[Vision2020] Test shows Ayers penned Obama's 'Dreams'

[No Weatherman]

The writer was reviewing a previous point he'd already made so he
glossed over it. Here is the original context that I've already linked
to:

To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar
"nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first
from "Fugitive Days":

"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter,
stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight
angling through the city."

The second from "Dreams":

"Night now fell in mid-afternoon, especially when the snowstorms
rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the
ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their
length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly
identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a
standard in the field.

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.

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.

Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's
conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29
words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three
levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive
Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise.
By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of
some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.
http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2008-October/057300.html



On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Chasuk <chasuk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 06:00, No Weatherman <no.weatherman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Friday evening I received a welcome call from a member of Congress
>> who has found the evidence as convincing as I have and has intervened
>> to have writing samples tested through a university-based authorship
>> program.
>
>> Two comparable nature passages — from "Dreams" and Ayers' memoir,
>> "Fugitive Day," respectively — scored very nearly identically on the
>> Flesch Reading Ease test.
>
> The Flesch Reading Ease test is designed to measure comprehension
> difficulty, nothing more, nothing less.  Literally millions of texts
> have similar or identical scores.
>
> Anyone with Microsoft Word can easily perform the same tests.
>