I’ve been offered a most excellent gig by those lovelypeople at The Skeptic Magazine.
A while ago I cobbled together an Alt-Med flowchart toenable the budding Alt Med junkie to select an appropriate pointless therapy.

Anew and improved version of this diagram now nestles proudly in the centre ofthe latest issue of the Skeptic magazine, where you can rip it out and stick iton your wall, if your so [...]

From Science, Reason and Critical Thinking
http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-am-centrefold.html
1/13/2012 5:58:00 AM
Search rank: 367

The 37^th Edition of the Carnival of Evolution is on display at a very interesting blog called The Lessons of Evolution run by William, who describes himself thus: “I’m thirteen years old and I hope to become an evolutionary biologist but I have diverse interests.” William’s edition of the carnival includes posts on [...]

From The Panda's Thumb
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2011/07/carnival-of-evo-2.html
7/6/2011 7:07:38 AM
Search rank: 353

Congratulations to Beth Goodbody of Virginia, who has won an iPad 2 and eBook version of James Randi's classic Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.

Beth writes: "I'm stunned. Happy, but stunned! . . .  I started out as one of the those people that believed in psychic powers, telepathy and such.  As I started learning more and more about the sciences and how real science can be proven again and again I started to lose those other beliefs. . . Along the way I found the books of James Randi and then the JREF website.  I've learned so much Mr. Randi and the JREF on how to look at the supernatural and the claims of hucksters and how to apply critical thinking to those claims and call them properly. . . . Thanks for drawing my name!"

As announced yesterday over the JREF's social networks, Beth's name [...]

From James Randi Educational Foundation
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/3-newsflash/1499-the-jref-is-proud-to-announce-the-winner-of-our-flim-flam-ipad-contest.html
11/3/2011 8:09:04 AM
Search rank: 351

Australian Skeptics

Leo Igwe is the founder of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, the Nigerian Skeptics Society and former director of the Center for Inquiry/Nigeria.  Leo currently works for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) as its director in West and Southern Africa.  He also represents IHEU at the African Commission on Human and People's Rights in Banjul, Gambia.

In the past few months, Leo has spent much of his time rescuing alleged witch children in Akwa Ibom state in Southern Nigeria.  He has been arrested, detained and beaten up several times by police and local gangs in the course of his work, campaigning against superstition, injustices and religious fanaticism.

On 20 August, as part of a speaking tour of Australia, Leo will be in Sydney to talk about how science and [...]

From Events - Australian Skeptics
http://www.meetup.com/AustSkeptics/events/23647471/
6/27/2011 7:34:09 PM
Search rank: 348

...imaginary jobs that might or might not materialize. As a long-time customer of New Balance shoes (not only do I like the shoes, but they're U.S. made), it looks like a 'free'* trade agreement will kill off 1,000 existing jobs in Maine (italics mine):

At the factory here owned by New Balance, the last major athletic shoe brand to manufacture footwear in the United States, even workers on the shop floor recognize that in purely economic terms, the operation doesn't make sense.

The company could make far more money if, like Nike and Adidas, it shifted virtually all of these jobs to low-wage countries.

So employees try each shift to make it up. Conversations on the shop floor are sparse at best, and the tasks at each work station have been stripped of waste and precisely timed. Workers cut leather for a pair of [...]

From Mike the Mad Biologist
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/KsPC/~3/gr6QBgORhYU/a_thousand_jobs_in_the_hand_ar.php
8/26/2011 12:55:16 AM
Search rank: 343

Image by goingslo via FlickrBusy. Crazy busy!

Last year I accepted a position with my union (CSEA) as Political Action Coordinator for my region (

From No 2 Religion - Just Say No!
http://no2religion.blogspot.com/2010/06/hey-martin-where-have-you-been.html
6/13/2010 8:39:00 AM
Search rank: 334

"Prevention is better than cure", so they say. And in most branches of medicine, preventing diseases, or detecting early signs and treating them pre-emptively before the symptoms appear, is an important art.

Not in psychiatry. At least not yet. But the prospect of predicting the onset of psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia, and of "early intervention" to try to prevent them, is a hot topic at the moment.

Schizophrenia and similar [...]

From Neuroskeptic
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/predicting-psychosis.html
4/1/2010 12:13:00 AM
Search rank: 330

Before joining Scienceblogs.com, I blogged independently at "Evolution ... not just a theory anymore." That was a cool name for a blog, but I didn't transfer the name to Scienceblogs because there were already a whole bunch of blogs with "Evolution" in the name. There was a lot of stuff on that blog, mostly not worth saving but a few items of possible interest. Also, I've kept a number of things on that site that don't really fit here at the scienceblogs.com site, such as lots of links to books I like, a few downloadable research papers, and so on.

Over recent months, "Evolution ... not just a theory anymore" has been increasingly vulnerable to nasty attacks from the usual suspects, even though it is just sitting there minding its own business. It turns out that upgrading the very old wordpress installation is tricky, and transferring the database to a new installation is a fool's errand, especially given that half the junk on the old site is junk. More than half. [...]

From Greg Laden's Blog
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GregLadensBlog/~3/4TstqjvBrss/my_new_old_blog.php
8/14/2011 12:35:54 PM
Search rank: 321

Answers, as promised, for last week's Skeptical Crossword - which, I understand from a very unscientifically selected sample, was way too hard.
Oh well.
Across
2. Pod Delusion6. Blinded8. Twenty-first9. Wales11. Hari Singh14. Gimpy15. Horsehair16. David Treddinick17. Back Knight2o. Allen22. Ben Goldacre23. Orson Lewis24. [...]

From Alice in Galaxyland
http://aliceingalaxyland.blogspot.com/2010/06/crossword-puzzle-answers.html
6/10/2010 5:37:00 PM
Search rank: 321

Atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other nontheistic Washington, D.C. residents will have no representation at Mayor-Elect Vincent Gray’s first official inaugural event—an ecumenical prayer service entitled “One City … Praying Together” at 8 a.m. Sunday, January 2, 2011.

“We would prefer that a government function such as an inauguration not be entwined with religion,” said Amanda Knief, a Humanist Celebrant and government relations manager for the Secular Coalition for America (SCA). “However, we find it overtly discriminatory when we request to be part of an ecumenical prayer service that is supposed to unite the entire city and are told there is no place for nontheists.”

Within hours of learning about the prayer service through a public press release on Monday, [...]

From Secular News Daily
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2010/12/30/atheists-excluded-from-d-c-mayor-elect-gray’s-inauguration/
12/31/2010 5:09:10 PM
Search rank: 312

Some interesting documents are coming out of Canada these days. Because it's registered as a charity, the LDS Church is required to report statistics about its spending. (Love the transparency. America, you could work on this.)

This caught my attention:

3) In 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Canada gave $40,000,000 to BYU Provo. In other words, 57.9% of the money received from the wards that year.

Wow. Forty mil per year going to BYU, and that's just from Canada. I wonder how much it's netting in total.

One might wonder why the Mormon Church sees fit to pour that kind of money into a university. You could argue it's to promote the fiction that faith and science are somehow compatible. I know that sounds like a strange principle to spend so much money on, but the Templeton Foundation spends

From Good Reason
http://goodreasonblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-is-byu-so-important-to-lds-church.html
3/18/2011 1:39:00 PM
Search rank: 311

Neuroskeptic readers will be familiar with the idea that too many people are being treated for mental illness. But not everyone agrees. Many people argue that common mental illnesses, such as depression, are undertreated. Take, for example, a paper just out in the esteemed Archives of General Psychiatry: Depression Care in the United States: Too Little for Too Few.

From Neuroskeptic
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/01/is-depression-undertreated.html
2/18/2010 3:31:05 PM
Search rank: 308

Walmart: A Christian institution? Image:Consumerist.com

Wal-Mart is the biggest US supermarket chain, with a controversial anti-union policy and low-wage policy. So you might think that the people least happy with the business might be those at the bottom of the social pile.

In fact it turns out that the opposite [...]

From Secular News Daily
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2011/01/25/evangelists-love-wal-mart-even-the-ones-who-should-know-better/
1/26/2011 4:05:00 AM
Search rank: 304

Friends of Calico Early Man Site Archaeological Dig

Come to The Calico Early Man Site Archaeological Dig - Learn a little science, have a lot of fun! Saturday and Sunday Digs, May 14th and 15th will be our last dig weekend for the season.  Because Mothers Day is on the first weekend, dig will be on second Saturday.

What a dig we had in April! The weather started out to be 101 on Friday and cooled to a beautiful dig on Saturday and Sunday.  Student Bonnie from Victor Valley College, and her cohorts who were surveying for new sites under her professor Richard, had a close encounter with a large desert tortoise who investigated her while she tried to make hands-off friendship with it.  Our lecturer talked about Project Archaeology and how to interest kids in this addicting [...]

From Skeptics upcoming events
http://www.meetup.com/Friends-of-Calico-Early-Man-Site/events/14796495/
4/7/2011 11:16:57 AM
Search rank: 300

On a long drive between Denver and Laramie, at way past bedtime, my seven-year-old son told me about a magazine he had seen at the barber shop.  He’s a good reader, so he could tell me what the words said, but he didn’t understand what they meant. He said there was a picture

Continue reading When You Die, That’s It.

From She Thought
http://shethought.com/2012/02/07/when-you-die-thats-it/
2/8/2012 6:00:23 AM
Search rank: 299

Created page with "If you're a college scholar, you understand how expensive things can be. The common price of tuition for school annually at a 4 12 months personal college is round $35,000 these ..."

New page

If you're a college scholar, you understand how expensive things can be. The common price of tuition for school annually at a 4 12 months personal college is round $35,000 these days. Many times college students have to pay for lots of that out of pocket; monetary assist only covers so much and not a lot of dad and mom can foot the whole bill.

College students additionally face other needed bills, one of many greatest of which is their textbooks. Faculty textbooks aren't cheap both - they'll run into the hundreds per book. Luckily the web has created an avenue the place it's fairly easy to search out cheap textbooks for college college students - however you need to know the place to look.

Only a decade in the [...]

From SkeptiCamp - Recent changes [en]
http://skepticamp.com/w/index.php?title=User:MountsSundberg636&diff=3799&oldid=prev
3/9/2012 5:57:50 PM
Search rank: 298

Created page with "If you're a college scholar, you understand how expensive things can be. The common price of tuition for school annually at a 4 12 months personal college is round $35,000 these ..."

New page

If you're a college scholar, you understand how expensive things can be. The common price of tuition for school annually at a 4 12 months personal college is round $35,000 these days. Many times college students have to pay for lots of that out of pocket; monetary assist only covers so much and not a lot of dad and mom can foot the whole bill.

College students additionally face other needed bills, one of many greatest of which is their textbooks. Faculty textbooks aren't cheap both - they'll run into the hundreds per book. Luckily the web has created an avenue the place it's fairly easy to search out cheap textbooks for college college students - however you need to know the place to look.

Only a decade in the [...]

From SkeptiCamp - Recent changes [en]
http://skepticamp.com/w/index.php?title=MountsSundberg636&diff=3798&oldid=prev
3/9/2012 5:57:39 PM
Search rank: 298

What better way to resurrect my blog than with a band like Better Than Ezra. Forming in 1988 with an enigmatic and yet unexplained name, the band suffered an early setback when lead guitarist Joel Rundell killed himself in August of 1990.

The band took a few months off, but reunited before the end of 1990 and continued touring the South. In 1993, they released their first nationally available, after several cassette-only releases sold out of their van or to local record shops. This album ended up in the hands of music executives, who signed the band in 1995. Within a few months, they released another album and had top-charting single, “Good.”

Their success is described by bassist Tom Drummond as taking “seven years to get signed, and then seven months to get to #1.”

From Anything But Theist
http://anythingbuttheist.blogspot.com/2011/02/music-monday-better-than-ezra.html
2/15/2011 12:41:00 PM
Search rank: 294

Finally the FDA cracked down on a worthless homeopathic medicine, HCG - homeopathic, sold over the counter. The FDA stated that such drops could not make the claims it was making. 

There are a lot of “fad” diets out there- and the HCG diet has been resurrected more times than most. But last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued letters to companies warning them that selling “homeopathic” HCG weight-loss drugs was not FDA approved and that there was no evidence of the weight loss claims, thus violating FTC rules.

     

This fad diet started in the 1950’s when Albert Simeons, a physician who claimed that while working in India he noted that pregnant women on a low-calorie diet lost fat rather than muscle and the fetus was protected. He hypothesized that the HCG reprogrammed the brain to lose fat rather than muscle, thus protecting the body against loss of muscle. Simeons went on to become an [...]

From JREF Swift Blog
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1560-fda-cracks-down-on-homeopathic-hgc.html
12/20/2011 1:00:00 AM
Search rank: 294

My personal opinions about the proposed health care reform notwithstanding, it makes me really worried, when I see what we all could be paying for if we have a universal health care system in the US.
I open today's (3/18/2010) St. Petersburg Times, and the front page has an article entitled "Here's what non-politicians think" (pdf). Among the "non-politicians" is a Christian Science practitioner Robert Clark, who believe in healing through prayer, which is basically a form of wishful thinking.
What's even worse, this article is continued inside the paper (sorry, they don't seem to have an on-line version), under a big, bold heading "Pros' take on health care bill"!!!
PROS??? Since when Christian Science (why is it called science anyway?) "practitioners" are called "Pros"? Pros [...]

From Pete's Wicked Blog
http://blog.linuxblast.com/feeds/3135723402085406415/comments/default
3/18/2010 11:46:00 PM
Search rank: 294

My personal opinions about the proposed health care reform notwithstanding, it makes me really worried, when I see what we all could be paying for if we have a universal health care system in the US.
I open today's (3/18/2010) St. Petersburg Times, and the front page has an article entitled "Here's what non-politicians think" (pdf). Among the "non-politicians" is a Christian Science practitioner Robert Clark, who believe in healing through prayer, which is basically a form of wishful thinking.
What's even worse, this article is continued inside the paper (sorry, they don't seem to have an on-line version), under a big, bold heading "Pros' take on health care bill"!!!
PROS??? Since when Christian Science (why is it called science anyway?) "practitioners" are called "Pros"? Pros [...]

From Pete's Wicked Blog
http://blog.linuxblast.com/2010/03/health-care-reform.html
3/18/2010 11:46:00 PM
Search rank: 294

Plain packaging on cigarettes would change how we smoke, and tobacco firms know it even if Tory MP Philip Davies does not

This week our

From Science: Bad science | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/12/ben-goldacre-bad-science-cigarette-packaging
3/12/2011 7:00:00 AM
Search rank: 293

Ever since civil unions became legal in Illinois, Catholic-run, partially-state-funded adoption agencies have been closing shop because they refuse to put children in the homes of loving, gay couples. Now, the Youth Service Bureau of Illinois Valley, a secular agency, is stepping in to help out the children that the Catholic charities don’t seem to [...]

From Friendly Atheist by @hemantsblog
http://friendlyatheist.com/2011/07/06/secular-adoption-agency-takes-in-children-the-catholic-church-doesnt-care-about/
7/6/2011 8:00:14 PM
Search rank: 293

We are posting below the text of the first of two Press Releases that have been issued by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) today, revealing the results from a major national survey of the religious and social attitudes of UK Christians.

RDFRS UK commissioned Ipsos MORI to carry out the research in the week immediately following the 2011 UK Census. It explored in depth the extent to which adults recorded as Christian in the 2011 UK Census (or who would have been recorded as Christian, if they had answered the question) believe, know about, practise and are influenced by Christianity, as well as their reasons for having described themselves as Christian in the Census.

Why did we commission this research?

The number of people selecting 'Christian' on Census forms has traditionally been rather high (in 2001 it was 72%), and this percentage has regularly been seized on by those trying to justify or increase religious [...]

From RichardDawkins.net - All Aggregated News Content
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644941-rdfrs-uk-ipsos-mori-poll-1-how-religious-are-uk-christians
2/14/2012 11:28:36 AM
Search rank: 291

Created page with "An Introduction to Trading On Forex The origins of the Forex market that we all know at the moment came about following the transfer away from fastened foreign money exchanges t..."

New page

An Introduction to Trading On Forex

The origins of the Forex market that we all know at the moment came about following the transfer away from fastened foreign money exchanges to new 'floating' foreign money rates within the early 1970's. Since this time the market place has steadily grown, with interest fueled by advances in expertise resembling telephone dealing and of course computers. These have allowed for ever extra individuals to enter the market.

International Exchange shouldn't be one central market. As a substitute it is comprised of a network of a number of thousand trading institutions comprised of Central Government banks, Worldwide banks, private and business firms and devoted brokers. While there isn't [...]

From SkeptiCamp - Recent changes [en]
http://skepticamp.org/w/index.php?title=BriannaBaeza650&diff=3808&oldid=prev
3/3/2012 10:58:30 PM
Search rank: 291