Poor Danny. Ever since Munjal's post on his fabulous research, he's been getting all sorts of attention. Not that I don't think he can handle it, because Danny is a techstar. Here is a snippet from Munjal's post:

What is a sexer? No not what you think...;-). He is working on a way to determine if a person is a male or a female. He has gotten it to be 85% accurate. Now remember that you get 50% right for free. But actually getting 85% is incredible. We are going to use this to make our similarity searches more accurate.

However, I thought I would publish Danny's further explanation of the 'Sexer' to help set the record straight:

From Wikipedia entry for "chicken sexer." note the comparison between sexer masters and chess masters.

Vent sexing

Vent sexing is not easy. The sexual organs of birds are located within the body; the professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female. Vent sexing is a difficult trade to master; many professional vent sexers are Japanese, where the art originated. The mystery of vent sexing was revealed to the Western world when a seminal paper was published in Japan in 1933 by
Professors Masui and Hashimoto, which was soon translated into English under the title Sexing baby chicks. After Masui and Hashimoto's discovery, interested poultry breeders brought in people who had been trained by them to teach the art, or sent representatives to Japan to learn it. The skill is complex and has been likened to skill at playing chess and other crafts or games where pattern recognition is the key to success.

The chicken sexing machine

In the 1950s, several machines were invented that illuminated and magnified the cloacas of newborn chicks, and chicks could be sexed by inspecting them with this machine. This method is obsolete; only two manufacturers made the machines, and both have left the business.

So, this means that Danny's program may revolutionize chicken sexing as well? Well, if it's for a good cause! Can you really describe exactly what it is about a female's versus a male's face that makes it distinctively one sex?

I don't know, though. The Sexer sounded much more scintillating when it was left up to my imagination!