How to define "Brainiac"

I submitted a query on the HARO reporter to try and get a better handle on the term "brainiac", and how it may be better relate to my website BrainiacDating.com

Do you-think of a brainiac as someone like Bill Gates, or those characters on the TV show "The Big Bang Theory"? What about the painter Van Gogh, or the self-taught and well-read cab driver? Most intelligence theories involve many different kinds of intelligence, and still the term "brainiac" is relatively new, and it's not even in my spell checker. Best I can tell it originated from a monster in the superman comics, but has lately become a term associated smart geeks. Do you have other examples of brainiacs, or different ideas on how it can be defined?

There were four responses:

1. At first glance, was not "Brainiac" the name given to one of the first super computers quite a long time ago?
I may be mistaken but I have some kind of vague memory of such a thing.

2. I think the term "brainiac" should refer not just to the scientifically knowledgeable, but to the worldly curious. I think we all should try to be as curious about almost everything, as much as we can.

One of the best experiences you can give a child, a growing Brainiac, or brain, is to ask; "Do you have any questions?"
Their response is often, "Questions about what?" to which you reply; "Questions about anything..." Then when they show their curiousity or concern about something, you help them find the answer, so much easier now, more than ever, using the Internet. Then watch as their enthusiasm grows, they becom enlightened in front of you, and so, do you. We grow better by wonder and curiousity, and trying to find the answer. If you encourage it in others, or even yourslef, you become wiser and smarter, often happier.

Brainiac for me, seems to represent someone who holds a lot of knowledge. It seems rather cold and distant, like one of the first large computers.

However, the best stories of The Big Bang Theory involve not just the intelligence of the characters, the Brainiacs that they are, but even more importantly, their kindness and love for each other, encompassing their geekiness for what it is, and being glorious there.

Hawk

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Definitely the guys on "Big Bang Theory", Temperance Brennan from Bones, the math guys on NUMB3RS (Charlie and buddies). They are folks who are very analytical and consider even everyday decisions on the basis of numbers and science. Example 1: deciding what to order in a restaurant, they might consider the nutritional value (maybe calorie count) versus price of the item to get the optimal value. Or they might consider preparation time to select the item that will be ready the fastest (while including the time it will take to eat the item). Or they might do a probability table to decide which item has the least risk of contamination. How it tastes and what they like wont even come into the picture. Example 2: attempting some physical feat (jumping a ditch, shooting a basketball), the person will first consider distance, trajectory, wind, etc.

.......................................................................................................

I consider myself a brainiac for the following reasons.

1. I study brains! I'm a doctoral candidate at MIT, studying the neural correlates of reading.
2. I use the other side of my brain too :-) I write young adult fiction in my spare time.
3. And I bring the two sides together in a brainy package on my blog "A Brain Scientists Take on the Art of Writing." (http://blog.liviablackburne.com)

--
Livia (Liwei) King Blackburne
Graduate Student
Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

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Brainiacs are people whose minds cannot shut off, no matter how much they try. In fact, their minds go at such at rate that its actually detrimental to the person's health. They are smart, in spite of themselves. Most brainiacs are attracted to hard subjects b/c they serve as types of distractions for their brain.

--
Sandra Ordonez
OurBlook.com

What do you think?

Top Online Dating Sites on Twitter

I recently started tweeting about Brainiac Dating on Twitter, and wanted to see what the major online dating sites were doing... and the answer is not much! Seems like an excellent opportunity for a dating application... who's going to be first?

Site	Tweets	Followers
Match.com	1562	2470
Zoosk	1030	3506
OKCupid	998	2452
LavaLife	394	388
BrainiacDating	301	364
JDate	268	2535
Chemistry.com	265	1201
EHarmony	83	821
PlentyOfFish	48	548
DateHookup	12	1077
Mingle2	3	264

The big question is how to provide high quality tweets so that you get more followers? I have been giving the profiles of the day and interesting contributions from the members, and articles like this!

Find a date in a house of books

I would have thought that a library or bookstore would be an excellent place to find an intelligent date. Although I was way too shy for this in college, I definitely observed people hooking up in the library.

Check out the book related ads that I have used on Brainiac Dating:

There were some interesting comments about this in the BrainiacDating forums.
In general, it was not as positive as I would have thought, but I tried to find more data by posting the following query for news sources on a reporter website:

Have you ever found a date in a library or bookstore? Perhaps you met in the stacks looking for similar books, and ended up exchanging phone numbers. This seems like a good way to meet someone who is intelligent and shares similar interests, but are most bibliophiles too shy for this approach? Are some locations better than others, do you have a good strategy, pickup lines or experiences to share? Interesting responses will be posted to the blog on my website: Thanks.

Supposedly this query is read by up to 100,000 prospective sources, yet I only got one reply and that was from a woman who's parents met while they were working at a research library. Golly, surely there is more to library dating than this! Just the other day I was standing in my local Barnes and Nobles waiting for my girl friend, and a couple of different guys gave me the eye. Not that I wanted their attention, but at least I know that some people do try to hook up in these place of learning.

Where the Brainiac Singles Are

I did a tally of the numbers per state (and province) as a percentage of the population based on the 16,000 members on my website BrainiacDating.com.

State	Members	brainiacs per 100,000 population
British Columbia	511	11.4
New York	1095	5.6
New Hampshire	64	4.8
Maryland	260	4.5
Maine	59	4.4
Virginia	352	4.4
Florida	794	4.2
Massachusetts	280	4.2
New Jersey	374	4.2
California	1543	4.1
Connecticut	141	4
Washington	269	4
Ohio	451	3.9
Colorado	191	3.8
Delaware	34	3.8
Georgia	383	3.8
New Mexico	77	3.8
Pennsylvania	481	3.8
Nevada	100	3.7
Oregon	144	3.7
West Virginia	69	3.7
Arizona	241	3.6
Kentucky	156	3.6
Michigan	365	3.6
North Carolina	326	3.4
Rhode Island	36	3.4
Indiana	216	3.3
Texas	810	3.2
Minnesota	167	3.1
Illinois	398	3
Kansas	87	3
Tennessee	194	3
Oklahoma	109	2.9
Iowa	87	2.8
Utah	79	2.8
Wisconsin	162	2.8
Alabama	129	2.7
Idaho	43	2.7
Missouri	164	2.7
Vermont	17	2.7
South Carolina	123	2.6
Arkansas	73	2.5
Nebraska	46	2.5
Montana	24	2.4
Alaska	16	2.2
Louisiana	98	2.1
North Dakota	14	2.1
Hawaii	27	2
South Dakota	17	2
Mississippi	57	1.9
Wyoming	10	1.8

So British Columbia has the highest percentage of brainiacs! But alas it's too good to be true. This is result is biased by the location of advertising, and while it was not specifically aimed at one region or another, I have no control over where Google or Facebook displayed the ads. The majority of the members on the site came through Google Ads on PlentyofFish.com which is
a website that originated from Vancouver, BC, so it is likely that there were more members there, more ads, and a
hence a higher percentage of members.

We have a great geeky set of winks on BrainiacDating.com.
While I generally recommend a custom email to initiate a serious contact, these winks are fun to play with.

Call me if you know math?

Hey you caught my eye:


Hi, wow, you made me smile.

Wow, truly amazing!

Hold that smile:

Pardon me:

What do you think of this?

I see stars in your eyes:

I see nature's infinite beauty:

Non Brainiac Support

Keeping up with all the support requests on BrainiacDating.com is hard work. Unfortunately, some people do not read instructions, and these are some of the examples from non-brainiacs!

Common problems are:
1) asking for their password even though there is a link right under the login form that says "forgot password".
2) can't log in, but it turns out that they never registered in the first place
3) put in their wrong gender, and not sure how to change it. Those are always funny to read.
4) why their photos do not show up in their profile, even though after they are submitted, a message
shows that says their photos are submitted for review.
5) Is your site completely free - yes, I suppose they do not trust other sites.
6) many people have trouble uploading photos

Then there are these outliers:

Someone replied back to the support email address about a wink. He should have clicked on the link to reply to the person who sent it:

I fully accept! Do not wake me, I rather like this dream!

Someone else flagged another member without a reason:

Flagged: joep3
Nothing to report...sorry

Then there is the accidental flagging:

i accidentally flagged a person named ..... by mistake.
i thought i was adding him to my favorites. please check this out for me and take him off the flagged list
for me PLEASE! thanks much.
Merry Christmas

And another one:

Sorry I made a mistake I was chatting and I didn't know what
flag meant so this was a Mistake the guy is great sorry I push the button

Yup, there is a reason that the flag is colored red.

Top Geek Dating Site

The leading site for geek dating is geek to geek (gk2gk.com). I found them advertised all over the internet on various geek related sites like wise geek and nerd passions. Membership runs at $20 per month, so it's not exactly cheap, especially in comparison to my site - BrainiacDating.com which is completely free. However, geek to geek probably makes money, so maybe I also need to start considering a small fee, at least to cover the cost of advertising which will allow my site to grow and ultimately offer a better service.

I found one of their ads as shown in its full size: The orange color is really horrible in my opinion - it looks like pumpkin pie, and I can't even discern the small images. In fact, I don't
like the orange - yellow - brownish color scheme on their site, and think that brainiac dating looks much nicer. I know that not everyone likes the black background on the site, but there is a way to completely change the color scheme by clicking on a color selector at the bottom left of all pages. My website may be the only online dating site that offers such a feature.



Another difference in philosophy is that a brainiac is not necessarily a geek and vice versa.
According to the definition on wiki:

The word geek is a slang term, noting individuals as "a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.

Compare with

Brainiac is a common modern term used to describe someone exceedingly knowledgeable in a certain field. Also a slang term, indicating a highly intelligent person. It can be used in a complimentary manner, or it can be used pejoratively depending on the context.

Well I am not sure I exactly would agree with the way these are defined on wiki, but it does illustrate the common notion of the two terms. I liked to think of a brainiac as someone who is out of the box, who thinks differently, is creative, and values intelligence and learning. I also think of a geek as a misfit, and not necessarily intelligent.

Cost of a Brainy Single

Since my online dating website BrainiacDating.com just passed the 15,000 member mark, this is a good point to reflect on the cost of acquiring all of these members. Firstly I should point out that this is the net number of active members on the site, not the total number that have ever joined - which is closer to 17,000.
According to my exit survey - about half of those who have left have done so because they have met someone, the rest of the departures were split by "did not find enough matches or activity on the site", "did not like using the site", or did not answer.

So the net number of members on the site - which is close to 15,200 as of today has been reached in about sixteen months since I started.

The following table shows the paid advertising sources of the new members:

Source	Number	Average cost per acquisition
PlentyofFish.com (via AdWords)	10,000	$3
Facebook advertising	3000	$3
Google Search( via AdWords)	200	$5
Ad in the MENSA bulletin	120	$4
Slashdot.com (via AdWords	100	$4
Yahoo Search Marketing	30	$5

Currently conversions on AdWords cost over $10, so I do not target it anymore. Cost of acquisition, usually called "conversion cost" is how much it costs in terms of clicks multiplied by cost per click to get each new member.
Not every click results in a new member joining the site, on average my ads have been running at about 5-10% joins/click.

Initially I exclusively focussed solely on Google, but the price of clicks kept rising through the end of 2009 so I switched to Facebook advertising almost exclusively starting in November of 2009. It has taken a few months to improve the use of the Facebook ads, and currently it is running at $2.50 per new member.

My AdWords costs were at a minimum from March to June 2009, as I suspect this was the period when the economy was at its lowest level and the large advertisers had pulled back. Also in the middle of last year many of the newest scams started to appear such as the acai berry weight loss, and they pushed the price up.

How to get the word out - Chapter 7

In the ongoing battle on how to spread the word to my site Brainiac Dating , I have recently started to find opportunity on LinkedIn. This is the #1 site for professional networking, and not obviously set up to handle anything to do with personal relationships, such as on a site like Facebook. I call this chapter seven because the story is on-going - hopefully one of these days there will be a breakthrough in virally spreading the good word about brainiac dating.



I looked for singles features on the site, but didn't find any. They don't even store that kind of information.
However, given the professional demographic segment that uses the site, it would be an ideal target for
finding smart singles --- if I could only find an easy way...

At first I asked one of my friends to help, and he politely said "no" because he'd like to keep his personal life separate from his private life. But I proceeded on my own, and found several singles related groups.
The groups feature on the site is relatively new, but it looks like it has many cool aspects, and is perhaps even better than the groups feature on Facebook. The only problem is how to bring people to these groups!

So I created my own called Intellectual Singles. So far it has four members, which is not bad for a few days, but hopefully more will start to join. I also joined a few others which are mostly for the business side of online dating, but I think there could be some useful information exchange. I have been reposting some of my blogs here to that site, just like using this site to promote that one. It's all a full circle, but hopefully an expanding one.

I am keen to see how this experiment works.