Yikes, thanks for the heads up.
Anyway, back on topic...
Bill Ayers can write (not that what he writes about is worth anything), but he's got this huge stigma behind him, so anything he writes will never be taken seriously. The concept that he would use a promising student with similar (to what extent, only they know) views on things as an outlet he can use to get his message out is not all that laughable.
I think an impartial observer would have to first decide how well cusum analysis can fingerprint an author. The author of the article says it's not perfect at identifying who wrote what, but I would like to know what the certainty of the cusum analysis rubric is.
Okay, you want me to laugh at the article? Here we go.
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Because obviously student case comments are the same genre of writing as memoirs.
I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.
Scientific! This is obviously not a smear.
Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.
I can tell the critical thinking skills of people who read this sentence are intact. Nope, no racism here folks.
Blah Blah Blah, this is nonsense and randomness, whenever you have two autobiographies you can find parallels, blah, blah...
The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.
Publishing fail. Books have editors, editors literally aim on scores like these, especially on 'popular autobiographies,' so its a meaningless stat.
A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."
"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.
Wrong way to use 'cusum analysis.' A Cusum analysis focuses on the unconscious usage of words like "and, an, or, the, of" and so on and so forth.
http://www.uwp.co.uk/book_desc/1324.html
http://members.aol.com/qsums/QsumIntroduction.html
A. They are the short connecting words, the function or 'filler' words, like
a and he I in is it of that the to was
and so on. Notice that these are words of 2, 3 or 4 letters. In effect, they form the syntax, or framework, of our language. They tend to be prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs—NOT the 'content words', that is, the nouns and adjectives, main verbs, all of which tell you what the sentence is about.
In addition, the use of words starting with a vowel has also been found to be useful in identifying authorship.
Cusum analysts have found that there are nine tests which can be tested on samples. The three most common are the use of the 2 and 3 letter words (23lw); words starting with a vowel (initial vowel words, ivw); and the third is the combination of these two together (23lw+ivw), this last having often proved the most useful identifier of consistency. The other tests involve the use of words of four letters as well.
One of these nine tests—and sometimes more than one—will prove consistent for a writer or speaker.
Blah blah blah, more random comparisons, less analysis.
American Thinker lies again.
In final, this is my advice:
THINK SKEPTICALLY
When a known source with a known agenda tells you they are properly applying a method, don't believe them.
Your onto me!
