We start at 7.30pm and each speaker gets 15 minutes. It'd be great to see you there and you can let us know you're coming on Facebook if you use that social medium.
Why Internet Dating Doesn’t Work – Dr Martin
Graff
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Romantic relationships play a huge part in
our physical, social and emotional well-being.
Successful relationships promote better health and even aid in faster
recovery from illnesses. Not
surprisingly, most of us seek to find a romantic relationship. However, should we resort to online dating to
find this? Drawing on psychological
research, this talk focuses on seven reasons why we shouldn’t. Some of the principal considerations are that
we make bad decisions in online dating and people are certainly not what they
seem to be meaning that such a matching system is not a good predictor for the
sustainability of relationships in a face-to-face context.
Dr Martin Graff is Reader and Head of Research in
Psychology at the University of South Wales.
He is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and a
Chartered Psychologist. Over the years
he has carried out research in the areas of cognitive processes
in web-based learning, individual differences in website navigation, online
interaction and the formation and dissolution of romantic relationships online
and offline. He has also carried out
research in the areas of online persuasion, and online disinhibition, and has
supervised several doctoral degrees in this area.
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From Richard Dawkins to Freud’s Death Instinct - Mike Waller
Dawkins
says we are exquisitely refined organisms whose evolutionary function is to
transmit copies of our genes. In this context, the evolutionary persistence of
depression seems to make no sense. Apart from its psychological effects, it is
heavily implicated in many life-threatening behaviours and illnesses. In
"Family stigma, sexual selection and the evolutionary origins of severe
depression's physiological consequences" (JSECP, 2010,4(2): 94-114) I
build on Hamilton's suggestion that a badly impaired embryo might be
"programmed" to self-eliminate if its condition would impede the
aggregated reproductive prospects of its kin.
Stockbreeders
know that family merit is the best guide to successful breeding, a reality
unlikely to have been missed by natural selection. If so, individuals perceived
as performing relatively badly in respect of close kin might well impose (by
way of impaired family reputation) a reproductive penalty on their kin group
well in excess of their own potential gene throughput. Here too, deeply
unpleasant though the idea is, self-elimination would make sound evolutionary
sense. With WHO identifying depression as the illness that, globally, causes
most disability, I believe this an idea that should be full explored as a key
guide to treatment.
Mike Waller has had an interesting and varied academic and
professional career studying government, management and psychology. A fully
paid up Dawkinsite he became interested in the problem of depression. His peer
reviewed paper on this subject was published in the Journal
of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (4(2): 94-114) in 2010.
Skeptical about Drug Laws – Phil Walsh
There are a plethora of instances where science is absent when it comes to so called medicines and treatments for a variety of ailments – from homeopathy to bogus cancer treatments which can actually cause harm.....but what about when science is absent from the laws which govern the progress of medicine? This is worthy of equal scrutiny and in this short presentation I hope to give a brief review of the problems encountered when trying to perform research with certain compounds and highlight some which show great potential for therapeutic use but are hindered by the issues described.
Phil Walsh
is 31 years old and holds an honours degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and a
master’s degree in clinical biochemistry. He has been working in research and
development within the immunodiagnostics industry for the past 9 years. His
other interests are based in neuroscience, psychology and an unhealthy penchant
for podcasts.
The Great Porn Phallusies
- Rachel
Rachel is a
regular consumer and occasional creator of pornography; she became excited when
she realised that the field of pornography was an apparently untapped well of
pseudoscience and logical fallacies. Tonight she intends to celebrate naughtiness,
challenge assumptions, and look at the facts behind what 'everybody knows'
about porn
Rachel says that there will be no explicit images in
this talk although there may be some page 3 type content. It will also include
some frank discussions of porn, sex, sexual assault, drugs, addiction, and use
of adult language.
Skeptical Activism: Why and how to get involved - Richard Sutherland
From naive
atheism at age 8, Richard became aware of the skeptical community and movement
around 2005 via discovering the James Randi Educational Foundation site and
forum, as well as the now defunct UK Skeptics forum. He was then inspired to
get involved in campaigning, initially targeting 'psychics such as Gary Mannion
the 'psychic' healer. This included getting BBC Children in Need to withdraw
support from an event he was attending, and being interviewed for a BBC
documentary on Mannion. He subsequently carried out an email campaign to
theatres hosting 'psychic' shows making sure that many who did not already
started to incorporate disclaimers on publicity material.
In 2008, alerted
by a JREF Million Dollar Challenge, Richard started a UK campaign against the sellers
of fake bomb detectors, which contributed to media coverage of the issue, and
played a minute part in the perpetrators finally being brought to Justice some
5 years later, and seeing 3 of 5 jailed, and one receiving a suspended
sentence.
He started attending
Birmingham SitP in 2012
