From a link at Bitch Ph.D., I tried a little gizmo at this website which uses my browser URL history to guess which gender I am (that's constructed gender, of course). It took a while, but the results came in at:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 94%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 6%
Okay, that's a great guess. However, far more interesting was the detailed list of how this estimate was created:
Site / Male-Female Ratio
google.com 0.98
youtube.com 1
ebay.com 1.11
mapquest.com 0.83
walmart.com 0.77
paypal.com 1.04
blogger.com 1.06
nytimes.com 1.13
walgreens.com 0.64
pbs.org 0.9
amtrak.com 0.75
bigfishgames.com 0.25
pizzahut.com 0.72
papajohns.com 0.79
icanhascheezburger.com 1.04
ama-assn.org 0.72
alternet.org 1.53
freerice.com 0.61
dailykos.com 1.56
From this, I deduce that even or almost even numbers of males and females use YouTube, Google, Blogger, PayPal, and ICanHazCheezburger. I was surprised that Big Fish Games was heavily skewed female -- I think of computer games as "boy dominated" -- until I realized that the realize why I consume games from this particular site is because they AREN'T sexist, shoot-em-up hand-eye coordination driven types but often rely on thoughtful deduction and, in the case of Virtual Villagers, creating relationships fer cripes sakes. It was also intriguing to see they think using Walgreens, Walmart, Pizza Hut and Amtrak are "female". Playing Free Rice online is an addiction I acquired from a lesbian comic strip site frequented by linguophiles, so I guess language skills are "female", too. And -- Alternet and DKos skew heavily male. No surprise there at all.
If you try this, feel free to post your results and reactions in my comments.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
YOUR BROWSER STEREOTYPES YOU
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2 comments:
It makes me slightly nervous that your browser history (and, therefore, all of ours) is so easily accessed via the web.
I don't know if I'm being too paranoid, but that's really scary to me....
Yep. This is one of the pieces of information FISA was designed to keep from being collected about Americans who weren't clearly under suspicion (i.e., enough to get a court order, which in fact had almost never been denied an intelligence or law-enforcement agency). Now, however, all your online history belongs to them. And if you think the Telcos didn't SELL it to them, you're quite naive. In turn, my prediction is that the Bush Regime is selling it to corporations -- they have a simultaneous hunger for power AND profit. If we can ITMFA, we might find some of this out.
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