We've mentioned a lot how interesting it is that the Turing Test was initially modelled after a test of gender. I just ran into a web program that tries to determine the gender of the author of a particular text: The Gender Genie.
It's based on an algorithim some guy wrote that analyzes "linguistic patterns of males and females," whatever that means. It seems to have an idea of which words are more commonly used by men versus women, and then it measures the frequency of these words in a given text. Apparently, "was" is a feminine word and "is" is a masculine word. Okay, sure...
Anyway, you paste a bit of text into this program, then select the genre of the text: fiction, non-fiction, or blog. I ran several of our most recent blog entries through it, under the blog category, and the computer guessed "male" for all of them.
Obviously the whole program is just stupid and ridiculous (in my humble opinion). But it's interesting that, however many years after those gender tests that the Turing Test is based on, people still think trying to find the "innate gender" behind the author of an anonymous text is 1.) possible at all and 2.) possible through formulaic mathematical calculation and 3.) a worthy pursuit.
Audre