Matthew Botos

I had a fairly smooth trip down to Florida for a work conference yesterday, despite the attempts of some yahoos to dump half their load of hay bales on the Schuylkill. The flight mostly stuck to the coast, offering views of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge - Tunnel and a number of beach towns.

The Shingle Creek is quite a nice hotel, and also quite large. One of those odd things about Orlando is how much land seems to be available; this place is massive, yet sits nicely isolated while still being within 15 minutes of the big parks.

Taking advantage of that, after a swim I grabbed a bite to eat at Wolfgang Puck’s in Downtown Disney before wandering over to the House of Blues. As luck would have it, Chevelle was playing, so I caught them in concert. They put on a good show, and there was plenty of people-watching to boot.

I took plenty of photos, of course: Orlando, Seaworld, conference.

I stumbled across another interesting academic paper on dating and mate preferences: HurryDate: Mate preferences in action from the University of Pennsylvania. They looked at about 10,000 speed daters and report:

Our main findings are that (1) HurryDate interactions are driven primarily by generally agreed-upon mate values and less by niche-based or assortative patterns, (2) the agreed-upon mate values for both men and women derive almost exclusively from physically observable attributes like attractiveness, BMI, height, and age and are not substantially related to harder-to-observe attributes such as education, religion, sociosexuality, having children, or desiring future children, and (3) small positive assortative trends arise in the areas of race and height.

I’m a little suspect of the self-reported data they relied on, though the bell curve on some of the parameters makes sense. It’s also interesting to see where the averages fall and the differences between sexes, including that women want more kids. They also confirmed at least one stereotype, albeit in rather dry academic language:

These results indicate that, while men generally chose thinner women, previously married men and African - American men had reduced tendencies to do so.

Someone needs to send these poor grad students some Sir Mix Alot!

They also noted a interesting self-awareness:

Our results also suggest that men and women are both aware that they are in a market and know, to some degree, how to respond to market forces. Both women and men decreased their selectivity to the extent that they were less desirable and, specifically, to the extent that they had a less desirable BMI. Heavier women said yes to a relatively high proportion of potential dates, as did men who were either heavy or very thin. Men appeared to attempt to compensate somewhat for having a less attractive face, but not at all for being older or shorter.

No earth-shattering revelations; my big take away here is to wonder if my all too intensive experience with both statistics and dating would give me advance standing in their PhD program.

One of my favorite quotes about dating is “if the right person for you is one a million, how many people do you have to meet before you find them?” Well, I noticed today that I’m up to 954 “closed” matches on eHarmony after various stints, so my odds are improving Though it doesn’t say much for Dr. Neil’s 29 dimensions of compatibility that for as many dates came from his matches, only one made it to an actual relationship…