Podcasts, Communicators and Coventry Skeptics

A Blog Post by Patrick Redmond


This blog post is a shameless plug for the Birmingham Skeptics Podcast. I try to feature a range of people and subjects on the podcast from authors and scientists to some of the interesting people that I meet at the events that I go to. You don’t have to have a book out or a television series to have something worth hearing.


 A case in point is Lucy Harper who I talk to on the latest podcast. A scientist turned science communicator, working for the Society for Applied Microbiology, who, when her busy life allows, comes along to Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub. She works with scientists the world over helping them to talk to each other and to talk to us. Increasingly, groups like ours show that the divide between the white coated elite and the masses is narrowing as our public appreciation of science grows, and perhaps conversely as science’s appreciation for the public also increases.

You’ll find that interview sandwiched between some rather random sounding short interviews I did at Coventry Skeptics in the Pub inaugural talk with AndyLewis. I couldn’t get hold of Andy who was on a tight schedule with his train but his talk was brilliant. I’d had a few beers and the people I suddenly thrust a microphone at and asked to speak were a bit startled and shell shocked, but I think the sense of fun and excitement from the night comes across. If you live anywhere near to Coventry please support them, a great bunch of people and a great night out.

I’m not sure how many people listen to the podcasts and I’m hopeless at promoting them. I can’t do one every week as family and life are just too busy but they will keep coming. So please listen to them, let me know any thoughts you have and you can get the full back catalogue here and subscribe and get the last twelve from iTunes here.

Thanks

Patrick Redmond (@paddyrex) - Born in Stoke and moved the vast distance to live in Birmingham. He is one of the organisers of Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub.

Why Nothing Matters

By Ronald Green

Why should nothing matter? If anything matters, why should nothing matter? And yet it does, for there isn’t anything, it seems, that nothing does not touch, or anything that does not touch nothing. History, philosophy, religion, science, art, literature, music – all look towards nothing at some point, stimulating questions that would otherwise not be asked.

What is this nothing, that we can’t actually see, touch or feel? Is it absolute? Is it relative to everything else? If we are able to think about it, write and read about it, is it something, and if so wouldn’t it then not be nothing?

This is precisely the mystery of nothing – that the more we think about it, the more there is to it.

The struggle to understand the concept of absolute emptiness, the absence of everything, has been going on for some two thousand years, for at least as long as there have been written records of what people thought is important. Those who have made it their business to think have been puzzling at "nothing", wondering what it was, whether it was anything at all, whether it existed, in fact, and if it did, how it affected things around it.

The Weekly Round-up w/e 29/7/11

Would you look at us, another weekly round-up only a week after the last one, we're getting good at this.  We've got various things on offer to you this week for your reading pleasure.  Before we move on, just a quick reminder that Mark Stevenson's 'An Optimist's Tour of the Future' talk fast approaching so make sure you've made a note in your diary, second Wednesday of the month as always.  Have a look over there to the right of the page for further details.  Here's what you've been waiting for:

The Weekly Round-up w/e 17th July 2011

A very warm welcome to the second weekly round-up that has appeared in a row, a trend we hope to be continuing. Included is a load of stuff that we've unearthed from the web this week for your perusal and delectation. Some of it's fun, some of it's funny, some will make you cheer. Oh, by the way, some may make you a little bit stabby (sorry about that).

First up we have a survey or two, almost identical, but with startlingly different expected results:-

The first, posted by persons unknown poses a series of leading questions about the

Jon Ronson - Time to get Organised

These have been exciting times for us here at Birmingham Skeptics.  We’ve had some brilliant talks over the last few months, word is getting around the midlands and as a result our talks have been getting more and more popular.  Those who were at Ash Pryce’s excellent ‘How to be a Psychic Conman’ show will have noticed how popular it’s become.

On top of this, we’ve got the amazing Jon Ronson doing his talk ‘The Psychopath Test’ for us next week (13th July) at The Victoria.  We’re really looking forward to it, and, looking at the numbers that have responded on Facebook, lots of other people from around the area are too.

As a result of this, we’ve decided that we need to be a little more organised

Fluence and the Machine

A blog post by James Cole aka @jdc325

At the recent talk by Andy Lewis at Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub, I saw a demonstration of an odd machine.

Here's a picture of Andy's magneto-electric therapy machine:

While looking for more information on this odd machine, I found

Skeptics on the Fringe

A post by Patrick Redmond

In case you were unaware we are less than two weeks away from one of the most ambitious skeptical projects you will probably ever come across. Edinburgh Skeptics on the Fringe goes live from Saturday August 7^th all the way to August 28^th. Be assured that this is an incredibly impressive undertaking with three entertaining and educational strands and the promise of even more.


Here’s my promotional bit:

The Fringe of Reason is 6.00pm every

Book Swap Proposal and Quirkology Review

A blog post by Tulpesh Patel

I’m a hoarder at the best of times, but I’m even more precious when it comes to books. It’s always been a dream to have my own personal library, big enough that I would need a ladder to climb the shelves. As time’s gone on, The Origin of Species aside, I’ve realized that there are just too many books in the world to spend time reading any of them twice. I’m slowly coming to realize that reading, thinking about and discussing books is more important than having colorful stacks of paper on a shelf. To that end, I’ve become a huge fan of book swapping schemes and I think it would be a great idea to get something like that going for everyone involved in the Birmingham SITP.

For those new to it, book swapping is quite simply a way to share books that you’ve read and pick up one’s you haven’t for free. They usually centre around a communal box or shelf, but they can be set up anywhere where there is a pool of people who enjoy reading. It was “Book Crossing”: that first got me interested in freecycling books and since then I’ve been a regular contributor and beneficiary of the book swap scheme at my “local train station”: (I must have swapped over 20 books over the last year or so), and I’ve campaigned unsuccessfully (and I admit only intermittently) for a book swap to be started at Aston - the box posing a fire hazard and it not being ‘in keeping with the university aesthetic’ are two of my favorite reasons to be rebuffed so far.

With public book swap schemes you’re relying on the kindness of strangers and the hope that people don’t just use it to dump their old Jackie Collins’, although one man’s trashy romance novel is of course another’s literary getaway. Hosting a Birmingham SITPbookswap will be a chance to swap books of a scientific/skeptical bent. Of course, because the scheme won’t be public in the same way as at a train station, the swaps needn’t be permanent, and people can arrange between themselves to lend books out and get them back as they wish.

Given that the regular monthly meetings are already packed with great speakers, it might be an idea to hold a separate event which would make things closer to a traditional book club. It might also be an idea to post reviews of books that people have read, so that even if you don’t have the book to swap and can’t make the meetings, people can still read recommendations and participate in the scheme more generally. I’d like to kickstart things with a quick review of Richard Wiseman’s “Quirkology”: http://www.quirkology.com/UK/index.shtml, which loosely ties in with the talk (‘The psychology of anomalous experiences’ with Professor Chris French on July 14) and is a book I’m happy to donate to a new home.

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Quirkology by Richard Wiseman

Quirkology is in a way the perfect book swap book as it’s really interesting but I’m unlikely to want to read it again anytime soon. It’s one of the better collections of pop-psychology books stuffing shelves (or Amazon warehouses) at the moment, largely down to Richard Wiseman's obvious love of the work and direct involvement in some of the studies.

There are a number of retreads of studies that you'll have come across if you've read any other pop-psychology (Milgram etc.) but it's a great gateway to some of the methods and fallacies in psychological research, written in an easy, accessible style. ‘Believing six impossible things before breakfast’ is a great, if slightly disconcerting, chapter on the psychology of superstition. The search for the world's funniest joke is probably the highlight and the worldwide eradication of FTSE-itis is very clever, taking full self-knowing advantage of the psychology that fills some of the book.

It’s a good book to dip in an out of, written by a psychologist who’s doing a lot to make science and psychology fun and engaging.

Tulpesh Patel is a Neurosciences PhD student at Aston University working in collaboration with the Birmingham Children's Hospital. He is also founder and Chair of the Aston Humanist Society.

Science in the News

A Blog Entry by Tulpesh Patel

The relationship between science and the media is a complicated one. The former is concerned with communicating evidence-based knowledge, the latter with providing 'infotainment' to the public. There is the worrying perception, especially among those working in science fields, that science reporting in the media is doing more harm than good; deliberate dumbing down and endless stories that have been misreported, misrepresented, or that over-played the significance of research findings. There's the MMR-vaccine-causing–autism scare, wonder cures for cancer which turn into nightmarish causes of cancer the next week, the Hadron Collider bringing about the End Times and Facebook causing syphilis, to name a few off the top of my head.

It's easy to lump journalists together in one group and demonise them as scoundrels who deliberately go out of their way to sensationalise every news story, so I was looking forward to hearing the other side of the story from David Gregory, the BBC Midlands science and environment correspondent, who was invited as guest speaker for the Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub meeting. David was refreshingly candid about the inner workings of television and was keen to stress its quick-fire and superficial nature. He did his best to reassure us that most journalists do their upmost to present accurate and objective stories, but whilst scientists and journalists could do a better job of communicating science, it's nearly impossible to say anything of note in the two minutes and 100 words afforded to science coverage on the evening news.

A running thread through the discussion was that the media just gives the public what they want: something that grabs their attention, that they feel is directly relevant to them, and, apparently most importantly, nothing too complicated. As a scientist I find it hard not to be disheartened by this pervasive idea that the general public are too dumb or disinterested to engage with science stories – it always is hard to see how other people aren't interested when you really are!

In an environment where editors and the audience want to know whether it's worth paying attention to the story within five seconds, attention-grabbing sound-bites are what it's all about. There is a fine line between making a story accessible and losing the science amongst the wackiness, but if the story doesn't have an eye-catching hook (or if the presenter's clothes or hair are too eye-catching), there is little chance of the scientific message being communicated.

The task for scientists is to perform sound research, report findings and share opinions with due care, accuracy and diligence. For the journalist it is to engage the public with exciting, but easily digestible, science stories; it is obviously not the responsibility of the media to explain the intricacies of every science story. Within science there is the expectation that the media should reflect the scientific concern for the provisional nature of knowledge; nothing is ever set in stone, progress and facts are achieved incrementally and only very rarely through the 'scientific breakthroughs' we often see on the news. It's easy to see how this translates into "scientists" change their minds from week to week, it's hard believe a word they say" in the public mind.

Making stories easily digestible also means that the media cannot spend too much time in the grey area inhabited by science. Stories often necessarily have to be presented as black or white and this leads to the thorny topic of presenting a 'balanced' argument. David expressed the problem that in a democratic organisation like the BBC, everyone who pays the license fee is, in theory, entitled to express their view, however wrong or damaging it may be. It's balance like
this that often leads to one emotive individual having more impact than a panel of scientists – how can you argue with a woman with breast cancer who is convinced it was caused by a nearby phonemast? The question of whether you should always present the other side of the argument, especially when it is unscientific, was one that some of the skeptics in the room got quite heated about, but had no real, workable answer for.

There is cause to be positive, though. With the help of charming, media-friendly personalities like Professor Brian Cox and Dr Ben Goldacre, it seems that science is undergoing a welcome resurgence ('How science became cool', http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/13/science-cool). More importantly, the limitless space and reach of the internet now means that viewers can be directed to follow up two-minute news stories on news sites, blogs and Twitter, and get as much science as they can handle – but only if they want it in the first place of course.

The public's perception of scientists and the science being conducted is vitally important. It is up to scientists, skeptics and sympathetic journalists like David Gregory to collaborate and do their level best to maximise the communicate of good science to the general public.

Tulpesh Patel is a Neurosciences PhD student at Aston University, working in collaboration with the Birmingham Children's Hospital. He is also founder and Chair of the Aston Humanist Society. A copy of this entry is also on his personal webpage, http://www.tulpeshandmae.co.uk