Yeah, Yeah, I Know They're Now Better at Chess

A while ago, I entered this page's URL in some Internet tool which told me that the likelihood of my being female was 66%, which sounds a bit too high to me. Via Marginal Revolution, here's the Typealyzer, a web tool which is supposed to tell you something about a blog writer's personality if you enter the blog's name. The first message you get is a disclaimer:

Note: writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-percieved personality.

Entering the CoR's address gives you this:

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Not surprisingly, they've phrased everything as positively as possible. It would be a nice little English exam to have pupils rephrase the whole thing using negative descriptions while saying basically the same thing. Bonus: Raises consumer awareness! I'd rephrase the disclaimer as follows:

Note: our instrument is completely useless. Results which give you roughly the opposite of the writer's actual personality are possible.

If you think about it, it's no surprise. Google translations clearly demonstrate that computers are no good at simply grasping the meaning of a sentence, and imputing a writer's personality from something s/he wrote seems a teensy bit harder. In other words: Don't even bother. Simply counting adverbs, semicolons and four-letter words won't do.

(See the first link's comments section for mixed feedback.)