Ada Lovelace Day!

I just found out that it’s Ada Lovelace Day and about the “Finding Ada Pledge” wherein individuals write a post talking about women they know in CS/technology and how awesome they are to celebrate… how awesome they are!

Blog Analysis

Yesterday, I came across an interesting thread on Hacker News. The topic of the article was the analysis of blogs.

According to the analyser, I am an INTP. Sounds about right.

The more interesting item was the gender analyser that was linked to. At the time, the analyser said I was a man, but after I posted my previous article this change to me being a woman. Both times the analyser was relatively uncertain, confident to a degree of sixty-ish and fifty four percent respectively.

I also tested the analyser on a fellow hacklaber’s, Leigh’s, blog. The analyser concluded that she was a woman, but was fairly unconfident.

After all this, I was rather curious as to how the analyser was determining genders. Someone linked to a very nice essay on the topic. I haven’t read the entire essay, but from what I have I selected a few of the easier to test and mimic characteristics and strongly incorporated them into this post. Writing this way felt a little awkward but wasn’t too bad.

In particular, I avoided Arabic numerals and the impersonal/gender-neutral pronoun while emphasising my use of other pronouns such as `I’, `she,’ `him’, etc…

I’ll post, test the blog again, and update with the results.

Update: I got the same score. Perhaps results are cached? Or maybe the post I’m displacing was equally feminine?

Update 2: If I give the test this article instead of the front page, there is a seventy two percent chance I’m a woman. In other news, Slashdot is almost certainly written by men, as is Wikipedia’s article on Computers, but the article on Woman is almost gender neutral.

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