12/1/10
The Most Important Invention of the Year

Forget green energy and an iron man suit for the military — the most important invention of 2010 is software that detects sarcasm. (Just checking to see if the software is up and running yet.) According to Time magazine, the Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification — developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — can pick up on sarcastic sentences in product reviews. The researchers tested it out with 66,000 Amazon reviews and it was right 77% of the time. Which means that — cue the singing angels — the smiley-face and winky emoticons may soon become a thing of the past, at least for people who only resort to them as a desperate means of ensuring their sarcasm is conveyed.

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