Telling gender from Facebook posts

Researchers have found that it is possible to predict gender and age purely from Facebook status messages. A September 2013 study published in research journal Plos One says that there are clear differences in the way males and females use language in social media. Age and location can also affect the choice of words, researchers said in the report, titled Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach.

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Females are more likely to describe emotions with words like "love", "wonderful", "excited", and use "I" while males are more likely to swear, talk about electronic games and sports, said researchers H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes Eichstaedt, Margaret Kern, Lukasz Dziurzynski, Stephanie Ramones, Megha Agrawal, Achal Shah, Michael Kosinski,  David Stillwell, Martin Seligman, and Lyle Ungar, all from the University of Pennsylvania except Kosinski, who is from the University of Cambridge. 
 
Word clouds created by researchers show that feminine status messages are about being excited about tomorrow, how cute puppies and babies are, feelings about the other half, or concerning family members. The masculine ones are about battles, football, Xbox, and the government. 

Areas to be explored further include investigating whether emotionally stable individuals indeed spend time writing about enjoyable social activities that may foster greater emotional stability, such as ‘sports’, ‘vacation’, ‘beach’, team’, or if introverts are actually interested in Japanese media as indicated by the research, ‘anime’, ‘manga’, ‘japanese’, and Japanese style emoticons: ˆ_ˆ predominating. 

The researchers used approximately 19 million Facebook status updates written by 136,000 participants that had been shared as part of  voluntary permission given through the My Personality application. The actual users studied had to use English as a primary language, have written at least 1,000 words in their status updates, and under 65 years old. This resulted in 74,941 volunteers, and 309 million words across 15.4 million status updates studied. 
  
The full study can be viewed here.

Install a treadmill at your desk to get more productive

A study published in research journal Plos One in February has shown that walking on a treadmill at your desk may make you more productive than if you are at a standard desk and chair arrangement. 

Source: Plos One

Authors of "Treadmill Workstations: The Effects of Walking while Working on Physical Activity and Work Performance" Avner Ben-Ner and Chimnay Manohar from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Darla Hamann from the School of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Texas-Arlington, and Gabriel Koepp and James Levine from the Obesity Solutions department, Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University, conducted an experiment at a financial services company over 12 months to study how the availability of treadmill workstations would affect physical activity and work performance of employees. 

Half of a group of sedentary volunteers received treadmill workstations during the first two months of the study and the rest in the seventh month of the study. They could walk on the treadmills at speeds of 0 to 2 mph (0 to 3.2 km per hour), if they wished, in place of a chair-desk arrangement. 

According to weekly online performance surveys from participants, their supervisors, as well as sedentary colleagues, overall work performance, quality and quantity of performance, and interactions with co-workers all improved as a result of the treadmill workstations. Specifically, the treadmill workstation led to about 77 fewer sedentary minutes per day, out of about 600 ‘discretionary’ minutes for non-sedentary activity, including approximately 500 minutes at work during a weekday. This accounted for an increase in total average daily activity caloric expenditure of more than 74 calories. 

Management will wonder if participants did less work as a result of walking on the treadmill, but the researchers say no. Both participants and supervisors rated the volunteers as more productive over time, especially after "an early decline in performance" as participants had to learn how to handle walking on the treadmill while working on various tasks. 

The researchers caution that while the volunteers have been found to be similar to their colleagues, they might have been motivated to be more active in the first place. They also suggested that the complexity of the work tasks might also affect the results.