Interesting developments in the fraud ratings
August 19th, 2008 Posted in InternetMany of you will have read my original post a few weeks ago on fraud ratings. I proposed the system as a (highly flawed) method for tracking public sentiment about publicly visible paranormal claimants. Well, there have been interesting developments in my fraud index over the last month, and I thought I’d update you.
Fraud Ratings Change
As you can see, the fraud index (which represents a coarse estimate of how the Internet evaluates the fraudulent status of leading psychics) seems to show that the world is slowly wising up to the trickery of these ridiculous people. The most profound result seems to be that Uri Geller is now leaping up the rankings with his fraud rating jumping from 1.29% when the index began, right up to a maximum value of 3.42% last week. This may well be a result of his recent court case where he tried to stifle public promotion of videos showing Geller using simple trickery to perform his ‘magic’.
As for the other psychics, well John Edward seems to be achieving very little, with his current fraud rating exactly the same as it was in teh first week. James van Praagh is making slow progress up the rankings, but the runaway winner of the fraud rating at the moment is Sylvia Browne, whose current score is now well over 6% (6.11% as of this morning), which is 50% higher than her nearest competitor.
Keep watching over the next few months as I’ll update you on more news regarding this fascinating statistic.
