you won't give up the search for the ghosts in the halls On one of the blogs I read, Opinionistas, there is a bit of a comment war going on now about whether "O" is who she says she is, both in terms of her profession and her gender. If you don't read it, she is a terrific writer and claims to be a young lawyer at big New York City firm - she also hints that she's worried about losing her job shortly because of her very honest tales of law firm life. Some people in her world have figured out who she is and have threatened to "out" her. Today a few of her commenters have referred to this "gender genie" website that they used to determine that she is not the female she claims to be.

I decided to try the Gender Genie with my own blog today. They get you to paste text into a window and they use "key words" to guess the gender of the writer (it doesn't have to be a blog - could be any type of article).

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

I tried five different posts of mine and the genie guessed that I was MALE three of those times. Interestingly, the posts which it found to be more "male" were ones where I was a bit more angry and terse. My posts that are more story-telling are the ones deemed "female".

There are too many people willing to believe in some kind of conspiracy out there. Maybe it's naive, but I prefer to take things at face value. If someone wants to go to that much trouble to fool you, what's the harm in playing along.. especially on a blog..? They are the ones doing all the work. They are the ones with issues...(!)

I really am a girl named Stacey, you know.  | ¶ 5:01 p.m.