But this year's big gong went to a higher education institution for the first time. I look upon the blacks as a set of monkeys, and the sooner they are eradicated from the face of the earth, the better.
The term “race”
K and r are evolutionary ecology terms, standing for carrying capacity and reproductive rate respectively: a species whose reproductive rate is low and whose population is fairly constant, inferentially related to the carrying capacity of its environment, is called K-selected, while someone with a high reproductive rate is said to be r-selected. Blacks, he says, are more fertile, mature faster, have looser social organization, are more aggressive, impulsive, sexually active, have smaller brains, and are less intelligent; Mongoloids are just the opposite, and Caucasoids are in between, although they are closer to Mongoloids.
The concept of intelligence
Several authors have examined Rushton's model, and I make no apology for relying on my own criticism here (Groves, 1990).
Brain size
Maturation rate
Sexuality
Social organisation
On the other hand, we were happy to receive some positive feedback online as a result of this correspondence. Needless to say, we strongly encouraged this student to read some of the critical literature (including ours) on the subject.
Oates’ theory of Reverse Speech: an update
It was claimed that the reversals on the tape were particularly evident; many of which were said to be related to NASA's alleged interest in the now-denied 'Face on Mars'. Our familiarity with it obviously contributed to our ability to hear it; on the other hand, this is one of the rare cases where a reverse sequence in English actually resembles a corresponding forward sequence, even if it's only four syllables long: it's Bob Dole's reversal 'It's an honour'.
Jane Curtain & Mark Newbrook
Rushton's use of the concept completely misses the ecological connection: for him it is all about. Is it too much to hope that this is the beginning of the end for David Oates and Reverse Speech.
Bad scams, good scams, better scams
You're almost relieved when Harry's letter from September reveals that your phantom portfolio just grew by $51,000 this month. By ignoring Harry's advice again, you've lost another monthly trading profit - this time around $363,000.
Richard Lead
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what constitutes a scam is a matter of opinion. Readers may have seen the numerous newspaper ads "work from home using your computer". The promoters usually sell computer programs for choosing the winner of the next horse race.
Bad scams
Some of them, usually written by "the world's largest investment advisor", sell for thousands of dollars a year. It is the same lack of critical thinking and the same refusal to accept reality in the face of evidence that compares hoax victims to believers in the paranormal, in UFOs, in a six-thousand-year-old universe, and all the rest of it.
Good scams
Better scams
Instead of getting into further accusations and discussions about what exactly happened at the time of the interview (because to be fair I should say the Australian producer's recollection of the events seems to differ from mine) , I'll try to set the record straight now in a constructive way by answering the original question, the 'Information Challenge', long enough – the kind of length you can achieve in a good article. In the sentence "Rover is a poodle dog," the word "dog" is superfluous because "poodle" already tells us that Rover is a dog.
The ‘Information Challenge’
This is related to the other sentence - 'that which is not duplicated in other parts of the message' - because repetitions lose their power to surprise. Note that Shannon's definition of the amount of information is independent of whether it is true.
Richard Dawkins
But even this is not the true information content of the disk in Shannon's sense. Can we measure the information capacity of that portion of the genome that is actually used.
Divining test 1998Report
Before starting the test, each diviner signed the identical statement used for the test of Jason Wor-. The diviner team then moved onto the field and the diviner made his choice for the location of the target.
Bob Nixon
The emplacement team used a die to select which of the four possible locations would hold the target. This was done to ensure that there was no degradation of the test area during the test phase.
Testing a healer
Alynda Brown & Jennifer Roche
So much so that I have a permanent neck condition which when stressed from things like sitting in front of a computer screen all day gives me headaches - in the back of my head and neck. However, according to Ms. Collins, my blocked sinuses were giving me headaches in the front of my head (she was quite particular about this) not the back of my head.
Footnote
I then received the same sheet of paper that was given to Jennifer regarding the effects of. If there's a single attribute we subscribers have in common, I suspect it's our epistemic hunger – the need for brain food.
The Lead balloon
B: the prize is behind door two, the host shows me door three, if I change I win. C: the prize is behind the third door, the host shows me door two, if I change I win.
Three doors of Monty Hall
A1: the prize is behind door one, the host shows me door two, if I switch, I lose. A2: the prize is behind door one, the host shows me door three, if I switch, I lose.
Roland Seidel
Under this protocol, the competitor won 27% of the time (slightly less than Seidel predicted). Furthermore, this decline/increase in death trend was more pronounced for the most famous of the famous.
Postponing death
Phillips and Feldman (1973) also presented data suggesting that the death drop phenomenon occurred not only for birthdays, but for presidential elections (in the United States) and for the Jewish Day of Atonement. A death decline was observed for 13 of the 17 election years, which was advanced in support of the death decline hypothesis.
This finding became known as the death-immersion/death-rise phenomenon (Phillips & Feldman, 1973). They found that, overall, the magnitude of the death-sinking/death-increasing phenomenon was very small.
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Most of the studies of ceremonial occasions and date of death have either failed to support the death/death rise hypothesis or suggested that it held only under very limited conditions (Alderson, 1975; if the death/death rise phenomenon occurs). on the whole it is probably only very small.
How should we challenge the charlatans?
What will be proposed is not an abandonment of this mode of challenging pseudoscientists; instead, an empirical investigation of the technique seems warranted. At the end of the question period, the two recruiters were met with sympathy from audience members who handed in their seventy-five dollar advance payments for acceptance into the TM program.
Guy Curtis
In the case of presentations by religious healers, creationists and psychics, it is unlikely that there will be many truly neutral members of the audience. Who in Skeptics would feel like a peer of the audience at an astrologer's presentation.
Are you on the lam?
These people are likely to be more like the rest of the audience than the skeptical intervener and as such will be a model for the more insecure members of the audience to follow. Like the die-hard believers, such "plants" provide a role model for the actions of insecure members of the audience.
Fleeing the coop?
These people do not identify themselves to the audience as people who will benefit from the success of the presenter; in fact, they sometimes pretend to be regular audience members. Robert Cialdini, on whose work some of the criticisms are based, believes that it would be extremely difficult to research the effectiveness of challenging questionable beliefs in the situation described (RB Cialdini, personal communication, September 21, 1998).
Shooting through like a Bondi tram?
It doesn't take much effort to produce contradictory anecdotal evidence straight from the skeptic. For example, Scott Campbell (1998) relates how his public criticism of Margaret Dent (psychic) convinced a nearby member of the public that Dent was a fake. . Some determinants of in-group and out-group persuasiveness: organization of information and attribution of independence.
Don’t forget to let us know your new address
At the other end of the spectrum were suggestions of some kind of unknown cosmic energy (the staple of the crank pseudoscientist) involved. The bone marrow (about 80% fat) helped keep the fire going, and resulted in the reduction of the bones themselves to ash.
Cold water on a hot topic
But the phenomenon retained its mystery due to the near-total reduction of a human body to ashes. Of course there are many more cases that arise under similar circumstances, where other parts of the room do catch fire and then you are dealing with a classic house fire.
Barry Williams
The secret of why the lower limbs so often remained after one of these fires was explained by the low fat content of these parts and their distance from the focus of the fire - there is not much fat in the shins and feet to sustain this species. of fire. We are often asked whether certain paranormal beliefs are specific to one country or another, and apart from the obvious, it is difficult to determine whether this is the case.
Postmodernism: a critique
Postmodern jargon cannot be "unpacked" and explained in simpler terms than the concepts of chemistry can. A bachelor is an unmarried man” is a “definitive statement”, but skeptics will have no problem with it.
Scott Campbell
Also, the cause of the pain is not the result of your search for the cause of the pain. SD severely curtails the dominance of modernism with 'W(hite) E(European)/ A(merican) M(ale)s'.
Mark Newbrook
This has often failed, even where it has really been attempted; and some of its failures relate to the biases of the dominant groups. But (along with most skeptics and most scientists) I simply do not agree that the great insights of the tradition are significantly related to these biases, or are particularly 'appropriate'.
Postmodernism: a further critique
And the misapplication of technology, again, is not necessarily an inherent aspect of the paradigm. SD also points out that some of the 'best' scientific theories, such as Newton's theory of gravity, have been.
AiG terminates Snelling
Jacques Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," in Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, p.320. The old part of the university lies to the west along the river Neckar, in the middle of the old town and directly below the 13th-century castle.
Armageddon and the prophets of Doomsday
He described many apocalyptic beliefs surrounding calendrical turning points and described the poor track record of predictions made about such points. He also described aspects of the thinking demonstrated by altmed supporters and some of the problems involved in using unproven remedies.
Richard Gordon
Rich in imagination, poor in memory”, in which she described her research into the malleability of memory and repressed memory. The other end of the torso was cared for in the next booth where one could purchase the original Hopi ear candle for a modest fee.
Travels of a Skeptic
My most recent excursion abroad took in the Philippines, the UK, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic. In the 1880s, for example, a stage hypnotist named Carl Hansen used to tell a member of the audience that he would become as stiff as a board.
Harry Edwards
My visit to Heidelberg as one of the three Australian delegates to the Second World Skeptics Congress had a threefold purpose. Vern Bullough (USA) spoke about the social and legal implications of the Recovered Memory Debate.
Across
Saturday evening saw the main social event of the Congress, when most attendees boarded a riverboat for a cruise down the Neckar River. After an excellent buffet we parked up, along with a number of other riverboats, to enjoy a spectacular firework display and the annual special lighting display of the four ruined castles perched high on the ridge above the river, called the Lighting of the Castles .
Down
Prof Sergei Kapitza from the Russian Academy of Sciences spoke about the state of "Science and Pseudoscience in Russia". Elsewhere in this edition are reports on the Congress by the other delegates, so there is little point in repeating.
Chocolate
Glenn Cardwell
The above are just a few examples of the range of ecological information presented by the author. The third part of his book describes the history of the regions after the arrival of the Europeans.
James Gerrand
New Guineans became crop growers due to the richness of the soil from volcanic eruptions and regular rainfall. He warns of the need to control increasingly destructive bushfires by fighting "fire with fire".
Two histories of the species
Then there is the city guard of the great city of Ankh-Morpork, whose motto reads above the door. Perhaps the latest in the series will have particular resonance for Skeptic readers.
Fantasy for Skeptics
Even the editors of Skeptical magazines are not immune to the temptations of fantasy, although mine tends to come in at the fall of the seventh wicket and save the Test match with an unbeaten double century, with the subsequent adoration of long , willowy, English women. I may, in fact, be the only person alive who has never gotten past the first fifty pages of Lord of the Rings, who finds it an excruciatingly boring job.
New web site
On September 30, I launched a special anti-creationist website that I call “No Answers in Genesis” (NAG), a title that I hoped might provoke a response from Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creationist website. Answers in Genesis does not provide reciprocal links to other websites as they point to ours.
John Stear
Ms Brown also published her complaint on the internet and had part of it published in the November issue of Prayer News, a tabloid (in all respects) produced by Answers in Genesis, the Australian distributors of the offending videotape. . These questions are taped and can be viewed, either on tape or transcribed, by anyone interested in the exact nature of the questions.
Creationist deception: a response
Ms Brown has since kindly provided me with a copy of her unedited tape of the interview with Prof Dawkins. At the level of the individual, Shermer is very good at explaining why (some) people believe strange things.
Martin Bridgstock
The last of these chapters is a review of the evidence for the Holocaust. I suspect that the book's two weaknesses—its jerkiness and its group-level weakness—are related.
Weirdness politely debunked
Is it harmful to let them visit fake fairies at the bottom of the garden? Most kids I know under the age of five—nearly all of whom still believe in Santa Claus—can explain in graphic detail how babies are conceived and born (Biology); most of them ask repeated and intelligent questions about the operation of machines and gadgets, such as videos and computers (physics);
Santa: harmless or a threat?
Although there are many adults who believe in God, and there are also many adults who believe in clairvoyance and numerology, I am not aware of any adults who believe in Santa Claus. Is it really harmful to allow children to believe in Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Jane Curtain
Perhaps the most serious (albeit unsupported) claim of anti-Santa lobbyists is that belief in Santa Claus can cause emotional and/or psychological problems. Another argument against Santa Claus is that the fantasy of Santa Claus contributes to the great commercialization of Christmas.
Compliments of the season to all our readers
To investigate whether reasonably intelligent and critically thinking people in the Monash University community support the Santa Claus fantasy, I decided to conduct a small and relatively informal survey. It should be noted that the only person who claimed to still believe in Santa qualified this by stating that she believes it is important to support the culture of believing in Santa Claus.
Southerly aspect
There was the secondary consideration that they might also have sought a comment from Colin Norris (a local UFO enthusiast with a naïve belief in the compassion and superior wisdom of extraterrestrials). The tape was run a few more times to see if we could get a slightly longer shot of the UFO (which happened at the beginning of the tape).
Allan Lang
I made a few phone calls to see if anyone knew if there was any astronomical, meteorological or aviation event that could have caused this sighting. There was a slight delay in finding the cables to connect the camera to the monitor and it wasn't until after 5 that we headed out to see the first confirmed bona fide (maybe) sighting of a vehicle from another world.
Michael Creech
Could you get someone to watch the footage and provide commentary for their evening news programme. The tape arrived late and there was no time to transfer it to the studio tape, and no one there had seen it yet.
Hunter gatherings
Our speaker at the August meeting of the Queensland Skeptics was Dr. William Grey, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Qld. He covered some of the reasons why we believe certain things and how we can judge things to be believed, drawing on Hume's Essay on Miracles.
Banana bendings
I was stuck on Norfolk Island during the September meeting due to bad weather, but I'm told that Frank Miller, BHP Engineering's Chief Learning Strategist and Fellow of the Institute of Engineers, was very well received and a lively discussion followed his presentation. Gail used simple examples and material from her own research to discuss with us some of the different factors to consider when designing statistical research and analyzing statistics.
Michael Vnuk
In our efforts to make sense of the world just to live, let alone approach the bigger or harder questions, William said that "any map is better than no map." Creating too many connections where none exist, i.e. credulity, is probably better in an evolutionary sense than creating too few connections, i.e. ultraskepticism, where nothing is accepted. Dr. Gail Williams, Associate Professor of Health Statistics at the University of Queensland, was our October speaker.
Tasmanian topics
I have learned many things, but I have never been taught anything”, seems to sum it up. Queensland Skeptics meets on the last Monday of each month at 7pm at Dutton Park State School, Annerley Road, Dutton Park.
Fred Thornett
However, on reflection, I felt that there was an unstated assumption underlying some of the discussions. The purpose of the examination would be to find "a normal and natural explanation of the phenomenon", with the implication that, apparently, if the phenomenon really occurred, there would be such an explanation.
It almost came to the surface in the statement "The key argument of skeptical inquirers .is the need for replicable experiments". However, the modified assumption would not imply any change in the skeptical criticism of most of the paranormal and extraordinary events and phenomena treated in Kurtz'.
I enjoyed the article on "The New Skepticism" by Paul Kurtz in the Skeptic (18/2) in which he gave a thoughtful and thorough consideration of a skeptical approach to reports of paranormal and occult phenomena, extraterrestrial sightings and other extraordinary happenings. Anecdotal reports,” he said, “The skeptic says that the report may or may not be true and if it did occur, alternative causal explanations can be made of it.
Occasional incorrect results are usually dismissed as due to some unobserved error in the experimental setup or in the instrumental readings or in protecting the experiment from external interference. However, this may not be a bad thing given the miscarriages of justice in recent years due to reliance on inadequate expert evidence.
News literacy
However, a modified critique is required to consider whether the event itself actually occurred, a critique that focuses solely on the reliability of the observer and the observation, leaving on the one hand questions of coherence with scientific knowledge. If Moore's use of the word is the usual pejorative in everyday language, then that tells us little.
Fundamentalism
The widespread existence of this literature also contradicts Moore's claim that these people are unwilling to engage in open discussion or debate. We must also note that he borrows from the work of a single scientist whose reliability and agenda are left in the dark.
Religion
The lyrics, some written by fundamentalists, were generally well researched and convincingly argued, making clever use of scientific research in the case of homosexuality. Recently, a cartoonist in the United States portrayed Christians as rats and another cartoon portrayed Christians, Muslims and Hindus as vultures.
Words, words, words
I am reminded of the Soviet Union's practice of defaming its Christian citizens as criminals, retards, mentally ill, and so on. Schenck and First Things, an open-minded conservative Christian public forum magazine that likes to publish atheist rebuttals by Paul Kurtz, Ed Doerr and others.
Skepticism and the OT
Medical objection
I got tremendous satisfaction during my first year as a subscriber because I didn't have to rely on borrowed copies of the Skeptic or randomly scan articles wherever I found them. Comparing the reasoned thoughts of most of your contributors to those of the leaders of our society, political, commercial and religious, often reminds me of Richard Feynman's principled belief in the primacy of doubt.
Compliment
It was a pleasure to be able to read and digest everything in my own time and refer to articles of particular interest. He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a flaw in our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.
Legal advice
He also believed that it was not certainty but freedom from certainty that empowered people to make judgments about right and wrong. Only by understanding uncertainty could people learn how to evaluate the various kinds of false knowledge that bombarded them: claims of mind-reading and spoonbending, belief in flying saucers carrying alien visitors.
Complaint
Scott Campbell, a member of the NSW committee, is a philosopher who is currently attached to the University of London. Brian deKretzer is a retired cartoonist Darwin committee member.
About our authors
Martin Bridgstock is a philosopher of science at Griffith University and is a Life Member of the Australian Skeptics. Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and is the acclaimed author of several widely read books on evolutionary biology.
Odds
Jane Curtain, member of the Santaphile and Vic committee, is a researcher in the Linguistics Dep’t at Monash. Guy Curtis is a lecturer completing his psychology PhD at the University of WA.
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