Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Researchers seem to think that if you curse a lot on Twitter, or Tweet the words "die," "kill," or "buy" often, you're probably a psychopath.

No, really. That's what they think:

Wald and Taghi Khoshgoftaar, a professor of engineering and computer science, used an already existing psychological formula to determine how likely someone is to be psychopathic by their writing. Using a process called data mining, they developed an algorithm that would scan the tweets of nearly 3,000 volunteers. It found that about 1.4 percent of users showed psychopathic tendencies, similar to the population as a whole, based on their Tweets and a questionnaire.

The results have limitations, the researchers said. For example, the computer program didn't recognize abbreviated versions of words, which are common on Twitter due to the 140-character limits. It also can't recognize the difference between someone using a word such as "kill" in an angry way or an off-handed joking way, such as "I could kill him for this."

Of course, that reminded me of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's restaurant:

So we were all jumping up and down, yelling "Kill! Kill!" and the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said "You're our boy!"