Online Dating for Scientists

http://dating.newscientist.com/

by BerislavLopac • 14 years ago

65 49 14 years ago

dating.newscientist.com

Only a matter of time before such a service sprung up. Nice to see News Scientist take this up though "The Dating Lab" seems to be behind the implementation [0].

[0] http://www.thedatinglab.com/

biot• 14 years ago

It seems to have sprung up a while ago. I found a profile there which was last modified in 2007.

cing• 14 years ago

Title is a little misleading, as far as I can tell there are no aspect of this site that verify the users are scientists at all. If only there was a dating site that did, that let me filter my potential mates by how prestigious an institution they got their PhD from =)

SilasX• 14 years ago

It filters by whether or not you want to date a scientist ... should be sufficient.

BadDesign• 14 years ago

And from what I see the profiles are public ? i.e. anyone on the Web can search the site without an account? Privacy please...

stefantalpalaru• 14 years ago

Are the profiles peer reviewed? Joking aside, one of the featured profiles is for someone who thinks "American" is a language.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> "American" is a language.

"American" covers a number of very distinct varieties of English. It isn't considered its own language for political and cultural reasons, not necessarily linguistic ones. (As another example, look at the divide between Hindi and Urdu.)

kylebgorman• 14 years ago

There is no legitimate linguistic authority that recognizes a language or dialect called "American". Even the term "General American", used to discuss features shared by most forms of American English requires "scare-quotes" to indicate that it's an abstraction across many different dialects.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

By the "standard" of mutual intelligibility you could cook up a much more compelling case for AAVE as a separate language from English than American English from British English. I get that you're playing devil's advocate, but seriously.

berlinbrown• 14 years ago

Spoken like a true scientist.

NanoWar• 14 years ago

Pro tip from them: "Lose your heart, NOT your cash" ;)

Wonder how the male/female percentages on those platform are...

frozenport• 14 years ago

Probably better than EE, where it is +infinity.

troymc• 14 years ago

When I Google "dating website for scientists" my first search result is Science Connection. They advertise in Scientific American and probably other places too. If you go to their website:

http://www.sciconnect.com/index.htm

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

this page [1] seems to suggest that the service predates 1997 by a good number of years.

[1] http://www.sciconnect.com/staff.shtml

Turing_Machine• 14 years ago

I remember them running print ads in Scientific American back in the 80s (if not them, an organization with a very similar logo of two lab mice).

pud• 14 years ago

Whois tells me it's a white-labeled "launch your own dating site!" site from http://datinglab.net/

treyp• 14 years ago

so does the footer

triplesec• 14 years ago

and they're all guys

michaelpinto• 14 years ago

I just want to warn you gold diggers that scientists tend to be very underpaid given their high levels of education.

derleth2• 14 years ago

Don't call them 'gold diggers', just mention that they're uninterested in people unable to financially provide for them.

It's a perfectly valid concern in this wintry economic climate.

rayiner4• 14 years ago

Interestingly, I think my science/engineer friends are behind the curve when it comes to online dating. I guess they're over sensitive about the stigma, but I think it's misplaced. A lot of my single female friends have OKcupid accounts and use them. It's a great alternative to the bar scene for women. No sweaty drunk guys harassing you.

Also: shared interest forums are a great place to meet people. My wife and I posted on the same law forum before we ran into each other in person.

Also, and this is unrelated but I have to share since I'm too married for it to be useful to me: if you're in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art on their gallery nights.

gonehome• 14 years ago

Works great for women, but poorly for men.

Women sign up, immediately get hundreds of messages - choose one and go on a date. Men sign up, send out a few messages and nothing happens.

rayiner4• 14 years ago

Which is why you send out hundreds of messages. Like job searching (well, job searching outside the bubble that is software development at the moment), the trick is volume.

Also, if you're sending out a ton of messages and still getting no bites, then you're probably pricing yourself too high. Aim lower and see if you get any bites. OKCupid isn't really that gender imbalanced (at least compared to the typical science/engineering circles) so most guys should be able to get some responses, statistically speaking.

nessus423• 14 years ago

I'm a guy and I've gone on a couple dozen dates from online dating sites over the years and met six of my past girlfriends this way. All of these dates came from women who wrote to me.

Cultivate interests that appeal to women, write an interesting profile, and put up a nice photo and the women will come to you. (I'm no Calvin Klein model, by the way.)

brandnewlow• 14 years ago

This man speaks truth about the MCA gallery nights. The Friday night events at the Art Institute and the Jazz nights in the summer at the Aquarium are also great date destinations.

ucee054• 14 years ago

So what's the best dating method for us sweaty, drunk guys?

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Is computer science science?

31reasons2• 14 years ago

Computer Science is Science as much as Math is.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

So no.

31reasons2• 14 years ago

OKCupid found through their data that online dating is highly racist. I am wondering how the online dating for scientists would look!

Jach• 14 years ago

How did they define racist? Besides the weak tendency to date someone your own race, there's also not a lot of variation from among those with doctorates in the first place: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tab7-7.pdf (Though there are a lot of temporary residents: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tab7-4.pdf)

mkhattab• 14 years ago

Do you mean that most people are highly selective about the race of their potential mate? If this is the case, I don't think that this is racist. Besides, scientists are humans too, I doubt there would be much of a difference.

potatolicious2• 14 years ago

How isn't that racist?

Racism doesn't need to involve blathering idiots who want to burn your house down, all it takes is someone to treat another person worse because of their race.

Which is to say, we're all at least a little bit racist. One of the greatest lies of modern society is that racism is somehow exceptional, or intrinsic to a character, when it is in fact highly contextual and can be brought out of anyone.

Race in dating is very heavily influenced by popular perceptions of particular races, including stereotypes - that someone won't give a black person the time of day even if they are articulate and hit other criteria is racist, though the fault here seems to lie more with society than the individual.

cupcake-unicorn• 14 years ago

I think of it this way: It's just as racist as how straight/gay people are sexist :) Physical attraction to someone is a whole different thing.

VSerge• 14 years ago

dating limited to any given group of people is just so backward it's amazing they'd try it for scientists. If you're university educated and are dumb enough to think only other university graduates are educated, you'll disregard lots of great people that have learned by say, reading on their own, and would also have a lot to offer. Reinforcing these artificial boundaries is just absurd.

urbionic• 14 years ago

Previous employee of Dating lab here, some info you guys might like: All in-house dev done on linux, content and profile vetting is taken very seriously, there is a dedicated team making sure no one get's scammed and profiles are real people. There is checks and balances to prevent on-line stalking also. The two-way match algorithm is also pretty beefy and rather impressive. A few of my friends are married to partners they met on one of the datinglab network sites, a few employees also. These guys have been in the business a while, they know what they are doing.

nautical• 14 years ago

Finally a place for sheldon cooper .. :)

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