun "I" apparently makes you sound female. But I would almost never use "I" in a formal academic paper. It would be kind of neat to try the experiment again, but with a group of papers all on the same topic, maybe a class essay assigned a few years in a row to a large group of college students? If you could discern two distinct styles, it would be interesting to see which style got the higher grades.