UPDATE:

The “medication” that The Amazing James Randi uses for his famous “overdose” is Calms Forte ( http://www.calmsforte.com/home/ to check it out ), so we’re suggesting this brand if you choose to partake in the pill-poppin’ goodness!

Also, get creative and make your own signs for this event! You can also print out flyers from this template: http://www.1023.org.uk/leaflet.pdf

You can and should spend some time over at the 10:23 website ( http://www.1023.org.uk/ ) to get more familiar with just how global this protest is, and for some useful information about not only the event’s history and culmination, but some good talking points!

And most importantly… let’s make this protest fun and safe!

But there’s more…we are following the “challenge” with (finally) brunch! Join us at the Kinsale (2 Center Plaza, right by City Hall Plaza) at 11 am. 10:23 participation is not mandatory for attendance…but do it! :)

You can rsvp on facebook for 10:23 here and brunch here. See you there!

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

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

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!

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:

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

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.

With that said, here is a list of memorable events from my experiences at Dragon*Con 2009:

• Met Skepchicks Surly Amy, A, Maria, Carrie, and Jen
• Got in to the Adam Savage panel early thanks to my “guest of Rebecca Watson” badge, and subsequently was introduced to said Mythbuster by said Skepchick
• Convinced Phil Plait to sit on my lap
• Witnessed an Alien ask an intelligent question at the SGU live podcast
• Molested aforementioned alien with a stuffed Sasquatch
• Successfully convinced Pamela Gay that I am not, in fact, 12
• Became homeless and bought my way onto the Skepchicks’ floor
• Wore a shark

You will find photographic proof of some (not all) of these events in my Facebook album.  Please share your own Dragon*Con experiences and link to your photos in the comments!

Qapla!

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.

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.

The sponsor is, as you’d imagine, a woo-tastic ‘healing arts’ / ‘wellness’ business that offers such non-healing ‘treatments’ as reiki, shiatsu, aromatherapy, accupressure and kinesiology (see Massage Therapy: Riddled with Quackery by Dr. Stephen Barret). In addition to these, you can partake in:

• Angelic healing – “Angelic Healing Session combines Reiki, Magnified healing, IET, and Intuitive energy reading… This treatment will leave you feeling relaxed, peaceful and you will be given exactly what you need to know and hear at that time.”
• Trace mineral hair analysis – Quackery of the highest quacking. Even a well-equipped professional lab could not possibly offer the information they claim to be able to provide.
• Angel readings – “Angel Readings and Goddess Empowerment Readings. A supportive and loving journey with the Angels and Spirit Guides in your Angelic Reading.”
• And my favorite, the “Animal Communication Development Circle” – “Bring a picture and be prepared to learn interesting facts about past and present animals in your life. No prior experience necessary.” Well… past life would, necessarily, be experience, no???
• Finally, every second Saturday of the month they hold their Psychic Fair.

For those of you who haven’t heard of them, psychic fairs are im some ways like the seasonal fairs you may have participated in when you were in grade school. For fall fairs, we’d often have someone’s mom dress up as a fortune teller and gaze into a crystal (or glass or plastic) ball. Now just imagine a room full of adults doing this, in one fashion or another, and you’ve got a psychic fair. The main difference being that all the kids in my class knew Mrs. Bridgman didn’t really have psychic powers. But we probably had just as much chance of hearing our actual future through the borrowed glass ball on a card table as one does from a psychic fair reader.

If you think I’m being too harsh on these so-called ‘readers’ and mediums and self-proclaimed psychics, then please do find me one, just one, who can make specific predictions and is willing to submit to a scientific demonstration of this power where their success is greater than random chance. And by specific, I do not mean vague generalities such as those one might find in a newspaper horoscope (see Forer_effect). As it stands, many so-called psychics have been un-masked as charlatans, and none that I can find has ever proven their powers in a simple but controlled testing environment where the possibility for the use of trickery (see Cold Reading) is removed from the equation. After all, when was the last time you saw “Psychic finds murderer” or “President saved, medium pinpointed gunman’s location” — well, aside from those mysterious mysteries of the mysterious shows that play in the ‘got an hour to fill’ slots on the History Channel (I guess thousands of years of history isn’t enough to fill their schedule, so UFOs and crystal skulls it is…)

So why do so many people flock to these sorts of events? What is it that people are looking for? Quite simply put, I believe they are looking for someone to tell them things will be OK; To reassure them that life will improve or take a particular turn. We all want to be comforted and reassured when we feel things are out of our control. And a few patrons are just looking to inject some drama into their lives. A clever reader will pick up on this and deliver them a few juicy tidbits that will add some fantasy excitement to their world. But for the most part, people are looking for reassurance or a a morsel of hope that says “tomorrow will be better”. And there seems to be no end to the people who will take their money and do so, regardless of whether or not they can actually deliver such notions honestly. Morally bankrupt doesn’t begin to describe this sort of behavior.

It should be said that not all self-identified psychics are just out to make a buck (although readers at psychic fairs _are_ there to make money — the general idea is to get as many people in and out during the allotted time, each paying a fee to be there). Some genuinely believe, or want to believe, that they have a special gift. And, just like the drama-seeker above, for some this gives them the feeling that they have purpose, that they’re not ordinary but are, instead, special and unique. Some psychics are seeking exactly what their customers are: validation. A sense of worth, and a sense of future worth, is something the true believers on both sides of the table seek. It’s a very powerful and, not always rational, drive and, in some way or another, we all play into it. And some attendees are there just for the fun, the novelty of it. Others, the repeat customers, are looking for more and there’s always someone around who’ll claim they can give it to them.

Which brings us to the sharks. The charlatans who see an easy mark and won’t think twice about taking your money and telling you whatever you want to hear — harmful or not. Some rationalize that they’re just “giving people what they want”, while others are more sociopathic and just don’t care. Fleecing the public, for the latter sort, isn’t giving them what they want, but giving them “what they deserve”. A shark is all too happy for you to walk off a pier straight into their greedy maw. And when called on the carpet, the shark will shrug and point out that you walked into his mouth of your own free will. Fuggedaboutit. (BTW – Shark on the carpet = hilarious.) This sort of con artist sees you about to take that wrong step and, rather than help you, steps in for the easy, greedy meal. And, sadly, there are a lot of hurt, angry, sad, depressed, worried, nervous, etc. easily exploitable people out there willing to take that walk.

Tragically, both types of ‘psychics’ are just as dangerous. The believer or the shark are equally prone to lead their prey into dangerous waters. Or, worse, devour them uncaringly if doing so will make them more money. Only the personal motivation of the two types is different. But the outcome can be just as treacherous. People have been known to stop taking medication, to throw away all their money, to leave loved ones and… worse. And whether a believer or a charlatan is to blame does not matter in the end if the ‘advice’ you’ve received does harm to you or your family.

So if you find yourself in Bridgewater on a second Saturday and have a few bucks to blow, I’m sure you can find a better and more rewarding use for your cash. Maybe an ice cream cone. Or a donation to the Disabled American Vets. But if you do decide to give the psychic fair a whirl, record your sessions (we’d love to hear them!). And, hey, if you find a real psychic, they could win a million bucks and give your money back.

Suggested reading: Scientists put psychic’s paranormal claims to the test