Skeptic's Bar (No crappy, no party !)

[Max]

Also Faraday agree with the MOTTO !

After seen all this brass he agreed to the MOTTO !

and joined the club !

and bought an LRL from SA !?

[Max]

Also Franklin joined the Bar !

[Max]

and Maxwell too !

of course he had some dubts about LRLs really work...
but anyway, this is the Skeptic's Bar...

[Max]

Quadro Traker again... the injunction

8:40 PM 4/22/1996
Federal judge bars sale of product, labels it a fraud


BEAUMONT (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday permanently barred a South Carolina company from making or selling the Quadro Tracker, a device supposedly able to detect a slew of items, from illicit drugs to golf balls.
U.S. District Judge Thad Heartfield, citing fear that the device could lead to civil rights violations and calling it a fraud, extended a temporary order he issued against Quadro Corp. of Harleyville, S.C., in February.
Quadro has sold about 1,000 trackers to school districts and law enforcement agencies nationwide at prices up to $8,000. Company officials touted the plastic, nonelectronic device with aradio antenna as a detector of weapons, explosives and narcotics.
But the FBI, after examining it at laboratories in Quantico, Va., and New Mexico, concluded that the tracker was nothing more than an empty plastic box.
Heartfield, who heard a week of evidence regarding the tracker earlier this month, agreed, finding that "the defendants engaged in a scheme to defraud." He ordered Quadro not to manufacture or sell any of its devices.
"None of the operational tests conducted by witnesses showed that Quadro's devices could locate objects except by chance,"the judge wrote. "Like the dowser with a divining rod, the user of a Quadro Tracker must ultimately rely upon, not science, but the belief that it works.
"The court finds that defendants do not know of any scientific principles which could make the devices operate."
Among the school districts that purchased the trackers were the Houston, Spring and New Caney public schools. Some who used it contend that it appeared to work, even though they couldn't explain it.
The Houston Independent School District bought two Quadro Trackers at about $900 apiece. But an official said after the controversy broke that the district was returning them to the manufacturer as part of a money-back guarantee.
New Caney ISD police chief Dennis Doerge said the district returned its Quadro Tracker recently for a refund, though he declined to say why. Doerge, who had once praised the device as a deterrent to mischief, said that his superintendent had asked him not to comment further.
Heartfield on Monday also expressed concern that continued use of the devices could lead to violations of the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The possible civil rights threat was a key argument brought by federal prosecutors.
"If a police officer attempts to use the Quadro Tracker properly, the device's antenna could swing towards a person, automobile, container, house, etc. by the forces of gravity, inertia or another outside agency," the judge said.
"The device would, in effect, improperly implicate the person or object and provide the officer with probable cause to search."
U.S. Attorney Mike Bradford said his office will now concentrate on an ongoing criminal fraud investigation against Quadro officials, and he hinted that action in the case could be announced "in the near future."
Robert Lyles, the Charleston, S.C., attorney representing Quadro, said he was disappointed by the ruling.
"The fight has been a very difficult one for Quadro," Lyles said. "They were essentially shut down in January. They have been expending their time ... fighting this thing. Now they've got to sit down and decide what they can do."
Lyles said an appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans was likely, adding that Quadro continues to maintain the effectiveness of its devices.
While the company was under FBI investigation, Quadro invited authorities to study its devices and offered a money-back guarantee to any displeased customers, Lyles said.
Quadro Corp. officials told prospective customers that the device has conductors, inductors and oscillators in it and is powered from static electricity generated when the operator walks around holding it. According to marketing literature, the tracker's user simply inserts a "locator card" in the device to find drugs, weapons and even specific people. During this month's hearing, government experts in physics testified that there was no scientific basis to believe the tracker works.

(http://www.ih2000.net/ira/quad0422.htm)

[Max]

again and again...

Quadro Crime Tracker

In 1993, The Quadro Corporation, based in Harleyville, South Carolina, started marketing theQuadro Tracker, a high-tech device which could (depending on which model was bought), find lost golf balls, illegal narcotics, weapons and explosives, or missing persons.

To use the machine, you fed in a “carbocrystalized signature card” which had been tuned to the “identical frequency modulation” as the object you were searching for. The Quadro Corporation explains the theory behind the devices:

[A]ll matter contains exact molecular frequencies. When a magnetic field is created by a contained electrically charged body moving through space at a perpendicular angle moving to its direction, and that field is brought into alignment with another exact field, resonating at the identical frequency modulation, then both objects attract, just as two bodies are attracted toward each other in a gravitational field.

The Quadro QRS 250G, consisted of an empty plastic box, an antenna, and a place to put the “signature cards.” James Randi describes how these cards were prepared:

To prepare a “carbocrystalized signature card” tuned to cocaine, the white-gloved [Quadro founder Wade] Quattlebaum took a Polaroid photo of the substance. That photo was then taken to what appeared, to the uninitiated person, to be a Canon copier. In actuality, explained Quattlebaum, this was an “electromagnetic frequency transfer unit.” Science marches on. An enlarged photocopy of the Polaroid photo was made, which “extracted the molecular structure and its subsequent frequency emission from the photo.” That piece of paper was then cut into tiny squares, one of which was inserted into the plastic “signature card” chip. Et le voila!

Quadro Corp. sold these things to, among others, law enforcement agencies and school districts, for as much as (U.S.) $8,000.
They were assisted by an assistant U.S. Attorney from Houston who bought into the scheme, paid $13,600 for distribution rights in four states, and then used his office to promote the devices. He’s the only one to have gotten nailed for the scam so far (he resigned and paid a $5,000 fine); although the company was shut down by court injunction in 1996, the three Quadro employees charged with mail fraud were acquitted by a jury in early 1997.
The prosecutor in that case, baffled to be on the losing side, tried to explain: “We felt that we proved that this was a worthless device,” he said, but “in fraud you have to prove intent, and perhaps they did not see clear intent to defraud.”
It is unknown how many search warrants were issued or gym lockers searched based on findings of the Quadro Tracker.


(http://sniggle.net/quadro.php)

///

FIND "missing persons" ???

What's interesting is that “carbocrystalized signature card” which had been tuned to the “identical frequency modulation” obtained from "a Polaroid photo of the substance"

What's really puzzle me is that even scientific institutions belived that BS at first.

"The Quadro Corporation explains the theory behind the devices:" bla bla bla like all the others !? like pseudoscientific argumentations maybe...

The Quadro's MFD theory is pretty funny :

"[A]ll matter contains exact molecular frequencies. When a magnetic field is created by a contained electrically charged body moving through space at a perpendicular angle moving to its direction, and that field is brought into alignment with another exact field, resonating at the identical frequency modulation, then both objects attract, just as two bodies are attracted toward each other in a gravitational field. "

NO COMMENTS AGAIN. ANY TEENAGER WITH A BOOK OF PHYSICS CAN Pi$$ OFF ALL THESE BS.

How law enforcement agencies in the US belived all that crappy theory ?

” That piece of paper was then cut into tiny squares, one of which was inserted into the plastic “signature card” chip. Et le voila !"

Oh yeah... so put that I want to find ELVIS... I have just to prepare that Polaroid photo and start walking ???

Kind regards,
Max

[Elie]

Quadro has sold about 1,000 trackers to school districts and law enforcement agencies nationwide at prices up to $8,000.

I have been sitting here, trying to find strong enough words to convey how I feel about the educators and police who buy these things. There are none.

[Max]

I have been sitting here, trying to find strong enough words to convey how I feel about the educators and police who buy these things. There are none.

Hi Elie,
totally agree. I don't know why these things happen.
I think that advertise is the only big discovery some of these "manifacturers" made in their entire life.

They are really good on pushing their pruducts.
It's the only thing I could think to explain why they actually sell that stuff.

Kind regards,
Max

[Max]

the Quadro madness hit again

"
Quadro Tracker worthless, wastes taxpayer money

Would you ever invest in a device that's supposed to find people buried under wreckage by detecting their psychic emanations? Would you ever invest in a company that you knew absolutely nothing about, and even the name was a secret? If you answered "no" to either of these questions, consider yourself a whole lot more intelligent than a whole lot of other people.

Quadro QRS 250G (the Quadro Tracker) is one of the greatest products ever marketed. It's a plastic box with an antenna on one end that, and I'm not joking or embellishing at all, detects people by a "...frequency chip [that] is oscillated by static electricity produced by the body [of the captive] inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity." Apparently, the technology inside is of a "secret type" not yet "known to modern science." This device, marketed by the Quadro Corporation of Harleyville, South Carolina, was supposed to not only detect people buried by wreckage after an earthquake or terrorist attack, but could be used for just about anything, including (once again, as much as I wish I was, I am not joking) detecting drugs in schools and police units.

Why am I, you ask, so upset about the Quadro tracker? Because when the FBI investigated the device in 1996, they determined that it's an empty plastic box that costs about $2 to make, assemble, and package. Well, I suppose that's nothing to be upset about, unless you're aware that they sold dozens of the Trackers for as much as $8,000.

What's really shocking is who they sold it to. Not your average chump fresh off the turnip truck, but to government agencies, high schools, and police departments. If you've still not caught on, re-read that to say "thousands of the tax dollars you worked so hard to give to the government have been spent on a worthless bit of pseudo-technology."

What's scary is that it was a fairly learned group of people that bought into this thing. Anyone who's been past a freshman chemistry class should know that the tracker's various claims about "static electricity," "molecular vibrations," and so on are completely bogus. And anyone who's been through grade school should know that if you're going to spend $8,000 on a device, you should at least get some idea of how it works. An enormous waste of money and time, money and time that you and I as taxpayers pay for, would have been avoided had people known just a tiny bit more about critical reasoning or, at the very least, been a little more cynical.

...
"

full article at: http://media.www.thetriangle.org/med...y-917761.shtml

It's bocoming a school case of how a fraud can involve higher level security of a country.

Kind regards,
Max

[Max]

"

Box of dreams - use of the Quadro Tracker which is supposed to locate anything, for the fight against illegal drugs

How a too-good-to-be-true tool fooled drug warriors.
Wade Quattlebaum had a dream, and he wanted to tell the world. Even better - and all the more American - he wanted to sell the world. He had built a better mousetrap - better than a better mousetrap, really. Quattlebaum went beyond doing something better to doing something that couldn't be done at all without his magic widget. 'He had designed a box that could find things - somehow. He wouldn't tell you, me, or anybody, not even the U.S. Patent Office, exactly how.
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It looked like just a plastic cellular phone, about 4 inches long, with a chrome antenna loosely attached. If you walked around, looking for something, the antenna was supposed to pivot around and point in the direction of what you were looking for. It was sold as a golf ball finder to begin with. But then Quattlebaum discovered further benefits and further possibilities for his gadget.
With the insertion of the right preprogrammed "frequency chip," Quattlebaum claimed, the device could find most anything - drags, guns, even missing persons. The law enforcement benefits seemed obvious - not just to him, but to cops, school board officials, even U.S. attorneys around the country.
He called his little magic box the Quadro Tracker, and it was a small-business success story that should make any hometown boy, high school dropout, and ex-car salesman from Harleyville, South Carolina, proud. Quattlebaum claimed sales of at least 1,000 Quadro Trackers, at prices ranging from $400 to $8,000 - the cost rising the more frequency chips you bought. He had distributors across the country helping get his helpful product into the hands of customers. A fine customer base it was, too: mostly local school boards and police departments.

It might have been happily-ever-after time for Wade, too, if it hadn't been for that meddling FBI. Their entrance on the scene as an unexpected spoiler turned the story of Quattlebaum and his amazing Quadro Tracker into even more of an archetypal modern American dream/nightmare - one that casts aspersions on the good sense of those embroiled in the front line of the war on drags.
Quattlebaum doesn't seem to want to tell the world much anymore. The phone just rings and rings, hollowly and eternally, at the headquarters of his besieged company, the Quadro Corporation of Harleyville, South Carolina. Directory assistance in Harleyville has no listing for him. His lawyer won't tell you how to get in touch with him. His vice president, Ray Fisk, doesn't return repeated phone calls.
Surely, Quattlebaum should have expected trouble - selling a device like this to law enforcement officers. He should have known someone might take a jaundiced look, maybe decide it was too good to be true. That's exactly what happened, and that's exactly the argument that Wade's lawyer uses to defend his sincerity.
Tim Kulp, a lawyer out of Charleston, says he knows fraud - the unlovely accusation that Federal District Judge Thad Heartfield of the eastern district of Texas heaped upon the head of Wade and the whole Quadro Corp. with his April injunction against the further sale or promotion of the Quadro Tracker. And, says Kulp, his client is no fraud: "I was in the FBI. I've dealt with these sort of boiler room fraud cases. And I tell you, those sorts don't try to sell things to cops. They sell them to old grandmothers, retired people down in Florida."
Still, facts are facts. And when FBI agent Ron Kelly, stationed in Beaumont, Texas, got savvied by one of his boys on the Jefferson County Narcotics Task Force in nearby Louisiana about this miracle device, which was sweeping the imaginations of various cops and school board officials in 1995, he thought it sounded screwy. Later on, big-shot scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories backed him up, but at first he just decided he wanted to get a look inside the magic box. So he took it to the nearest place that could help: He ran it through the courthouse X-ray machine.
"It was clearly hollow," he recalls with almost a chuckle. "It didn't take a lot of effort on our part to determine it was phony."
At first Kelly thought they might just be dealing with a local bunco artist; soon he realized the Quadro deal was big, bad, and nationwide. The FBI boys in Beaumont brought it to the attention of the U.S. Attorney's Office there, and they told it to the judge: Judge Heartfield, who decided to put the kibosh on it. Heartfield permanently enjoined the Quadro Corp. and its staff from, and pardon the legalese, "using the United States mails or private commercial interstate carriers, or causing others acting on their behalf to use the United States mails or private interstate carriers, to solicit customers or entities, promote, sell, transfer, or demonstrate the Quadro Tracker...and devices of a similar design marketed under a different name." The same went for using telephone or other wire communications to do the same.
That's not the end of Quadro's troubles. On August 21, a federal grand jury in Beaumont indicted Quattlebaum, the company, its officers, and a Quadro distributor in Texas on four counts of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Each defendant is facing a possible five years in prison and a $250,000 fine per count.

All this Quadro Tracker business sounds too silly to be true, and it sounds worse yet when you read some of the Quadro Corp.'s promotional materials. A brochure selling the device to a school swears: "The tracker will also locate specific drags in solution. This means that even a person who had been using drugs will have traces in their bodily fluids, blood, etc. Thus the Tracker will indicate people who are using drugs, as well as those who are merely carrying it. Therefore extreme caution should be taken if searching a person, or making accusations, as they may, indeed, not be carrying drugs on them!"
Philosophy-of-science mavens may detect a hint of what Karl Popper calls "unfalsifiability" in the above claim - and that means bad science, in Popper's eyes. But people buying this device seem to have more problems with science than merely failing to grasp Popper's philosophy of demarcation.
And that's not all, as they say on TV: "Quadro units have been designed to locate people from a photograph, as well as from a fingerprint. Thus missing prisoners, or escaped prisoners can be located with ease. The machine will identify an individual, no matter what disguise or surgery is undertaken. It has been tested over a distance of 500 miles, and will track, we believe, at any distance."
Well, it's possible, isn't it? It's possible! Isn't anything possible in this topsy-turvy world of ours?

Maybe in the topsy-turvy world of an ultimately futile war against drugs, any old flimsy straw looks like a mighty log with which to build. Certainly, school officials who bought, or thought about buying, Quadro were really convinced it worked. Never mind that the "frequency chips" that had to be loaded in the Quadro (and cost hundreds of dollars extra per chip), which were said to be "oscillated by static electricity produced by the body inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity," were merely small photographic images of the search target, sealed in plastic.
But the Quadro boys were good salesmen. "It was a very exciting demonstration," admits Wolfgang Halbig. "I was excited." Halbig, director of student discipline for Seminole County in Florida, only narrowly averted wasting the school board's money on the device, through magical intervention of a sort.
"We were all sitting in the school board auditorium," Halbig remembers. He had invited Quattlebaum and the former police chief of Harleyville down to demonstrate the tracker after an enticing phone call from a Florida Quadro distributor, who also happened to be the mayor of the small Florida town of Lake Helen in Volusia County.
"They walk in with it in hand. You see the antenna swing. It points to a sign. You move the sign, there's a bullet. They had a gunpowder chip in there. We were finding bullets, we were finding marijuana. I saw the big picture: A device that could serve as a deterrent! Just let kids know we have a tool that can find those substances...." Halbig trails off wistfully. A dream too fine to come true. But Halbig got a hint of how it might have worked.


..."

full article (very long) at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...28/ai_18850960

[Max]

as also Nostradamus said

another member joined the bar

[Max]

now also Ampere !

[Max]

and Volta too !