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Noms de Scam, Coming to a Phone Near You

August 29, 2019 LauraWattenberg 3 min read No Comments

Rachel from Cardholder Services is a legend. Her robocalled promises to lower credit card interest rates have kept enforcement agencies busy for years. The Federal Trade Commission even has an official Rachel FAQ. But one question it doesn’t answer. Why is she named Rachel? The name wasn’t just a random […]

What Does a Neural Network Think of Your Name?

August 21, 2019 LauraWattenberg 4 min read 6 Comments

What if you could tap into society’s psyche and see how names frame our collective mental narratives? Now, perhaps you can. An artificial intelligence engine paves the way. Talktotransformer.com lets any user harness the power of a neural network system trained to write text. Just enter the beginning of a […]

Shockingly Rare Names for Girls

August 13, 2019 LauraWattenberg 2 min read 2 Comments

It’s no secret that Jill is no longer the height of baby-name fashion. The name’s all-time peak was back in 1966. But would you have guessed Jill was more old-fashioned than Dorcas? More unusual than Zerenity? Baby name statistics tell us that’s reality. Jill may still sound comfortably familiar, but […]

These Names Are Right Back Where They Started

August 6, 2019 LauraWattenberg 2 min read No Comments

50 years later, they’re just where they started out. The names Althea, Elvis and Trevor are exactly as popular today as they were in 1969. That makes them, by one measure, the most stable possible names over the past half century. But the two-point snapshot of stability doesn’t tell the […]

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