

Automatic writing - edu
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2252153,00.html

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nirmal
The book titles mentioned in the article seem to be really facts oriented. The
act of listing facts is the easiest part of writing anything, in my opinion. I
would like to see a machine that could put something together like an
Isaacson's biography on Einstein. List the facts of his life but then also
draw out the way in which they interplayed with the world politics to lead him
down the path he took.

Or maybe, I'm completely mistaken and all we need is to somehow better model
this in the machine's database.

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byrneseyeview
Some Bloomberg stories are written this way. That's how they can have five
paragraphs of analysis and a couple relevant quotes three seconds after new
economic data are reported. Their profiles, and articles about stories rather
than numbers, are done the usual way, though.

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almost
Um, this really seems like complete and utter bullshit. More so after seeing
the youtube video.

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kcl
The idea is genius, the act itself, when it isn't explained to the consumer,
is completely immoral.

I'm reminded of the "Your Family's Geneaology Book", where "Your Family" is
replaced with your last name. For instance, "The Smith's Geneaology Book". The
books, which aren't cheap, are full of generic content about cultures and
countries. Inserted in the middle is perhaps a page of surname-relevant
scholarship. One of my uncles with a different last name has one, and his
didn't come with any surname specific material at all: just a printout in the
back of people in the US sharing his name.

They've been selling these since before the internet was around, and as a kid
they were my first introduction to this type of content-free marketing.

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D_T
When I read this I was laughing. But the Guardian is not The Onion so...

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DXL
Here's a video of how Parker does it: <http://youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY>

The writing is mostly VB Word macros, but impressing still.

