Best Time Ever!

Michael Edmonds reflects on the 2012 NZ Skeptics Conference.

Having just driven four and a half hours back to Christchurch from the NZ Skeptics conference in Dunedin I should be tired. However, I am still on a bit of a buzz from a really great conference, although a glass of Coca-Cola and a handful of M&Ms might also have something to do with it.

This was my third NZ Skeptics conference, and knowing a few more people certainly helped enjoy the conference, not to mention meeting up with Siouxsie Wiles and Dave Winter, two of my fellow Scibloggers who made it along – Dave’s talk outlining some of the common misunderstandings regarding evolution was delivered with energy and enthusiasm and was really interesting.

Other speakers included Professor of Science Communication Jean Fleming, who made some salient comments about engaging those with unusual views in dialogue rather than just telling them they are wrong. This approach was used the very next day when another speaker delivered a rather controversial medical approach, the Marshall Protocol, in treating chronic disease. Members of the audience asked polite yet probing questions in order to tease out possible erroneous thinking. It was fascinating to watch and made me proud to consider myself a skeptic (and Siouxsie asked some excellent questions, while maintaining composed in the face of someone who criticised the use of mouse models in research).

Professor Richard Walter described some fascinating ‘alternative’ archaeologies which have been developed in NZ, including claims that New Zealand was settled by ancient Celts, Chinese and other races. This sounds funny but the right wing, racist undertones implied by some of these alternatives is also a little scary.

Anthropologist David Veart delivered an enlightening and entertaining talk looking at the history of fad diets (and associated beliefs) in New Zealand. Who knew that cornflakes were originally developed to help suppress masturbatory urges? (Though as one conference goer tweeted – possibly providing far too much information – “cornflakes never stopped me …”). One part of the talk that was very interesting to me personally was that of Ulric Williams, a medical doctor in my home town of Wanganui, who pushed the eating of non-processed food (generally good) as well as an anti-vaccine agenda (quite bad) which resulted in Wanganui having one of the highest levels of polio in the early 20th century.

Fellow Cantabrian Mark Ottley gave a fascinating talk about Well-Being – how it is measured, and how the government is now using various measures of well-being as well as looking at our GDP in assessing how New Zealand is performing, and the direction in which we should be heading.

My own talk on how to make a good Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) complaint seemed to go down well, so hopefully when skeptics come across advertisements flogging off dodgy alternative medicine products or services they will know exactly how to knock them on the head using the ASA.

The final talk for the conference was by Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan who, with humour and eloquence, described the complexities that occur when law and medicine come together in dealing with dodgy therapies, patients and doctors. I haven’t managed to cover all conference speakers, so apologise to those I have not mentioned. The cola and chocolate appear to be rapidly wearing off. So I will finish with a big thanks to those who organised the conference, particularly Katie and Warwick – I had a fantastic time.

And thanks to my fellow SciBloggers who finally taught me how to twitter properly (I think), though it will be a long time before I am anywhere close to the skills of Queen of the Tweets, Siouxsie, who can get off five while I am still writing one.

Also one final word – Siouxsie and fellow skeptical podcaster, Craig, managed to corner, corral and coerce many of the speakers to do podcasts for their Completely Unnecessary Skeptical Podcast (CUSP –thecusp.org.nz). I recommend taking a look or a listen sometime. Michael Edmonds is manager of science programmes at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT).

If meetings really lower IQ…

… then there’s little hope for the world, says Alison Campbell, who attends far too many meetings. Fortunately however, that may not be the case.

I attend a lot of meetings; that’s the nature of my job. Recently the Dean came in and waved the front section of the NZ Herald under my nose. “Look,” he said, “all those meetings are really bad for you.” Scenting a way of getting out of them, I grabbed the paper and found the article in question (syndicated from the UK paper, The Telegraph).

“Attending meetings lowers your IQ,” cried the headline, and the article goes on to say that:

“[the] performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.”

The story is based on a press release about research carried out at Virginia Tech’s Carilion Institute. And this showed that the research outcomes were more nuanced and more complex than the newspaper story would have it. The research found that small-group dynamics – such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties – can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people (Kishida et al. 2012).

In other words, meetings don’t necessarily lower your baseline IQ. What they may do is change how you express that IQ, particularly if you’re susceptible to peer pressure. The internal urge to conform can result in people making decisions as part of a group that they might not have made on their own, especially if they have concerns about their status in that group. (As the Virginia Tech release notes, this was shown to good effect in the superb film 12 Angry Men, with Henry Fonda leading a stellar cast.)

The researchers placed study participants in groups of five and studied their brain activity (using MRI scans) while the groups were engaged in various tasks. While the groups were working they were also given information about the intellectual status of group members, based on their relative performance on those cognitive tasks. (There’s a tendency for people to place great store on relative measures of IQ, and where they personally sit on the scale.) And afterwards, when participants were divided on the basis of their performance into high- and low-performing groups before their IQs were measured again, they were found to differ quite signficantly despite the fact that all participants had statistically similar baseline IQs when tested at the beginning of the study.

“Our results suggest that individuals express diminished cognitive capacity in small groups, an effect that is exacerbated by perceived lower status within the group and correlated with specific neurobehavioural responses. The impact these reactions have on intergroup divisions and conflict resolution requires further investigation, but suggests that low-status groups may develop diminished capacity to mitigate conflict using non-violent means.”

As I said, this is altogether more nuanced, more complex, and much more interesting than the news story that caught the boss’s eye. I suspect I’ll be attending meetings for a while yet.

K.T.Kishida, D.Yang, K.Hunter Quartz, S.R.Quartz and R.Montague (2012) Phil.Trans.R.Soc.B 367(1589): 704-716.

Inspiring Aussies and dodgy waiters

After almost 15 years of intermittently tagging along with her parents, Iris Riddell reports on her first official attendance at a NZ Skeptics Conference.

I attended my first ever Skeptics conference this year. Well, that’s not entirely true. Technically, I’ve been coming along since I was six years old, but critical analysis and conferences in general aren’t so interesting at that age. Rather, I attended my first ever Skeptics conference that I fully appreciated. I came away from the Christchurch get-together in August with my head in a spin, inspired by the lectures I’d witnessed and the people I’d spoken to.

One of those people and one of the biggest highlights for me was Kylie Sturgess, educator, writer, blogger and podcaster extraordinaire. She winged her way over from Australia with Dr Martin Bridgstock especially for the conference, and shared with us the results of a study they recently conducted, regarding what the average Queenslander believes in.

The session that really got me buzzing was one of theirs, about activism, the future of skepticism and the two cultures it is starting to sprout. Martin Bridgstock said skepticism is divided into two camps: he called the first group “the old grumpies” and cheerfully lumped himself in that category. The grumpies tend to be older people who belong to structured organisations, whereas the second group is far younger, and connect via podcasts, blogs and forums as well as casual social gatherings. I was so set off by this discussion that I’ve started making motions toward organising a Skeptics in the Pub event for Hamilton, but that’s another story.

I was surprised at the diverse age range at the Christchurch conference. There appeared to be a lot of people my own age (I’ve just turned 21) or not much older. Sure, there were still plenty of the “old grumpies” that Martin Bridgstock so proudly associates himself with, but there were definitely a lot of younger people, too. As someone often frustrated by the lack of critical thinking in the majority of my peer group, it gave me hope to see so many young skeptics.

The Friday night entertainment was a quiz on all things skeptical, with a bonus challenge to write a limerick as a group. These were gathered up and read out over the course of the next three days, and there were some very funny and clever ones to come out of the mix. I’ve never heard so many poems about alternative medicine, horoscopes and Ken Ring in one place.

I have to say, unfortunately, that the waiting staff at the venue for the Saturday night dinner were very unprofessional and had little respect for personal boundaries. I first noticed something amiss when I glanced up the table to see Gold, the chair-entity, receiving a rather sensuous head massage. “That’s odd,” I thought, and returned to my conversation. Moments later, one of them was looming over me. “Excuse me, ma’am. We’ve had a complaint about the state of the cutlery. Fancy a spit shine?” By the end of the meal they were zigzagging precariously up and down the unoccupied dining tables, a bottle of wine in each hand, singing loudly. I don’t think anyone was surprised when, once the food had been dispatched, they announced that they were members of a local theatre group, and the evening wound up with a short improv performance. For the record – the actual kitchen staff was polite, efficient, and served up some wonderful meals.

Some of the other notable lectures were earthquake expert Mark Quigley on forecasting quakes (see p 8 – there were at least three detectable aftershocks over the weekend, including one during a conference session), a wonderful photographic presentation by Simon Pollard on how different cultures commemorate the dead, and a talk by Puzzling World founder Stuart Landsborough on his psychic challenge and experiences with mediums. All around it was a thoroughly thought-provoking and inspiring conference, and a great experience for a first-timer like me … an almost first-timer, at least.

Some limericks – and a clerihew – from the Friday quiz night

Jenny McCarthy knew that she oughta
Do what was best for her daughter
But how to appease
Her daughter’s disease?
Give a 10C solution of water.

There once was a preacher named Ray
Who would eat a banana a day
He claimed they were godly
But skeptics looked oddly
At him and his fruity DNA.

To give me a homeopathic gin
Is an absolute mortal sin
I had a hangover so chronic
I needed a 14C tonic.

Sir Isaac Newton
Never slept on a futon
His 3 Laws of Motion
Were one hell of a notion.

Irrationality waxes once again

There are times when the world seems to run along quietly from day to day, with very little happening. Then there are times like these. There are the ongoing aftershocks in Christchurch, many of them big enough in their own right to qualify as major quakes at any other time. There was the far larger earthquake in Japan, with its ensuing slow-motion nuclear disaster. There are wars and revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa which seem set to transform the politics of those regions. Millennial anxieties are on the rise once more.

It’s only to be expected at such times that irrationality should flourish. When natural disasters strike at random, many have a desperate need to seek some kind of pattern, or cause. Hence the attention given to Ken Ring’s claim to have used phases of the moon and solar activity to predict the Christchurch quakes – if the experts can’t say when earthquakes will strike (though the general pattern of aftershocks has actually followed GNS’s forecasts quite well) then there is a niche for those who claim they can. Many skeptical bloggers (eg Peter Griffin, Matthew Dentith, Alison Campbell, Darcy Cowan and particularly the Silly Beliefs team) have dealt with Ring’s claims; we add our five cents’ worth later in this issue.

Meanwhile in the US, many commenters on internet forums are putting the Japan earthquake down to karma for Pearl Harbour. Also in that country self-proclaimed prophet Harold Camping is raising quite a stir with his calculation that the Rapture will occur on May 21 this year – 19 months before the 2012 buffs’ choice for the Big Day. Camping says of the current upheavals: “There are still people that God has to save, and he uses them to get them to cry out for his mercy.”

There’s not much sign of that happening yet in Christchurch, where the citizens are more intent on helping themselves and each other, rather than seeking divine assistance. Slowly the city is getting back on its feet, despite ongoing tremors; life is returning. A small sign of that is that the NZ Skeptics annual conference will once again be held there, from 26 to 28 August. Register with the form mailed out with this issue, or do it on-line at www.skeptics.org.nz

Christchurch always seems to have had more than its share of Skeptics, many of whom have been seriously affected by the quakes. It will be good for us to get together once again, to share the strength of our usually far-flung community.

Another cracker of a conference

THE 2009 annual NZ Skeptics Conference in Wellington was its usual mix of good times and thought-provoking material, though with some unique touches. The Kingsgate Hotel was a rather more luxurious venue than we’re used to; the few problems that arose were mostly due to the high number of late enrolments, making this one of the largest gatherings in recent years.

Continue reading

TV3 – the best of news, the worst of news

It’s Bent Spoon time again-the time when the Skeptics highlight the worst-and best-of the year’s media.

In the first double-header of its kind, one organisation has won both brickbats and plaudits from the NZ Skeptics Society in its 2007 Bent Spoon and Bravo Awards for gullibility and critical thinking respectively-TV3 News and Current Affairs.

TV3´s Campbell Live programme took the Bent Spoon award for Carol Hirschfeld´s August 31 interview with self-proclaimed energy healer and clairvoyant Simone Simmons, who claims to be visited regularly by the spirit of Diana, 10 years after the death of the Princess of Wales.

Promotional material provided by Simmons´s publicist cites her appearance on television in New Zealand and elsewhere as endorsing her claim to be a “global psychic and personality”. Less complimentary was one reaction to Simmons´s Diana ‘tell all’ book, when Guardian columnist Mark Lawson called it “rubbish even in a genre that has redefined the meaning of garbage”.

Her appearance on the Campbell Live programme did nothing to cement TV3´s claim to offer `leading news journalism´. It´s a shame really because we know Campbell Live can do quality current affairs, but they certainly didn´t live up to any standards of excellence in reporting, story telling or research with this one.

It is important to strongly challenge psychics regarding their claims, because it´s an industry like any other and should be called to account. Otherwise you end up with people believing they are getting value-for-money when they ring psychic hotlines, like the Victoria University Students Association Women´s Rights Officer who spent thousands of dollars of student union money ringing psychic 0900 numbers earlier this year.

Research on how women, in particular, are preyed upon economically and psychologically by the psychic industry was covered at the recent Skeptics Conference, in Christchurch, and a news item covering local research into this has won TV3 reporter Tristram Clayton a Bravo commendation.

Clayton´s Psych Addictive item (July 17) gained praise for providing a seldom-seen critical look at the million-dollar 0900 psychic phoneline business. A recent study by Auckland University psychologist Dr Robin Shepherd revealed women who became psychologically dependent on the psychic hotlines were spending more than $7000 annually each, and not for entertainment purposes either. Shepherd gains a Bravo Award for her study, which is seen as providing hard-to-get data on the exploitation involved in the psychic phoneline industry.

Clayton also won plaudits for items on the establishment of a UFO database and reporting on the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill.

We´ll be watching his future career with interest. Perhaps he can teach the old hands at Campbell Live a thing or two about story selection and follow-up. If TV3 feels it must fill its news programming with such soft items, the least they can do is bring some journalistic integrity to it.

The controversy over the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill provided multiple nominations for the Skeptics to consider. The attempt to provide standards and accountability in this lucrative trade saw Minister Annette King and industry group Natural Products New Zealand gain Bravo Awards.

We don´t often give awards to politicians, and we don´t often see vested interests providing leadership of this nature, so it´s good to recognise good work when it does happen even if, in this case, it was ultimately unsuccessful.

It is important for complementary and alternative medicines in New Zealand to be appropriately regulated to provide broad consumer protection, whether quality control in product manufacture, truth in advertising, or evidence-based comparisons of the effectiveness of outcomes against other treatments.

The Bent Spoon is named after the infamous symbol of self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, and was formally confirmed telepathically by the assembled Skeptics at their annual conference, along with Bravo Awards recognising critical thinking in the media.

The dangers of flying

I must make a point of never again flying while the All Blacks are playing in the World Cup. I was over the Atlantic for the 1995 final, and flying home from the South Island during this tournament’s quarter-final. The conclusion is plain: if I’m flying, the All Blacks lose. I know this is nonsense, but the power of coincidence is such that when two rare events coincide twice, it’s hard not to feel they must be linked. Even when the main reason for my trip south was to attend the 2007 New Zealand Skeptics’ Conference, where the pitfalls of such superstitious thinking were repeatedly exposed. As always, the event was a hugely enjoyable occasion, with lots of good company, interesting presentations and fine food.

The conference kicked off on Friday evening with a competition to build the best Rife machine, from a pile of assorted components. All of the creations worked as well as the genuine article, an example of which one member had brought along.

Saturday dawned fine, calm and clear (despite a forecast from Ken Ring that the weekend would be “mostly dry, cloudy, and annoyingly windy), and began with a history of magic from local magician Geoff Diggs, who explained why magicians have not come so far since the days they were rated only slightly above freak shows and the man who lifts steel anvils with his private parts. This was followed by a session on alternative medicine. After lunch came talks on psychic hotlines (see NZ Skeptic 84), creationism in Australasia, and a presentation on a recent documentary about big cats in Canterbury which was entertaining if not entirely persuasive. The day concluded with a discussion on the proposal to change the society’s official name from the New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Inc.) to the simpler and more familiar NZ Skeptics. Then it was time for dinner, and the presentation of the annual Bent Spoon and Bravo Awards (see p18). The day finished as it began, with a magician, this time Michael Woolf, who baffled all with his prediction of that day’s Christchurch Press headline several days in advance.

The name change proposal drew widespread support, and was duly actioned at the AGM the following morning. Full details in next issue. More illuminating presentations followed on economics, the dangers (or otherwise) of sodium in food, and the poor correlation between naturalness and goodness. Expect to see some of these items in the next few issues of the NZ Skeptic.

Then it was off to explore the wonders of the mainland. A highlight of the trip was Stuart Landsborough’s Puzzling World in Wanaka. Stuart, a skeptic of long standing, has a challenge to psychics-see the details at www.psychicchallenge.co.nz

But it’s good to be home. Now if only we could have avoided that flight.

Forum

Do we really need a name change?

Given that we’re called the NZ Skeptics in virtually all instances-our website, journal, the flyers, the publicity posters etc-do we need to go through a formal change to the incorporated society’s constitution to implement it?

What do we achieve by that, that we do not already have? Not a lot, as far as I can see, except possibly an easier word to spell on the annual membership form 🙂 Though I suspect the bank would bank stuff addressed to the NZ Skeptics these days-and we can always list that as a trading name, in any case!

What do we lose by that, that we currently have? I still have to say that I appreciate the ability to point out that we do have a defined area of skepticism as exemplified by our formal name, rather than being skeptical about everything under the sun-I get calls asking me to comment as official head of the Skeptics on everything from religious beliefs to economic theories, from the smacking bill to Treaty settlements, climate change to whether New Brighton Mall would benefit by changing to a slow road…

At present, I feel I can point to the formal name and say, this is not our brief-given the diffuseness of the aim to “promote critical thinking”, per se, how do we define what we are thinking critically about? Or do I need to have an official position on all things…

Just want you to think about the ramifications here folks.

Vicki Hyde, Chair-entity
Christchurch

‘Paranormal’ no longer our brief

Isn’t there a reverse side of this coin? If we insist that our role is limited to the paranormal, how can we claim to speak authoritatively on important non-paranormal matters such as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)? How do we justify the almost universally non-paranormal content of our conferences? How do we justify Bent Spoon and Bravo awards that do not relate to the paranormal? If we insist that our role is limited to the paranormal, how can we claim to speak authoritatively on important non-paranormal matters such as CAM?

On this last point, I note that in the summary of submissions given in the MACCAH report to the Minister, our submission was cursorily noted as being from an organisation concerned with investigations into the paranormal, not as from the NZ Skeptics.

Keith Garratt
Rotorua

No name is perfect

As I see it, any name we choose (even the NZ Society for Skeptical Inquiry) is not going to convey our specific areas of interest. Only the aims and objectives can do this to any extent. Broadly speaking we avoid politics and religion, but with regard to the latter we do comment on religious claims that impinge on science.

I’m still for making our informal name the formal one. Worth reminding ourselves that our fellow Australians call themselves Australian Skeptics Inc.

Warwick Don
Dunedin

Maori sniping uncalled for

I must add my voice to Hugh Young’s plea in the last New Zealand Skeptic. There is a fairly constant sniping in the magazine about Maori religious practices. As if somehow they’re any different from anyone else’s. I would be a lot happier, if we are going to be snide about this, if we gave equal time for instance to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s yearly prayers for the souls of those who died in World Wars I and II. I am as atheist as the next guy, and quite happy to go on the offensive against religion, but let’s spread the offence equally. Actually, this sort of quaint practice is treated with much more grace in Britain, where fairy rings become tourist attractions. Does anyone imagine that people want to come here as tourists just to see a little England?

I was also a little puzzled at a reference to absenteeism in John Welch’s column. What on earth has this got to do with scepticism? We all know that people sometimes lie to take time off work. And in my view, many people in this country work long and hard for very little reward, so good on them. I could argue about this all day, but my opinion of this has nothing to do with scepticism either, Welch is merely pushing a political barrow, as I have just done.

Lastly, I was unable to make the last conference, but one reason I was anxious to go, was that titles of ‘Ethnic fundamentalism’ and ‘Linguistic fascism’ had sounded warning bells. Perhaps as used to be common, they could be reprinted in the next issue of the Skeptic so those of us who were unable to hear them can judge for ourselves.

Bob Metcalfe

(Look for Elizabeth Rata’s article on ‘ethnic fundamentalism’ in the next issue -ed.)

Quackery Alert

The ACC-sponsored conference Many Faces of Abuse (Auckland, 10-12 August 2005) features a plenary speaker, Anne McDonald from Melbourne, who cannot talk, walk or feed herself. Her minder, Rosemary Crossley, is the inventor of Facilitated Communication – a technique whereby a facilitator supports the hand or arm of a severely disabled person and thereby enables that person point to letters of the alphabet. This technique gives severely disabled people the miraculous ability to spell out words, sentences and even whole paragraphs of astonishing, unlikely and often wildly pornographic prose. As a result of Facilitated Communication, hundreds of families and caregivers worldwide have had their lives and careers destroyed by devastating and subsequently-discredited allegations of sexual abuse. Among responsible organisations and individuals concerned with mental and physical disability there is now widespread agreement that Facilitated Communication is nothing more than a powertrip for manipulative therapists who prey on the vulnerability and dependence of the severely disabled.

In the US, in an unprecedented move, several major national professional bodies have adopted a formal position opposing the acceptance of Facilitated Communication as a valid mode of enhancing expression for people with disabilities. In the UK Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, president of the High Court Family Division, condemned Facilitated Communication as dangerous and declared that it should not be used by British courts to support or reject allegations of abuse.

Two of the other plenary speakers at the Many Faces of Abuse conference, Jo Massarelli and Marc Tumeinski, are followers of Wolf Wolfensberger of Syracuse University. Wolfensberger is a Jewish Holocaust survivor turned born-again Christian who claims that the medical profession is now killing more handicapped people per year than the Nazis did between 1939 and 1945.

For conference details see:

imaginebetter.co.nz/mfoa2005_index.shtml