The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) stresses the importance of promoting teacher leadership in the United States. Here at TIES we feel that our fellow teachers are our own best resources. We are looking for high school and college biology educators who are interested in presenting our TIES workshops to middle school science teachers in their state. Our reasoning is that a middle school science teacher will typically cover many areas of science within his/her annual curriculum, including earth science, physical science, and life science. It is virtually impossible to become an expert in all of these areas, at least not initially. The purpose of TIES is to inform interested middle school science teachers about the most up-to-date concepts of natural selection, common ancestry, and diversity in order for them to confidently cover the topics in their classrooms and fulfill their curriculum requirements. In addition to providing science teachers with innovative professional development opportunities, TIES also has ready-to-use online resources for the classroom, including presentation slides, labs, guided reading assignments, and an exam.

We are excited by the wonderful work being done by Bertha Vazquez and the TIES Program, which was founded by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Here area couple of recent activity reports to help introduce you to this important project.

We got three more workshops this week. Two are from Kenny’s zoo outreach. The other is a district-level workshop in North Carolina through one of our more active TTCs.

March 30, 2017: District-Level TIES Workshop, Raleigh, North Carolina presented by Kathryn Green
April 15, 2017: Evolution for Educators, presented by Hannah Kistner, Education Associate, Santa Barbara Zoo, Santa Barbara, CA
April 19, 2017: Evolution for Educators, presented by Melanie Fernandes, Curator of Education and Corey Shumaker, Program Coordinator, Capron Park Zoo, Attleboro, Massachusetts

More workshops to be announced soon. New Mexico is coming together.

We sent in a proposal for the annual Texas Science Teachers Conference.

Quantitative data: I reached out to the TIES network.

I have some quantitative data for the CFI board. It is a small sample focused entirely on how TIES workshop content corrected teachers’ teleological misconceptions. The results are positive but the focus is very specific.
I also have two teachers willing to do pre- and post- tests on their workshop participants. One teacher can also provide pre-and post- on over 100 students when the teachers return to their classes.
I have a TTC who is a college professor who is willing to help us create a tool for true statistical analysis. Ideally, it would require comparing students who receive TIES curriculum with those who receive non-TIES evolution curriculum.

I was put in touch with a local school interested in a TIES workshop. I followed through and got a 3-hour workshop confirmed for March 16. It’s at West Miami Middle School.

Our first quantitative study on students has now been designed with the help of a professor in Nevada and two teachers in Miami; we have a pre-test and a post-test for two groups of students. One group is receiving TIES instruction and the other is receiving traditional evolution instruction. Both groups are addressing the Florida Sunshine State Standards for evolution at the middle school level (which are quite good as I’ve mentioned before). In addition, each group will be further subdivided into regular and gifted classes. You cannot compare gifted kids to regular kids.

Kenny Coogan was in Atlanta this week for an avian trainer conference. I am looking forward to hear how it went. He sent photographs of his TIES workshop there. He also added a workshop this week:

August 19, 2017, Evolution for Educators, presented by Larson Ankeny, Education Specialist, STEM Programs Coordinator, The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, CA.

We are now at 10 workshops so far for 2017.

As mentioned in last week’s report, we will have also lots of student data coming from Georgia, with a little more teacher data coming from North Florida and North Carolina.

I reached out to TTCs and teachers in Mississippi and Nebraska since they have their proposal page now open for their state conferences. And I think we will have good news coming soon from some efforts in Georgia, too, stay tuned.

I was put in touch with a local school interested in a TIES workshop. I followed through and got a 3-hour workshop confirmed for March 16. It’s at West Miami Middle School.

Our first quantitative study on students has now been designed with the help of a professor in Nevada and two teachers in Miami; we have a pre-test and a post-test for two groups of students. One group is receiving TIES instruction and the other is receiving traditional evolution instruction. Both groups are addressing the Florida Sunshine State Standards for evolution at the middle school level (which are quite good as I’ve mentioned before). In addition, each group will be further subdivided into regular and gifted classes. You cannot compare gifted kids to regular kids.

Kenny Coogan was in Atlanta this week for an avian trainer conference. I am looking forward to hear how it went. He sent photographs of his TIES workshop there. He also added a workshop this week:

August 19, 2017, Evolution for Educators, presented by Larson Ankeny, Education Specialist, STEM Programs Coordinator, The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, CA.

We are now at 10 workshops so far for 2017.

As mentioned in last week’s report, we will have also lots of student data coming from Georgia, with a little more teacher data coming from North Florida and North Carolina.

I reached out to TTCs and teachers in Mississippi and Nebraska since they have their proposal page now open for their state conferences. And I think we will have good news coming soon from some efforts in Georgia, too, stay tuned.

Recently, the science writer John Horgan took skeptics to task in Scientific American and at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism for focusing too much on weak problems at the expense of strong ones. As examples of soft targets he listed ESP, heaven, homeopathy, Bigfoot, and disbelief in vaccines and climate change; among hard ones, multiverses, the Singularity, overtreatment and overtesting for cancer (notably, mammograms), overmedication for mental illness, and the deep-roots theory of war. He contended that tribalism is served by our self-indulgence with “weak” targets.

Horgan was quickly advised how varied skepticism really is. Outside the United States, widespread belief in homeopathy matters much more if governments decide to include it in publicly funded, cash-strapped national health services at the expense of more effective treatments. Here, Bigfoot can only wish for such importance. But, as the late journalist Simon Hoggart said, even seemingly insignificant beliefs create “a distracting background interference with the truth.”

As for mammograms . . .

The first time I heard a scientist question the value of screening mammograms was in Dublin in 1988, when Dr. Petr Skrabanek outlined to me the arguments he made in his 1985 letter to The Lancet. Skrabanek, whom I met a year and a half after founding Britain’s The Skeptic magazine, was my first “skeptic about skepticism.” In 2013, a Cochrane survey noted that the most reliable studies indicate that screening does not overall reduce breast cancer mortality but does cause much unnecessary treatment. It’s not a good target for skeptics in general, however, because most of us are not medical experts capable of mounting trials.

This goes to the heart of what, for me, skepticism is about: things we can test. Probably everyone knows at least one woman who knows that a mammogram saved her life with early detection. We can’t test this any more than we can test whether the heavy weight pressing on someone’s chest in the middle of the night was sleep paralysis, an alien visitor, or a ghost. We can only consider probabilities.

Some people are born to skepticism, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. I think I was born this way. (“Everything I say, there’s always an argument,” my mother used to say.) As a Cornell student from 1971–1975, I watched friends experiment with transcendental meditation (TM) and Erhard Seminars Training (est). I became a professional folksinger and spent the rest of the 1970s encountering adherents of “old knowledge”—witchcraft, palmistry, and other beliefs that would shortly be reframed as “New Age.” Particularly memorably, someone once told me he investigated a reincarnation claim and found the true explanation was genetic memory. Inwardly, I was like, “That’s absurd,” but I didn’t want to have to sleep in my car. In January 1981, I called a friend and said, “Let’s do something new and different for my birthday.” “I can’t,” he said. “I have to go write up this lecture/demonstration.” I said, “So I’ll come to that.”

“That” was James Randi, showing psychic surgery and metal bending, critiquing TM, and so on, and I thought he was . . . amazing. Here was someone who could provide a reasoned basis to all those “Seriously?” moments. That Martin Gardner and Isaac Asimov, whose work I knew from middle school, were Randi’s cofounders made CSICOP an organization worth following.

In late 1986, the then executive director of CSICOP, Mark Plummer, was pushing people to start local groups and suggested I start what became The Skeptic. The first responses were both exhilarating and sad. Exhilarating because people really wanted the magazine—people such as later editors Toby Howard and Chris French. Sad because so many wrote of their personal isolation.

I think Horgan’s complaints would have been more accurate then, when we all seemed to cycle through a relatively narrow range of common beliefs. In 1998, when I began my second stint as editor (I had handed it off to Toby Howard and Steve Donnelly in 1989), Michael Shermer’s work suggested it was essential to broaden our canvas to include scientific controversies such as climate change, science fraud, and education. How many times can you debunk astrology and stay interested?

Internationally, skepticism looks very different than in the United States, where the religious right has built huge controversies about evolution and reproductive rights, which are practically politically dead elsewhere. We “foreigners” can maintain our distance from matters of faith in ways that the U.S. “mother ship” cannot.

In 1991, I turned to specializing in what was then a barely born subject of interest: computers, freedom, and privacy or, as I often say, “the border wars between cyberspace and real life.” As the Internet increasingly became a political football, I began to notice the distinct trend toward policy-based evidence making, particularly in the areas of copyright, cryptography, and surveillance, where dissenting evidence is no more welcome than it is to an astrologer (“I know astrology is true,” an acquaintance said recently. “It’s mathematics.”) The FBI’s recent effort to compel Apple to hack one of its own phones was a great example of technological magical thinking. Dozens of mathematicians cited the laws of mathematics; many politicians refuse to believe there’s no “middle ground.” Over the past five to ten years, what were separate interests have converged, and in London it’s common to see my technical friends speaking at Skeptics in the Pub meets and skeptical friends becoming computers, freedom, and privacy activists.

In my technology writer capacity, the Singularity is an untestable claim. Perhaps artificial intelligence will outstrip human intelligence, continue to improve exponentially, and solve all our intractable problems. Many start-ups (such as the U.K.’s DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014) hope that’s true. To date, experience has shown that we can’t solve social problems by throwing technology at them. The only available test is to wait and see.

However, the goal of the skeptical movement was never—or not for me—to debunk specific beliefs. Instead, it should be to spread critical thinking on whatever subject is shoved in front of us. For me, the most exciting thing is to look around Britain and see all the skeptical activity—The Skeptic magazine under the editorship of Deborah Hyde, more than 100 Skeptics in the Pub groups, the QED conference, ASKE—and to know the magazine helped make that happen. My greatest wish is that it will survive me.

I was delighted to be invited to contribute to this fortieth anniversary issue of Skeptical Inquirer. The magazine first came to my attention when I read James Alcock’s wonderful book, Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (Oxford/Pergamon Press, 1981) back in the early 1980s. I confess that, prior to reading Alcock’s book, I believed in quite a number of paranormal claims. Indeed, I can even remember presenting an entirely pro-paranormal session on parapsychology to a class of adults at a local community college as part of an introductory psychology course. In my defense, back then skeptical critiques of parapsychology were even rarer than they are now, and all the books I used in preparing the lecture were uncritically pro-paranormal—but I still cringe inside to recall that session.

Apart from opening my eyes to the fact that there were skeptical books out there (if you knew where to look for them), Alcock’s book also contained numerous references to a publication called the Skeptical Inquirer, which I had never heard of up until that point. I cannot remember how I came to learn that Mike Hutchinson was the U.K. distributor for the magazine, but somehow I did and I took out a subscription. I used to eagerly await delivery of the magazine and immediately read every issue I received from cover to cover. It felt as if a whole new world was opening up for me. I also purchased and read many classic skeptical books by the likes of Martin Gardner, James Randi, and Philip Klass. I bought and read in its entirety the mammoth volume A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology (Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 1985).

In 1985, I got a job as a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Up until this time, my interest in skepticism was very much a hobby, something that I pursued in my own time purely for my own enjoyment. But I decided that I knew enough about the area to give a two-hour lecture on parapsychology as part of a “Theoretical Issues” module that I taught in. This time, my presentation was much more skeptical. My interest in all things skeptical, but particularly the psychology of paranormal belief and ostensibly paranormal experiences, continued to grow, and after a few more years I was even publishing the odd paper in this area. (I am sure you all read my first empirical report in the Australian Journal of Psychology.)

In 1995, I decided I knew enough to present an entire module on “Psychology, Parapsychology, and Pseudoscience” as an optional final year module as part of Goldsmiths’ BSc program in psychology. It proved to be a popular option with the students, and I loved teaching it. The range of topics I could cover was very wide, from entertaining subjects such as the techniques used by psychic con artists to the most profound questions facing humanity such as the possibility of life after death. The module also provided a fantastic training in critical thinking, helping the students to understand why some forms of evidence, such as properly controlled scientific studies, are so much more credible than others, such as anecdotes and personal experience.

Over the next few years, more and more of my research was in the area of anomalistic psychology, but I certainly felt that my interest in the “weird stuff” was only tolerated as long as I also published in what were perceived to be more “academically respectable” areas of psychology. I obliged for a while, but I was becoming increasingly aware that it was anomalistic psychology that really fascinated me. In 2000, I set up the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths (APRU; http://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/) to provide a focus for research activity in this area. I made a conscious decision to focus all of my research efforts in the area of anomalistic psychology.

One of the APRU’s aims was to raise the profile and academic respectability of anomalistic psychology, and I like to think we have had some success in achieving this. We generally publish our research findings in high-quality peer-reviewed journals and edited academic volumes. However, we are also keenly aware of the value of public engagement for universities, and therefore we take every opportunity to provide an informed skeptical perspective on a wide range of paranormal topics via the media and public events. Last year, for example, Goldsmiths hosted the European Skeptics Congress. The APRU also organizes an Invited Speaker Series and the Greenwich branch of Skeptics in the Pub, both of which are open to members of the general public and regularly draw in large attendances. For a decade, the APRU edited The Skeptic, the U.K.’s longest-running magazine devoted to providing a skeptical perspective on the paranormal.

The skeptic scene is currently thriving in the United Kingdom at all levels. Within academia, anomalistic psychology is increasingly taught at universities as an optional course, and the number of academic publications in this area increases year to year. At the grassroots level, there are around fifty branches of Skeptics in the Pub up and down the country and numerous conferences such as those organized by Centre for Inquiry–UK and the wonderful annual QED conference co-organized by Merseyside Skeptics and Greater Manchester Skeptics. The APRU has certainly played a role in achieving this healthy state of affairs—and it is fair to say that the APRU would probably never have existed if I had not read James Alcock’s book all those years ago and been inspired to take out a subscription to Skeptical Inquirer.

Una de las mejores cosas que nos brindan las vacaciones es la oportunidad de leer y Edzard Ernst ha publicado un nuevo libro este año, en el cual examina el origen, los principios y la práctica de la homeopatía y discute las razones de su permanente popularidad. Irónicamente, mientra la medicina moderna ha cambiado notablemente, la homeopatía, que tiene sus raíces en la alquimia y la metafísica, continúa practicándose tal cual se hacía en los días de Hahnemann.

Homeopathy—The Undiluted Facts : Including a Comprehensive A-Z Lexicon es la historia de la homeopatía y su casi mágica atracción, con una discusión científica y racional de las cuestiones biológicas, químicas y psicológicas que surgen al analizar su tratamiento.

Tal como escribe en su libro:

Mi objetivo más importante es proveer un servicio a los consumidores informando sobre los hechos científicos de manera accesible. Mucha gente seducida por la homeopatía e incluso muchos individuos que la usan, no saben casi nada acerca qué se trata. Tal vez creen que tiene algo que ver con la medicina herbaria, por ejemplo. O quizá asumen que la homeopatía funciona como las vacunas. O pueden creer que la homeopatía es sinónimo de la medicina holística. Confusiones de esta clase nunca pueden constituir una buena base para tomar decisiones terapéuticas. No apunto a perpetuar viejos mitos sino más bien a proporcionar decisiones basadas en la evidencia y con buen información.

This article was originally available in English.
Click here to read it.

Edzard Ernst: Soy profesor retirado de medicina alternativa. Durante 20 años he ejercido en la Univesidad de Exeter. He investigado la medicina alternativa, en todos los aspectos, todos los tratamientos que se pueda imaginar. Ahora estoy retirado, he publicado mucho y mi más reciente libro trata sobre homeopatía.

Kylie Sturgess: Usted tiene una trayectoria de muchos años, y ahora su nuevo libro se llama “Homeopatía: los hechos sin diluir”. ¿Qué lo llevó a esta publicación particular que ha sido escrita luego de todo el trabajo que hizo antes?

Ernst: La homeopatía estuvo presente durante toda mi vida. De niño fui tratado por un homeópata, mi primer trabajo luego de estudiar medicina fue en un hospital homeopático. Consideré que un libro era importante porque el público lego malinterpreta la homeopatía. Incluso tengo la impresión de que los escépticos no están muy seguros de lo que es y cometen muchos errores cuando critican a la homeopatía.

Sturgess: ¿Cuales son algunos de los errores que cometen los críticos de la homeopatía?

Ernst: El más obvio es afirmar que los remedios homeopáticos no contienen nada. Obviamente, esto es cierto respecto de muchos remedios, pero no de todos. Si usted toma arsénico, por ejemplo, está tomando arsénico puro. Si está preparado de acuerdo a la farmacopea homeopática, el arsénico puro es un remedio homeopático. No lo compra con receta porque ello podría matarla. La primera dilución de arsénico contiene suficiente arsénico para matarla. La segunda dilución también podría ser mortal. Hay demasiadas malinterpretaciones y las cosas son muy complicadas.

Otra malinterpretación acerca de la homeopatía es que hay solo un tipo singular de homeopatía que podemos criticar. Esto no es cierto. Hay diferentes tipos de homeopatía. Está la homeopatía clásica, la cual fue enseñada por Hahnemann hace 200 años, pero hay otras, como la homeopatía clínica, homeopatía compleja, isopatía, etc. Las cosas se tornan complicadas, y pensé que un libro podría explicar todas estas complejidades.

Sturgess: Me dí cuenta de que usted escribió que trató de evitar la jerga e hizo lo posible para abstenerse de tomar una posición determinada mientras escribía el libro. ¿Fue difícil debido a su experiencia anterior, o le ayudó sabiendo que usted había estado a favor de la homeopatía y luego se convirtió en un escéptico respecto a ella?

Ernst: Creo que en el mundo de la homeopatía, probablemente soy bastante particular porque obviamente un homeópata está totalmente convencido y frecuentemente es crédulo y está lejos de la realidad. Tal vez yo fui homeópata hace tiempo. Ahora, soy uno de los más francos críticos de la homeopatía y por lo tanto y comprendo ambos campos. Creo que esto es lo que hace que mi libro sea inusual.

Sturgess: Lo que me sorprende es la disminución de la prescripción de la homeopatia por parte del Sistema Nacional de Salud en el Reino Unido. ¿Que lo sorprendió cuándo estaba haciendo investigaciones para el libro?

Ernst: Si usted investiga una disciplina y va profundizando, encuentra nuevas cosas sobre la homeopatía, acerca de cualquier materia, que no esperaba. La parte sorprendente sobre la homeopatía que no les gusta escuchar a los escépticos, es que hay muy pocos estudios que no pueda objetar metodológicamente. Son estudios sólidos, y muestran que la homeopatía funcione. No estoy diciendo que la evidencia demuestre que la homeopatía funciona. De hecho si usted observa la evidencia críticamente y la resume, la totalidad de la evidencia no demuestra que funcione. Si usted escoge ciertos estudios, encontrará algunos buenos que demuestran lo contrario, y éste es otro error que cometen los escépticos respecto de la homeopatía cuando dicen que no hay buena evidencia. Primero que todo, hay mucha evidencia. Han hecho 500 pruebas clínicas. Segundo, algunas de estos ensayos muestran que la homeopatía sí funciona, y algunos de éstos son metodológicamente correctos (puedo especular por qué pasa esto y hay dos posibilidades: 1) Puro azar. 2) Fraude). De nuevo, llenos de contradicciones y fascinantes, una disciplina absolutamente fascinante.

Sturgess: La última vez que lo entrevisté fue acerca se sus memorias, Un científico en el País de las Maravillas, y le pregunté sobre el futuro de las afirmaciones de la medicina alternativa. ¿Cree que cambió su punto de vista desde entonces?

Ernst: No sé lo que dije aquella vez pero ¡sé que no soy bueno a la hora de predecir el futuro! De lo contrario, estaría en la costa oeste apostando en las carreras de caballos y convirtiéndome en un hombre rico. Solo soy un científico, y no puedo leer la borra del café. Habiendo dicho esto, creo que la medicina alternativa va a permanecer. Podemos luchar contra ella tanto como queramos. La gente no es precisamente racional y quiere creer en la medicina alternativa y en montones de cosas. Lo que podemos hacer es prevenir el daño que pueden hacer los farsantes, y eso es lo que estoy tratando de hacer.

I discovered the Skeptical Inquirer shortly after its name change from The Zetetic. It changed my life. I had already rejected religion after reading atheist writings, but I was still open to belief in UFOs, ESP, and all sorts of other weird things, simply because I had never come across anyone who questioned those beliefs. It was a revelation to learn that there were other explanations for those phenomena. And it was a revelation to learn about the human psychology of how our thinking can lead us astray. Regular reading of Skeptical Inquirer educated me: it was equivalent to taking a college course in critical thinking.

Most people hate to admit it when they are wrong; I don’t. One of the things I most love about skepticism is the opportunity to find out I was wrong about something. It means I have learned something and have a better grasp on reality than I did before. I feel smarter, and I find that very satisfying.

I wanted to know more. I read skeptical authors voraciously. I attended CSICOP conferences as a sort of groupie, wanting to see and hear in person the luminaries whose books I had read, the intellectual giants who had become my idols. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would be on the same stage with them some day. It never occurred to me that I might have anything to contribute. Then, in 2002, I attended CSICOP’s Skeptic’s Toolbox workshop, and Wallace Sampson and Ray Hyman encouraged me to try my hand at writing. I had never written anything before. When my first article was published in Skeptical Inquirer in 2003, I was ecstatic. I kept writing, and it developed into a whole new career. By my count I have now had thirty articles and reviews published in SI.

I continue to be overwhelmed and astonished at the unexpected course my life has taken. I have spoken at skeptical conferences in five countries. I am an editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog. I have written for Quackwatch, Skeptic magazine (where I have a regular column as The SkepDoc), online publications, medical journals, and even briefly for O, The Oprah Magazine! I have coauthored a textbook on consumer health and appeared in several anthologies. And none of this ever would have happened if I hadn’t subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer way back when.

My main area of focus has been medicine, alternative medicine, and quackery, because that’s where I have something to contribute from my background as a physician and because I think medicine is the most important issue for skepticism today. Belief in Bigfoot and UFOs doesn’t directly hurt anyone, but false beliefs about health regularly kill people. Anti-vaccine activism threatens everyone’s public health. Desperate, vulnerable cancer patients are victimized by charlatans who persuade them to give up treatments proven to cure or prolong survival, get them to empty their bank accounts and mortgage their homes to pay for treatments that don’t work, and get the dying to squander their last days in Mexico getting coffee enemas instead of at home spending quality time with their loved ones.

Beliefs in bogus treatments are as strongly held as religious beliefs. One of the lessons I have learned is that evidence and reasoning have no impact on true believers. I don’t write for them. I write for the inquirers and the fence-sitters. Just as I had never questioned ESP until I read authors who questioned it, patients are not likely to question alternative medicine and quackery if all they have access to is what the proponents have written. My aim is to put correct information out there where seekers can find it to counteract some of the misinformation they are bombarded with. The culmination of my efforts is a free ten-part video lecture series on YouTube (http://web.randi.org/educational-modules.html) produced by the James Randi Educational Foundation. In it, I distilled everything I’ve learned about science-based medicine and alternative medicine into the essential information that I want everyone to know.

The proudest moment of my life was when I became a CSI fellow. It validated my work and meant I had been accepted into the company of the people I had so long admired. My appointment to the Executive Council was icing on the cake. It’s still hard for me to believe that I have become one of those people.

As a woman in the male-dominated fields of medicine, aviation, and the military, I frequently encountered sexist attitudes and unfair treatment. I wrote about my struggles in my book Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon. I never had any such struggles in the skeptical community. I was warmly welcomed and appreciated, and no one even thought to mention my gender. I was always treated as an equal, as a skeptic, not as a “woman skeptic.” I felt that I had found my true home and family. I’ve been very distressed by recent reports of sexism in the skeptical community because it is so at odds with my personal experience.

As long as humans are humans, promoting critical thinking will be a never-ending Sisyphean task. But I prefer to see the glass as half-full: I am encouraged by what the skeptical movement has accomplished over these past forty years. Skeptical information is widely available; skeptical organizations have sprung up all over the world; conferences have multiplied and are well attended; the media know who to call for the skeptical response to a story; religious belief is declining. On the occasion of this fortieth anniversary, I want to congratulate CSICOP/CFI and Skeptical Inquirer for all they have done to make the world a better place. And I can’t thank them enough for making my own life more rational, more meaningful, and more productive. I am bursting with pride to have made some small contribution to their efforts.

I needed a work-study job, and the new physical anthropologist reportedly was coming to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with a large skeletal collection of monkeys, which with luck would need a handy work-study student to clean and organize.

It was the fall of 1965, and I was a junior in college, majoring in physical anthropology. I got the job; there weren’t many work-study students willing to wash, sort, and label slightly smelly and somewhat greasy monkey bones fifteen hours a week. Prof. Neil Tappen not only hired me and, over time, taught me a whole lot of science, he gave me my first lesson in skeptical thinking.

Did I mention I was a physical anthropologist? Did I mention that every physical anthropologist secretly wishes that Yeti and Bigfoot were real? Of course we do!

Back in the 1960s, Bigfoot and Yeti cropped up in the tabloids even more often than they do today, along with astrology and alien visitations. One afternoon while we were waiting for class, a fellow student brought up Yetis, which quickly turned into a could-they-be-real conversation. “Well, maybe they’re out there but really good at hiding themselves,” and so on. Prof. Tappen happened by and, as he was the primate expert, we asked him his opinion. Were there undiscovered giant primates living in the wild? Would anyone find them?

“Highly improbable,” was his answer. The claimed evidence was some dodgy footprints and some pieces of leather in the Himalayas that were claimed to be Yeti scalp but which could be just about anything. This was well before DNA analysis put to rest the claims of hair and skin as being from unknown primates. Tappen was small but tough and wiry. He had stalked those now-skeletal monkeys through the jungles and shot them out of the trees. He was a good field biologist who could handle himself outdoors. I pressed him, “But if you had the chance, wouldn’t you go on an expedition to find a Yeti?”

He just looked at me with what I hoped was patience, but it might have been exasperation. “I’ll be first in line for the second expedition,” he commented and then went on his way.

Right. If Yeti or Bigfoot truly were real, someone would have found some really good evidence by now. Once some actual evidence existed, Neil indeed would have been first in line to pack up his field gear and head off into the wild to study this strange new primate—but given the combined improbability of its existence and the lack of good evidence, he wasn’t going to waste his time. Just because the idea of giant primates in relict environments is really cool and you truly want it to be real, it can’t be wished into being.

You have to think with your head, not with your heart.

I received my PhD and taught biological anthropology for several years before becoming a nonprofit director at the National Center for Science Education, which opposed the teaching of the pseudoscience of creation “science.” These activities connected me to  CSICOP, and I was made a fellow in 1988. Then and now, the question of how to identify a claim as potentially valid is at the core of scientific skepticism.

Then, as now, I recommend a classic article by the physicist James Trefil (“A Consumer’s Guide to Pseudoscience,” Saturday Review, 1978, pp. 16–21) that helped me think about the relationship between science and pseudoscience. Sometimes offbeat ideas turn out to be correct, so you can’t just toss aside anything that isn’t mainstream. And any scientist will tell you even more quickly than a purveyor of woo that we don’t yet know everything about how nature or people work: there’s a lot left for science to discover. So how do you distinguish the useful ideas, the potentially good ones, and the worthless?

Trefil suggests thinking of the content of science as being composed of three concentric circles (see Figure 1). In the center are the core ideas of science—the tried and true, repeatedly tested, and secure explanations that we rely on. Heliocentrism is here to stay. So is evolution, thermodynamics, CO₂ as a warming gas, and lots more.

Next is the frontier, where explanations are being proposed and actively tested. These are the hypotheses that university and industry scientists are working on now. Any science journal’s table of contents can provide dozens of unsolved problems. Most of the solutions, alas, will not pan out: mostly you get pebbles, and some of the shiny stuff turns out to be mica, not gold. If the explanation is a good one, though, it will work its way into the scientific consensus and into the core. Otherwise, well, there’s the outermost concentric circle, the fringe, full of ideas with serious problems.

Fringe science is incompatible with one or more core ideas of science. Flood geology, the creationist idea that Earth’s sedimentary deposits are the result of the waters of Noah’s flood, violates a very long list of core principles of geology. “Free energy” machines (you can invest in them on the Internet!) violate the principles of thermodynamics—like all perpetual motion machines, physicists don’t invest in them. ESP? No mechanisms proposed, but worse, no unqualified demonstrations of the phenomenon.

One marker of a fringe idea is that professional scientists aren’t spending time on it; they know it is very unlikely that ideas contradicted by core scientific explanations are going to be useful. The fringe is the land of amateurs, and not necessarily in a good way. Occasionally (rarely?), a fringe idea will make its way into the frontier. Even less often, it will be demonstrated to be a keeper. Continental drift was a decidedly fringe-y idea when first proposed, but gradually evidence built up, and it moved to the frontier. For decades scientists tested and built on the idea, and plate tectonics is now a core idea of geology. Mostly, however, fringe ideas deserve to stay there. But science is open to new ideas—it’s not a closed shop. Still, to make the grade, the explanations have to be valid: your crazy idea has to actually help explain nature.

And my friend Bigfoot? Well, some manifestations of the story are wildly improbable: that Yetis and Bigfoots are relict Gigantopithecus is going to stay on the fringe forever as violating too many core understandings of mammalian population biology. How many individual Yetis would be required to maintain a breeding population for the last ten or twenty million years—without a single fossil, bone, carcass, or reliable sighting? What are the caloric requirements of a large primate, much less a breeding population—and where is that food going to come from in a place such as Bigfoot’s northwest coast forests? Unlike bears, another large mammal, Bigfoot, as a primate, is physiologically incapable of hibernation. What’s it going to eat during the winter? Yeti has the same problem—only squared.

The quickest, back-of-the-envelope way to start analyzing a possible pseudoscience is to see, first, if professional scientists are spending time on it. If none are, that’s a significant sign in itself. But maybe the idea is too new and, yes, scientists tend to be conservative, so professional scientific disregard isn’t a deal-breaker in itself. But what is a deal-breaker is if the idea is incompatible with a well-accepted, core idea of science. Of course scientific explanations can change—but remember, the definition of a core idea is that it is so well tested that it’s not worth continuing to test it. A core idea is used to build new hypotheses and explanations. We doubtless still have things to learn about the solar system, but that the Sun is at its center is not going to change with new data or theory.

If someone comes up with an explanation or concept that flies in the face of really solid science, don’t waste your time. Wait for the second expedition.

Anthony Pratkanis is a professor of psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz and an expert on social influence. He is a noted consultant on fraud who has been hired as an expert witness for many high-profile court cases. His CSICon 2016 lecture was titled “Altercasting as a Social Influence Tactic”

Gerbic: It was really nice to see you again, Anthony. I met you at SkeptiCal back in 2011 and loved your lecture. If I remember correctly, you talked about how social influence can be used to sell flim-flam. I’m sorry to say I didn’t end up quitting my day job and starting a new career, otherwise I would probably be on my yacht right now or more likely in prison. Please give the readers some of your background.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Pratkanis: In the past, I have given a number of talks on how those who sell flim-flam and take people in fraud use social influence and persuasion. In these talks, I basically go through various influence tactics and illustrate how the flim-flammer and fraudster uses them. For those who would like to get a feel for this, they might want to read “How to Sell a Pseudoscience,” which appeared in Skeptical Inquirer back in 1995.

My analysis of how flim-flammers and fraudsters use influence is based on the science of social influence. For the last sixty years or so, social researchers have been using the scientific method by involving case studies, surveys, and especially experiments to identify 107 effective social influence tactics. I use these as the basis of a Social Influence Analysis—identifying what influence tactics are used in a situation and how that would ultimately impact behavior.

Gerbic: So, what is altercasting, and how did you get interested in it?

Pratkanis: Altercasting is a class of social influence tactics where the agent of influence puts the target into the exact social role for best persuasive impact.

Con criminals use this all the time. As one fraud researcher put it: A con will take any role in order to win your confidence or trust. One of the most common con games is known as playing the hayseed (or what I call “the expert snare”). The con acts like a country bumpkin and thus the mark is placed in the role of expert or know-it-all. That gives the mark the confidence needed to bet or get involved in the scam. The expert snare is the basis for the pool hustle. My interest in altercasting grew, in part, by trying to explain how influence was working in this situation.

However, there were two events in the mid-1990s that served as the catalyst for an altercasting theory of source credibility. One was a protest at my university; students marched on the state legislature demanding lower pay for professors and increased professor workload. (The students were effective; now students complain about how large my classes are). The other incident was watching the cult leader Shoko Asahara of Aum Supreme Truth—the ones that were responsible for the subway gas attacks—interact with his followers. His followers looked to be the same age as my students, and they were coming up to him, kissing his feet, paying top yen to drink his bath water, and giving up their belongings to him. I thought: “Gee, I am the one here with a PhD and paid below market rates, and this guy is gouging himself on sushi at the expense of his followers. There seems to be something wrong with the current theory of source credibility based on expertise and trustworthiness.” What seemed to be going on in that situation was based on social relationships and social roles. That realization led to the work on altercasting published in my essay “Altercasting as an Influence Tactic,” which appeared in D.J. Terry and M.A. Hogg’s book Attitudes, Behavior, and Social Context.

Gerbic: Considering you were elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 2011, you are no stranger to scientific skepticism. We have all this knowledge, so many talented people in our community, and evidence on our side. Why can’t we nip flim-flam in the bud? It seems like it is as pervasive as it ever was.

Photo by Brian Engler.

Pratkanis: Well, we still live in a demon-haunted world, even though all of us have the opportunity to hold up a candle to the darkness. That’s the way it has been for the length of our species’ existence, and thus we need to be realistic in what we can expect. The rub is that with issues such as global climate change and the rise of granfalloons (social identities) that feed off of each other and give rise to violence, we have to accomplish more than what we can realistically expect.

With that being said, I think humanists and skeptics can make more use of a science of social influence. For example, there have been a number of experimental demonstrations of a wide variety of social influence tactics—social norms, commitment, social consensus, among others—for promoting pro-environmental behaviors. These findings are, for the most part, left on the table unused.

One of the important things that skeptics can do is to stop using a science of social influence against achieving their goals. For example, it is common to see an issue—such as the environment—turned into an us vs. them frame. Those on the left do this when they link environmentalism with an attack on capitalism. When we do that, we are merely altercasting an enemy who will not listen and will oppose us. It may feel good to have that “superior” identity and social role, but meanwhile nothing is being done on an issue like climate change.

Gerbic: You were on the Oprah Winfrey Show?

Pratkanis: Yes, back in the 1990s. The topic was: “Would you get on the bandwagon?” The show consisted of a number of clever “candid camera” style episodes illustrating how people would conform in a variety of settings.

The question most people want to know about Oprah is: Is she the same in person as she is on her TV show? I hate to disappoint, but I can’t answer this because we were on the TV show together. I can say that she combines two sets of attributes that are rarely seen together—she is incredibly smart (off the charts smart) and she is a very warm and effective communicator.

Gerbic: I understand that you are starting to learn magic and are incorporating a psychic act into your lectures. Please tell us about that?

Pratkanis: I teach a course called the Social Psychology of Flim-Flam. The course covers how to use the scientific method to make sense of everyday questions (for example, What’s happening in the Bermuda triangle?) and explores why we believe crazy things (for example, Why do we think ships are going down in the Bermuda triangle?).

A few years ago, I started playing “the most amazing, the most wonderful, the most adorable Professor Pratkanis, master of the noosphere.” For you skeptics, the noosphere is the thought-energy field around each of us that allows thoughts to be communicated telepathically, solids to be transmuted, and most miraculously transforms ordinary tap water into “noospherically aligned magnetized water” capable of effecting a wide range of cures (and to do so equally well for all of them) and to bring inner harmony and healing.

I found that this noosphere routine is one of the most effective ways of communicating critical thinking and skepticism. Students quickly realize that even their college professor can fool them with a simple mind-reading or object levitation. Most of the students enjoy the gag and start to play along. A couple of the best students show up to class and do their own noospheric psychic phenomenon. That is gratifying.

One of the great personal benefits of my use of magic in classes was that a friend heard about it and introduced me to the fellowship of magic. I am proud to be a Magician Extraordinaire of Ring 216 (“Extraordinaire” means I perform in Ring charity shows; it is not a statement about my level of talent) as well as a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and of the Society of American Magicians, and I am an Inner Circle Magic Garage Magician. I have to say that few things have brought me as much enjoyment and delight (as well as knowledge and personal development) as being part of this magician’s fellowship.

Gerbic: So, tell me about CSICon? What were your favorite parts?

Pratkanis: Obviously, the magic performances by Banachek and Jamy Ian Swiss! Those were two incredible shows that I will remember and value for a long time to come. What a treat! I also really enjoyed finding out about the latest flimflams (such as those described by Stuart Vyse and Paul Offit) and hearing about how people are combatting these problems (such as Bertha Vazquez’s work on science education and your work on Guerrilla Skepticism). And then there are many old friends, especially Ray Hyman who, for me, defines what it means to be a skeptic and a psychologist. He is the role model—plus he has so many cool stories to share.

By the way, Susan: Thanks for doing this; you have an amazing level of energy and talent; what you do is very important; the glue that holds much together and the catalyst for the next cool thing to happen (i.e., leadership).

Gerbic: Thank you so much, Anthony. By the way, I just spoke to a small group of anthropologists in Scotts Valley, California, the other day. I showed up early, and the woman in charge asked what I would be lecturing on. I said “Wikipedia” and mentioned that I ran a skeptics group in Monterey. She said “Oh, do you know Anthony Pratkanis?” Well that sure knocked me off my guard. She said that you were a local and that she likes to talk to you about skepticism and religion. She even went to SkeptiCal in 2011 to watch you lecture. I thought, how charming.

Speaking of which, SkeptiCal will be held in Berkeley, California, Sunday, June 11. And of course, everyone needs to attend CSICon 2017 at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, October 26–29. The Halloween contest is on Saturday, so get to thinking about your costume. Make sure you put in your vacation requests now; it will be here before you know it. Arrive in time for the Thursday morning workshops, and stay over till Monday morning. You’re going to need the extra sleep, trust me on that.

We confirmed two more workshops this week, including the biggest and most important science educator conference in the country.

March 30, 2017: National Association of Science Teachers Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, presented by Nicoline Chambers
October 22, 2017: Kansas Association of Science Teachers, Wichita, KS presented by Kathleen Warnock

We have sent in proposals for TIES professional development workshops in New Mexico and Oklahoma.
I worked with the TIES presenters whose workshops are next on our calendar, in Michigan and Wisconsin. In addition to being comfortable with our slide presentation, they must be able to introduce at least one hands-on classroom activity and one online evolution game. They must also show the participating teachers the many free resources found on our webpage.
I’m getting ready for my own TIES workshop this coming Thursday at a local middle school.
I met with local celebrity Dave Barry. He has agreed to interview Richard Dawkins at his Miami event on May 27, 2017. I can’t wait to help Dave develop his questions for Richard! Can you imagine them discussing why the opening of the koala’s pouch faces downward towards the ground? Not exactly intelligent design.
From Kenny Coogan: “The CFI / Dawkin's FB page shared one of our TIES posts and it reached 300,000 people, compared to our normal 1,000. From February 23 to February 24, we gained 25 fans/followers. On February 23, I posted several pictures of my workshop and shared them on the IAATE's FB page (10k followers) and it was shared on RDF. We have 868 fans. Up by about 200 since November.”

Two TIES workshops took place last week, one at the Wisconsin State Science Teacher Conference and another at a middle school in Miami, Fl.
- After a successful first workshop, the Wisconsin presenter is excited to do more. I just received this e-mail from one of her teacher participants:
  
  “Good Evening, I just attended a session at a conference that was very engaging on Evolution and Natural Selection. I was looking at your links and would love a copy of your middle school exam on evolution. Thanks for your time.”
  Mary Witt, 7th Grade Science Teacher”
  
  I’m very pleased teachers are getting acquainted with our resources!
- The Miami workshop was a district-level 3-hour workshop. Conferences are a wonderful place to get the word out about TIES. However, I want to work on getting more district-level workshops. Teachers who go to their state and regional conference are ahead of the curve, they are excited about teaching and always looking for ways to improve their instruction. At local workshops, you find the sleepy and bored teachers who are forced to “endure” yet another district-imposed professional development. This was the case in Miami. I don’t blame them; they had just taught a full day of classes. By the second hour, however, they were totally engaged. I wish I would have videotaped them trying out our signature activity, This Lab is for the Birds. I created this lab based on the famous work of Peter and Rosemary Grant of Galapagos fame. The teachers were laughing and carrying on much like students.
  Here is the e-mail I received the next day:
  
  “Thank you so much for your time yesterday. We had a great time during the activities and had the opportunity to learn many new things. Thank you for all the resources, ideas and great lab.
  Thank you again. We appreciated it and enjoyed it.”
  Desiree Rodriguez, West Miami Middle, Science Department Chair
I sent out an e-mail to all our presenters about my goal of getting more local workshops on our TIES calendar. It prompted a TIES Teacher Corps Members in North Carolina, Kathryn Green, to finalize her district workshop. This will be her third local TIES workshop in addition to co-presenting for us at the North Carolina State Science Teacher Conference last year. She has 15 teachers signed up so far.
- March 30, 2017: Friday Institute, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC presented by Kathryn Green
We have three workshops scheduled for this week: North Dakota, Michigan, and Rhode Island. It’s been a busy week going back and forth to make sure these TIES Teacher Corps Members are comfortable with our materials. These are all first-time, local presenters.
And, the Miami event looks official!

Artículo traducido por Alejandro Borgo, Director del CFI/Argentina.

Habiéndote criado en Salinas, California, durante los años 70, si querías saber algo, los medios para encontrar una respuesta eran mínimos. Nos basábamos en los diarios, la radio y un par de canales de televisión para informarnos. Si querías más detalles, estaba la Enciclopedia Británica y la biblioteca pública. Encontrar material crítico sobre lo paranormal era difícil. Si lo mencionaban, era inevitablemente explotado en forma sensacionalista — fuera en favor de los fenómenos o dejándote con un “nadie lo sabe...” Yo era extremadamente crédula e ingenua. No tenía a quién preguntarle y la Guerra Fría estaba en su esplendor. Era una época no adecuada para creer en lo paranormal, la vida después de la muerte, y que una deidad solidaria no permitiría la Tercera Guerra Mundial. Así eran las cosas.

Cuando descubrí la revista Skeptical Inquirer, en 1996, fue algo revelador. Me abrió los ojos. Creo que el primer número que conseguí era el de Enero/Febrero. Mi suscripción comenzó con el ejemplar de Setiembre/Octubre de 1997. En él encontré respuestas a montones de cuestiones —sobre fantasmas, videntes, Pie Grande y todo me fascinó. Me enteré de cosas sobre las cuales nunca había pensado, y luego de leer algunos artículos pensé “¿La gente cree en esto?”. Otros artículos me hicieron pensar “Espera, ¿esto no es real?”. A principios de 2002 recibí un volante del CSICOP (ahora CSI); cerca de donde estaba se llevaría a cabo una reunión de escépticos. Llegué y decidí cambiar mi vida. Hice de anfitriona, invitando a la gente a sentarse en una mesa grande que había elegido y presentando a las personas aún sin conocer a ninguna. Debieron sentirse muy entretenidos. Nunca había estado rodeada por tanta gente inteligente. Debería haberme sentido completamente intimidada, pero eran muy amables. Mi confianza (completamente simulada) y su reacción me permitieron encontrar mi gente y nunca me sentí tan aceptada.

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

Luego de ese fin de semana, Carol y Ben Baumgartner me invitaron a un taller de Ray Hyman, en Eugene, Oregon, y luego, en agosto de 2002, ya estaba totalmente involucrada con este mundo.

Unos pocos años más tarde todo había cambiado: Internet se volvió popular y casi todos tenían e-mail. El foro de la Fundación James Randi para la Educación (JREF) me permitió conocer a otros escépticos locales, lo cual me permitió co-fundar el Monterey County Skeptics, en 2007. Por ese entonces Facebook expandió todavía más la comunidad. En los cruceros que organizaba la JREF no había Internet, lo cual hizo que nos sentáramos a charlas durante largas horas. Finalmente, fui a una conferencia donde Tim Farley habló sobre Wikipedia y por qué los escépticos debían preocuparse por ella. Pasaron meses y finalmente comencé a hacer pequeñas ediciones, como autodidacta. Comencé a publicar en Facebook lo que estaba haciendo, y la gente me hacía preguntas. Cuando la gente me pidió si yo podía hablar a sus grupos y se interesó más gente, me lo tuve que tomar en serio: fue el nacimiento de la Guerrilla Escéptica en Wikipedia (GsoW).

El proyecto es, y siempre lo ha sido, más que corregir la Wikipedia, para educar a millones de personas que nunca conoceré. GsoW era para la gente de la comunidad. Yo quería apoyar a aquellos que estaban haciendo ciencia, escribiendo artículos y libros, dando conferencias, y haciendo podcasts. Quería que la gente se enterara de nuestra historia, y se sintiera inspirada por voceros como yo. Mi principal objetivo respecto de la comunidad ha sido apoyar a la gente y sus proyectos —encontrar, entrenar, y motivar a la gente para hacer que nuestra comunidad sea más fuerte y que crezca. Apoyo firmemente las conferencias, ya que por mi propia experiencia sé que las cosas importantes ocurren cuando la gente se encuentra cara a cara. Compartir alguna bebida y aprender juntos. He organizado varios proyectos como Operation Bumble Bee, Operation Ice Cream Cone y Operation Tater Tot.

Quiero agradecer al CSI por darme la oportunidad de hablarles. Nunca imaginé que mi nombre se vería impreso en las páginas del Skeptical Inquirer en tantas oportunidades. Vayan para el Skeptical Inquirer mis felicitaciones por 40 años de un trabajo sorprendente. Espero que podamos seguir trabajando juntos por mucho tiempo.

Last week Wikileaks revealed what was claimed to be a trove of documents about CIA spying techniques that allow agents to access a variety of popular consumer devices ranging from smartphones to televisions. While the revelations made international news and spurred widespread concern—as well as a slew of inevitable headlines along the lines of “What You Can Do To Protect Yourself”—much of the coverage was predictably alarmist. There are a few things to keep in mind about the recent revelations for the average American who’s concerned that the CIA is spying on them.

The CIA doesn’t do domestic U.S. spying or investigations; that’s handled by the NSA or FBI, depending on the issue. The ability of the NSA to conduct mass surveillance is limited by the USA FREEDOM Act, which requires, for example, that the organization must make requests to telecoms to access databases of telecom-collected metadata. In other words the telecoms, not the NSA, hold the information.

Furthermore most of the information released so far is not actually about mass surveillance or spying on large groups of American citizens (or anyone else). Instead it’s about technology that has been developed to exploit devices that require the end device to be compromised. There is an important difference between spying on everybody and people hacking into the personal electronic devices of specific people who happen to have devices whose flaws can be exploited.

As I noted last year in my CFI blog “A Skeptic Reads the Newspaper,” critics can express legitimate outrage at raw data being collected en masse on all Americans without a warrant—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone is actually being spied upon, or their phone calls, emails, text messages, and other communications read. There is a difference between communication metadata (for example, lists of times and durations of phone calls to a specific number, or frequency of emails to or from a given email account) and actually reading or accessing the content of that phone call or email.

The disparity was brought into clear focus in the wake of the November 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 129 people—and the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper office in January of that year—when French authorities were forced to explain why the attacks weren’t prevented even though several of the attackers were known to authorities for their terrorist links, and the French benefit from cooperation with American, British, and other intelligence agencies. The answer was simple: they can’t track or watch everyone, even if they wanted to.

Intelligence officials have stated that it takes fifteen to twenty agents to monitor one suspect twenty-four hours a day. This is an incredibly costly and time-consuming process. At the time of the attacks, the French authorities had 11,000 people flagged as a possible threat to national security; of those, 5,000 were elevated to an additional level of concern and considered candidates for additional surveillance.

America’s spy agencies don’t have enough staff to monitor the residents of Cleveland, much less the entire country or the whole world. It would easily tie up every national security employee indefinitely. This doesn’t mean that raw data may not be gathered, but whether anyone ever actually looks at it (or has reason to analyze it) is a whole other matter. The problem that intelligence agencies face is not having too little data, but precisely the opposite: having too much.

If a few thousand people on established watchlists who have criminal records and/or known connections to terrorist organizations can’t be tracked, why would anyone think that government spy agencies are spending their time reading the personal emails or spying on ordinary citizens? The vast majority of Americans (and their communications) are of no interest whatsoever to national security and therefore are unlikely in the extreme to be picked out of the literally billions of communications exchanged globally every day to be examined by a human.

This of course does not mean that ordinary people—accountants, Denny’s managers, car mechanics, etc.—cannot be spied upon and watched, just that it’s very unlikely that they would: With terrorist attacks to prevent, Russian hackers to deal with, and countless other legitimate threats and targets, why would the NSA listen in on a teenager’s cell phone conversation or intercept a text between a married couple about what groceries to buy on the way home from work? It’s likely that at least 99.99997 percent of communications between average Americans are irrelevant to anything that national security agencies care about, and because of that it would be pointless, counterproductive, and an enormous waste of resources to monitor what most of us do, say, or write.

The average person’s privacy can be invaded in countless ways, by anyone from Peeping Tom neighbors to anonymous computer hackers; American spy agencies hardly have that market cornered. And, of course, many millions of people voluntarily post private information about themselves on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media. From the names and birthdays of their family members, to pets, to when (and where) they go on vacation, to personal medical issues, and so on, there’s an enormous amount of personal data that people happily put online.

It’s also important to note that experts have offered very simple advice to help improve your cybersecurity: update your software. Many of the vulnerabilities discussed in the Wikileaks data have been known (and patched)—in some cases for years. As The New York Times notes, “In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value. Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted apps by name, and described them as ‘bypassed’ or otherwise compromised by the C.I.A.’s cyberspying tools. Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache... More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps—at least not in the sense of ‘bypass’ that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies.”

There is no magic bullet to prevent hacking, and any computer can potentially be vulnerable. But for as much as the public fears—or seems to fear—its loss of privacy, doing simple things such as changing passwords and updating software remain simple and effective.

QuickTakes offer brief (1,000 words or less), timely commentary on topical news items.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Claire Klingenberg is a public relations and events manager living in Prague in the Czech Republic. She is also the liaison for international relations of the Czech Skeptics’ Club Sisyfos, as well as the co-organizer of the Czech Paranormal Challenge. I met Claire at CSICon 2016; she had just attended QED in Manchester, England, a couple weeks before.

Susan Gerbic: Hello, Claire! It’s so good to be able to talk to you again. I wanted you to talk about your attendance at the two skeptic conferences you attended in October 2016 and also about the upcoming conference you are helping with, the European Skeptics Congress held by the European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO).

So, let’s start with a bit of an introduction. Please tell readers a bit about yourself.

Claire Klingenberg: Hello, Susan! As you mentioned, I do public relations and events management for a group of magicians, mentalists, and card sharks. Apart from that, I am studying comparative religion and religious studies. I’m quite new within the skeptics’ movement. I officially joined two years ago. Prior to that, I was helping with organizing the experiments of the Czech Paranormal Challenge (since 2013), as well as interviewing close to 100 possible participants. I am very proud to say that our challenge currently offers the second-highest monetary award for proving a paranormal claim in the world. Oh, and I have the absolutely cutest dog—Figaro, a 150 pound Greater Swiss Mountain.

Gerbic: Wonderful! It was a joy to meet you. Our mutual friend Leon Korteweg in the Netherlands told you to make sure to look me up when you got to Vegas, didn’t he? Leon is a very important part of my GSoW project and is quite active in the Dutch skeptic as well as the European skeptic communities. We joke that Leon is my mini-me.

Klingenberg: Oh, absolutely! Leon is great; always keeps me on my skeptic toes. Yes, he told me so, but not just him. Many people at QED spoke about you as being not only the must-meet celebrity of the skeptic world, but wonderful. I was very excited to have the opportunity to meet you the evening before CSICon and am happy to say they were right.

Gerbic: Wow, thank you. I was a speaker at QED in 2014 and loved it. It’s held in Manchester, England, and the vibe is really different than the American skeptic conferences. What is this conference all about, and what were your impressions?

Klingenberg: QED, at least from my perspective, is a very high-energy event, with many things going on at the same time (talks, workshops, podcasts, films, panel debates), so many brilliant people mulling around and simply not enough time to see and do everything, which makes you want to come back next year. The range of topics covered is astounding—from ethics in magic to evolutionary biology to effective science communication and everything in between. Both the audience and the speakers are on average young and very active in their fields of interest. It was all so energizing and motivating.

Gerbic: Then almost two weeks later you found yourself in Las Vegas attending CSICon. How different were the two conferences?

Claire Klingenberg with Massimo Polidoro at CSICon 2016, photo by Karl Withakay.

Klingenberg: CSICon was more what you would imagine under the word “conference” at first impression. But after getting to know the other participants, it started to feel like a family, community meeting, even to my Czech colleague and me, who were complete outsiders.

Gerbic: Claire, tell me about some of your highlights of CSICon.

Klingenberg: The talks at CSICon were shorter with the advantage that you could hear and see everyone, giving you a taste of everything (and food for thought) without the feeling that you are missing out on something. The participants were incredibly welcoming, and even though CSICon had a slower pace than QED, there never was a dull moment. I love being around and speaking with people smarter than I am, and CSICon was wonderful because it offered many opportunities to do so. I am very happy to have become a part of the CSI community and can’t wait for the next CSICon.

Gerbic: Now let’s talk about the European Skeptics Congress (ESC) happening September 21–24. I’m so excited that I will be a speaker at this event, my first time in Europe (outside of the UK trip). What should I and other attendees expect? Will English-only speakers be comfortable attending?

Klingenberg: This is the seventeenth ESC. It will be held in Wroclaw, Poland, which was last year’s European Capital of Culture. It is a co-organization of the KSP—the Polish Skeptics Club and the Czech Sisyfos. It is an international conference, so don’t worry if your Polish and Czech are a bit rusty, all of the Congress will be held in English. Even I and my colleague from the Polish side, psychologist Tomasz Witkowski, communicate in English. We couldn’t understand each other otherwise.

The skeptic community is not that large, and the speaker list can get a bit repetitive when you regularly visit skeptic conferences. So to spice things up, we took the “concert” approach. Start with what the audience knows and can sing along to (Susan Blackmore, Mark Lynas, Scott Lilienfeld), then introduce them to something new and enriching (brilliant Czech and Polish speakers), and end with the evergreen hit (James Randi).

Gerbic: So, there must be something you are getting out of all these skeptic conferences? Why do you attend these? Most people in our community have never attended even one skeptic conference, and here you are attending several in one year. Personally, I think that it can completely change your life for the better. The people you meet, the experience of being in a giant room with so many people who think of things the way you do, who see the science speakers as rock stars—I mean James Randi! He is in the top ten of amazing people, much higher on my list than any movie star. What can you tell readers that will finally convince them to pick a conference to attend this year?

George Hrab and Claire Klingenberg at CSICon 2016.

Klingenberg: In the last year, I’ve been to four conferences: the first Rationalist International Conference (RIC) in Tallin (Estonia), Skeptikon in the Czech Republic, QED, and CSICon. Even though all of them center around skeptical and rational thinking, they are very different. The RIC focused on the religious and secular clash in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India and the issues related to multiculturalism and cultural plurality. Skeptikon was about the importance of skeptical, critical, and rational thinking. QED and CSICon were about everything, though both in different ways.

What I personally get out of all these conferences is a feeling of humility and many wonderful new ideas and projects to work on and introduce in my country and to my fellow Czech skeptics, as well as creating personal relationships in different countries, which is absolutely crucial when cooperating on trans-border issues. This is something the European skeptic community is well aware of and working on. Europe is a small playground, divided by many languages, but combating issues that do not respect borders, be it quack-medicine or conspiracy theories.

Gerbic: Thank you so much, Claire. I look forward to meeting new people and renewing friendships at the ECSO conference in Wroclaw this September and hope you will find the energy to attend CSICon again October 26–29 in Las Vegas, baby. Everyone check out the CSICon Facebook page for updates and socializing.

The word on the street is that we need to drink eight to ten eight-ounce glasses of water (8x8) every day to keep hydrated and healthy. The word on the street is wrong.

The myth says:

75 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated
In 37 percent of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger
Even mild dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as much as 30 percent.
One glass of water shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100 percent of the dieters studied in aU-Washington
Lack of water is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue.
Preliminary research indicates that eight to ten glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80 percent of sufferers.
A mere 2 percent drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.
Drinking five glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45 percent, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79 percent, and one is 50 percent less likely to develop bladder cancer.

The myth has been repeatedly debunked by doctors and scientists. Even Snopes has declared it false.

I thought the myth was dying, but apparently not. I still see people who carry their water bottles everywhere. I got an email from a man who said:

“I've started working out again, and was trying to figure out how much water I should be drinking every day. I keep running into this calculation 2/3 body weight in pounds, drink that many ounces. So, I weigh 300lbs, 2/3rds of that is 200 ounces... that's 25 cups a day! It seems like a ton of water to be drinking, and I can't find anyone citing where this info comes from. All of the articles I read are just blindly relaying the same thing. Some say 1/2 the weight in lbs in ounces, but 2/3rd if you're active.”

Eight to Ten Eight-Ounce Glasses?

Here’s how the eight to ten glasses myth got started. A study in 1945 found that people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. Overall. But it went on to say, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” The 2.5 liters was simplistically translated into eight to ten eight-ounce glasses of water, and the clarifying sentence was ignored.

We get our water from many sources. Food provides 20–28 percent of total water intake. Watermelon, strawberries, lettuce, celery, and spinach are 90–99 percent water; yogurt, apples, pears, oranges, carrots, and cooked broccoli are 80–89 percent water. Bananas, avocados, baked potatoes, and cottage and ricotta cheese are 70–79 percent water. Pasta, beans, peas, fish, chicken breasts, and ice cream are 60–69 percent water. Bread, bagels, and cheddar cheese are 30–30 percent water.

Beverages other than water provide around 44 percent of our water intake. Beverages are composed mostly of water—even beer and wine. Fruit juices are mostly water. Sodas are mostly water. Tea and coffee are mostly water. Some people warn that caffeine is a diuretic that can remove water from the body, but it does not have that effect in people who drink it regularly.

Two-Thirds body Weight in Ounces?

I’m not sure where the rule about two-thirds body weight in ounces came from, but a doctor named Fereydoon Batmanghelidj did recommend drinking half your body weight in ounces. He just made that up. He was a crank who believed dehydration is the main cause of disease. He promoted his Water Cure, which was not based on any scientific evidence. His story is an interesting one; it’s a cautionary tale about how an intelligent, educated man deceived himself. I wrote about him for Science-Based Medicine. I’m guessing some people gullibly accepted his non–evidence-based recommendation of half your body weight and arbitrarily raised it to two-thirds to allow for extra water losses with activity.

Symptoms of Dehydration and Over-Hydration

If you become mildly dehydrated, you may experience symptoms of thirst, dry mouth, decreased urination, darker urine, headache, or muscle cramps. Thirst will usually get you to drink more, thus solving the problem.

Over-hydration can be dangerous. In the early stages, it can cause nausea and vomiting, headache, confusion, and disorientation. If not treated, it can cause muscle weakness, cramps, seizures, and coma. People have died from water intoxication, notably Jennifer Strange, a California mother of three who drank 7.5 liters of water in a radio contest to win a video game system. She came in second in the contest, went home, and promptly collapsed and died. Several radio employees were fired, the station was eventually shut down, and a jury awarded her survivors over $16 million in damages.

A study of runners in the 2002 Boston marathon found that almost 2,000 participants had some degree of hyponatremia (low blood sodium levels due to over-hydration) and ninety had critically low levels. These runners gained weight (water weight) during the race. Runners believed mild dehydration would impair their performance, but studies have shown that dehydration of up to 3 percent does not affect performance.

So How Much Water Do You Need to Drink?

Individual water requirements vary according to ambient temperature, physical activity, illness, and many other factors. It does not make sense for everyone to drink the same arbitrary quantities of water, whether eight to ten glasses or 200 ounces a day. There are two reliable guides to how much to drink:

Thirst. Drink when you are thirsty. Not necessarily just water; other beverages will do.
If your urine turns dark yellow instead of light yellow, and if you are urinating less frequently than usual, drink more fluids.

That’s all you need to know. Simple.

Artículo traducido por Alejandro Borgo, Director del CFI/Argentina.

Para alguien que debe ser el único investigador escéptico full-time en el Reino Unido, mi camino exacto hacie el escepticismo es difícil de recordar. Sin tener ninguna creencia sólida en algo que no estuviera verificado, no hubo un momento clave donde yo tuviera que cambiar de opinión. En cambio, mi descubrimiento del movimiento escéptico se dio gradualmente, en lo que es sin duda algo común a mucha gente: un programa de televisión me llevó a un podcast, que desplegaba un mundo de medios escépticos, lo cual hizo que me abocara a la búsqueda de escépticos locales y, pronto, formar una sociedad escéptica.

Cuando co-fundé la Sociedad de Escépticos de Merseyside, a principios de 2009, los grupos de Escépticos en el Pub recién habían comenzado a difundirse llevando a cabo eventos en Londres, con grupos en Oxford y Leicester antes que el nuestro en Liverpool. Si hablamos de cifras, el crecimiento de los grupos de Escépticos en el Pub es alentador: en siete años, ya hay más de cuarenta grupos locales activos. Prácticamente no hay ciudad que no tenga grupos escépticos cerca.

El crecimiento orgánico del escepticismo en el Reino Unido, demuestra a la vez la fuerza y la debilidad de un movimiento descentralizado que va de abajo hacia arriba. Aparentemente no hay organización oficial alguna. Sin una organización central que determine lo que se puede hacer y lo que no, los grupos locales se administran de forma autónoma, donde la condición para que una persona forme parte de ellos es que pueda encontrar un lugar adecuado y un conferencista apropiado. Esta apertura hizo maravillas respecto del rápido crecimiento de la comunidad escéptica del Reino Unido durante la última década.

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

La desventaja inevitable que tiene un movimiento sin sede central es la falta de un representante para manejar el activismo y dirigir el entusiasmo en actividades eficaces contra la pseudociencia, mientras que los grupos locales concentran sus energías en las actividades locales. Esta desventaja no es infranqueable si se la encara apropiadamente. De hecho, a un año de la formación de la Sociedad de Escépticos de Merseyside, hemos comenzado con la Campaña 10:23 —una serie de estrategias de publicidad diseñada para hacerle llegar al público la ineficacia de los remedios homeopáticos (una pseudociencia que resulta vergonzosa para los escépticos británicos, dado el apoyo del gobierno del Reino Unido a la homeopatía, en el Servicio Nacional de Salud (NHS) que ronda entre los 4 y 6 millones de libras esterlinas).

La estrategia, en realidad, no era nada nuevo: tomar una “sobredosis” de medicamentos homeopáticos para mostrar que los remedios no contienen nada, excepto azúcar. Lo que hizo que nuestro plan fuera diferente de los anteriores fue la escala: apuntamos a los escépticos de todo el país para que tomen una “sobredosis” precisamente a la misma hora, las 10:23 (el número hace referencia a la constante de Avogadro, que se puede usar para explicar la naturaleza inerte de los productos homeopáticos). Para lograr este objetivo, necesitábamos convencer a los grupos escépticos del país para que sigan nuestro plan y se unan a nosotros. Afortunadamente, he visto en varias ocasiones que cuando te aproximas a un grupo escéptico con un pedido de apoyo en lugar de un decreto normativo, invariablemente encuentras una respuesta cálida y entusiasta. Los escépticos quieren ayudar y ser parte de una idea que valoran.

Nuestra Campaña 10:23 fue un éxito impresionante, con 300 escépticos en 13 ciudades tragando píldoras de azúcar como ejemplo. Esto generó la atención de toda la nación, siendo el principal noticia en el sitio web de la BBC durante un día entero y apareciendo en los diarios nacionales. Tan exitosa fue la campaña que en 2011 —sorprendentemente a menos de dos años de que creáramos la Sociedad de Escépticos de Merseyside— hicimos que la campaña llegara al mundo, acercándonos a cualquier grupo escéptico que encontráramos, ofreciendo el mismo atractivo por el entusiasmo, la ayuda y la acción. El 6 de febrero de 2011, 1.700 escépticos, en 70 ciudades, en 32 países, incluyendo a un investigador de la Antártida, participaron colectivamente en un evento que alguna vez fue soñado por un pequeño grupo local de Liverpool. Como muestra de ello, las ventas de productos homeopáticos en Polonia cayeron un 17 por ciento luego de la Campaña 10:23.

Si bien la Campaña 10:23 fue exitosa, el apoyo del NHS a la homeopatía no disminuyó. Esta es quizá la mayor desventaja de una comunidad escéptica autónoma y descentralizada: se trata de lo que se puede lograr con un voluntariado con tiempo limitado, y los voluntarios concentran su atención y activismo donde tienen interés. Los grupos escépticos insisten repetidamente en terreno conocido, mientras que las ideas desmitificadas requieren una revisión constante. Para algunos escépticos, esto puede causar cansancio o aburrimiento.

La habilidad para sortear esta fatiga es una de las fuerzas auténticas para tener un grupo con dedicación y profesional, por lo cual me sentí tan encantado de transformarme en posiblemente el único escéptico full-time de mi país, cuando me convertí en el director de proyectos de Sigmon Singh’s Charity, The Good Thinking Society, en 2014. Entre los muchos proyectos que encaramos en los dos últimos años, hicimos un seguimiento sistemático de la homeopatía y fuimos contra el apoyo de la homeopatía por parte del NHS, profundizando en las especificaciones de los acuerdos de ese apoyo, políticas de salud y encargando procesos a los voluntarios que tuvieran tiempo, interés y experiencia. De este manera por primera vez hemos sido capaces de exponer cómo y dónde los fondos públicos del país se gastaban en la homeopatía y trabajando con abogados para confrontar legalmente las decisiones regionales de financiación con alentadoras señales de éxito.

Nuestra mayor victoria fue lograr que en junio de 2016, el NHS de Liverpool dejó de apoyar económicamente a la homeopatía como resultado de nuestra campaña. Estamos intentando hacer lo mismo en el resto del país. Y, naturalmente, nuestra posibilidades de éxito se vuelven mayores teniendo el apoyo de una comunidad escéptica apasionada y entusiasta.

El escepticismo todavía es un movimiento en crecimiento. Cuando me convertí en un escéptico activo en 2009, parecía que la gente mezclaba el término homeopático con herbario o natural. Tal vez el mensaje escéptico está empezando a abrirse camino. Voy a suspender mi juicio hasta que tenga más datos. Después de todo, soy un escéptico.

Letter to the Editor of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine,

In her excellent article on Wikipedia (“Let Your Questioning Start with Wikipedia,” March/April 2017), Susan Gerbic describes this wonderful resource to combat ignorance. I am always amazed at how easy it is to find an answer, compared to my school-age years, when I felt consigned to the World Book Encyclopedia. However, she didn’t explain the need for caution. Several years ago, during a Super Bowl, I was curious about the age of the half time rock performer. And there, in the first paragraph, it stated that he was, “born and anally raped….” I was stunned, and actually believed that the poor man had been a victim of sexual abuse. Granted, it seemed an odd way to write it, and lo and behold, the next day, it was edited out. Ms. Gerbic makes the point that statements need to be referenced. And of course then one can search the reference. Nonetheless, it doesn’t always stop the unscrupulous from contaminating this incredible resource. Readers need to remain skeptical.

Mr. Diamond
North Carolina

Skeptical Inquirer (CSI) received this letter to the editor about my recent article. My very first letter to the editor about me. I’m actually very flattered. And I really want to use this opportunity to explain the inner workings of Wikipedia and how everyone is needed to help police it.

First off, this happened several years ago, and I seriously did not expect Mr. Diamond to know what to do when he spotted vandalism on Wikipedia. But he and everyone reading this will by the time you are done reading.

Little known facts about Wikipedia:

Every edit that has ever been done on Wikipedia is public. It takes seconds to discover who made the edit and when. I should say that “who” is relative; it could be an anonymous ISP address.
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. And anyone can revert vandalism
You do not need an account to edit Wikipedia
You can edit on your phone, tablet, or desktop computer
Most vandalism reverts are done by robots on Wikipedia. They do thousands a day.

I don’t know who this rock star Super Bowl performer Mr. Diamond is talking about is, but let’s see if we can figure it out. Then we will be able to look into this further.

I’m going to start by searching for Super Bowl on Wikipedia. I see a link for Super Bowl entertainers during half time. Let’s look through that list. Remember he says “several years ago” and “of the half time rock performer,” which makes it sound singular, not a part of a group. We can narrow it down even further as Mr. Diamond said he looked on Wikipedia to find more information, and Wikipedia was invented in 2001. So it had to be after 2001.

Several possible candidates look like they could fit:

Lenny Kravitz - February 1, 2015
Slash - February 6, 2011
Tom Petty - February 3, 2008

Let’s look at these three.

First up, Lenny Kravitz.

On the top right side of every Wikipedia page (you do not need an account; everyone can see this tab if they are looking at a desktop screen), click on the “View history” tab.

You will be taken to a page that shows every edit ever made to the page.

We are looking for February 1, 2015, as well as the days before and after. On the left side you will see current and previous.

You can mouse over the “prev” and without clicking on the link you should see a preview of the edit that was made as well as the edit that was there before. Do this so you can quickly find the change. I don’t see the vandalism Mr. Diamond mentions. But I do see that during the Super Bowl this was added.

The vandalism was added on Feb 1, 2015, at 16:01 by someone named Gman261 and was reverted back to normal at 16:02 by someone named Gloss.

I can click on the “contribs” next to Gman261’s username and I will be transferred to a “User contributions” page. This specific one tells me that Gman261’s only edit on Wikipedia under this user name was the one on Lenny Kravitz’s Wikipedia page. It was a mobile web edit. This is interesting to look at, because most people who do vandalism will do a string of edits all in a row. If Gman261 had done so, we would be able to quickly look at all of them and revert them in seconds if they were vandalism.

One more note before we leave the Kravitz Wikipedia page. If we click on the “talk” link next to Gman261’s name we will see this very polite note from Gloss.

“Hello, I'm Gloss. I wanted to let you know that I undid one or more of your recent contributions to Lenny Kravitz that do not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page.
Thanks! Gloss 00:02, 2 February 2015 (UTC)”

Who says that Wikipedia editors aren’t polite? The rule on Wikipedia is to always assume good faith. If only this were a rule in the real world.

Next up, Slash from Guns N’ Roses fame. He performed on February 6, 2011. Following the same steps as above we find,

This was an edit made by an anonymous ISP address that lasted under a minute on the Wikipedia page before it was reverted by a robot.

That same ISP made several more edits to the page in quick succession, saying that “Slash has a face” and “slash fucked up life,” again reverted in minutes. It’s almost painful to read the vandalism as the spelling and grammar are atrocious. There were probably 100 edits done on the Wikipedia page by various editors within an hour. All were tiny changes, some of which were actually good and others of which were more vandalism. Here is an interesting one that lasted less than a minute: “He also acknowledged benig a s"street bum and pan-handler in his late-teens to supports his various hobbies and habits.” And this: “This part of his Wikipedia entry is really lame and those who posted it need to get a life and stop trying to be so gay and perfect about Slash's gear. Tone is in the fingers, bottom line, end os story, don't be a fucking poser.” In the early life section, someone tried twice to get this vandalism to stick: “his first word was abie.”

Once the Super Bowl was over, the Wikipedia page went back to about thirty edits a month.

Lastly, let’s look at Tom Petty, February 3, 2008.

Like the others, there are hundreds of edits all made quickly. Most were helpful edits such as adding commas and making the grammar clearer. Then there was some vandalism where someone called him a “douchebag” and when that was reverted seconds later, they tried again calling him a “really big douchebag” and someone in all caps wrote “SMALL PENIS REDNECK COMMIE,” which was reverted within a minute. And again, “MAKING THE SUPERBOWL STINK COMMIE LIB SMALL PENIS.” Here is an entertaining one: “he was also one cool cat and he ate some pies while he was in a relationship y a know.”

At 17:11 we find the edit that Mr. Diamond talked about. Made by ISP 76.111.36.135. At 17:12, the edit was reverted by someone named Trichotomous.

What I suspect is that Mr. Diamond was watching the Super Bowl with millions of others around the world, and thought “hmmm, how old is Tom Petty now?,” clicked on his Wikipedia page, and just happened to see the page that had the vandalism on it. If he had looked a minute before or a minute after, he would not have seen that specific vandalism. This was a snapshot of a moment in time.

Here is an interesting statistic. Mr. Diamond wasn’t alone in looking at Tom Petty’s Wikipedia page that day. Normally, the Tom Petty page receives 4,000 views a day. But on this specific day the same page received 263,656 views. Trolls know this, and are more likely to vandalize when they know the page is at its peak of popularity. It is possible that a Wikipedia editor could ask for a lock on editing for a day to keep trolls off. But Wikipedia does not like to do this. They know that the page will be reverted quickly when vandalism happens. They really don’t want to keep the page from receiving good changes also.

The way this all works is that editors put Wikipedia pages that interest them on their personal watchlist. And then anytime there is a change to that specific Wikipedia page they will see it on their watchlist. If it is vandalism, then it takes two clicks to revert it. Only seconds.

Also, robots (bots) troll Wikipedia looking for vandalism. Each bot has its own special purpose, maybe looking for the word “jerk” that is submitted as the only addition to the page. The way bots work is fascinating, and this article talks about how the bots are deleting each other’s edits. This is something we really need to be talking more about as we get closer to self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.

So, for those of you interested in helping out Wikipedia and keeping it clean, I suggest this article written by Tim Farley, who inspired me to start editing Wikipedia.

To sum up Tim’s article: If you see vandalism, hit the edit (some say edit source) tab on the top left side of the Wikipedia page. You will probably be looking at code. Find the vandalism on the page and delete it. Go to the bottom of the page and leave a reason why you are making this edit. It can be as simple as “removing vandalism” and then click save. Lastly, pat yourself on the back.

Really, there is little to repairing vandalism on Wikipedia. You really can’t break anything. If you do something wrong, then someone will come along and fix it. Depending on how popular the Wikipedia page is, the edit might sit there unchanged for days or weeks. So, when you see it, fix it.

Thank you, Mr. Diamond, for your letter. It was fun to investigate.

Ellen Tarr is an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Midwestern University in Glendale, AZ. She presented a Sunday talk at CSICon 2016 called “The Truth about Rh-Negative Blood Types.”

Susan Gerbic: Hello there Ellen, so good to talk to you about your presentation at CSICon this last October. I love the Sunday paper presentations; I’m always learning something new. And your presentation was definitely about a subject I knew nothing about. Can you please tell the readers more about your presentation?

Ellen Tarr: Of course! My presentation focused on trying to correct some common misconceptions about having a Rh-negative blood type. Approximately 15 percent of the world’s population is Rh-negative, and this has led to some interesting speculations. Some people think Rh-negative individuals are more evolved, or at least more distantly related to monkeys, compared to Rh-positive individuals. Based on a limited understanding of genetics, others go even further and claim that there is no natural way that the Rh-negative blood type could have evolved and therefore, some supernatural or paranormal race was involved. The “Rh-negative people are special” community generally accepts that being Rh-negative is associated with a wide variety of physical, cognitive, and personality traits. Most of these are relatively benign, but I’ve also seen claims that being Rh-negative blood makes you immune to some infections, such as HIV. This kind of information can be dangerous, and I hope both my presentation and upcoming article make convincing arguments that there is no evidence for these claims.

Photo by Karl Withakay.

Gerbic: I notice that you have written about Sasquatch DNA also? That must be interesting?

Tarr: Yes—I heard about the Ketchum paper from a colleague (Dr. Tyler Kokjohn). We were discussing the claim that she couldn’t get it published because mainstream scientists were biased and unwilling to give it a fair review. Lack of meaningful interaction with mainstream scientists is a valid concern, and I like to think of myself as open-minded, so I decided I would write a review. I attempted to make it accessible for nonscientists, and I wrote it less formally than I would for a journal. The paper was clearly not suitable for publication, and I tried to point out how the data should have been analyzed and presented for the study to be considered credible. In addition to people who are believers regardless of evidence level, I think there are a lot of people who would like Sasquatch (or something similar) to be real but are not willing to accept the evidence currently available. Hair analysis and DNA seem legitimate, but they don’t have the expertise to evaluate the work and determine if the conclusions are accurate. My hope is that I can bridge the gap a little. The review ended up being longer than I had anticipated, and Jeremy Vaeni was kind enough to post it on his Center for Bad Ideas site.

Gerbic: And tell us about Project Core and your involvement in it?

Tarr: I joined Project Core rather late. It was in the data analysis phase, so I wasn’t involved in designing the survey or collecting the data. It was an interesting project because everyone had different interests, which led to some individual commentaries in addition to the synopsis of results. There were some basic demographic, health, and phenomenon-related questions that had discrete answers, but there was also an open-ended portion where the respondent could describe an experience in their own words. While many stories fit various templates, there were some that didn’t resemble anything I had heard before, and I really struggled for an explanation. We are hoping the correlations we found will be used to generate and test hypotheses in further work. Of interest to me was that 30 percent of respondents that reported blood type were Rh-negative, which is more than we would have expected but consistent with other paranormal research. I have some hypotheses about this, but further work is needed to see if those are supported.

Gerbic: I’m always fascinated with how people found out about the skeptic community and what makes them decide that sitting in the audience isn’t enough anymore. What is your story?

Tarr: I found my way into the skeptic community in a roundabout way. I noticed that some people interested in the paranormal were looking for greater interaction with scientists and just jumped in where I thought I might be able to help, like with the review of the Ketchum paper and then with Project Core. I’m Rh-negative, so the topic has been on my radar for awhile. My dad read some things he thought were interesting, and I decided to see what had been scientifically established on the topic. Once I did the research, I wanted to publish it so others had the information. I looked around and decided a strictly academic journal would probably not get the audience I wanted, and I found the Skeptical Inquirer. It was reputable and had a broad audience, so I submitted my article in the hope it would be accepted. I then saw the information for CSICon and the Sunday session, and thought it would be a great way to report what I had learned.

Gerbic: Please tell us about some of the highlights of CSICon.

Tarr: I really enjoyed Jill Tarter’s talk. Everything I do is at such a small scale—I spend most of my time comparing protein sequences or looking through a microscope. It’s difficult for me to comprehend collecting and analyzing data on the scale that she talked about, and hearing about what they are looking for in all that data was really interesting. Elizabeth Loftus was after her, and finding out how successful they have been at planting memories was a little unsettling. I also attended the cold reading preconference workshop. Although I understood how it was done, I was not at all good at doing a cold reading myself. I’m not quitting the day job yet.

One thing the planners did right that they might not have even thought much about—the steady supply of coffee during the conference. So many conferences end the coffee after the morning break, but a caffeine-deprived attendee is not a happy attendee. It was my first visit to Las Vegas, so I really appreciated the meal package because I didn’t have to figure out where to go. This was also a great time to meet other conference attendees and talk with the speakers informally. The planners did a great job of scheduling events and making sure there was plenty to do.

I enjoyed the Tournament of Kings Dinner, and next year, it might be fun to get the rivalry going earlier so there is a lot of cheering from our sections. I don’t know how many people noticed, but there was a fire alarm that went off briefly during the show. I asked the server about it, and he said if there was a real problem they would be the first to know down there because of the horses, so he didn’t worry about an alarm unless someone confirmed it. I’m glad it was a false alarm, for the obvious reasons, but also because the headline, “Skeptics conference attendees die in fire because they doubted the fire alarm,” would not help the movement.

It’s been a good week for TIES.

Our TIES Teacher Corps Member in Louisiana, Blake Touchet, wrote a proposal to present a TIES workshop at a science teacher conference in Mississippi. We’ll most likely need to wait for months before we hear back from the conference organizers since Blake sent our proposal in very early. He noted that evolution standards begin in 4^th grade in Mississippi. This is encouraging. Blake presented successfully for us last October in Baton Rouge and is also awaiting word about his proposal to present for us at the NSTA Regional Conference in New Orleans later this year. (NSTA=National Science Teachers Association).
We confirmed another district-level workshop this week.
- June 8, 2017: Torrance Unified School District Professional Development Day, Torrance, CA, presented by Nicoline Chambers
We had three workshops in three different states last week, Michigan, Rhode Island, and North Dakota. I received excellent feedback from all three presenters, but I was truly heartened when I read the e-mail from presenter Scott Johnson in North Dakota. His workshop experience truly demonstrates the fact that we are achieving the goals of our teacher institute. The idea for TIES began to blossom back in November of 2014, I had the opportunity to tell Richard Dawkins about my small efforts to help my colleagues with their evolution curriculum by providing them with resources and content. Richard Dawkins truly demonstrated his commitment to evolution education in the United States when he offered to come to my middle school and help me with my efforts. After this successful event, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science asked me to take my efforts to a national level. Our intention was to provide middle school science teachers with solid content on evolutionary biology and valuable free resources. Scott Johnson’s words inspire me to double down on our efforts. TIES is succeeding. From one middle school in Miami all the way to the great state of North Dakota!

“It went really well overall for North Dakota. The teachers were extremely appreciative of having the resources and I was able to ensure they had a copy of the PowerPoint and "coaching" about delivery before they left. In the beginning, I shared my own observations of the traps we often build ourselves when delivering evolution concepts as well as voicing how difficult the message can be when we are in more rural locations (North Dakota has mostly smaller schools with some large schools) that can have their own agendas. I stressed, as North Dakota Science Teachers Association president, that we as an organization support your resources for the entire unit you provided and they can rely upon this resource for reference that is backed also by the NSTA as well. That speaks volumes, and the attendees were visibly appreciative. We lastly had issues with connectivity (which I anticipated) so I talked through what they would see when we had lags.

Several thought it was an hour presentation and had to leave to make the next session (program issue). Those that remained I broke it down to a smaller and more intimate setting. That was really fun and we discussed more personal aspects and I turned it into a coaching session as we finished. Pretty cool stuff

All told, I had two middle-level earth science teachers (which I did not anticipate) that appreciated the earth timeline link and geological profile aspects to the presentation; the rest were either middle schools or high school level life science teachers and I shared my experiences with linking carbon dating in chemistry and evolutionary adaptations in anatomy for an overall message of evolution being a cross-curricular and binding concept across all of science rather than that unit commonly taught in biology class. And most often taught hesitatingly and almost done seeking forgiveness (my opinion).

To wrap up, I saw genuine relief for the support offered in this unit-based presentation you prepared. Teachers in attendance saw a variety of options and support and we brainstormed the different ways a fuller unit could be generated to surpass just the power point (thanks to the multiple links and presenters notes). Truly great stuff and I appreciate the work! I plan on sharing what you have provided as often as I can in future interactions in my district and with my other interactions on our public communications throughout the state. That's how it works around here and I anticipate the network to endure and the message to be amplified in the months to come. Thank you so much for the support and the work!”

Q:

Why do ghost hunters look for ghosts at night with the lights off? Obviously it’s more dramatic, but is there some specific reason or investigative rationale behind it?

—S. Pedroncelli

A:

Nearly every ghost-themed “reality” TV show and film has one or more scenes in which the investigators walk around a darkened place, usually at night, looking for ghosts. Much of the reason that modern ghost hunters look for their quarry in the dark has nothing to do with science or investigation but instead early Spiritualist fraud and fakery—specifically the conditions under which ghostly hoaxing by psychic mediums would least likely be detected and visitors would be most open to misperception and psychological suggestion.

In her book on the Spiritualist town of Lily Dale—the site of various CSI investigations over the years (see, for example, Radford 2002)—Christine Wicker notes that “mediums so disliked light that they nailed planks over the windows of their séance rooms. . . . The mediums further improved their chances by constructing so-called spirit cabinets—curtained-off portions of the room from which the spirits emerged once all the lights were extinguished. Spirits demanded such conditions, the mediums said” (Wicker 2003, 65).

Whether ghosts indeed had a clause in their contracts to appear only out of the spotlight is unknown, but the darkness certainly helped mediums hide hoaxing and trickery. It’s the same reason that magicians carefully control where their audience sits; they are keenly aware of the angles from which they can be observed and use that to their advantage in hiding their illusions. While it’s an unspoken rule that an inquisitive audience member is not allowed backstage—or onstage behind the magician while he or she performs—mediums offering a ghostly experience would give clear instructions about where their audiences could sit, what they could do, and so on.

When mediums and ghost conjurors were caught faking, it was often because the investigators did not follow the rules carefully set for them but instead took steps to get a clearer view of what was going on, for example by bringing out hidden flashlights or whisking a dark cloth they’d been told not to touch off a prop concealing trickery. Keep in mind of course that bringing literal and metaphorical light to supposed ghost activity would only reveal fakery and presumably not deter real paranormal entities. If automatic writings really did magically appear on mediums’ slates by ghostly hands—or the spirit trumpets really did float in the air from otherworldly forces—there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in a brightly lit room. The same holds true today; that ghosts are more apt to appear when close scrutiny and open investigation are thwarted is not a coincidence.

Some ghost hunters believe that darkness helps to draw out ghostly entities. Yet even a casual review of ghost reports reveals that this is not true: most sightings do not occur in darkness. People have reported seeing ghosts in broad daylight, in the morning, and at all times of the day. Well over a century ago, it was recognized that ghosts were not necessarily associated with the dark—popular perception notwithstanding. Educator and researcher Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research concluded around 1885 when analyzing hundreds of eyewitness ghost reports that “ghosts may be seen in daylight or in artificial light, at dawn or at dusk, and in various parts of a house or outside in the yard,” according to Michaeleen Maher (2015, 328).

It is true that people are statistically more likely to report seeing a ghost in the evening, but it does not logically follow that ghosts must be more active after sunset. There are several nonsupernatural reasons why ghost reports would occur more often at night, especially in homes. For one thing, there’s a sampling bias: most people are not at home during the daytime, and most of their waking hours while at home occur in the evening. Obviously, people are more likely to report potential ghostly activity at night in their homes instead of during the day at an office job, post office, or assembly plant. Furthermore, people are more likely to be in psychological states that can induce misperceptions (and even mild hallucinations) in the evening. The evening hours—which of course largely overlap with the darkness hours—are when people typically get off work to relax; sometimes they drink alcohol or use recreational drugs. Others succumb to another common mental state that has been clinically proven to greatly increase misperceptions and hallucinations: ordinary fatigue.

This of course does not mean that everyone who is tired after a long day will necessarily see or hear things that aren’t there, but fatigue is a real and significant factor that cannot be dismissed. Ironically, ghosts are almost never reported under the conditions that most ghost hunters search for them: in near darkness with flashlights and EMF detectors.

Conducting an investigation in the dark is the equivalent of tying an anvil to a marathon runner’s foot. It intentionally hobbles the investigation and is completely counterproductive. It also violates common sense and logic; if you are trying to identify an unknown object, is it better to look for it under bright lights or in a darkened room? There are virtually no other objects or entities on Earth that anyone would think are better observed in darkness instead of light; why would ghosts be any different? Humans are visual creatures, and our eyes need light to see—the more light the better. Darkness, by definition, severely limits the amount of information available. Searching at night in the dark puts investigators at an immediate and obvious disadvantage in trying to identify and understand what’s going on around them. If limiting the investigator’s ability to detect things around them helps find ghosts, why not take it a step further and use blindfolds and earplugs?

Furthermore, this strategy fails on its own terms. While some report seeing ghosts as glowing figures, many people report them as shadows or dark entities. Searching a dark room for a shadowy figure is an exercise in futility. If it were an established fact that ghosts emit light, there would be some logic to looking for them in a dark room. Unless a ghost or entity has been specifically and repeatedly reported or photographed emitting light, there’s no valid, logical reason that ghost investigators would work figuratively (and literally) in the dark.

There is no logical or scientific reason that ghosts would not (or could not) manifest themselves in bright light and under well-observed conditions. In fact, while many ghostly experiences are said to be liminal, others have been claimed to be very clear and obvious, such as in poltergeist cases in which dishes, telephones, and other large items are claimed to suddenly fly off tables and shelves. Some ghosts have even been claimed to move and rearrange furniture, including chairs and tables. These are not faint, brief sounds or light arguably best perceived in the dark but instead large and loud obvious ghostly displays that presumably should and could occur in bright daylight and while cameras are recording—yet do not.

This quest for minimal light creates an amusing paradox in which ghost hunters’ desire for ghost-friendly (not to mention error- and suggestion-prone) darkness must be weighed against the fact that ghost hunters must be able to see something in order to sustain the pretense of investigation. So a compromise is often reached in which ghost hunters use flashlights. That’s right: after choosing to remove a bright, fixed light from the investigation area (by looking after dark, turning lights off, etc.) the ghost hunters then re-introduce small amounts of light into the area, thus clearly illuminating only what is directly in front of the flashlight, whose light constantly moves along with the ghost hunters and thus introduces moving shadows into an area in which moving shadows are easily mistaken for ghosts. If a ghost hunter has reason to believe—based, for example, on multiple eyewitness reports or videos—that ghosts emit light, then the investigation to find those entities should be done in complete darkness; if not, then it should be done in bright light. But to turn lights off in an investigation area and then turn smaller lights back on is illogical and a very poor investigative strategy virtually guaranteed to fail.

It’s like trying to record auditory evidence for ghosts by turning off stereos and devices generating ambient noise—but then putting on headphones to listen to music while investigating. It’s as if the ghost hunters are unwittingly doing everything they can to introduce false-positive evidence of ghosts and make it as difficult as possible to determine whether something paranormal is truly occurring or not.

As Thomas Paine wrote, “It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry”; thus ghost hunters should not be content to sabotage their own research by turning the lights off or otherwise impeding their ability to investigate and identify the source of any anomalies, whether natural or supernatural. The reason it’s often done for television shows is obvious: it makes for dramatic footage. It’s spookier and more visually interesting to film the ghost investigators with infrared cameras. If the purpose of the investigation is to get spooky footage, turn the lights off. If the purpose is to scientifically search for evidence of ghosts, leave the lights on.

References

Maher, Michaeleen. 2015. Ghosts and poltergeists. Chapter 25 in Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. Ed. by Etzel Cardena, John Palmer, and David Marcussen-Clavertz. New York: McFarland.
Radford, Benjamin. 2002. Messages from beyond at a Spiritualist meeting. Skeptical Briefs, June.
Wicker, Christine. 2003. Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead. New York: HarperCollins.

TIES Weekly Update - February 21, 2017

TIES Weekly Update - February 28, 2017

TIES Weekly Update - March 7, 2017

Spreading Skepticism

From Tiny Acorns…

Homeopatía: los hechos sin diluir Entrevista a Edzard Ernst

This article was originally available in English.
Click here to read it.

My Personal Odyssey in Skepticism

Bigfoot and I: Reflections on Forty Years of Skepticism

Pratkanis on Altercasting and CSICon—an Interview with Susan Gerbic

TIES Weekly Update - March 14, 2017

TIES Weekly Update - March 21, 2017

Cómo me involucré en el mundo escéptico

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

QuickTake: A Skeptical Look at CIA Spying Revelations

Skeptic from Czech Republic Checks Out CSICon

Do I Really Need to Drink 200 Ounces of Water Every Day?

Eight to Ten Eight-Ounce Glasses?

Two-Thirds body Weight in Ounces?

Symptoms of Dehydration and Over-Hydration

So How Much Water Do You Need to Drink?

Activismo escéptico de abajo hacia arriba

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

Vandalism on Wikipedia

You thought your weekend was interesting? Ellen Tarr talks about Rh-negative blood and Sasquatch DNA

TIES Weekly Update - March 28, 2017

Ghost Hunters in the Dark

Q:

A:

References