India tests nuclear capable missile

India successfully test-fired today a nuclear-capable missile that can reach Beijing and Eastern Europe, thrusting the emerging Asian power into an small club of nations with intercontinental nuclear weapons capabilities.

Footage showed the rocket with a range of more than 5,000km blasting through clouds from an island off India's east coast. The defence minister said the test was "immaculate".

"Today's launch represents another milestone in our quest for our security, preparedness and to explore the frontiers of science," India prime minister Manmohan Singh said in a congratulatory message to the scientists who developed the rocket.

The Indian-made Agni V is the crowning achievement of a programme developed primarily with a threat from neighbouring China in mind. It will not be operational for at least two years, the government says.

Only the UN security council permanent members - China, France, Russia the United States and Britain - along with Israel, are believed to have such long-range weapons.

Fast emerging as a world economic power, India is keen to play a larger role on the global stage and has long angled for a permanent seat on the security council. In recent years it has emerged as the world's top arms importer as it upgrades equipment for a large but outdated military.

The launch, which was flagged well in advance, has attracted none of the criticism from the West faced by hermit state North Korea for a failed bid to send up a similar rocket last week.

But Chinese media noted the test with disapproval.

"The West chooses to overlook India's disregard of nuclear and missile control treaties," China's widely read Global Times tabloid said in an editorial published before the launch, which was delayed by a day because of bad weather."

India should not overestimate its strength," said the paper, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party's main mouthpiece the People's Daily.

India has not signed the non-proliferation treaty for nuclear nations, but enjoys a de facto legitimacy for its arsenal, boosted by a landmark 2008 deal with the United States.

Yesterday, Nato said it did not consider India a threat.

The US state department said India's non-proliferation record was "solid", while urging restraint.

"India says its nuclear weapons programme is for deterrence only. It is close to completing a nuclear submarine that will increase its ability to launch a counter strike if it were attacked.

India lost a brief Himalayan border war with its larger neighbour, China, in 1962 and has ever since strived to improve its defences. In recent years the government has fretted over China's enhanced military presence near the border.

It is buying more than 100 advanced fighter jets, likely Rafales built by France's Dassault, in one of the largest global arms deals.

Even so, slow procurement procedures and corruption scandals mean its army, the world's second biggest, relies on critically outdated guns and suffers ammunition shortages.

Today's launch may prompt a renewed push from within India's defence establishment for a fully fledged intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) programme, with weapons capable of reaching the Americas, though some of India's allies may bridle at such an ambition.

The Agni V is the most advanced version of the indigenously built Agni, or Fire, series, part of a programme that started in the 1960s. Earlier versions could reach old rival Pakistan and Western China.

The three stage rocket is powered by easier-to-use solid rocket propellants, can carry a 1-tonne nuclear warhead and is road mobile.

Elise may be in trouble on 'American Idol'

Skylar Laine and Phillip Phillips have it, which is why they’re surely safe. Jessica Sanchez had none a week ago and still needs to work on hers. And Elise Testone got to hear about her lack of it for what seemed like an eternity.

To hear the judges tell it, the voices are not the issue. As Randy Jackson reminded everyone, the talent here is way better than those of any competing show, which is a complete shock coming from one of the guys who picked said talent. It’s all about connecting with the song and the audience so we can see the contestants are as great as the judges think they are.

Everyone sang twice, one recent hit and one soul number. That gave the judges two chances to remind us that Jessica has a really great voice and they were totally right to save her. But they did note after her second song, “Try a Little Tenderness,” that she needed to improve that connection. She may not be the low vote-getter again, but if you didn’t like her shoutiness before – and judging by the results last week, many of you didn’t – your opinion was unlikely to change Wednesday.

She could still find herself in danger, but Joshua Ledet is unlikely to join her this time. If there was ever a week that set him up for success, it was this one. He sang last, and the soul theme allowed him to close the show with “A Change Is Gonna Come” and got Jennifer Lopez begging the viewers not to send him home. Then again, ask DeAndre Brackensick how well that plea worked out for him a couple of weeks ago.  

Skylar might not have Jessica’s voice, but she can sure work a crowd. Though “Born This Way” was better than “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” she had the audience eating out of her hand, and the judges along with them. The same went for Phillip, particularly with his cover of Usher’s "U Got It Bad."

Colton Dixon, on the other hand, might have to worry for the first time this year. Neither “Bad Romance” nor “September” were truly gripping, and it particularly hurts that Skylar’s Gaga cover was better than his. And speaking of trouble, even though Hollie Cavanagh sang as well as she has all year, going first won’t help her, and her fans may not be as determined after she survived last week’s scare. The endorsement from the Liverpool Football Club was appreciated, but an NFL club would have helped her more, given that the show is located on this continent.

As for who’s likely to go ... let’s just say that the deck was stacked against Elise from the beginning, and the piling on from the judges didn’t help.

After her performance of "Let's Get It On," Steven told her she needed to "take it up a notch," while Randy opined that she's "not really sure" what's right for her voice, and that she "kind of oversang" the tune. That's tough talk coming from the "Idol" judges. And it didn't end there. 

"Elise has a vacation home in the bottom three. I don’t think she has a massive fan base in this thing,” Jimmy Iovine noted in the mentoring session. “I don't know what it is. She's a fabulous singer. If she isn't great, she doesn't get the votes."

Breivik 'did not expect to survive'

Mass killer Anders Breivik said today he thought he had only a slim chance of escaping Norway’s capital alive after setting off a bomb in the government district on July 22nd.

On the fourth day of his terror trial, the anti-Muslim extremist said he had expected to be confronted by armed police when he left Oslo for a youth camp on Utoya island, where he killed 69 people in a shooting massacre. No one stopped Breivik on his way to the island.

Breivik told the court today he had prepared for a firefight with police in Oslo by playing video games, and said: “I estimated the chances of survival as less than 5 per cent.”

Breivik has confessed to the bomb and shooting rampage, but rejects criminal guilt saying he was acting to protect Norway and Europe.

Book review: “Who is That Man?” by David Dalton

The conjurer’s art is a tricky one, all the more so when that sleight of hand is brought to bear on an individual’s identity. Bob Dylan has been rock music’s resident shape-shifter for more than 50 years now, replacing one persona with another, as fans, scholars, pop culture mavens and chat-room habitues make their case for the version of Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., that best encompasses all the others. Veteran biographer David Dalton has taken a more involved approach than we’re used to seeing as he sifts through each successive, mounting image of a man who doesn’t so much resemble someone you might pass on the street as he does a living, breathing construct, a superimposition of selves, lies, truths and lies that beget truths.

Dylan’s history, such as he designed it, resembles a great mash-up of literary styles: tall tales, farce, the picturesque, the picaresque, the road saga, the surrealist internal monologue. It all goes into the hopper, just as folk, rock, blues, Tin Pan Alley and cabaret went into the music. As Dalton notes early on, if you’re going to understand Dylan, you need to recognize that everything is mutable in his world, and often inverted. “His fabrications are the most profound, interesting, and authentic part of his personality,” Dalton writes.

Hyperion) - ‘Who Is That Man?: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan’ by David Dalton (Hyperion. 383 pp. $26.99)

If you’re into self-made people, the figure — a panoply of figures, really, all set on top of one another — that emerges here will represent an apex of sorts. Dylan had a normal background, pretty humdrum, even, but no interest in leading any kind of a normal life, and so he invented a back story that would make a profligate liar like Huck Finn blanch. Of course, if you believe that family dynamics are sacrosanct, you’ll probably be less than thrilled when you learn that Dylan enjoyed telling the press that he had no parents, even when he was sending them airline tickets to come watch his shows. Papa Zimmerman, as you might guess, was less than enthused, but he made excuses anyway, as a lot of people do for Dylan throughout his strange narrative. Dalton, fortunately, has the good sense to underscore the drama inherent in that narrative arc and serves up a big, wide, subsuming tale, interspersed with tidbits and analysis about the music that both soundtracks and mirrors it.

For all of the shelf-busting Dylan literature that’s out there, it’s rare that you find a book in which the music is discussed as adroitly as any aspect of the life. A lot of Dylan biographers stress the man’s vitriol, cataloguing one withering put-down after another, sometimes offering up a theory for how such and such a horridly offensive remark turned into a given song lyric. There’s a weird fetishization of Dylan’s top disses, and the music, which is both autonomous and tethered to Dylan’s shifting personas — one more paradox and inversion — gets distorted. Dalton is a penetrating critic, though, and when he makes the sage point that “Chimes of Freedom” — a song in which a lightning storm is a trigger for solidarity — is practically a hymn, the acerbity is provided with a foil, and we see that Dylan didn’t so much shed one identity for another as manage multiple selves at the same time.

Dalton then turns to the effect of this multiplicity on Dylan’s relationships and on the people who loved him. Dalton’s take on “Blood on the Tracks” (1975) — as gut-wrenching an album as there is in rock-and-roll — and the busted, pain-wracked man who made it is the freshest you’ll find. Bob-niks have debated the album’s autobiographical quotient ever since it came out, but as Dalton says: “Songs are autobiographical by definition. What you make up is you, too. Angels and demons are painted by the same hands.” So that’s what you get then: not a single identity, guise, art, but rather an individual who, we might say, was/is his imagination. The further that imagination can go, the more people come to populate the narrative of one man’s life, even though they all begin, and end, at the same point.

Fleming is a cultural critic who has written for the Atlantic, Rolling Stone and many other publications.

Titanic sinking left shroud of grief over Southampton

SOUTHAMPTON, England – Southampton seaman Alfred Ernest Geer had been hard up for work for months because of a coal strike that had docked most of the city's ships. Then an unexpected opportunity to earn a small wage presented itself on the morning of April 10, 1912.

About 600 of the Titanic's approximately 900 workers hailed from Southampton, a port city in England. More than 500 from the city died.

Titanic was due to set sail that day on its maiden voyage from this thriving port city on England's south coast. But a few of its 900 crewmembers had stayed out too late in a local pub and failed to show up in time for departure. The ship's officers picked six men hanging around on the quay looking for work to replace them, including Geer, 26.

"He would have been elated to get the job," says local amateur historian Gillie Dunkason in Southampton's overgrown and almost forgotten Old Cemetery. "So many families were already on the bread line because of the national coal strike, which had laid up lots of ships because they were dependent on coal for fuel."

Geer, who shoveled coal into a ship's steam engines, was not forgotten on this day at the cemetery. His great-nieces, Kath MacKenzie, April Gregory and Linda Bentley, were there looking at the memorial to the ancestor they never met.

MacKenzie says she and her relatives started to research their family history last year.

Kath MacKenzie lays flowers at a memorial marker for Alfred Ernest Geer, her great-uncle. Geer was a stoker who shoveled coal into the ship’s steam engines. He was given the job aboard Titanic on the day it set out to sea.

"We knew there was a relative who had been on the Titanic and died," she says, laying a bunch of yellow roses next to the headstone. "Our dad used to tell us his uncle and cousin had gone down with the ship, but we can only find his uncle.

"We know he had worked on another ship, the Olympic, which was docked because of the coal strike. He was one of the last few chosen to work on the Titanic. He was a stoker; that was one of the hardest jobs."

MacKenzie says her father, who had also been a stoker, had never told them much about their great-uncle. This was not uncommon among families who lost a loved one on Titanic, Dunkason says.

"People didn't talk about it. It was like the war — it was such a disaster for this city and for so many families who lost their livelihood," she says.

About 600 of Titanic's 900-strong crew were from Southampton. More than 500 people from the city lost their lives — a third of the total casualties. Most of them were waiters, sailors, stewards, engineers and, like Geer, stokers. Very few bodies were brought back to England.

"When Titanic went down, the shipping company the White Star Line stopped the crew's pay but charged families the freight costs of shipping the bodies back," says Valerie Ferguson, who volunteers at the cemetery along with Dunkason. "Most couldn't afford it, which is why we have so many memorials rather than graves."

Only one of the 538 Southampton residents to perish was a passenger: Henry Price Hodges, a wealthy businessman who dealt in pianos and gramophones, an early version of the record player. Like the majority of Titanic's Southampton victims, his body was never brought back.

USA TODAY and National Geographic Channel are producing a series of reports on the centennial of the Titanic’s sinking. See more at natgeotv.com/titanic. Watch Titanic specials on The National Geographic Channel starting April 8 at 8 p.m. ET.

Hodges is buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with more than 100 other Titanic victims, but he is remembered on the Art Nouveau headstone of his wife's grave in the Southampton cemetery. Local politician John Hannides, who is responsible for arts and culture in the city, says the enormous social impact of Titanic's demise was unique.

"Southampton was affected more than any other city in the world by the sinking of the Titanic," he says. "There were roads where every household lost a family member. You can only really imagine the sense of despair and loss."

When news of the disaster reached Southampton on the afternoon of April 15, most people didn't believe the ship everyone thought was unsinkable could have met with such disaster. In the following days, crowds of expectant relatives gathered outside the White Star Line's offices by the docks, waiting for names of survivors to be released.

Flags flew at half-staff, condolence notices filled the local newspapers, and a memorial service was held at the city's main church. Surviving crew returning to Southampton were met by crowds at the station. Two weeks after the disaster, 50,000 people — nearly half of the city's population at the time — turned out to an open-air service to remember the dead.

Southampton's mayor at the time, Henry Bowyer, set up a relief fund to help the widows, orphans and dependent relatives of those who died. Local people arranged concerts, sports days and other charity events to contribute to the fund, which helped families pay school fees, medical bills, apprenticeship fees and for necessities such as milk, eggs and even artificial teeth.

One hundred years after Titanic set sail from Southampton, it still plays a huge part in the city's identity.

Its legacy lives on in the 370 cruise ships that dock at the port every year and in the thousands of jobs provided by the docks and cruise industry. To mark the centenary, the city is opening a huge $23.5 million interactive museum called Sea City on April 10, the very day Titanic set out 100 years ago. The museum will display some of the 4,000 artifacts the city has gathered and offer recordings of the recollections of many of the survivors.

"Sea City will become symbolic on a scale that really does underline the respect and commemoration the city wants to show for the Southampton people who perished," Hannides says.

"We want to make sure their stories and experiences are accessible to people throughout the country and throughout the world. We want to make sure their stories live on for generations to come."

The Jesus debate: Man vs. myth

(CNN)– Timothy Freke was flipping through an old academic book when he came across a religious image that some would call obscene.
It was a drawing of a third-century amulet depicting a naked man nailed to a cross. The man was born of a virgin, preached about being “born again” and had risen from the dead after crucifixion, Freke says.
But the name on the amulet wasn’t Jesus. It was a pseudonym for Osiris-Dionysus, a pagan god in ancient Mediterranean culture.  Freke says the amulet was evidence of something that sounds like sacrilege – and some would say it is: that Jesus never existed. He was a myth created by first-century Jews who modeled him after other dying and resurrected pagan gods, says Freke, author of  "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?"
“If I said to you that there was no real Good Samaritan, I don’t think anyone would be outraged,” says Freke, one of a group of mythicists who say Jesus never existed. “It’s a teaching story. What we’re saying is that the Jesus story is an allegory. It’s a parable of the spiritual journey.”
On this Easter Sunday, millions of Christians worldwide will mark the resurrection of Jesus. Though Christians clash over many issues, almost all agree that he existed.
But there is another view of Jesus that’s been emerging, one that strikes at the heart of the Easter story. A number of authors and scholars say Jesus never existed. Such assertions could have been ignored in an earlier age.  But in the age of the Internet and self-publishing, these arguments have gained enough traction that some of the world’s leading New Testament scholars feel compelled to publicly take them on.
Most Jesus deniers are Internet kooks, says Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who recently released a book devoted to the question called “Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.”
He says Freke and others who deny Jesus’ existence are conspiracy theorists trying to sell books.
“There are people out there who don’t think the Holocaust happened, there wasn’t a lone JFK assassin and Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.,” Ehrman says. “Among them are people who don’t think Jesus existed.”
Does it matter if Jesus existed?
Some Jesus mythicists say many New Testament scholars are intellectual snobs.
“I don’t think I’m some Internet kook or Holocaust denier,” says Robert Price, a former Baptist pastor who argues in “Deconstructing Jesus” that a historical Jesus probably didn’t exist.
“They say I’m a bitter ex-fundamentalist. It’s pathetic to see this character assassination. That’s what people resort to when they don’t have solid arguments.”

 The debate over Jesus’ existence has led to a curious role reversal. Two of the New Testament scholars who are leading the way arguing for Jesus’ existence have a reputation for attacking, not defending, traditional Christianity.

Ehrman, for example, is an agnostic who has written books that argue that virtually half  of the New Testament is forged. Another defender of Jesus’ existence is John Dominic Crossan, a New Testament scholar who has been called a heretic because his books challenge some traditional Christian teachings.
But as to the existence of Jesus, Crossan says, he’s “certain.”
He says some Jesus deniers may be people who have a problem with Christianity.
“It’s a way of responding to something you don’t like,” Crossan says. “We can’t say that Obama doesn’t exist, but we can say that he’s not an American.  If we’re talking about Obama in the future, there are people who might not only say he wasn’t American, but he didn’t even exist.”
Does it even matter if Jesus existed? Can’t people derive inspiration from his teachings whether he actually walked the Earth?
Crossan says Jesus’ existence matters in the same way that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s existence mattered.
If King never existed, people would say his ideas are lovely, but they could never work in the real world, Crossan says.
It’s the same with an historical Jesus, Crossan writes in his latest book, “The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus.”
“The power of Jesus’ historical life challenges his followers by proving at least one human being could cooperate fully with God. And if one, why not others? If some, why not all?”
The evidence against Jesus’ existence
Those who argue against Jesus’ existence make some of these points:
-The uncanny parallels between pagan stories in the ancient world and the stories of Jesus.
-No credible sources outside the Bible say Jesus existed.
-The Apostle Paul never referred to a historical Jesus.
Price, author of “Deconstructing Jesus,” says the first-century Western world was full of stories of a martyred hero who is called a son of God.
“There are ancient novels from that period where the hero is condemned to the cross and even crucified, but he escapes and survives it,” Price says. “That looks like Jesus.”
Those who argue for the existence of Jesus often cite two external biblical sources: the Jewish historian Josephus who wrote about Jesus at the end of the first century and the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote about Jesus at the start of the second century.
But some scholars say Josephus’ passage was tampered with by later Christian authors. And Price says the two historians are not credible on Jesus.
“Josephus and Tacitus – they both thought Hercules was a true figure,” Price says. “Both of them spoke of Hercules as a figure that existed.”
Price concedes that there were plenty of mythical stories that were draped around historical figures like Caesar. But there’s plenty of secular documentation to show Caesar existed.
“Everything we read about Jesus in the gospels conforms to the mythic hero,” Price says. “There’s nothing left over that indicates that he was a real historical figure.”
Those who argue for the existence of Jesus cite another source: the testimony of the Apostle Paul and Jesus’ early disciples. Paul even writes in one New Testament passage about meeting James, the brother of Jesus.
These early disciples not only believed Jesus was real but were willing to die for him. People don’t die for myths, some biblical scholars say.
They will if the experience is powerful enough, says Richard Carrier, author of “Proving History.”
Carrier says it’s probable that Jesus never really existed and that early Christians experienced a mythic Jesus who came to them through visions and revelations.
Two of the most famous stories in the New Testament – the conversion of Paul and the stoning death of Stephen, one of the first Christian martyrs - show that people seized by religious visions are willing to die, Carrier says.
In both the Paul and Stephen stories, the writers say that they didn’t see an actual Jesus but a heavenly vision of Jesus, Carrier says.
People “can have powerful religious experiences that don’t correspond to reality,” Carrier says.
“The perfect model is Paul himself,” Carrier says. “He never met Jesus. Paul only had an encounter with this heavenly Jesus. Paul is completely converted by this religious experience, but no historical Jesus is needed for that to happen.”
As for the passage where Paul says he met James, Jesus’ brother, Carrier says:
“The problem with that is that all baptized Christians were considered brothers of the Lord.”
The evidence for Jesus’ existence
Some scholars who argue for the existence of Jesus says the New Testament mentions actual people and events that are substantiated by historical documents and archaeological discoveries.
Ehrman, author of “Did Jesus Exist?” scoffed at the notion that the ancient world was full of pagan stories about dying deities that rose again.  Where’s the proof? he asks.
Ehrman devoted an entire section of his book to critiquing Freke, the mythicist and author of “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?” who says there was an ancient Osiris-Dionysus figure who shares uncanny parallels to Jesus.
He says Freke can’t offer any proof that an ancient Osiris figure was born on December 25, was crucified and rose again. He says Freke is citing 20^th- and 19^th-century writers who tossed out the same theories.
Ehrman says that when you read ancient stories about mythological figures like Hercules and Osiris, “there’s nothing about them dying and rising again.”
“He doesn’t know much about ancient history,” Ehrman says of Freke. “He’s not a scholar. All he knows is what he’s read in other conspiracy books.”
Craig A. Evans, the author of “Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence,” says the notion that Paul gave his life for a mythical Jesus is absurd.
He says the New Testament clearly shows that Paul was an early enemy of the Christian church who sought to stamp out the burgeoning Jesus movement.
“Don’t you think if you were in Paul’s shoes, you would have quickly discovered that there was no Jesus?” Evans asks.  “If there was no Jesus, then how did the movement start?”
Evans also dismissed the notion that early Christians blended or adopted pagan myths to create their own mythical Jesus. He says the first Christians were Jews who despised everything about pagan culture.
“For a lot of Jewish people, the pagan world was disgusting,” Evans says. “I can’t imagine [the Gospel writer] Matthew making up a story where he is drawing parallels between Jesus’ birth and pagan stories about Zeus having sex with some fair maiden.”
The words of Jesus also offer proof that he actually existed, Evans says.  A vivid personality practically bursts from the pages of the New Testament: He speaks in riddles, talks about camels squeezing through the eye of a needle, weeps openly and even loses his temper.
Evans says he is a man who is undeniably Jewish, a genius who understands his culture but also transcends his tradition with gem-like parables.
“Who but Jesus could tell the Parable of the Good Samaritan?” Evans says. “Where does this bolt of lightning come from? You don’t get this out of an Egyptian myth.”
Those who argue against the existence of Jesus say they aren’t trying to destroy people’s faith.
“I don’t have any desire to upset people,” says Freke. “I do have a passion for the truth. … I don’t think rational people in the 20^th century can go down a road just on blind faith.”
Yet Easter was never just about rationale.
The Easter stories about the resurrection are strange: Disciples don’t recognize Jesus as they meet him on the road; he tells someone not to touch him; he  eats fish in another.
In the Gospel of Matthew, a resurrected Jesus suddenly appears to a group of disciples and gives them this cryptic message:
“Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
And what did they see: a person, a pagan myth or a savior?
Albert Schweitzer, a 20^th-century theologian and missionary, suggested that there will never be one answer to that question.  He said that looking for Jesus in history is like looking down a well: You see only your own reflection.
The “real” Jesus, Schweitzer says, will remain “a stranger and an enigma,” someone who is always ahead of us.

Taking a Chance on Love, and Algorithms

THE invitation from Yoke.me, a new online dating start-up, seemed innocuous enough. It suggested that I meet some of the single pals of one of my friends.
Yoke.me pulled in data from Facebook — my city, for example, and what movies I prefer — then generated matches with people from my extended social circle, based on common interests, like a shared love of Rihanna’s music or “Game of Thrones.”
It is ingenious, in a way. How many single people have trolled through a friend’s photo album on Facebook, spotted someone cute and then asked for intel about his or her availability? Poring through a trove of friends of friends can seem better than gauging whether the creep factor of a random person is low enough to warrant an in-person meeting.
Yet the idea was still troubling. My friends and I started a long e-mail thread about it, riffing that despite its elegant design, it seemed awkward and presumptuous. Not all Facebook “friends” are actually friends, and it’s not entirely clear that the bands and shows we’ve “liked” on Facebook can really be used to say anything meaningful about us.
“I’ve found my newest nightmare,” one friend said. “One match was a girl because we share a birthday,” said another. “One match was a guy because we both like Gilt,” a shopping site. “Is this for finding friends, dates or enemies?”
To be fair, the problem doesn’t seem to be confined to Yoke.me. It may be part of online dating itself. Sites and apps like OKCupid, eHarmony, Skout, Plenty of Fish and Match.com have attracted loyal followings. But in a world where we can pay someone for lunch by tapping two phones together and stream live television over a tablet computer, the de facto model of browsing through static profiles on a Web site or in a mobile app can feel comically outdated.
It may not be a problem that software can solve on its own, said Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University. “Technology is not the way to figure out who is compatible and will never be,” he said. “At the end of the day, the human algorithm — neural tissue in our cranium called a brain — has evolved over a long period of time to size up people efficiently. On a blind date, a person arrives and in that instant I can say I’m glad I did this or regret it.”
Professor Finkel, along with several other researchers, published a study this year raising doubts about the idea that a personality test or algorithm of the kind popularized on eHarmony, can help you meet a potential mate.
Sites that say algorithms can help you find your soul mate “are probably spitting in the wind,” said Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the algorithm paper, who has written upwards of 120 papers on online dating.
EHarmony counters that the algorithms it uses do work, citing research it conducted investigating the satisfaction of couples who met through the site, and their divorce rate.
The system that eHarmony has built is “based on years of empirical and clinical research on married couples,” said Becky Teraoka, an eHarmony spokeswoman. They include “aspects of personality, values and interest, and how pairs match on them, that are most predictive of relationship satisfaction.”
While Professors Finkel and Reis question the value of algorithms, they do say that online dating is useful because it can broaden the pool of people you come across on a regular basis.
“In everyday life you don’t encounter people with signs on their head that say, ‘I’m single and looking,’ ” Professor Reis said. On sites you can find “dozens of people that you might want to meet.”
The trick is to weed out the weirdos and arrange a face-to-face meeting as quickly as possible — which, in a sense, is what Yoke.me is trying to do, as are similar services like theComplete.me and Coffee Meets Bagel.
Other sites are trying to move past the algorithm. A start-up called myMatchmaker uses in-the-flesh people as intermediaries. Some, like Nerve.com, and How About We, aim to streamline the process and encourage interactions around more than a profile.
But Kevin Slavin, a game developer who studies algorithms, says those sites are already starting from a flawed base.
The digital personas we cultivate on Facebook are often not very indicative of who we are, he said. “A first date is the most tangible instance of you being the best possible version of yourself, the version you think will be the most attractive to someone else,” he said. “It is impossible for that to be the same person on Facebook.”
Rob Fishman, who helmed the development of Yoke.me, says he views the service as an icebreaker, not as a crystal ball capable of divining whether or not someone is your one true love. “We aren’t saying you will want to spend your life together; you don’t even know each other yet,” he said. “You like the same band, talk amongst yourselves.”
Eventually, Mr. Fishman said, the service will be sophisticated enough to incorporate real-time data funneled through Facebook about songs people are listening to and articles they are reading and to make matches based on that — perhaps a more realistic way to connect two people through a social network.
ALL of this may simply mean that online dating is at an early stage. In other realms, we’re already moving toward a future when the most dazzling and successful technologies are not visible and work almost by magic.
Consider Kinect from Microsoft. You can play a dance game by moving your whole body, without the need to hold a physical controller. Or try Square’s latest mobile application, Pay With Square. The app’s software will show a cashier a photo of a customer to verify payment information. Shoppers never even have to remove their phones from their pockets — only say their names and show their faces.
Then there is the Paper drawing app for the iPad. Its “rewind” feature lets users twist two fingers in a counterclockwise motion to erase their last few brushstrokes.
And, of course, there is Siri, the iPhone service that can understand spoken commands, perform Web searches and write and send text messages. Although Siri isn’t perfect, it feels like a taste of the future.
That shift is leaving online dating in the dust. It feels clunkier than it should — like a poorly designed tablet or a Web service that keeps crashing.
It’s a technology quandary fit for modern times, and one that doesn’t have a clear solution in sight — yet. No one wants to see Cupid interfering with his or her love life; we just want the arrow to hit squarely on its mark. And, maybe someday, it will.