Slashdot Mirror
Google vs. Boilerplate Activism
ArmorFiend writes with this NYTimes article which "details the efforts of journalists to discern real reader-written letters from boilerplate form letters. Seems like there should be a centralized searchable DB of letters to the editor."
The problem with boilerplate form letters are that people who only have a shallow understanding of an issue or topic can simply mad-lib a form letter and sound like they're informed. This doesn't benefit the recipient nor the writer (who thanks to these canned letters, is given a cheap way out of actually learning, participating or becoming really involved)
I can't help but notice a similarity between this and students who steal code off the web and claim it as their own.
____
ATS11=0 the secret to beating everyone else to a 1 line board.
Remember when Microsoft supported a 'grassroots' campaign to have people write in to their local newspaper and talk about how they supported Microsoft during the anti-trust trial?
These journalists are working to make sure they don't get played like that. And of course, clever public relations professionals are always trying to make boilerplate look less like boilerplate...
Advertising is drying up, pure and simple. Most modern ads don't even list the advantages of their product in a traditional manner.
P.R. is the new advertising...in the future, it will be very difficult to tell genuine product reviews from laudatory PR copy. Sophisticated PR will lead to the collapse of trust in the media-and I welcome it! People trust the media far too much already...
here's a tip from me to you: if your local news is reporting about 'a miracle diet,' or a 'revolutionary new (fat/aging/heart attack) fighter', they are just lazily barfing up public relations. learn to recognize PR, and educate your friends about it. maybe in the future, you will be able to make money determining which media outlets are legit, and which are paved in Astroturf..
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The Chinese sometimes name people with numbers. It is said to be lucky.
In a related story, Harry S. Truman's middle name was in fact, "S". It stood for nothing but the letter.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I saw this on Yahoo earlier today.
Yahoo link
Hey, you can win a T-shirt or a cooler if you get enough of their letters published in your local papers.
When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.
Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.
Click on the links. You will find many people agree with me.
Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
My wife wanted me to help her e-mail a form letter to our senaters. I told her it was stupid and got her to type her own letter and send it postal mail. They still will ignore her (we're liberals, they're republicans), but at least she did something.
If you spot the "demonstrating genuine leadership" letter, send it to these folks who've listed 74 and climbing.
Paul Boutin | writer for Slate, Wired, etc
Yes but the congresscritters want to know how committed you are to that point of view. So believe it or not a five line handwritten 'kitchen table' letter is regarded far more highly than a laser printed form letter.
Thats not quite what is being talked about here which is bogus letters to the editor. Looks like the GOP is getting really rattled by the drop in Bush's opinion ratings which are now lower than his father's at the same point in the cycle. So they have a Web site that pumps out bogus letters to the editor under the names and addresses of local supporters. They need the local addresses because even the most ludicrous GOP lapdogs like the New York Post are not going to publish a letter saying 'President Bush is the greatest President ever, he has been demonstrating genuine leadership, blah blah' if it is from GOP HQ. And even if they did publish it readers would ignore it as a piece of ludicrous propaganda.
The GOP 'aliengrams' only have force if their source is disguised. They are written as independent letters of support. The only thing that makes them of interest to a local paper is that they come from a local person. Hence the need for the lie.
Campaign tactics of this sort say a lot about the character (or rather lack of it) of the politicians who use them. The intention is to deceive people into believing that there is widespread support for Bush's policies such as the invasion of Iraq.
The major newspapers like the London Times or the New York Times will almost always call before publishing, at least in my experience. The London Times wants to know that the letter has only been sent to them, and will quite often want to edit for length (although my style is compact enough to usually not need this).
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I must admit, sometimes I felt like there wasn't enough background provided and I wanted (and sometimes obtained) more information about the subject I wrote about, but this is a world away from just creating form letters with zero thought.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You'll note in the article that one thing editors are concerned about is actually _printing_ these form letters. They're not taking polls, they're actually publishing content, and there's something at least vaguely dishonest about sending a "letter to the editor" that you didn't write.
Just to support this point -- it's more than vaguely dishonest, it's plagiarism. It doesn't matter if the original author wants the work passed off or not; passing it off without crediting the source is plagiarism no matter what. (That's why you can't turn in your friend's term paper as your own even if your friend approves.)
Remember a company called Digital Integrity? they folded a few years ago for lack of funding due to the dot-com bailout in 2000. they had a good, legitimate product and an excellent crew to make it work. they made a search engine that searched and compared whole blocks of text, originally written by a professor at Berkeley to look for plaigerism in students termpapers. The software ran on unix and linux and was written in C++. I wonder what happened to the software? Sounds like it would be a good application for this sort of thing. The Boilerplate letters I get in my spam folder every day are pathetically written, and rarely actually reflect the opinions of the illiterate morons that use them.
Stupid Humans.....
The only thing you really need to do is get a large enough body of media submitting their frequently-boilerplated topics and check if they've been spotted before. You'd want to have a way to retrieve the other submissions so you could do an eyeball test, something not available in Razor right now, but the code could be extended to do this.