IBM's Teri-is-a-Girl-and-Terry-is-a-Boy Patent

theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent for utilizing naming conventions to assign gender-based avatars for instant messaging. A user named Teri, IBM explains, would be given a girl avatar, while a user named Terry would be provided with a boy avatar. The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat, who as a result will be assigned a 'generic, genderless human figure image as his or her avatar.' Way to honor that significant-technical-content patent pledge, Big Blue!"

English names only?

[NotQuiteReal (608241)]

What about odd spellings?

Re:

[catch23 (97972)]

Yeah, what about Xie Hua? Is Xie a male or female?

Re:English names only?

[amRadioHed (463061)]

Xie would be the last name. Unless you mean is Xie Hua male or female. Either way, Hua sounds feminine to me.

Re:English names only?

[camperdave (969942)]

Either way, Hua sounds feminine to me.

You haven't seen many films about US marines, have you?

Re:English names only?

[catch23 (97972)]

Also I might note that in some cultures, there is less of a male/female oriented names. My sister and I were named off of a variant of the jade stone, which probably has little to do with me being male, or my sister female.

Re:English names only?

[geminidomino (614729)]

A gay furry.

Re:English names only?

[geminidomino (614729)]

Doesn't matter. Anyone who calls himself "Legolas", l33t-crypted or not, deserves a gay furry avatar[0], and I'll stand by that assertion until the day I die.

[0] Unless his parents gave him that name. Then he can be forgiven if he goes Menendez.

Re:English names only?

[b4dc0d3r (1268512)]

Doesn't matter. Anyone who can recognise "Legolas", l33t-crypted like that, deserves a gay furry avatar[0], and I'll stand by that assertion until the day I die.

[0] Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Re:English names only?

[ozamosi (615254)]

My name is Robin, which is basically exclusively male here in Sweden (I've never met any females called Robin, but it's among the top ten most common boys names), which is mostly male in England, and which is mostly female in the US.

Oh, and I run all my software in (US) English.

I'd like to see the software that figures out the gender of all the Robin in the world!

Re:English names only?

[orclevegam (940336)]

Likewise Kyle, which although often male, is occasionally used as a female name. Then there are those that come up with entirely new names, or that use nicknames, or handles to contend with. Yeah, sorry, this sounds like it's utterly useless, you've taken what once was a simple question of "Are you male or female?", and turned it into "Based on your name our software thinks you're X, is this correct?". All they've done is taken a simple question and reworked it so that it makes a potentially embarrassing/insulting/annoying assumption about a person, which then needs to have steps put in place to insure that it's made the correct assumption, all for the sake of avoiding a simple binary question.

RTFP

[The Amazing Fish Boy (863897)]

The whole point of the patent is that it's for cross-cultural communication, not just for English names only. It's not a totally unreasonable idea. It sounds like it looks the user's gender up based on where they are from and what their name is. Odd spellings would likely be classified as unisex, unless there were a general rule for naming conventions (e.g. In North America, names ending in 'i' are likely to be female.) Furthermore, you could build up your 'odd spelling' database by recording the gender people select for themselves.

The example ozamosi posted below [slashdot.org] would be covered fairly well by this patent: Robins in North America would be classified as female, but Robins from Sweden would be classified as male.

My criticism of the invention's effectiveness is that it's not completely fool-proof, and would inevitably assign the wrong gender for people with the spelling typically adopted by the opposite gender. It might be a worse "faux pas" to address a male as female (or vice versa), than to leave assumptions of their gender out of the picture. Of course this might vary from culture to culture, and I really don't know about that. It might be more effective to just force the user to input their gender, but this would have to be done on every client, which could be problematic.

Of course, I'm not sure whether we should be assisting the enforcement of "societal conventions" based on differences in gender, but that's a different topic from the invention's effectiveness.

By the way, here's the relevant part:

an expansive list of names compiled from those used in many different cultures catalogued according to gender (that is, male, female, or unisex), a list of rules for associating a username not included in the list of names with a particular culture, and a list of rules derived from naming conventions that are employed in many different cultures catalogued culturally, linguistically, nationally, regionally, and/or according to other relevant anthroponomastic criteria.

Re:English names only?

[mackyrae (999347)]

Or my step-mom Terry?

Terry & Terry

[BHS_Turf (8387)]

Both my wife and I are named Terry, and yes, she took my last name. The running joke is that I get all the bills, and she gets all the cheques.

Re:English names only?

[Nasajin (967925)]

I was going to say that Marilyn Manson might get annoyed with the automated gender mixup, but then I realised that he probably wouldn't.

Re:English names only?

[Naturalis Philosopho (1160697)]

Keep reading. It's about tyranny, not taxes. Why do some people find it so hard to distinguish between symptom and disease?

What's worse, is that it's done dumbly

[Cajun Hell (725246)]

It's amazing that they analyze [wikipedia.org] the name so hard. I would just throw a database at the problem. It's inconceivable that IBM doesn't have a shitload of demographic databases around, which already have name-sex pairs. Just select sex, count(*) where name='terry' group by sex. If the ratio is overwhelming in one direction, choose that, and if the margin of error is too high (and I'd set that pretty low to avoid pissing off Miss Pat), pick neutral. That would work with any language, too (assuming IBM has a database for that culture).

Wouldn't it be easier.....

[Yuan-Lung (582630)]

...to just ASK the user during the sign up?

Are you [ ]Male [ ]Female

Would you like to use a avatar that is
[ ] Male
[ ] Female
[ ] Generic Genderless
[ ] Tentacle Monster
[ ] Cowboyneal

Why not just ASK?!?

[Locke2005 (849178)]

My friends Gail and Carol might have a problem with this method, since both of them are male... Sam and Mel might have problem too, since Sam is short for Samantha and Mel is short for Melonie.
I prefer the solution used in the interactive game "Leather Goddesses of Phobos": at the start of the game, you have a sudden urge to use the restroom. Your gender for the rest of the game depends on which restroom door you choose.
Really, I think arbitrarily guessing people's gender is just going to alienate them when you guess wrong.

Re:So, what did they decide for...

[Nerdfest (867930)]

Oh deer ... we never thought of that.

Re:So, what did they decide for...

[by Anonymous Coward]

D'oe

Not even that.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

When ever you try to assign gender on anything except the Chromosomes it will fail.

Actually it fails pretty spectacularly when you try to determine it based on chromosomes, too. There are XY women with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), and both XXY and XYY men. In many cases, especially those of AIS, they may go their whole lives without knowing that their chromosomes convey something different than their sex organs.

And using sex organs starts to fail as well when you get into intersexed and transgendered people; someone's sex organs may not match the gender they 'pass' as in social contexts, or that they prefer to be treated as.

It is anything but a black and white issue.

Re:Not even that.

[shermo (1284310)]

I always thought it was a black and white issue.

You simply refer to people how they want you to refer to them.

Re:Have to post anon here

[Dzimas (547818)]

All names are made up, when you get right down to it. We have traditionally used a fairly small set of Anglicized names in North America, but that's changing. There are lots of kids of all colors with some fairly creative (and occasionally bizarre) names. The most popular male baby names in the USA include Jaxon, Jaden and Xander. Popular girl's names include Alyssa, Ashlyn and Caitlyn. These are hardly traditional. Common "Afro-American" names are merely an evolving sub-set of modern names. Most importantly, many follow fairly predictable patterns... Jada, Tierra and Imani have a and i endings, denoting female. Darnell and Darius have masculine endings, and names starting in De (as in DeShaw) are male while La denotes female (LaToya).

Re:Standard Behaviour

[nine-times (778537)]

Geeze, here we go again. Listen, patenting stupid crap isn't evil. *Suing* other people for your stupid crap patents is evil. Countersuing other people for violating your stupid crap patents after they've sued you for violating their stupid crap patents is simply a business reality these days.

Big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Novell have to patent any little thing that floats into their heads that the patent office will let them patent. They all do it, and the purpose is mostly for the sake of maintaining a defensive-patent war chest to keep the other big companies at bay with mutually assured destruction.

Start complaining about them being evil when they sue someone.

Re:No one uses boring avatar names

[dfm3 (830843)]

Even then, assigning a male avatar is probably still a safe bet.