"Browser History" analyzes your habits, guesses at your gender

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender. Of course the idea is definitely not new, in fact Xerox (of all companies??) has a patent on the whole process and I’m certain plenty of networks already do something of the sort… but what the heck, let’s have some fun!

So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender...

Mike on Ads: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

Mike's algorithm estimated that there was a 98% chance that I'm male, 2% chance that I'm female.

Not that I'm an effeminate fellow at all :-), but I was surprised that my browsing history indicated only a 2% chance of me having two X chromosomes...

(via Megan McArdle)

Where y'all from?

Top 20 countries of residence, in declining order, of enrevanche readers, per Google Analytics:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Germany
5. India
6. France
7. Finland
8. Australia
9. Philippines
10. South Korea
11. Ireland
12. Spain
13. Italy
14. Belgium
15. Mexico
16. Norway
17. Netherlands
18. Sweden
19. Switzerland
20. Singapore

The abominable ho-man

Area codes in which Ludacris has ho's. (Strange Maps)

Something Ludacris has in common with Governor Spitzer: area codes 202 and 212 are covered.

Related (lyrics NSFW):

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage

Guestblogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, Bernard Harcourt writes, inter alia:

In practically all [of the studies that measure the social effects of incarceration in America], we have used the imprisonment rate to measure society’s level of incapacitation. But the prison rate alone may not capture what we were trying to measure. The most straightforward interpretation of my findings is that neither the rate of imprisonment alone, nor the rate of mental hospitalization alone are good predictors of serious violent crime over the period 1934-2001. In contrast, the aggregated institutionalization rate (aggregating the mental hospitalization and prison rates) is a strong predictor of homicides. This suggests that there is something going on in the relationship between mental hospitalization and prison — perhaps a form of substitution — that should make us rethink entirely how we measure social control and incapacitation. [italics mine - bc]

But since practically none of our studies on prisons, guns, abortion, education, unemployment, capital punishment, etc., controls for institutionalization writ large, most of what we claim to know about these effects may be on shaky ground.

(Source: Institutionalization vs. Imprisonment: Are There Massive Implications for Existing Research?)

Hat tip: Reason's Hit and Run blog

Except when I'm on the phone with Mom, and then I drawl

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes

Hat tip: Rachel at TinkertyTonk.

And I certainly have a good *face* for radio.

Drill-down demographics

It's Neighboroo.

Slice and dice demographic information and view via a Google Maps interface.

Not just for politics, of course, but:

My ZIP, your ZIP, red ZIP, blue ZIP.


Um... my ZIP.

Neighboroo.

Hat tip: Gothamist.