Hey guys, come join us for this month’s brunch! We had great attendance last time, but let’s do even better this time! The Living Room has delicious food and an impressive list of mimosas (as well as some bloody Mary varieties) so you should definitely be there. See you at 11 am on Sunday, August 22nd (101 Atlantic Avenue in the North End).

If you are on Facebook, don’t forget to RSVP on our event page!

Travis Roy of Granite State Skeptics talked a bit about skeptical activism and also demonstrated how the Power Balance bracelet, and other trinkets like it, is far better at relieving you of your money than anything else. Turnout was lovely and we had several new faces in the audience. Welcome!

BSitP July 26th, 2010 – Travis Roy “Skeptical Activism” from Maggie McFee on Vimeo.

(NB: Dont forget to RSVP here or on Facebook for this Saturday’s BS Brunch!)

Hey gang,

Late update, but we’ve just heard about an event you might find interesting. Creation, a new movie about Charles Darwin and his personal struggle with faith in the light of reason, is playing in an advanced screening TONIGHT! The film is based on a book by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson, and stars Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin. Over at the JREF Swift Blog, Jeff Wagg has some information:

For those in the Boston area, there’s an **advance** screening on January 14, 7pm, at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge. The Q&A panel includes author Randal Keynes, and professors Thomas Glick and Jon Roberts of Boston University. RSVP at CreationBoston@43kix.com

RSVP to that email address if you’re planning to go, and be sure to RSVP on Facebook or leave a comment here in case any other Boston Skeptics want to meet you there! And if you miss the film tonight, the official release will be happening on January 22nd, so you can always catch it then.

Hat tip to SkepticScott for giving us the heads-up!

Discovery Channel has unleashed yet another ghost chasing show into the, apparently ghost-filled, wilds of television. The supposed twist in this show is that the two leads, the brothers Klinge, have a mobile ‘lab’ and are touted as being ‘scientific’ in their methods. Boy did that notion fall apart mere minutes into the show… The only science on this show seems to be that which went into creating the gadgets they fill their mobile lab with. Gadgets they then go on to use poorly including, sadly, what’s probably the most potentially useful of all their tools and one whose properties are so very well understood, the camera.

One of the shows most excited moments involved a ‘hit’ from an image they captured during the night in Tombstone, Arizona. The image, according to their gleeful cries, contains what they call a “shadow person”. Before I go on, I want to point out something that, had truly scientific methods been employed, would have been important but, given how sloppy this was, is now only marginally interesting. That is the fact that the original shot and the recreation were done with different cameras with different focal lengths. As I said, this doesn’t matter in the end as you’ll see, but it will help you understand why the original image looks so ‘flat’ and how far away objects look so much closer. (A quick primer on focal length at Wikipedia.)

But now, let’s let the pictures do the talking (click each image to open larger version). The 5 Minute Debunk of the Ghost Lab shadow person:

I’ve been thinking a lot about reading lately, in part because of a really cool new Boston Skeptics meetup that is currently in development.  I’m new to active Skepticism, so for the past few months I have been avidly reading books related to science and skepticism.  I’m fairly certain I’ve finished more books since January than I did in all four years of college (unless you count Agatha Raisin mysteries).  Right now I’m in the middle of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (that one gets some funny looks on the bus), and while it is a good read and very interesting, I won’t lie:  I can’t wait to finish so I can start Simon Singh’s Trick or Treatment.  I often find myself in a conundrum at the bookstore, trying to decide what topic to read about next. Atheism? Evolution? Quantum mechanics? Quackery? Gaaaa!

Help me out: What are you currently reading, how do you decide what to read next, and what are your recommendations for fellow skeptics?

Last weekend, I attended my 4th Dragon*Con in Atlanta.  This year’s con was my first as a skeptic, and I had an amazing time with the SkepTrack!

This took surprisingly little convincing.

In the past I have focused on the Joss Whedon-related events, so it was great to get a different experience and keep things fresh (not that Dragon*Con could ever be described as “stale”). I was very impressed with the number of Boston Skeptics I ran into during the weekend!

One part of the SkepTrack that I particularly enjoyed was the accessibility of its guests.  Sure, the stars of Firefly are very friendly (did I mention that Nathan Fillion took my picture last year?), but they are far too in demand to spend any significant amount of time chatting with one random fan.  The SkepTrack celebs, however, were more than happy to chat and take pictures (for free!) with fans.

Maybe I should cut Boston Globe some slack on this, since their entire science and medicine department got sacked due to budget cuts… except that every single newspaper makes exactly this mistake, including the Boston Globe when it still had a fully-staffed science department. Wait, shit, I’m burying the lede, aren’t I? Damn, maybe those journalists are good for something after all.

You may have noticed that whenever you read a science article in a newspaper, even when they’re just quoting from a press release, journalists will almost never give the title of the study they’re talking about. If you’re lucky, they’ll give the lead author’s name or the name of the journal in which the study was published.

I can kind of see how they might justify this. After all, most academic journals are subscription-only, so most newspaper readers wouldn’t be able to look up the article if they wanted to. But, even for the pay journals, usually an abstract is available online, as it is in the case of the New England Journal of Medicine article that the linked Boston Globe story references. However, failure to give citations is less about whether Joe Average has a subscription to NEJM and more about respecting the process of science. As Ben Goldacre writes here about the media’s propensity to treat science as “absolute truth statements from arbitrary authority figures in white coats, rather than clear descriptions of studies, and the reasons why people draw conclusions from them”.

You can certainly see that at work in the Boston Globe article on vetebroplasty. The writer sets up a tired old “he said, she said” frame, pitting the arbitrary authority of “two recent studies” against the anecdotal wisdom of “many patients – and their doctors”. It’s as if the study authors just randomly decided (is that what they mean by a “randomised trial”?) one day that vertebroplasty is crap, the experience (read: anecdotes) of real-world doctors and patients be damned! Ivory tower! Arrogance!

Of course, that’s not how it works. In reality, the authors of the vertebroplasty studies wanted to figure out whether this popular procedure has any effect, so they designed an experiment to figure it out. (I just picked one study I found in NEJM that was published this month. I have no idea whether it’s either of the studies Boston Globe is talking about, since they didn’t give the article titles, so I just have to assume it is. This is why the titles are fucking important to know.) As per the academic gold standard of the Randomised Controlled Trial, they collected volunteers to undergo either a sham surgery (the controlled part) or the real deal, selected at random (the random part). It’s unclear whether the surgeons were blinded, but that’s usually difficult to do with surgery.

The results? “Improvements in pain and pain-related disability associated with osteoporotic compression fractures in patients treated with vertebroplasty were similar to the improvements in a control group.” This is something we typically see, a non-significant difference between the treatment and the placebo drug or sham procedure. The abstract even includes exact numbers, for those with the statistical knowledge to interpret them.

An obvious criticism leaps out at me: the study has a sample size of 131, which is too small to be really conclusive. But note that this isn’t a criticism anybody makes in the Globe article. The Globe’s not interested in what the study actually says or what its actual flaws might be. It’s only interested in pitting authority versus authority, because that’s easy and doesn’t require any knowledge of the subject area or tedious investigation.

But, hey, it’s not for us plebes to go questioning authorities like academic medical researchers or some doctors or newspaper writers. Just sit back, relax, and take their word for it.

It’s time once again, ladies and gents, for the truth to set you free, for the dead to speak, the bones to talk and for you to peer into the spirit world and thwart its dastardly interference in your day-to-day dealings. That’s right, it’s psychic fair time in Bridgewater, MA. Or at least it was a couple of Saturdays ago and will be again the second Saturday of next month when the whole charade is played out again for the curious, gullible and/or those mired in something akin to false hope syndrome.

Throughout the year, events such as this entice people to pay a fee (the Bridgewater fair at Uplifting Connections is $1 per minute and runs for 7 hours) to sit and have someone tell you what you what they think you want to hear and, by way of some vague generalities, make you feel that they truly know the secrets to make your life better. And sometimes, to keep it mysterious and interesting, maybe giving you a little spook. For while these fairs, which resemble speed-dating more than anything, may be a recent phenomenon, the tricks of the trade have changed little from the hokey carnival mediums of old who were just as adept at taking your money.

Continuing our tour of local purveyors of woo, we come next to Dahn Yoga.  Now, aside from the fact that it often pushes certain woo-ish ideas, yoga can be a valid form of exercise. I’ve generally forgiven it for its excesses because of this, and would have done the same for the Dahn Yoga centers I see both near my job (in the Back Bay) and my home (in Cambridge), too.

But back in February, we were fortunate enough to get the inimitable Tim Farley, of WhatsTheHarm.net, as our speaker for Boston Skeptics in the Pub. Amongst other things, Tim talked about a woman named Julia Siverls who died during a Dahn-sponsored course. This piqued my curiosity and prompted me to look into things a bit more deeply.

How does one adequately sum up a lecture delivered by a grown man who believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and who in an attempt to validate his absurd belief discounts centuries of astronomical and geological evidence with one Powerpoint slide each?

Such is the challenge I face this morning in attempting to describe for you the idiocy I and my fellow Boston Skeptics and Boston Atheists witnessed last night. Luckily, creationist and recent Harvard PhD Nathaniel Jeanson delivered identical lectures yesterday morning and evening, and Jeff Eyges, who attended the morning lecture, did a wonderful job of summing up the basics over on Pharyngula. There’s also a very nice overview from a member of Boston Atheists, and Boston Skeptic Andy Clayman gave a recap in the comments here. Read those, and in the meantime I’ll give you my own quickie recap: