I received the following email with subject line, “Andrew, just finished ‘Foreign language skills …'”:
Andrew,
Just finished http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/12/24/foreign_languag/
This leads to the silliness of considering foreign language skills as a purely positional good or as a method for selecting students, while forgetting the direct benefits of being able to communicate in various ways with different cultures.
– Found this interesting..Since you covered a language-related topic, I thought you might be interested in our new infographic where we put the new Google translate iOS app to the test. We compared the app against our best human translators and found the results quite surprising.
Would you like me to send you the link?
Thanks,
Ashley Harris
Outreach Coordinator
“Ashley Harris,” indeed.
What I’m wondering is, can’t all these bots just communicate with each other and leave us humans out of the loop? Or maybe I should be afraid of this happening?
I’m sorry to break it to you, but again, this looks like a real person:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ashley-harris/a8/290/2a8
You’re high enough profile and your blog high traffic enough to get some attention from humans.
Risky prediction (LinkedIn??)but if they are real its the most sensible linked in (fake?) picture I have seen to date.
D’oh. You’re right — it’s probably a fake profile. Especially given that the photo doesn’t show her face. Now I feel like a rube (no offense to those named Reuben, or even Rubin, intended).
But there do appear to be a whole lot of people named Ashley Harris out there, both men and women.
If you search around you can find forums long abandonded by humans but still active. There, the spam bots peddle thier wares to each other, presumably learning from each others responses.