Several MIT students have created quite a project for their class on "ethics and law on the electronic frontier" [ed note: Does no one take Modern British Poetry in college anymore?]. According to the Boston Globe:
Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.
Even their professor, a computer scientist, was amazed. The project, which was done in 2007 and dubbed "gaydar" by the class, has yet to be published in a scientific ...
