“Data mining the heart” from the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section:

The dating website OKCupid has begun publishing statistics about its users’ behavior on its blog, and using the numbers to generate real-world advice. For example: Men get more responses from women if they don’t smile in their profile pictures, and women find most men below average in attractiveness — but write to them anyway. More recently, the site has begun inviting collaboration with academics to do more thorough studies with the data. And in the past few years, several other researchers used data from other online dating and speed dating companies to uncover insights into what makes men and women actually respond to each other.