In their paper Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment, Fisman et al. had a bit of fun with a speed dating dataset. Here’s what they found:
Women put greater weight on the intelligence and the race of partner, while men respond more to physical attractiveness. Moreover, men do not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own. Also, we find that women exhibit a preference for men who grew up in afflÂuent neighborhoods. Finally, male selectivity is invariant to group size, while female selectivity is strongly increasing in group size.
The dataset is substantial with over 8,000 observations for answers to twenty something survey questions. With questions like How do you measure up? and What do you look for in the opposite sex?, this dataset is definitely high on human element and should be fun to play with.
[via Statistical Modeling]
Did you hear about the MySpace private photos leak? It is a huge data ethics blunder. There is a torrent file of 17GB in size containing all the pictures as well as an HTML file with the captions and basic statistics (number of pics, number private for each user etc.). Sounds like an interesting dataset…except for the pictures part.