Do People Whose Names Begin with “D” Really Die Young?

Smith, Gary

doi:10.1080/07481187.2011.553342

Cited by 20 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…In particular, Abel and Kruger [2] observed that several categories of people whose first name began with 'D' appeared to die earlier than those with other names. This effect did not show up in a larger-scale study [31], and an independent study by Pinzur and Smith [26] concludes that first name and life expectancy are not related.…”

Section: Related Work 21 Names and Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 87%

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

Ye¹,

Skiena²

2019

Preprint

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Your name tells a lot about you: your gender, ethnicity and so on. It has been shown that name embeddings are more effective in representing names than traditional substring features. However, our previous name embedding model is trained on private email data and are not publicly accessible. In this paper, we explore learning name embeddings from public Twitter data. We argue that Twitter embeddings have two key advantages: (i) they can and will be publicly released to support research community. (ii) even with a smaller training corpus, Twitter embeddings achieve similar performances on multiple tasks comparing to email embeddings.As a test case to show the power of name embeddings, we investigate the modeling of lifespans. We find it interesting that adding name embeddings can further improve the performances of models using demographic features, which are traditionally used for lifespan modeling. Through residual analysis, we observe that finegrained groups (potentially reflecting socioeconomic status) are the latent contributing factors encoded in name embeddings. These were previously hidden to demographic models, and may help to enhance the predictive power of a wide class of research studies.

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Section: Related Work 21 Names and Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 87%

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

Ye¹,

Skiena²

2019

Preprint

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2015

Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics

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The AI Delusion

Smith¹

2018

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We live in an incredible period in history. The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are useless in judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think. We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

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Do People Whose Names Begin with “D” Really Die Young?

Cited by 20 publications

References 13 publications

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media

References

The AI Delusion

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