26 August 2009 by Antoine Loup.

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

I orginally came across this through a post at Tech Crunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/21/the-personas-project-from-mit-is-all-kinds-of-cool/ 

I use my full name and also my nickname so I ran it twice and here are the results:

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26 August 2009 by Antoine Loup.

I flew back from London a few weeks ago on a Virgin Atlantic flight. As we were flying I was taking photos out of the window. I noticed there seemed to be something flapping near the wing.

I zoomed in and took as many photos as I could. Once the plane landed (it wasn’t much longer after I took the photos), I talked with some of the staff. The flight attendant asked me to speak with the captain, who then wanted me to show the picture to the engineer. I waited for the engineer to arrive, showed him the photos, and told him where I was sitting.

They all seemed very interested and even while I was waiting to go through customs, the pilot, stopped and said thanks again.

I hope it was nothing serious, but at least they all took the time to listen and seemed genuinely concerned. That was good customer service.

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