With dating moving to an online platform, we’re generating lots of data
Q. How much fun can it be to play with baseball statistics? Just ask Yankee Hall of Fame outfielder Mickey Mantle. A. “During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times,” said Mantle, as reported by Zack Hample in his book “Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semiexperts, and Deeply Serious Geeks.” As the Mighty Mick mused, “You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seveb years without ever hitting a ball.” Go figure! Q. Is the “non-equilibrium system of interacting particles” getting to you? You’re not alone. How so? A. That’s physicists’ talk for vehicular traffic, says Gemma Tarlach in “Discover” magazine. “Traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing” (“New Journal of Physics”). It appears that neither construction nor accidents are directly responsible for congestion.
According to the World Health Organization, some 1.25 million people die every year in traffic accidents, half of whom are defined “as vulnerable road users on foot, bicycle or motorcycle.” And traffic pollution was linked to asthma, pulmonary disease, eczema and even food allergies.
Even more vulnerable in sheer numbers are other species, including birds, which worldwide die at a rate of about a quarter of a billion annually. Yet some birds such as roadkill-eating crows are particularly adaptive, interrupting their meal to fly straight up or walk to a different lane as traffic approaches. As to how many land animals are killed annually, no single entity keeps track. But “over a 17-month period, one study documented more than 8,000 fatalities along a 1.1-mile stretch of road in Indiana.” Q. Are you one of the 30 million Americans who met their romantic partner on an online dating site (Pew Research Center)? If so, you’ve helped generate billions of pieces of data, ripe for analysis, including one broad category of “deal breakers.” Can you identify any of them? A. As reported by John Bohannon on “sciencemag.org,” sociologist Elizabeth Bruch and team randomly selected 1,855 people from New York City registered on an “established, marriage-oriented dating site” that produced some 1.1 million interactions (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”). Their initial finding? “When it comes to the early state of dating, it seems to be all about the deal breakers”: Without a photo, both men and women were 20 times less likely to look further. Also, smoking could drop interest some 10-fold. And the biggest deal-breaker was age, for women at least, who were “400 times less likely to browse the profile of a man significantly older than herself.”
However, women in their 40s were 10% more likely to show interest in a man 55-years-old than in one her own age. Not surprisingly, men in their 40s showed more interest in younger women.
Other findings? Women were 10 times more likely to browse the profile of a guy six inches taller, whereas men were about three times more likely to browse hers. Plus, men were less likely to show interest in a heavyset woman, “whereas women showed little aversion to — with some showing even more interest in — heavier-set men.”
Overall, these dealbreakers were less pronounced in the second (messaging) stage of online dating.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Bill is a journalist, Rich holds a doctorate in physics. Together the brothers bring you “Strange But True.” Send your questions to strangetrue@compuserve.com.