For some reason I tend to find personality-type tests entertaining. I
found this PersonalDNA site through
a link from a link from a link from a blog whose feed I subscribe to
(but I don't recall preceisely which at the moment).
My numeric scores combined with their glossary defenition of what the
terms mean to them:
- Confidence
- How confident you are about expressing your opinions and accomplishing things.
- 54 [Sounds about right vis a viz expressing my opinions, but seems low as far as accomplishing things goes.]
- Openness
- Your degree of openness to new experiences.
- 80 [Sounds about right with the caveat that said experiences are moral, ethical & legal.]
- Extroversion
- How outgoing you are. High means you are extroverted. Low means you are introverted.
- 14 [There is no question I'm an introvert, but am I really that introverted?]
- Empathy
- How much you understand (and experience) the emotions and thoughts of others.
- 92 [This seems overly high; I try and understand how other people think and feel but I wouldn't say that I regularly "experience" their emotions.]
- Trust in Others
- The general faith you have in other people; how much you think people are good at heart.
- 74 [I'm generally willing to assume good intent until specific experience teaches otherwise.]
- Authoritarianism
- Your adherence to the social order and how much you favor obedience.
- 50 [Uh, ok.]
- Masculinity
- The degree of your stereotypically-male traits.
- 84 [They don't enumerate what "stereotypical male traits" they are talking about so...]
- Femininity
- The degree of your stereotypically-female traits.
- 58 [Does this mean I'm slightly in touch with my "feminine-side?"]
- Spontaneity
- How comfortable you are with making plans at the last minute.
- 72 [This number probably would have been even higher when I was in college.]
- Attention to Style
- How aware you are of fashion trends. How much effort you put in to your own style.
- 12 [Hey, at least I didn't score in the single digit range!]
- Agency
- How much you believe you determine your own outcomes. High means you believe that you have control over your life. Low means you believe that other factorssuch as chance, fate, and powerful others influence your life.
- 60 [I'd have expected this number to be higher...]
- Imaginative/Earthy
- Your prefererence for concrete or abstract things. Low means you prefer abstract, theoretical things. High means you prefer detail-oriented, practical things.
- 14 [Perhaps a bit low; I am good at troubleshooting because I can pick out relavent details from the "big abstract picture" so to speak.]
- Functional/Aesthetic
- Your prefererence for beauty or form. Low means you care more about how something works. High means you care more about how something looks.
- 10 [I guess this goes along with the low score for attention to style...]
Incidentally, some of the questions asked you to answer—instead of on a
mere sliding scale (1-10, etc.)—by plotting your answer on a two
dimensional grid. Nice technique (though broken without Javascript being
enabled).
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, June 12,
2007
at 20:30
141 comments
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Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame) posed the following research invitation on his blog yesterday:
Anyway. The cover of Bradbury Stories is as shown [at right], with BRADBURY in navy blue and the letters within BRADBURY that spell RAY in white. I thought this was pretty cool and wondered: are there other famous people who first name is contained, in order though not necessarily consecutively, within their last?
Ray makes it looks so effortless that youd think there would be lots of others, but I spent about half an hour trying to name some and could only come up with one: sportscaster Al MichAeLs. I tried to interest the assembled Grand Slam brain trust into thinking of others, but evidently even the Sony greenroom provided too much stimulus for a dull pursuit like this one.
But hey, this is the Internet. Theres got to be lots of bored people out there. Can anybody think of other kangaroo celebrities like bRAdburY and michAeLs?
I doubt I could name ten five sportscasters at all from
memory. I'm not at all up to date on popular culture. (Although
Jeopardy! is an enjoyable show, I rarely watch TV and never saw Ken play during his famous winning streak; for what it is worth probably
the main thing we have in common is religion.) So basically, I have to resort to programatic analysis of
existing data rather than my own wealth of trivia knowledge re: celebrities,
etc.
My first apprach was to turn to Project
Gutenberg as a source for a list of (mildly) famous authors. Naturally
these authors are all dead since nothing published since Steamboat Willy was produced in 1928 has
been allowed entered the public domain (nor, I fear, will it ever—at
least in my lifetime—but I digress...)
I spidered their index of authors. I chose to discard any
name where the given name was spelled by consecutive letters in the surname
(think William Williams or Eino Leino) as being
too uninteresting.
I only came up with three answers:
- Asa Don DICKINSON
- Archibald Lee FLETCHER
- Helvi HERLEVI
As an alternate approach I decided to find U.S. government lists of names
that I could put together & run some regular expressions over.
For surnames I ended up using a list of surnames ranked by frequency from the Census Bureau (incidentally Cleverly clocks in at 86,655th out of their 88,799 listed surnames).
For given names I chose the 1,000 most popular names in the 2000's for both boys and girls (2,000 names total based on Social Security card applications).
In total we have 88,799 unique surnames and 1,935 unique given names (65
unisex names are on both lists). Incidentally, did you
know that "Baby" is the 831st most popular boy name and 989th most popular girl name? I sure didn't.
(But maybe if I'd been born a
Babey, Bagby, Bagsby, Banbury, Baraby, Barby, Barnaby, Barnebey,
Battersby, Blackaby, Blackerby, Braboy, Brackenbury, Bradberry,
Bradbury, Bradby, Brasby, or Brayboy
instead of a Cleverly I would have?)
Taking the cartesian
product of these two sets gives us 171,826,065 name combinations to
consider. How many "interesting" combinations exist? 65,733 or 1 out of every
~2,614 combinations. That's too many to list in the body of this post
(but you can download them).
What surnames have the most flexibility in mixing and matching with
a given name to produce an interesting result? The top five are:
- BHAMARANIYAMA
- 28 possible given names: Amani, Amara, Amari, Amaya, Amiya, Amy, Amya, Ana, Aniya, Anya, Ari, Aria, Bria, Hana, Maia, Mara, Maria, Mariam, Mary, Maryam, Maya, Mia, Miya, Mya, Nia, Nya, Ray, & Riya.
- JOSEPHPAULINE
- 24 possible given names: Ali, Ean, Eli, Halie, Jan, Jane, Jean, Joan, Joe, Joel, Johan, John, Jolie, Jon, Josephine, Josh, Josie, Josue, Julie, Paul, Saul, Sean, Shane, & Shaun.
- SANTAMARINA
- 24 possible given names: Amara, Amari, Amina, Ana, Ann, Anna, Ari, Aria, Maia, Mara, Maria, Mia, Mina, Nia, Nina, Sam, Samara, Sanaa, Sara, Tamara, Tamia, Tara, Tia, & Tina.
- CHAMBERLIAN
- 22 possible given names: Abel, Alan, Ali, Alia, Amelia, Ari, Aria, Ben, Bria, Brian, Cael, Cali, Cara, Carl, Carla, Carli, Celia, Ean, Eli, Elian, Erin, & Mia.
- KANJIRATHINGA
- 22 possible given names: Ana, Anahi, Anita, Ann, Anna, Ari, Aria, Ian, Jan, Jana, Kai, Kaia, Kara, Karina, Kian, Kiana, Kira, Nia, Nina, Raina, Tia, & Tina.
Two thoughts: Girls seem to definitely have an edge over boys in this contest and I can't recall ever meeting someone with one of these surnames.
If we narrow our cartesian product down to the 10,000 most common
U.S. surnames we end up with only 5,992 interesting pairs (out of 19,350,000
combinations). The top five surnames become:
- Vanlandingham
- Candelaria
- Evangelista
- Santamaria
- Chamberlain
with nineteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen and fourteen respectively. How many of the given names can you find hidden within these surnames?
Restricting the search to the top-100 most popular surnames (only
52 interesting pairs)
the winner is Richardson (boys win finally: Aron, Carson, Cason, Chad, Ian,
& Ricardo).
For the record with Cleverly as your surname your only choice
is Lee. (I'm not having any second thoughts about what we named
our twins though!)
Anyway, with such popular given names maybe some of todays kids with
those names will grow up to be famous celebrities in the future...? :-)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, June 12,
2007
at 23:45
169 comments
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