Sunday, February 12, 2006
Mad Pseudoscientist Update
Remember the story about the guy who tried to make a book about cancer entirely by cutting and pasting comments from websites? Dawno, the sparkly eared moderator of Absolute Write's blogging forum, took it upon herself to actually order a copy of the book and see if she could locate the original text to the book. Now her analysis is up at the following link:
NVNC ID VIDES, NVNC NE VIDES: Survival of the Stubbornest
Sure enough, there's only a few teeny snippets of original text. Some entire chapters were made with one hit of Ctrl-V. Sources vary from widely respected scientific authorities to outright quacks. Things may get interesting now that Dawno has allerted the book's real authors that their words have been sold without their permission.
This doesn't reflect very well on either Pavel the Cancer Boy for his content stealing, or PublishAmerica for the fact that they printed this book. Real publishers have fact checkers to look through how-to books and at least be sure the author has properly cited his sources and not misinterpreted them. Of course, real publishers also know that editing does not consist of running MS Word's spell and gramar checks, and that marketing does not consist of the author begging individual bookstores to stock his book...
NVNC ID VIDES, NVNC NE VIDES: Survival of the Stubbornest
Sure enough, there's only a few teeny snippets of original text. Some entire chapters were made with one hit of Ctrl-V. Sources vary from widely respected scientific authorities to outright quacks. Things may get interesting now that Dawno has allerted the book's real authors that their words have been sold without their permission.
This doesn't reflect very well on either Pavel the Cancer Boy for his content stealing, or PublishAmerica for the fact that they printed this book. Real publishers have fact checkers to look through how-to books and at least be sure the author has properly cited his sources and not misinterpreted them. Of course, real publishers also know that editing does not consist of running MS Word's spell and gramar checks, and that marketing does not consist of the author begging individual bookstores to stock his book...
Labels: Tinfoil Hat
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Thank you for mentioning my efforts on your blog. I'm hopeful that some good will come of my work, not the least that it will be a cautionary tale to potential PA victims - but if that's all it accomplishes then I'll be satisfied.
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