The Quackometer

You can now subscribe to RSS Feeds to get all the Quackiest Stories direct to your browser without scanning the news sites and papers yourself.

The News Alert Engine is still being thoroughly tested and handheld. Expect a few technical glitches and bad matches for a few days yet.

The biggest problems have been keeping down the false positives, that is, stopping stories being flagged as quacky when they are probably quite reasonable. Up to now, the tuning of the engine has really focused on making sure quacky stories were always flagged. With the scanning of huge numbers of newspapers stories, my effort is going into keeping good stories off the quackometer site.

Also, I need more ideas for other news sources to scan - especially outside of the UK. If you know of a (supposedly) reputable paper that publishes medical woo as fact on a regular basis then I will try to include it.

I am struggling with a few sites for technical reasons; the Independent is the most disappointing so far. Because of how the site is constructed, the quackometer finds it hard to do its work.

Noir.

Labels: quackometer, tools