Posts Tagged ‘ quackometer ’

For a while now, the quackometer has been regularly and automatically scanning various blogs for good writing about quackery. The end result is a twice-daily distillation of what’s hot in the blogosphere about quackery -or as the little black duck calls it, the quackoblogosphere. Now, this digest is available as an RSS feed so that you can see who is writing the best stuff in one easy to find location. Please let me know if there is a blog out there that is not being scanned. You can see the full list of scanned blogs from the quackoblogosphere’s home page. PS Apologies for using the word ‘Holistic’ in the title. I felt rather dirty when typing it.

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Le Canard Noir is pleased to announce the arrival of the Quackometer QuackSafeTM Toolbar Button for Internet Explorer that will allow one-click access to the Quackometer and QuackSafeTM Search Engine. Click the button to find out if your current page is Quackery. Highlight a name in the text and click the button to find out if they might be a quack. Type a query into the Google Toolbar search button and click the Quackometer button for reliable search results. UPDATE: The Toolbar button now has access to the QuackSafeTM Search Engine. Simply enter your query into the Google Toolbar and hit the duck’s head. As a sophisticated reader of my site, you may feel that you too can spot a quack a mile off. But in these days of...

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If you would like to receive emails whenever the quackometer finds a quack newspaper article, then provide your email address here. Email alerts will only be sent for the most quacky stories and you can choose which region of the world you want to know about. Your email address will only be used by the quackometer automatic alert engine to warn you about quack stories. The black duck is not a spammer and will strive to ensure you only get interesting alerts. Canceling News Alerts If you have already registered and wish to stop receiving alerts, or you have any other problem, then please contact with the email address given below.

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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...

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The latest quackometer functionality is now being tested on the quackometer web site. Throughout the day, the little black duck will be reading the news for you and creating alerts if quackery is found. Hoards of quackbusters around the world will be alerted to potential quackery in the newsapers before it starts hitting peoples’ doormats. Together we can expose the worst offending news sources. Daily lists of quack stories will be available on this site. As you are well aware, many so-called serious newspapers regularly publish quack health stories with little or no critical appraisal of their validity. Stories in newspapers are one important area where quacks can seek validation and advertising without too much trouble. The Quackometer intends to expose this laziness as as the ink is drying...

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The quackometer is an experiment to see if it is easy to spot quack web sites just from the language they use. The idea for this site came about after various discussions on Guardian writer Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog. Several people have noted how quack web-sites use similar language and vocabulary and once you can spot the patterns, spotting quackery is easy. Quack words include “energy”, “holistic”, “vibrations”, “magnetic healing”, “quantum” . These words are usually borrowed from physics and used to promote dubious health claims. As such, their use is pseudoscientific and just meant to impress and bamboozle the gullible. So, is it possible to spot a quack web site just from its use of language? Is is possible to automate the process? The Quackometer intends to...

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