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

[lfalen]

I don't buy most conspiracy theories, this one included. This is about the same as Joe campbell claiming that a previous poster was actually three people and all the theories on who wrote Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: "No Weatherman" no.weatherman at gmail.com
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:34:45 -0700
To: "Vision 2020" vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Test shows Ayers penned Obama's 'Dreams'

> 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.
> >
> 
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