Maths is not intrinsically funny. There are no known calculus jokes. You need to take them to a bar after class, then they'd mark you funny.
There are many math jokes. Not funny ones, maybe, but the jokes exist. (What's the cross product of an elephant and a grape?)
There are no known calculus jokes.
It's as though you haven't heard my calculus pick-up line: "I wish I was your derivative, so I could be tangent to your curves."
...those who know binary and those who don't.
...so the bartender says, "come on, guys, know your limits".
...and the mathematician says, "if one more person goes into that building, it will be empty!"
I'M PURPLE AND I COMMUTE
6: Only when I use it on my brother.
I am just a simple Pole in a complex plane.
13: What about "see-through shirt"?
19: Probably the biggest gender skew of any I have tried, which is a lot.
I read something referencing this data last week (at academia.SE calling out a question asker for likely sexism) where "confused" was one of the key words. I was a bit surprised as I thought the stereotype was that women were clearer than men. A little poking showed that "confused", "confusing", and "clear" all skewed female.
"Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender."
"She" and "he" have enormous splits! I'm shocked!
The site won't work on my phone, but I'd be curious if "unhelpful" also skews female. That is men aren't expected to be helpful, but women are and so are separated into helpful and unhelpful.
I wonder what adjective best fits my senior colleague who has been repeatedly emailing me and calling me all weekend to talk about a completely insane idea. (I haven't answered the phone or responded to the email; I'm not sure if writing a dismissive response will provoke more anger than continuing to ignore the messages.)
Hmm. "Insane" skews male in physics but female almost everywhere else. "Crazy" skews female. "Crackpot" is surprisingly mixed. In my experience, almost all crackpots are male.
But evals are such an important part of figuring who is a good teacher!
They should really put error bars on these points. Some of the weirdness of, say, "buxom" or "disingenuous" is surely due to very low statistics.
34.2: Values are occurrence per million words.
Whoa, "cute" is strongly male. I find that pretty surprising. (Physics is the one exception, can't say I find that totally surprising.)
Women in positions of authority are not likely to be described as cute. True fact that I just made up!
"Sexy" is even malier!
It's also fun to find words that are essentially only used for one gender. E.g. "perky."
"Obtuse" is generally a male trait, except among engineers, where it is a radically more common descriptor for women.
To really do some blog science we need similar statistics for women and men not in positions of authority.
Or men and women in positions of actual authority.
"Douche" and "Douchebag" aren't common, but they skew male.
Same with "asshole."
"Ass" is quite common, consistently more for males.
45: No, that makes perfect sense to me. From a college-age population, girls are much more likely to use 'cute' of someone who's not a practically available romantic prospect: actors/other celebrities are 'cute', and professors go in that category. From a college boy, I'd expect 'cute' to be more reserved for someone he might actually date, and evaluation of women who aren't interpersonally available to use either cruder or at least more adult-sounding vocabulary.
(I don't have any data for this, but it sounds right to my ear.
51 and 52: "Ass,nice" appears more often for women.
I guess they didn't try to filter adjectives by what they described? Looking at some of my reviews from last semester lots of adjectives aren't directly describing me "the textbook was an excellent resource," "the homework problems involved unnecessary calculations," ....
"The large-animal anatomy lessons were demonstrated on a nice ass."
Also, I can grab positive words like "vivid" out of my reviews but the context is "could have been more vivid."
Also "nice" in "it would have been nice if...."
Actually, it's pretty amazing how almost all of the negative comments are couched in ways that involve positive adjectives. "It would have been helpful to know," "the homework should have been more well-crafted," "the professor who taught this the previous semester was great, unlike this time," that kind of thing.
I once compared a TA to George Washington because I was bored and I liked the guy compared to the asshole TA from the other section who subbed once.
52
I just wanted to agree with 52. Cute is used to describe an aspirational crush for young women but not generally for young men. An older attractive women with authority over the crush-haver would be hot or something else.
In my student evaluations, I got described as "sweet" by more than one student. The patronizing + gendered element really annoyed me, especially because I am not a particularly sweet person, and I don't think I was sweet to my students.
I looked up my dad on Rate My Professor once.
Come to think of it, I looked up my dad on there once as well. IIRC there were two reviews, one positive and one negative. Not very enlightening.
I just went and looked up my dad. Lots of "brilliant guy but he expects undergrads to think like grad students." A decent Looney Tunes comparison. But nothing as good as my dad's own reports of his evaluations, on which a student once wrote, "I think he should go live in vector space."
I think they were mostly positive. The truth is I've looked up a bunch of my friends on there and it was sort of amusing at the time but I don't really remember what the reviews were like.
I think the one saying Lee looks like Grace Jones is no longer up there, but I suppose that probably skews female.
I just checked again and my dad had 7 ratings, most of which were very positive. I'm not sure if I was just misremembering or if had checked at a time when there were fewer and the balance was more mixed. In any case, this does make me feel good since "good teacher" is an important part of my memory of him.
I once compared a TA to George Washington
"[TA] makes his class row across icy rivers in dangerously overloaded small boats. Also, he makes them camp outdoors in freezing weather for weeks. When they go home in protest, he has them shot."
"the homework problems involved unnecessary calculation
Are any professors actually described as "unnecessary"?
62: Yes. That one struck me; very skewed.
OT: If a local newspaper forgot to renew its domain name, can just anybody go register it? Asking for a friend who noticed the Trib loaded funny this morning.
OT: If a local newspaper forgot to renew its domain name, can just anybody go register it? Asking for a friend who noticed the Trib loaded funny this morning.
Pretty much, though they might run into trademark issues.
And if I ask for a basket of money to give the domain back, all of a sudden I'm the bad guy?
I don't like him that much. Maybe acquaintance.
38. The first thing I looked at was "crazy." Average is female-skewed, yes, but a) fine arts is off the hook, and b) men are crazier than women in economics and hard sciences. Men are also "hot" more often than women in lots of fields.
Check out "creepy", especially with respect to the fine arts.
skews female
New experience at a party: hearing one friend misgender another, not knowing quite what the hell to do about that.
I misgendered a student once on the second day of class. I thought he was an adorable baby butch, but I was wrong. Anyway, he was grace itself and corrected me immediately, clearly, and so pleasantly I wasn't even able to stay mortified.
...the third statistician yells "we got 'im!"