Thursday, July 31, 2014
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Anger as top dating site admits setting up ‘unsuitable’ couples as experiment by SCoTT d’arCy A DATING website has admitted ‘experimenting’ on unsuspecting loveseekers by setting them up with ‘bad matches’ to test its technology. New York-based site OkCupid, which has 30million worldwide users, including Irish subscribers, made the admission on its OkTrends blog. It provoked a backlash online and comes after Facebook conducted similar psychological experiments along with two US universities. In the blog, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder claimed experiments
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No way, Cupid
were necessary to test the site’s ability to match potential partners. He said: ‘Guess what, everybody – if you use the internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments on every site. That’s how websites work.’ The site, which is free to join, asks users to answer a series of questions and uses algorithms to match them to others, providing the result as a percentage. In one experiment, users who were a
bad match at 30 per cent were told they would be good for each other – a 90 per cent match – and resulted in those couples making contact more often. Mr Rudder said: ‘When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are even when they should be wrong for each other.’ In the comment section on the blog, Jeff Trigger said: ‘People signed up expecting you all to be truthful.
You weren’t. It’s not funny. If you want to perform science experiments, go to school.’ Sheri Young added: ‘Guess you’ve lost some credibility.’ Bernie Hogan, chairman of the ethics review board at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, said: ‘Some users are being exploited.’ OkCupid, which launched in 2004, also owns dating site Match.com and the Tinder mobile app.
Keep Dublin tidy – Please recycle this Metro Herald when you are finished with it
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‘Wake up to threat of ebola’ A DOCTOR returning from an ebola danger zone has urged the world to wake up to the growing threat after risking his life working 24-hour hospital shifts trying to save pregnant women struck down by the disease. Benjamin Black, who gave up his public service job to volunteer in Sierra Leone, said doctors were struggling to cope with the overwhelming pressure. Mr Black, pictured above in his protective suit, said one of his first patients was a pregnant woman complaining of severe bleeding and fever after helping prepare bodies of ebola victims for a funeral. Later, after he performed an emergency hysterectomy on
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