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February 15

Artificial Intelligence, any ways to guess gender from names?

Greetings,

@ WT:WOMRED#Growth Team Features; we need mentors! I came across one interesting point being discussed by User:Ipigott.

Personally when I visit multiple language Wikipedia where in I do not know the respective language and culture at all, even without taking into account the articles they are editing, I can guess at least few female user accounts, request some help on women's rights related article and do get such help. Even I can make a guess to some extent what likely percentage of women are editing on the wiki project looking at recent changes. Of course I am too rational to claim any supernatural abilities in me, How I have ability to guess gender may be this question pertains to multiple disciplines like cultural, linguistic, anthropology, psychology etc.

But giving such task of guessing gender from user names for software would sound next to impossible. Still what possibilities would exist for AI researcher?

Are there any scientific studies on this topic in above discussed various scientific fields?

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 12:29, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There are at least two separate questions here. When editing Wikipedia and independent of their User Name, editors can set Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-personal to the gender which they prefer to be addressed, or deliberately leave this unspecified, which is the default for new accounts. Then any other user can use the correct terms when referring to them, if that has been specified. The Navigation popup gadget (active it on your own page here) will show the gender and other information when you hover over the name of another editor in talk pages and elsewhere. As to the more general question, then "guess" is the best that can be done, although many names, if not Usernames, do indeed mostly get applied to one preferred gender. Mike Turnbull (talk) 13:10, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English, at least, has quite a few unisex names, and it would be interesting to see how, or if, AI could somehow figure out the gender based on nothing but the name. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:50, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reminds me of the Turing test and Douglas R. Hofstadter's wonderful piece from Scientific American in 1981 here, where male?/female? Chris, Pat and Sandy are discussing what Turing called the 'imitation game'. --T*U (talk) 18:31, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there is lots of such software.https://duckduckgo.com/?q=name+gender+software] 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 22:27, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And they are all based on guesswork. If you have a name such as "Chris Smith", and no other information, it is impossible to know what the gender is. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:15, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well put Baseball Bugs. Many years ago I knew a family where Chris and Chris were married, and named their first child Chris. Now sort that one out! Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:24, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Evelyn Waugh was married to someone named... Evelyn Gardner. They didn't have children however. --Jayron 32 15:58, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Even with a given name such as "Andrea" or "Anne" you can't be sure: Andrea Denver, Anne Mulder. --Lambiam 15:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Michael Learned would also give such an AI trouble as well... --Jayron 32 15:59, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And Christopher Norris. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:20, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

On top of all that, now we have the minefield of not knowing whether a random person prefers to be associated with a gender that does not match their outward appearance, or no particular gender, or all genders, or something that changes sometimes; and having to choose one's pronouns accordingly. By the way, where could I get hold of a litre of that "gender fluid"? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:53, 16 February 2022 (UTC) [reply]

Yes, by switching language names can change gender, but maybe that's cheating. In English Andrea is female, in Italian it's male. Andrea Denver is an Italian living in the US. In Dutch Anne is a female name, but in Frisian it's male, the female equivalent being Antje. Have a look at the map on [1] (sorry, Dutch only). Once you know the language, the number of unisex names rapidly drops. And in languages with marking of grammatical gender on nouns, it would nearly always be possible to correctly guess someone's gender from the name. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:47, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

All AI approaches require training data; a set of inputs with corresponding correct answers. Given that those data are quite simply not available over the set of Wikipedia editors, the best that you could expect would be for the AI to repeat the skew attributable to the initial assumptions. 37.166.208.180 (talk) 19:56, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think some respondents here have missed the point. The question was about guessing gender, and I'd expect guessing in this context to mean choosing an answer with a reasonably high probability of being right, not determining a right answer with certainty. There is never certainty anyway (people in this modern era can switch gender at any time). Names could be misleading even in earlier times, e.g. Waltons' actress Michael Learned. I do have the impression that those software models do reasonably well at guessing genders from names, but I would never claim them to be perfect. 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 22:08, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 16

Minor biology question

In Columnella, why are some of the discoverers(?) in brackets and some not? Clarityfiend (talk) 23:10, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The reason was entirely an accident of formatting, and entirely unrelated to anything scientific. I have amended the article to insert brackets in all places where they were missing. Dolphin (t) 23:48, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. So nothing juicy like being a member of the Illuminati or the Cabal? Clarityfiend (talk) 09:49, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not as far as you should know ;) --Jayron 32 13:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The name and date after a binomial name is a reference to the authorship and date of the publication that first formally described the species. The official convention is to put these in brackets if the species was first described in a different genus. See International Code of Zoological Nomenclature Article 51.3. I have reverted User:Dolphin51's change, so that the brackets now again match those in World Register of Marine Species. Jmchutchinson (talk) 10:10, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Clarityfiend (talk) 12:46, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 17

Did anytime NASA or any space agency save Earth from major calamity?

Did anytime NASA or any space agency save Earth from major calamity? Like diverting mountain-sized comet etc. Rizosome (talk) 16:17, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Only in movies. --T*U (talk) 18:09, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, they have not, but they may be very likely in the process of causing one. --Jayron 32 19:43, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That particular Internet meme calamity was not caused by NASA. That meme is caused by the Internet echo chamber of know-it-alls learning their physics from Sandra Bullock in that thing. 85.76.97.34 (talk) 16:08, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Or from Ken MacLeod in The Sky Road, or … —Tamfang (talk) 01:25, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No Janes were ever harmed by NASA. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:11, 18 February 2022 (UTC) [reply]

I'd argue their work on climate change is helping to moderate, if not avert one. Fgf10 (talk) 00:14, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I got the answer from this line: Only in movies. Rizosome (talk) 15:02, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite discovered the ozone hole. That discovery led to action which prevented major calamity. --OuroborosCobra (talk) 21:42, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The USGS and the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) predicted the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which helped to convince 60,000 people to evacuate to safer ground. The volcanologists were likely aided by many working professionals in the space science community as there is some overlap in the space and Earth sciences, particularly when it comes to remote sensing. Viriditas (talk) 22:20, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

human detecting when mobile phone is about to ring

Please ignore any hypothetical medical aspects to this question (I know about that policy, and will ask a Dr if it becomes an issue). The question is intended as purely about detecting electromagnetism biologically.

Yesterday evening I was resting in bed, not really asleep, when I had a sudden feeling of panic (something like an electric shock in my chest) that lasted about 1 second, enough to bolt awake. A second or two later, my cell phone rang. I'm aware of LED gizmos that flash when your phone is about to ring, due to some kind of change in the electromagnetic environment when the tower connects to the phone (I guess the phone's transmitter powers up). So I'm wondering whether I did a similar detection biophysically somehow.

Any thoughts about this? A quick web search didn't find anything. I don't remember noticing this effect if my phone rings while I'm awake. Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 23:11, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Certain birds and fishes can perceive electric / magnetic fields: see bioelectromagnetics, perception and behavioral effects of electromagnetic fields, and electroperception. While evidence in humans is scarce, especially in air medium and at radio frequencies, it is conceivable that perhaps something rare and undiscovered may be present in some individuals. Another explanation could be happenstance. How often do you feel panic or something similar during evenings? How often do you get phone calls during that time? Perhaps they simply happened together. GeorgiaDC (talk) 04:00, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence in humans is scarce, but not non-existent. For example, it appears that humans are sensitive enough to sense changes in Earth's magnetic field. Sensing when a phone is going to ring is very different of course and very susceptible to confirmation bias. Matt Deres (talk) 13:56, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Beyond GeorgiaDC's explanation that this might be something you are regularly experiencing that you happened to attach to the phone ringing, another far more mundane (and therefore IMO likely) explanation is that your phone was already doing something before you detected it ringing. Many smart phones will turn on the screen maybe a second or two before they have an audible ring, if your phone was within your line of sight, you might have noticed this. Phones can of course also affect other things notably speakers so if your phone was near a speaker that was playing music, you might have heard this. Alternatively it's possible it had an audible ring before you became aware of it. Either way in your sleepy state you misinterpreted the surprise from whatever your phone did or cause as a physical sensation, and probably also misinterpreted the time between the surprise and your phone ringing. Edit: line of sight may be indirect especially in a darkened room since the brightness of the phone may light up the ceiling or whatever even if the phone is completely out of even your peripheral vision.) Nil Einne (talk) 10:26, 18 February 2022 (UTC) 11:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A third possibility is that you had been dreaming, and the phone woke you up, and that in the fraction of a second that this happened, your brain concocted a story to explain this, involving an apparent electric shock apparently happening before the phone rang. Note that sense of time in dreams is screwy: I've had "long" dreams, that seamlessly incorporated the event that woke me from that dream, in a way that is unlikely to be possible unless the whole dream actually occurred and was triggered by the thing that woke me. Also note that its possible to start dreaming before you fall asleep, and to continue dreaming after you wake up: see Hypnagogia and Hypnopompic. Iapetus (talk) 10:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am surprised nobody linked yet to our article about electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

Short version: some people complain of headaches (and other symptoms) which they attribute to the presence of electromagnetic fields nearby. A considerable number of scientific studies have been done on the subject (along the lines of: turn on and off a transmitter at random, ask the subjects if the transmitter is on or off, see if they do better than random chance). The conclusion of those studies is pretty clear: the symptoms are due to the nocebo effect rather than actual physiological sensitivity.

Presumably, if a patient in those studies could reliably feel an "electric shock through the chest" whenever the transmitter was turned on, they would have scored very high on detection ability, and we would have heard of them by now. Maybe OP is just much better at detecting EM fields than all of the participants in electrosensitivity studies, but the explanations above seem more plausible. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 14:36, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And also Synchronicity. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.193.130.191 (talk) 11:55, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This phenomenon of predicting an event before it occurs may also be a neurological phenomenon where the brain interprets the sequence of events out of order. I remember reading a paper about it a long time ago. Similarly, we know the brain experiences natural distortion of perception due to trauma, most notably during a car accident, where many people will report time slowing down. This is also related to perceptual distortions such as flow and peak experiences, as well as non-dualism. It may also be the case that the perception of cause and effect may seem reversed due to the brain getting confused, similar to something like synesthesia. Viriditas (talk) 22:39, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 18

Has anyone ever tabulated element yields in the r-process

The r-process produces heavy as well as light elements and I've seen many papers graphically displaying the expected element yields for a given mass number and electron fraction, but none displaying them in tabular format. Anyone know one that does? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How about this one? Pritychenko, Boris (2020). "Determination of Solar System R-Process Abundances using ENDF/B-VIII.0 and TENDL-2015 libraries". arXiv:2012.06728 [astro-ph.SR]. --Amble (talk) 22:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 20

Where do birds go in a bad storm?

We just had one in England, so it got me thinking. I live by the sea, so I know what the gulls do. They either go far out to sea and ride out the storm on the water, or try to fly above the storm. Or they go inland and find an open space (less risk of flying objects), such as a field and hunker down until it's over. I think it depends on the strength and type of storm.

The seagulls are physically strong, thick plumaged birds and powerful flyers, however. What do the rest of them, do? I'm thinking of the ubiquitous urban pigeons, sparrows, crows, starlings and such. --Iloveparrots (talk) 00:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some can perch in thick trees with claws that grasp automatically when muscles are relaxed. Others may gather on the leeward side of structures, vegetations, or forests. See 1 2 3 4. Most still need to feed and drink, however, especially to maintain body temperature against the weather. Sometimes they find insects hiding in the same places as they are from the storm. Sometimes they're unlucky and starve or exhaust themselves, even for seabirds who can fly with the storm or shelter within its eye as long as they keep pace with its movements. On a personal note, it's not uncommon to find birds under/inside people's domiciles around here during a major storm. GeorgiaDC (talk) 07:01, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The gulls come inland. When I lived in Whitley Bay, Tyneside we could always tell when there was bad weather out at sea, the school playing fields (about a mile inland) were covered in gulls. What's more, even if disturbed they walked, hopped or if they had to made a short flight. They certainly did not want to be up in the air. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:26, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There are always lots of gulls in Birmingham and we're about as far from the sea as you can get. --TrogWoolley (talk) 13:13, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some original research: at the height of the storm at midday on Friday in Hertfordshire (about 45 miles from the Essex coast), there were blue tits, great tits, nut hatches, a robin and a lesser spotted woodpecker at my birdfeeder which was swinging around violently. So I think the answer must be that they keep calm and carry on. Many garden birds are territorial, [2] so they won't stray far from home. Alansplodge (talk) 11:43, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The robin sits in a barn to keep himself warm. DuncanHill (talk) 12:16, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Addressed by xkcd. CodeTalker (talk) 19:49, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of storms move in from the seas. Bad idea to try to ride them out out there. And storm systems can extend far up in the atmosphere. Think how many planes have crashed because they fly into instrument conditions up there. 74.64.73.24 (talk) 01:52, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Err, since GB is an island, ALL storms move in from the sea! :-) Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:20, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all. Many types of storm form directly over land. ----

Our little island is a bit too small for any of that. Nearly all of our storms are second-hand from the Atlantic. On the rare occasions that they come from Continental Europe, watch out!. Alansplodge (talk) 23:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Clockwork Orange, the Ludovico technique - would it actually have worked?

For anyone who didn't see the film or read the book, it involved aversion therapy. The government, in the story was experimenting with curing criminal behaviour by exposing people to graphic images of violence, rape, war, genocide and such while simultaneously pumping them full of drugs which brought upon a feeling of sickness and a "death like, paralysis state". The idea being that long term mental associations would be formed that would cause even the thought of doing such things to make it physically impossible to act upon such impulses because of permanent changes to the psyche. Like a an aggressive thought would cause the sickness and paralysis to return until the person purposefully rejected that thought, the idea being that it was now physically impossible for the subject of the experiment to commit an aggressive act.

The story was obviously a warning against such things. That it was better to be a bad man than to be compelled to "goodness" against one's will.

Question I have here, is would this have actually worked in real life? I know that attempts at aversion therapy WRT things like homosexually didn't work, so I'm curious. I'm suspecting that various governments probably tried such things over the years. Just watched the movie on DVD... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iloveparrots (talk • contribs) 02:19, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The reports on the effectiveness of aversion therapy are a mixed bunch, and controlled experiments described in sufficient detail to make them repeatable are rare. When reasonably effective at all, this appears to depend on the condition being treated. There is no body of established psychological theory that would allow one to predict the effectiveness of operant conditioning by torture for what seems to be sociopathy. --Lambiam 10:18, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You may be interested in Classical Conditioning in “A Clockwork Orange” from Psychology Today. Alansplodge (talk) 11:50, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 21

Onion in sock

Is it true that sleeping with a onion in your sock is a good remedy for the common cold? Thanks. 205.239.40.3 (talk) 11:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No. Surprisingly, I can even cite a source to support my answer. there have not been any scientific studies that have looked at this specifically is code for "that hypothesis would violate so many rules of physics and biology that no serious researcher would devote time to testing it, no serious funding agency would give money to study it, and no serious journal would publish results about it".

@OP: since you asked here, presumably you thought it was possible the answer was "yes". I would encourage you to examine why you believe so. I suspect the answer is that someone told you, and possibly that someone added that they did it and it worked. Citing from Anecdotal_evidence#Scientific_context:

A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. (...) For example, here is anecdotal evidence presented as proof of a desired conclusion:

There's abundant proof that drinking water cures cancer. Just last week I read about a girl who was dying of cancer. After drinking water she was cured.

Anecdotes like this do not prove anything. In any case where some factor affects the probability of an outcome, rather than uniquely determining it, selected individual cases prove nothing. (...) In medicine, anecdotal evidence is also subject to placebo effects: it is well-established that a patient's (or doctor's) expectation can genuinely change the outcome of treatment. Only double-blind randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials can confirm a hypothesis about the effectiveness of a treatment independently of expectations.

Synchronicity is "a person's subjective experience that coincidences between events in their mind and the outside world may be causally unrelated to each other yet have some other unknown connection." Alansplodge (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

See randomized controlled trial for the actual method to know if something works. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 12:01, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

At least some scientists thought it worth their time and effort to conduct a double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial of garlic as a mosquito repellant, and a peer-reviewed journal published by a highly respected learned society thought this merited publication.^[3] I doubt there are a priori reasons to rule out the effectiveness of sulfur compounds exuded by onions as providing relief for the common cold, any more than there are reasons to rule out a role for zinc supplements. --Lambiam 18:16, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, according to National Onion Association, the claim that raw onion can treat the flu is "a theory that dates back to the 1500s" and "In recent years, many articles online have claimed that this folk remedy is effective." One assumes those national onions are American ones. Maybe it's something that would be used by Novak Djokovic who, in 2020, spoke of his knowledge of "some people" using "prayer" and "gratitude" to "turn the most toxic food, or maybe most polluted water into the most healing water."?? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC) p.s. onions can be quite large, so presumably you'd need and extra large sock to accommodate one?[reply]

Between 1946 and 1989, the British Government funded the Common Cold Unit, where volunteers could have an all-expenses-paid holiday on Salisbury Plain, provided that they were willing to be infected with one of the many cold viruses, in the hope that a cure or effective treatment could be found. The unit eventually closed with the conclusion that there was none. Whether they experimented with onions-in-socks seems unlikely. Alansplodge (talk) 13:36, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Onions are mentioned here but only as "In ancient Egypt, cold sufferers were told to treat it by reciting a magical spell, while the ancient Romans recommended wolf's liver in mulled wine. Other “treatments” have included eating mustard or milk-soaked onions, wearing nutmeg around your neck, or inhaling chlorine gas." I guess they never thought of putting their feet in the milk-soaked onions. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:50, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Onions might help open up your breathing passageway, although putting them in socks doesn't seem like the best placement. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:56, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't put on clean socks (and wash your feet), you may smell sufficiently strongly as to make people keep their distance, which will actually lessen your chances of catching a cold, etc., from them.

Actually, I believe the original idea was to hang the onion-bearing sock around your neck, and it may be that this traditional belief has persisted orally from a couple or more centuries ago, when (for poor people at any rate), washing bodies and clothes was a luxury (geddit?) of cost and time that could less often be afforded. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.193.130.191 (talk) 22:32, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No wonder it didn't work! Everyone knows you need to wear the onion on your belt, which was the style at the time. --47.155.96.47 (talk) 22:48, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think the question was about a possible remedy, not a prophylactic. [4]. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:54, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Whoever told you this doesn't know their onions about cures. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:00, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

They should get on their bike. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:05, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Brings to mind the old saying: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. An onion a day keeps everybody away. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:27, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

February 22

Why did JWST send first images too early?

I believe JWST would take 6 months to send first images, but it send too early i.e on 3 February 2022 Source, why so? Rizosome (talk) 07:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]