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Success Stories - Telegraph Dating members share their experiences
I found her. Thank you.
Emma, 2014-06-27
Thank you. I have found a wonderful man.
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Online dating service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Online dating ( OD ) or Internet dating is a personal introductory system whereby individuals can find and contact each other over the Internet to arrange a date. usually with the objective of developing a personal, romantic, or sexual relationship. Online dating services usually provide unmoderated matchmaking over the Internet. through the use of personal computers or cell phones. Users of an online dating service would usually provide personal information, to enable them to search the service provider's database for other individuals. Members use criteria other members set, such as age range, gender and location.
Online dating sites use market metaphors to match people. Match Metaphors are conceptual frameworks that allow individuals to make sense of new concepts by drawing upon familiar experiences and frame-works. This metaphor of the marketplace – a place where people go to “shop” for potential romantic partners and to “sell” themselves in hopes of creating a successful romantic relationship – is highlighted by the layout and functionality of online dating websites. The marketplace metaphor may also resonate with participants’ conceptual orientation towards the process of? nding a romantic partner. [ 1 ] Most sites allow members to upload photos or videos of themselves and browse the photos and videos of others. Sites may offer additional services, such as webcasts. online chat. telephone chat (VOIP ), and message boards. Some sites provide free registration, but may offer services which require a monthly fee. Other sites depend on advertising for their revenue. Some sites such as OKCupid, Plenty of Fish and Badoo are free and offer additional paid services in a freemium revenue model. [ 2 ]
Some sites are broad-based, with members coming from a variety of backgrounds looking for different types of relationships. Other sites are more specific, based on the type of members, interests, location, or relationship desired. A 2005 study of data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that individuals are more likely to use an online dating service if they use the internet for a greater amount of tasks and less likely to use such a service if they are trusting of others. [ 3 ]
How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
Mathematician Chris McKinlay hacked OKCupid to find the girl of his dreams. Emily Shur
Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morning, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.
McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match. com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. He’d sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid’s algorithms. Most were ignored; he’d gone on a total of six first dates.
On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.
OkCupid was founded by Harvard math majors in 2004, and it first caught daters’ attention because of its computational approach to matchmaking. Members answer droves of multiple-choice survey questions on everything from politics, religion, and family to love, sex, and smartphones.
On average, respondents select 350 questions from a pool of thousands—“Which of the following is most likely to draw you to a movie?” or “How important is religion/God in your life?” For each, the user records an answer, specifies which responses they’d find acceptable in a mate, and rates how important the question is to them on a five-point scale from “irrelevant” to “mandatory.” OkCupid’s matching engine uses that data to calculate a couple’s compatibility. The closer to 100 percent—mathematical soul mate—the better.
But mathematically, McKinlay’s compatibility with women in Los Angeles was abysmal. OkCupid’s algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen—more or less at random—had proven unpopular. When he scrolled through his matches, fewer than 100 women would appear above the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in a 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.
He realized he’d 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’t.
Chris McKinlay used Python scripts to riffle through hundreds of OkCupid survey questions. He then sorted female daters into seven clusters, like “Diverse” and “Mindful,” each with distinct characteristics. Maurico Alejo
Even for a mathematician, McKinlay is unusual. Raised in a Boston suburb, he graduated from Middlebury College in 2001 with a degree in Chinese. In August of that year he took a part-time job in New York translating Chinese into English for a company on the 91st floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. The towers fell five weeks later. (McKinlay wasn’t due at the office until 2 o’clock that day. He was asleep when the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 am.) “After that I asked myself what I really wanted to be doing,” he says. A friend at Columbia recruited him into an offshoot of MIT’s famed professional blackjack team, and he spent the next few years bouncing between New York and Las Vegas, counting cards and earning up to $60,000 a year.
The experience kindled his interest in applied math, ultimately inspiring him to earn a master’s and then a PhD in the field. “They were capable of using mathematics in lots of different situations,” he says. “They could see some new game—like Three Card Pai Gow Poker—then go home, write some code, and come up with a strategy to beat it.”
Now he’d do the same for love. First he’d need data. While his dissertation work continued to run on the side, he set up 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a Python script to manage them. The script would search his target demographic (heterosexual and bisexual women between the ages of 25 and 45), visit their pages, and scrape their profiles for every scrap of available information: ethnicity, height, smoker or nonsmoker, astrological sign—“all that crap,” he says.
To find the survey answers, he had to do a bit of extra sleuthing. OkCupid lets users see the responses of others, but only to questions they’ve answered themselves. McKinlay set up his bots to simply answer each question randomly—he wasn’t using the dummy profiles to attract any of the women, so the answers didn’t matter—then scooped the women’s answers into a database.
McKinlay watched with satisfaction as his bots purred along. Then, after about a thousand profiles were collected, he hit his first roadblock. OkCupid has a system in place to prevent exactly this kind of data harvesting: It can spot rapid-fire use easily. One by one, his bots started getting banned.
He would have to train them to act human.
He turned to his friend Sam Torrisi, a neuroscientist who’d recently taught McKinlay music theory in exchange for advanced math lessons. Torrisi was also on OkCupid, and he agreed to install spyware on his computer to monitor his use of the site. With the data in hand, McKinlay programmed his bots to simulate Torrisi’s click-rates and typing speed. He brought in a second computer from home and plugged it into the math department’s broadband line so it could run uninterrupted 24 hours a day.
After three weeks he’d harvested 6 million questions and answers from 20,000 women all over the country. McKinlay’s dissertation was relegated to a side project as he dove into the data. He was already sleeping in his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.
For McKinlay’s plan to work, he’d have to find a pattern in the survey data—a way to roughly group the women according to their similarities. The breakthrough came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First used in 1998 to analyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single, solid glob.
He played with the dial and found a natural resting point where the 20,000 women clumped into seven statistically distinct clusters based on their questions and answers. “I was ecstatic,” he says. “That was the high point of June.”
He retasked his bots to gather another sample: 5,000 women in Los Angeles and San Francisco who’d logged on to OkCupid in the past month. Another pass through K-Modes confirmed that they clustered in a similar way. His statistical sampling had worked.
Now he just had to decide which cluster best suited him. He checked out some profiles from each. One cluster was too young, two were too old, another was too Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists. This was the golden cluster. The haystack in which he’d find his needle. Somewhere within, he’d find true love.
Actually, a neighboring cluster looked pretty cool too—slightly older women who held professional creative jobs, like editors and designers. He decided to go for both. He’d set up two profiles and optimize one for the A group and one for the B group.
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’d already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn’t want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he’d 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.
Best Christian Dating Sites in 2014. How to Pick the Right One for You
There’s a lot of information on the web about the best Christian dating sites . but as Christian singles ourselves, we haven’t found much of it to be truly helpful in our decision-making process. So we figured instead of complaining about it, we’d try to help solve that problem.
Best Christian Dating Sites
We’ve created a comparison chart and detailed resource of the best Christian dating sites. We update it regularly as we get feedback from readers and do further research. Hey, we’re just trying to help a brother or sister out and keep it real. Just doing our part…
But here you are…
So before we go any further, let’s agree that we’re going to accept online dating for what it is: a tool that aids us in the search for Mr. or Miss Right. There’s no shame in using tools.
We’ve searched high and low for reliable information that would guide us to make an informed decision when choosing the best Christian dating sites . and there really aren’t many places that offer information from actual Christians.
We’ve done our fair share of online dating, and we just thought we’d offer our experience and research to those of you who want it. A piggyback ride, perhaps? After all, if we’re still single, we’d at least like to think our money went to something more useful than some awkward first dates.
We plan to update this page as new information arises, so check back often as our reviews of Christian dating sites grow. And if you have anything to contribute to the discussion, we’d love to hear it. Use a pseudonym if you don’t want to use your real name. There’s no shame in that either. We just want to hear your take on any site you’ve had experience with.
DOLLA-DOLLA BILLS, Y’ALL!
Everyone wants to talk about money first. This is evident from our own lives, our conversations with friends, and from the surveys we’ve conducted among online Christian daters.
If you show them the money, will they show you the love?
Money is a big issue.
So let’s talk scratch: Just because a site costs less doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting a good deal. That being said, just because it costs more doesn’t mean you get a better site either.
Many of the seven sites we’ve reviewed offer a free trial membership. While you’re probably not going to fall in love in ten days or less, miracles can happen. And if you want to test-drive a site, a free trial is a good way to go.
But if you’re ready to go all in, you should know that many factors can change the price of subscription to a Christian dating site. Depending on how long you commit, you can easily make the price per month decrease. The average price for a one-month membership on Match, Chemistry. com and Christian Cafe runs close to $35, Christian Mingle is priced for about $30 for a month, and eHarmony will cost you around $60/month.
Suffice it to say: If you’re choosing strictly based on price, then Marry Well is the front-runner at $12 for a one-month subscription. You can get three months for $25 on Marry Well (less than one month on Christian Mingle). They even have an $8 monthly plan for “cash-strapped” college and graduate students and a scholarship program for people involved in ministry.
Christian Cafe
It’s hard to figure out what kind of numbers these sites are pulling in. They’re not too keen on publishing exactly how many active members you’ll have access to.
A recent Christian Mingle’s commercial states that they have gained 2 million members in the past year alone. What does that mean for your search? Well, anyone can create a free profile on the site (or most sites). Just because there are a ton of profiles does not mean that there are that many actively paying members in which to communicate with.
Marry Well is still a new site, and a quick search from a metropolitan area such as Dallas/Fort Worth showed a much smaller selection of profiles than the sites that have been around for years such as eHarmony, Match, Christian Cafe, Chemistry. com, and Christian Mingle.
Here’s what you need to consider: If you live in a small town or rural area and you’re not into long-distance relationships, the number of online dating profiles within your geographical region is already slim. You’ll need to either expand your driving distance or choose one of the sites that boast millions of profiles to choose from.
With the exception of Marry Well, all 5 of the other sites generally include hundreds to thousands of profiles for Christians to choose from that are within a reasonable driving distance (under 2-3 hours). Marry Well has potential, but it might be a bit longer before we can wholeheartedly recommend it for its large membership.
Membership Numbers. SingleRoots Recommends
‘Dating Naked' Star Is Suing Because Everyone Saw Her Naked
In a strange twist of fate, a naked reality star is suing VH1's pants off.
During an episode of the risque reality show "Dating Naked " that aired on July 31, New York model Jessie Nizewitz claims the cable network aired uncensored footage of her privates. Now she's filing a lawsuit against the show for $10 million, and as you can see in the photo of the alleged NSFW editing error. she might have a good case.
As far as the fallout from the show, the reality star says her grandma is giving her the cold shoulder and the man she had been dating (we're assuming regular, mostly-clothed dating) isn't calling her back. In addition, NY Post reports Nizewitz has been heavily mocked online, making her literally the butt of everybody's jokes.
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