A new kind of spam
I just received the following unsolicited email:
Dear Dr. Gelman,I have seen your article “Direct data manipulation for local decision analysis as applied to the…” in the Risk Anal, 2005, and I thought you would be interested in evaluation of our Pathway Studio 6.0 (including pathway analysis software, molecular interaction database, and text mining tool) for pathway, molecular interaction, and experimental data analysis.
With Pathway Studio you can use accumulated published biological knowledge in conjunction with experimental findings to advance mechanistic understanding of disease:
- Identify relationships among genes, proteins, small molecules, cell processes, etc. and build disease pathways
- Analyze gene expression, proteomics, and other high throughput data: reconstruct pathways, find targets and regulators
- Update the database on-the-fly with recently published information and protein interaction data from experiments.
If you are interested, learn more and sign up for evaluation here: . . .
Kind regards,
Natalia Alexandrova
Ariadne
Tel: 240-453-6296
Fax: 240-453-9026
email: natal@ariadnegenomics.com
Why did this spam offend me so much? Somehow I feel like scientific communication should be above this sort of crap—sending a robot to find the emails of all authors of scientific publications and promoting some kind of crap that virtually nobody would be interested in? Ugh. I hate liars.
Comments
How is this person lying? At least they are straightforward about what they are offering, describe what it does so you can decide what you want, give you useful contact information and leave the action up to you.
This may be unsolicited email, but if all spam were this honest, the world would be a wonderful place. Count your blessings.
(frankly, I hear “Ivory Tower” all over your indignation. You seem more upset by this than by fraudulent inheritance emails. The only reason I can see is because these fairly honest and forthright sales people are defiling your hallowed halls with base mercantilism without your permission)
Posted by: Ted Dunning | May 28, 2009 07:34 PM
Ted:
1. She’s lying in the first paragraph of her email. If she really “seen” my article, she’d know that it had nothing whatsoever to do with “molecular interaction” or any of the other topics she mentioned. I can only assume they ran a program to scrape off the emails of all authors of articles in a set of journals that include Risk Analysis.
2. I definitely have an ivory tower perspective here. In the grand scheme of things, spammers may be bad people, but they’re not nearly as bad as Bernard Madoff or, for that matter, people who mug little old ladies on the street. I would have no objection to you or others expressing your indignation over these much more horrible activities.
3. She is not “giving me useful contact information.” I have no interest in molecular interaction, etc. Her information is about as useful to me as would be an ad for a pizza parlor in Omaha, Nebraska.
4. This is not “base mercantilism.” It’s lying. Base mercantilism would be: “We scraped your email off a list of authors of articles in biomedical journals, and we hope you might be interested in …” I have to admit, I wouldn’t be thrilled with that either—sending an unsolicited mass email is the cyber equivalent of sending a robot to go to my home and knock on the door—but at least they wouldn’t be outright lying.
And I think it’s an insult to honest, hard-working salesperson to call this sort of spammer “fairly honest and forthright.” What would be fairly honest and forthright would be if they would actually read the articles they’re scraping, or at least hire a programmer to write a Perl script to searching for “molecular interaction” in the files they’re scraping.
Posted by: Andrew![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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May 28, 2009 08:24 PM
an insult to honest, hard-working salesperson
To refer to salespeople as “honest” is an insult to the rest of the honest world.
Also, I like pizza, and I like Omaha.
Posted by: Gabe | May 30, 2009 11:46 PM