![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n This weeks links are all about love and storytelling (as if there\u2019s a difference). \u00a0First up, a story\u00a0I<\/em> found charming about a geek who decided to datamine his way to OkCupid success<\/a>:<\/p>\n OkCupid\u2019s algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen\u2014more or less at random\u2014had proven unpopular. When he scrolled through his matches, fewer than 100 women would appear above the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in\u00a0a city containing some 2 million women (approximately 80,000 of them on OkCupid). On a site where compatibility equals visibility, he was practically a ghost.<\/p>\n He realized he\u2019d have to boost that number. If, through statistical sampling, McKinlay could ascertain which questions mattered to the kind of women he liked, he could construct a new profile that honestly answered those questions and ignored the rest. He could match every woman in LA who might be right for him, and none that weren\u2019t\u2026<\/p>\n He text-mined the two clusters to learn what interested them; teaching turned out to be a popular topic, so he wrote a bio that emphasized his work as a math professor. The important part, though, would be the survey. He picked out the 500 questions that were most popular with both clusters. He\u2019d already decided he would fill out his answers honestly\u2014he didn\u2019t want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he\u2019d let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You\u2019ll have to read the article yourself to see if his mathematical approach paid off.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Meanwhile, perennial favorite Math With Bad Drawings also cast a wide net recently<\/a>, asking passerby at a math conference to illustrate why they loved math in a single sheet of paper. \u00a0He has 39 images up in his gallery, but this was one of my favorites.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n But perhaps you\u2019re not in love with math. \u00a0Perhaps you find it hard to date and settle down with any academic discipline.<\/p>\n Then you might enjoy this choral rendition of \u201cEvery Major\u2019s Terrible\u201d performed by\u00a0the\u00a0Simon Fraser University Choir<\/a>\u00a0and inspired by this XKCD<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n