IBM's Teri-is-a-Girl-and-Terry-is-a-Boy Patent 277
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, what about Xie Hua? Is Xie a male or female?
Re:English names only? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
You haven't seen many films about US marines, have you?
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I was thinking "whore" with a thick, New Jersey accent. See also The Sopranos.
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Why would Xie be the last name? I know someone by this name, and Hua happens to be the family name (I'm Chinese btw). I also know someone by the name of Xie Chen. (obviously Chen is the last name here). In the first case, Xie Hua is a guy, in the second case, Xie Chen is a girl.
Re:English names only? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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um, in the U.S. last name is synonymous with family name. that's just because of western name order conventions.
when someone says last name they aren't talking about the last word in your name. otherwise appending a Sr., Jr., II, III, etc. to your name would change your last name. but that's not how it works.
obviously if a Chinese American were to fill out their name in a legal document they would write their family name as their last name, and probably write their name using a western name order. and if a
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A Chinese name would have the family name first as you obviously know, and so I was making the assumption that the proper name order was being used. In that case the name would have to be either a family name of Xie and a given name Hua, or it could be a two character given name "Xie Hua". Either way the rather feminine Hua would be in the given name.
Of course if the the poster was using western name order and Hua was the family name then yeah, I wouldn't attempt to guess the gender of the person. Xie seems
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Contrary to popular rumour, and "a" ending on a name isn't necessarily feminine in all societies.
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The sound of the name has nothing to do with it. As ChameleonDave points out, it is usually considered a feminine name in Mandarin because it can mean flower.
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Heh, I just noticed you were the original poster, so I guess we can assume that the western name order was intended.
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Better question, what kind of avatar would xx13g0l4zxx get?
Re:English names only? (Score:5, Funny)
A gay furry.
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The application says "anthroponomastic", not "anthropomorphic"! Get it right!
Re:English names only? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:English names only? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:English names only? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or the character Theresa "Terry" Dolittle from the movie Jumpin' Jack Flash?
Terry & Terry (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think Brian would be too upset.
Re:English names only? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: New Names (Score:2)
Yeah, what about all those Dion/Dionne pairs? (Male/Female).
However, 70% of names with "sh" in the last syllable and 4 vowels are female. (Laetisha, I'm lookin' at you honey!)
It's to help you guess others' genders (Score:2)
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to. So instead of you thinking, "I wonder if this person is male or female?" it suggests: "Kyle is from North America and this is usually a boy's name." Of course, "Kyle" is a bad exampl
I should have been born in Sweden or England (Score:2)
I'd like to see bureaucracies and creditors here in the US that could remember that I'm a Mr Robin and not a Ms. I was born during WW II and named after Robin Olds, an ace pilot, so it's not as if I haven't been here a while.
A lovely little clerk once teasingly asked me if I was sure I was male. An offer to have a look at my genitals was declined (dammit!) but she was a good sport.
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Also what is this bit about a "database storing anthroponomastic information to perform the anthroponomastic analysis of the username of the first user to determine the probable gender" Is that a table of known names vs gender stats based on public records? Or is it name fragments and endings matched to probability of gender? For example
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Reminds me of a little project I did for one of my CS classes: try to predict nationality by last name. Was going along the same lines, take names, enclose in, say, $ and ^ (to mark beginning and end), then chop into up to 5 or so character blocks and accumulate frequencies of different blocks by nationality (learning data pulled from different countries universities phonebooks).
Worked surprisingly well too...
Paul B.
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aside from algorithms being non-patentable, you would need a different algorithm for every culture. also, many cultures don't have strict rules for assigning genders to words/names. language is already pretty idiomatic, but names are even more so. a database of common first names would be simpler to implement.
either way, they shouldn't have been granted a patent on such an obvious/trivial non-invention. this doesn't contribute anything to the body of human knowledge shared by our society. it's like patentin
RTFP (Score:4, Informative)
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:
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Boston Tea Party ring a bell ?
Re:English names only? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Off the top of my head, unisex names of people I have known from France or Quebec: Jean, Jolie, Jules, Michele, Noel, Patrice, Rene, Sacha, and Sidney.
I know a Terry... (Score:3, Informative)
who is going to be very irritated when it's assumed she's a boy.
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Yet I imagine that mistake is still preferable to calling her generic and genderless.
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And I have an ex-girlfriend who goes by "Mel" (real name Amelia) who's probably also going to be annoyed at being mis-identified.
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I have a friend named Melanie who is known as "Mel", and I suspect that she'd just think it funny if a computer decided she's male.
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Or Mel Gibson (actor/fruitcake), or Mel Martinez (US Senator), or...
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Strange (Score:2, Informative)
The filing date is February 28, 2008.
The only way a patent gets through that quick is 'Accelerated Examination' (decision in 1 year or less).
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Apparently IBM is in a big hurry to start offending people by misrepresenting their genders.
Standard Behaviour (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standard Behaviour (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If a company wanted to do assign avatar gender based on name in a program, the safe route for them is to avoid it altogether, rather than give IBM the opportunity to sue. But in this case, it's something incredibly obvious and someone else could have come up with independently (and probably did).
As of today, the situation is that a company like Microsoft with plenty of its own patents can afford to risk it, or easily convince IBM to let them license this for free. A startup does not have that luxury.
Patenti
Stymied by "Pat", eh? (Score:2)
What, do they watch old Saturday Night Live episodes [wikipedia.org]? ..bruce..
So, what did they decide for... (Score:3, Informative)
It's commonly thought of, and used, as a girl's name, but in one of its most famous uses (the movie) it's a male name.
Re:So, what did they decide for... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, what did they decide for... (Score:5, Funny)
D'oe
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They'll get the stripper Avatar~
No one uses boring avatar names (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me a break, no one uses names like "Jill" and "Steve" for their avatars! They use names like xXDeath_StalkerXx and KillMurder_415 and awesome stuff like that. This patent ain't worth a case of Bawls.
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Re:No one uses boring avatar names (Score:5, Funny)
Even then, assigning a male avatar is probably still a safe bet.
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They only use names like that because "Jill" and "Steve" were taken a LONG time ago.
Jill31923913 and Steve12384238432 @aol would tend to disagree with you... :-)
Pub Pat (Score:2)
I know A guy (Score:2)
with the first name Tracy. I wonder what they assign him?
This is just trouble waiting to happen. When ever you try to assign gender on anything except the Chromosomes it will fail.
Not even that. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
I always thought it was a black and white issue.
You simply refer to people how they want you to refer to them.
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Screw the prior art argument - just bring this guy along to explain that it simply won't work so why bother. Instant retraction.
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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.
I agree it's difficult to assign a gender (if you only allow male, female) to an XY woman with AIS since you have external female appears with internal undescended testic
Hmm (Score:2)
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Maybe they'd assume it was a typo of Ving Rhames, in which case you'd get a nice suit, some wire-framed dark sunglasses, and an air of awesomeness onscreen.
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Maybe they'd assume it was a typo of Ving Rhames, in which case you'd get a nice suit, some wire-framed dark sunglasses, and an air of awesomeness onscreen.
Or an appropriately small, pixelated version of a certain scene from Pulp Fiction. Possibly resized and resampled by (wait for it)....
Bringing out the GIMP!
Explanation required for this sh#t (Score:2)
i wouldnt even want to think that ibm thinks they are above us. im looking forward to someone explaining the bullshit going on with those patents either openly, or anonymously here.
Leslie, Tracy, Sam? (Score:3, Interesting)
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> I wonder where that leaves, Leslie Nielson, Tracy Lawrence, Charlie Dore, Alex McKenna, and the like.
With Michael Learned (Mrs. Walton from "The Waltons" series, for those forgetting).
BTW, as I read the patent, one of the rules make "Penny" a man's name, as well :-)
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Not to mention Sean Young and Stacy Keach
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Some call it innovation (Score:2)
I call it worthless.
What's That? It's Pat. (Score:2)
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.'
Congratulations! It's a patent!
What's worse, is that it's done dumbly (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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You can also quite easily take into account ethnicity.
"Jean", American. FEMALE
"Jean", French. MALE
You can also quite easily take into account age.
"Sam", 12 years old. GENEREIC
"Sam", 56 years old. MALE
You can also quite easily take into account surnames.
"Mary Valentine" FEMALE
"Merry Brandibuck" MALE
You can also quite easily take into account titles and suffixes.
"Princess Shackba" FEMALE
"Tam Jr." MALE
If you've got the data, add in known pseudonyms, or middle names.
"Chris" AKA "Christopher
I dare you.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Superman.
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Batman.
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He-Man.
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I dunno, but in my experience, I've never met a girl named Jeff, Thomas, or Richard. Still, some parents go out of their way to ruin their children's lives with bad names. On the same vein, I've never met a man named Betty, Julia, or Karen. You might be able to stretch the point by going cross-cultural. Their very well might be names from other parts of the world which sound similar to common North American/European names, but which are gender neutral or gender-reversed from their American/European counterp
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I wonder what the origin of that difference is?
American girls keep stealing boys' names. No, seriously. Check out chapter 6 of Freakonomics [wikipedia.org].
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YRO? (Score:2)
How is this about "rights"? Especially since the patent claims that the user can override the selection, later?
If you ask me, this belongs in Idle
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You insensitive clod! (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be easier..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you [ ]Male [ ]Female
Would you like to use a avatar that is
[ ] Male
[ ] Female
[ ] Generic Genderless
[ ] Tentacle Monster
[ ] Cowboyneal
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Exactly!
Or, leave it .... you know .... BLANK! (is that the cowboyneal choice?)
I wonder (Score:2)
Would that software return an appropriate avatar for ssj4chan?
And because I don't know if I want to be modded funny or interesting.
Would it return a brown skinned guy I say Raul? what about Abdul, Cole or Hiro? Do I smell a lawsuit?
Why not just ASK?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Your mother is so Terry, IBM thought she was a man!
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Anyone who implemented this would probably be smart enough to let you change the avatar during the sign-up process. This is a way to placate the ladies who get all upset that the systems tend to default to male avatars which is slightly more accurate than randomly assigning one or the other. A checkbox before the avatar default is chosen I'd think would be even more accurate, though.
Re:Have to post anon here (Score:4, Interesting)