Re: OT: Billboards That Look Back

Maria C. wrote:
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by - their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.===end quote

Very interesting, especially the part about the gender of the billboard "user."

A friend of mine once helped to develop software for a computerized dating company, and their research found huge differences in the gender of the users (who would browse through the database looking for boyfriends and girlfriends). The final system presented diametrically opposite user interfaces for each gender.

To log in, you had to create your own profile first, so the gender of each login user was known.

Women would log in and see a user interface that flipped though pages showing the raw data of the men: age, education, occupation, income, prior marital status, etc. At the bottom of each page was a button labeled "Show photo."

Men would log in, but their user interface simply flipped through photos of women. At the bottom of each page was a button labeled "Show data."

Apparently each gender has its own sequence of filters when sorting through information. And in fact (to bring this thread back to a.u.e.) when I was in college it seemed as if women professors and men professors gave me different types of comments on my English essays, perhaps because different filter sequences were kicking in while they read my dry writing.

dleifker





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