Data mining is nothing new but a group of former math majors who started an online dating site think the maths can tell them something about people.
The founders of OkCupid say it can - they claim 7 million visitors per month and every six weeks,the writers create a blog posting there they sort members' online interactions and then make dating suggestions based on the results.
"It's our version of an advice column," says Sam Yagan, OkCupid's chief executive. "We love the fact that our own data tell us what works on a date."
Well, maybe. Their data suffers from the same flaws as evolutionary psychology and its insistence on surveying nearby college students does - results can be interesting but can also easily be misleading or even nowhere near accurate. Making a numerical model from flawed data isn't anything special and the respondents are limited to people who want to be on a particular dating site, so it isn't going to be any more accurate for general dating advice than it is in determining if people are racist.
Some of it seems obvious; be skeptical about heights, weights and income. Duh.
And women, flirt with the camera for your avatar pic:
