Tom Morris: 2006-11-20

2006.11.20

I'm so fed up of pseudoscience on the 'net that I'm in the process of writing a script to complement the Crackpot Index - basically, it's a little script that you can have sitting in your toolbar, and when you find a website that looks quite kooky, you can press the button and get a little pop-up window to give you the Kook Rating. It's coming along quite nicely. 2006-11-20T09:32:09Z

PZ on Eugenie Scott: "Scientists have a role to play in our culture, and it's not as the pleasant, soothing flim-flam artists, mumbling consolation and excuses in return for a donation on the offering plate. We're supposed to be clear-eyed and critical, even when it's easier to play the priest and lie." 2006-11-20T09:17:15Z

They will come, but that's not everything 2006-11-20T09:04:47Z

Kent is wondering whether his Second Life property will make him any money. No, not on it's own. It'll hopefully go up in price so that when you sell your land out, you can make some money. That said, you can use your land to promote a product - like Kosso does with the BlogHUD, and people do by selling all sorts of virtual appendages.

Your property won't make you money, any more than your web hosting account will make you money. You gotta find a way - sell something or promote something from First Life. This is actually very healthy. If you just made money automatically for having property that people visited, then it would reduce the competitive nature of running places in Second Life.

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Developing a bullshit detector 2006-11-20T13:23:04Z

My Bullshit Detector software is quite difficult to build. I'm searching through text and URLs to produce an index number (kind of like a reverse PageRank) - but it is difficult to detect context. For instance, I consider the words "Deepak Chopra" to be a good sign that "here be bullshit". But how to differentiate between a page that mindlessly repeats his spiritualist twaddle and a page that rips it to shreds? Basically, this is a good case for a lot of testing and iteration.

Currently, I'm covering a wide variety of topics in bullshit detection - pseudoscience (things like creationism and "quantum vibrations"), religion (new age, dark age and revival tent style), alternative medicine (homeopathy and the suchlike), conspiracy theories (chemtrails, Holocaust denial) and the folks who tend to trade in bullshit (Ann Coulter, Prince Charles, Pat Robertson etc.). The other main problem with developing a bullshit detector is that you have to basically don the thickest damn waders you can and climb right in and hunt that bullshit. Currently, I have about 278 terms which I look for (often with variations - I'm using Perl-compatible regex) in order to detect whether the page is bullshit or not. Most of these are names of bullshiters, but also some of the many silly words, organisations and practices they use to foist their rubbish off on us under.

I've built it, and am going to be demoing it tonight to a few friends. If they like it, I'll publish it tomorrow (and, of course, roll their suggestions in to the iterative development process. I'm using microformat-style formatting in order to make it in to a very basic API too. I might also make it so that you can choose to run it in "reporting" mode, which would basically add the results to a database - so I could then output a directory of websites based on their Bullshit Rating.

There is an important task in this - which is to try and shake people in to building web applications that take a stand on things, rather than just trying to remain agnostic. Part of "users and developers party together" is the fact that developers are users too.

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