Logic to determine Gender based on FirstName
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It's Pat!!!
--Sorry, as a Saturday Night Live fan I couldn't resist.
Good luck with the project. Personally I am amazed there are commercial tools available for this 'tilting at windmills' type of effort.
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And what does the "genderizing" tool return as the gender for Jagannath? Anyone? Anyone?
There is no "i" in team, but idiot has two. -
There are probably genderization tools out there that WILL force a gender if you ask it to, but most of the programs / list services will mark records with an M, F or A... male, female, ambiguous. Any project you are doing that absolutely positively needs to force a gender has some flawed business logic around it that you might consider changing up.
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i agree that its not possible to get right, but if you give me your email address, I have 2 text files that list the top most often used male names and top most often used female names. Dont know where I got it, or how accurate it is, but it looks pretty good. Seems like it would be waaaay better than what you got, which sounds like nothing.
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I want to be there when you explain to a client that their 5-million name mailing will be a few months late and you're going to charge them for thousands of interns who are going to phone each person on the list to find out if they're male or female (or some variation thereof).
Do you also call TV stations to complain every time an ad comes on for a product you don't use?
The "flawed logic" is assuming every problem has an exact solution.
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Shoot.... in this day an age of supposed equal opportunity, why would you need to know? Might even be against the law if it's for college admissions, for example...
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
Its often useful to get a ratio of m/f in a list to see if it meets you needs (when buying a list that is). I've used the table lookup before and with all the caveats already mentioned it works well and is fast. From a data perspective it's useful to have a 'Dont know' value and then set m/f when you have a personal (in person or phone) contact to confirm.
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There are just too many 'exceptions' or unusual names for something like this to work well. We've only been discussing 'english' names....what about foreign names or made up ones - Dweezle or Moon Zappa come to mind.
-SQLBill
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Or just simple Valery, Alex, etc.
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Code for TallyGenerator -
Dont get too hung up on the exceptions. You're right that it won't work 100%. The question is, is it useful at 90%? At 80%? I see too many solutions thrown out because they won't be 100% (and thus make us IT guys uncomfortable), but it's really a business decision for the business stakeholder. For example, if you could estimate 90% accuracy is it really horrible if 10% of printed mailers have Mr instead of Mrs (or vice versa?). I'd be most people with ambiguous names are kinda used to it being wrong once in a while.
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Whar about Miss, Dr., Snr., Sir end in the end?
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Code for TallyGenerator
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