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Science reports that recordings of 400 university students found men and women both say about 16,000 words per day:
We have developed a method for recording natural language using the electronically activated recorder (EAR) … participants wear the EAR for several days during their waking hours. The device is programmed to record for 30 s every 12.5 min. All captured words spoken by the participant are transcribed. … The data suggest that women spoke on average 16,215 (SD = 7301) words and men 15,669 (SD = 8633) words over an assumed period of, on average, 17 waking hours … the difference does not meet conventional thresholds for statistical significance.
See also the New York Times and Marginal Revolution. The method was so easy and they are getting so much criticism for only looking at university students, surely someone will soon do a similar study on older adults. This would be a perfect "idea futures" application – let’s bet on the fraction of words women are found to speak in that new study.
Added: At my suggestion, InTrade is now offering this as a betting topic!
Let’s Bet on Talk
Here are the contract specific rules as stated on Intrade. --------------------For this contract to settle (expire) at 100 ($10.00) the following conditions must be met:
1. The study must be first reported on or after July 10th, 20072. The study must find that women talk exactly 10% or more then men over a typical whole day3. The study must include more then just university students, but need not include university students
This contract will settle (expire) at 0 ($0.00) if the next study finds that women do not talk exactly 10% or more then men.-------------------
I suspect that the point 2. above has been misstated, or at least sounds ambigous. More precise statements could be that -... women talk exactly 10% or more in excess of men ... or,... women talk exactly 110% as much as men or more ...
You should also add restrictions as to what sample size, and/or level of statistical significance would be considered acceptable for settling this contract.
Mark, how many words people say per minute of conversation and how many words they say per day sound like very different questions to me - the difference of course being: how many minutes a day do people converse?