Skepticism

The grassrootsskeptics.org website officially launches today: Philadelphia, PA – 9/4/2009: Grassroots Skeptics today announced the official launch of its website, GrassrootsSkeptics.org. The website is the centerpiece of the group’s planned outreach and advocacy in the skeptical community. “There are a lot of passionate advocates and community groups working diligently to advance critical thinking,” said Grassroots Skeptics founder K.O. Myers. “We want to help increase their effectiveness, by making it easier for them to find new members, share resources, and identify methods for getting their message out.” The group plans to use the site to gather and organize information about skeptical advocacy. At launch, the site will feature an index of local skeptics groups, information on many skeptical blogs and podcasts, discussion forums, and a calendar of skeptical events. The events calendar is a joint project, maintained in collaboration with the prominent skeptical website Skepchick.org. “There is an amazing amount of information out there that could be helpful for people who want to start or join a skeptical organization,” Myers said. “We want to collect and organize it, to make it more useful for the dedicated individuals who volunteer their time to promote an evidence-based lifestyle.” “Widespread misinformation about vaccines has lead to a resurgence in preventable illnesses; scam artists posing as ‘psychics’ prey on the grieving; ‘alternative medicine’ companies sell billions of dollars of dubious treatments, with almost no government regulation,” said Myers. “Critical thinking is more important than ever, and local skeptics groups are working hard to spread that message. With GrassrootsSkeptics.org, we hope we can make their outreach more effective.” Future plans for the site include a skeptical speakers’ bureau, a searchable map of skeptics groups and skeptic-friendly attractions, and a development kit for skeptics who want to start new groups. “We’re excited about this launch,” said Myers, “but we’re already looking forward to making GrassrootsSkeptics.org a richer, deeper resource for the organized skeptical community.” Grassroots Skeptics is a volunteer organization that promotes critical thinking and a reason-centered worldview by helping local skeptics groups to share tools, information and strategies, and connect with skeptical individuals and activists both locally and globally.You can also follow Grassroots Skeptics on Facebook and Twitter.

This post is going to be highly speculative, based on a few things that I’ve coincidentally just read over the last 24 hours and some past wonderings. Last night, I read an article in the ASU State Press newspaper from Tuesday, August 25 about Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing who I had been interested in working with in my Ph.D. program because of his fascinating work on the subject of influence and persuasion. (He just “retired,” though the article notes he is still working 60 hours a week on his research.) That article noted the phenomenon of “social proof,” where people are more likely to do something if they think that other people do it: Social proof is a simple way for people to decide what actions would be appropriate in a given situation, based off what others like them have done in similar situations, Cialdini said. Those kinds of norms have been very powerful in moving people to conserve energy, recycle and refrain from littering, he said. … Cialdini and his colleagues have recently done research on energy conservation in several hotels in the Phoenix area. The hotel managers allowed Cialdini to place different signs inside hotel rooms and depending on what the signs said, the colleagues were able to significantly increase the willingness of people to hang up their bath towels. ...

From the Young Australian Skeptics: Inspired by the annual The Open Laboratory, the Skeptical Blog Anthology is a printed anthology of blog posts voted the very best of 2009, managed by the Young Australian Skeptics in conjunction with the Critical Teaching Education Group (CTEG). The anthology is an attempt to bring a greater awareness of the skeptical content on blog sites and showcase some of the range and diversity in the blogosphere. With an aim to provide text-​​based resources to classes and readers who may be interested or intrigued by what skepticism has to offer, entries from January 1st to December 1st 2009 are eligible for submission. Both a print and Portable Document Format (pdf) will be made available for purchase via Lulu​.com, with estimated printing early in 2010. Entries can be self-​​nominated or proposed by readers of skeptical blog sites. The guidelines proposed by the popular Skeptics’ Circle are a fine indicator of the kind of content suitable for the anthology, including urban legends, the paranormal, quackery, pseudoscience, intelligent design, historical revisionism, critical thinking, skeptical parenting/​educating skeptically, superstitions, etc.There’s a submission form at the Young Aus Skeptics website. ...

In Skeptoid #167, Brian Dunning argues that scientists should never engage in debate on pseudoscientific topics. His arguments include: It’s a waste of time.It gives pseudoscience undeserved credibility by putting it on an equal footing with science.There are few people in the audience who haven’t already made up their minds.Most of the people in the audience can’t distinguish good from bad arguments.His position is similar to that of Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who recommends that scientists not engage in formal debates with creationists. While Dunning correctly points out some major flaws in how formal debates have frequently gone, and I agree that such debates should be discouraged, I think there are cases where they are worthwhile–it depends on the formulation of the resolution to be debated, the setting of the debate, and, perhaps most importantly, the quality of the debater. Too many creation/evolution debates have involved scientists who believe themselves to be good debaters, but who don’t understand how debate works and aren’t sufficiently familiar with creationist arguments to an appropriate breadth and depth. Unfortunately, many of those scientists think they won the debate or did a passable job when in fact they performed very poorly. The resolution to be debated should be formulated so that there is a clear burden of evidence on the promoter of the pseudoscience, where it belongs. It’s a mistake to formulate a debate resolution as a false dilemma, where if the scientist can’t refute scattershot attacks, the pseudoscientist wins. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research won most of his debates by not only engaging in such a shotgun approach (the “Gish Gallop”), but also by refusing to talk about the age of the earth or flood geology, thus freeing himself from having to present any positive evidence in favor of his view. (I spoke a bit more about Gish’s debate success and how to successfully counter his debate strategies in my workshop session at this year’s American Humanist Association conference.) The setting of the debate is also important, and is relevant to Dunning’s concern about audience. An academic debate at a university is more likely to have audience members who are actually interested in the evidence than, say, a debate at a church. It’s also significant whether the debate is being recorded and will be distributed further–a well-done debate that is recorded and transcribed, and distributed in the form of a book, DVD, or online is going to have a much larger audience and may have much more significant consequences than the potential persuasion of five people in Dunning’s example. There are also debates conducted in written form, which provide the possibility of much more comprehensive argument and references to other material than an oral debate on a stage or on television, which I think generally makes them preferable. The concern about giving a pseudoscience proponent undeserved credibility is a real one, and for that reason it’s probably a good idea for the debater to be someone of similar or lesser public stature, as well as someone well-versed in both debate and the details of the pseudoscience’s claims. Proponents of pseudoscience often issue challenges to prominent individuals for the primary purpose of getting publicity from it, which they may get to some degree either from denial or acceptance–but much more from acceptance if they so much as appear to hold their own. Dunning dismisses the concern that failure to debate leaves pseudoscience unchallenged, but I think there is a real potential concern here, as a refusal to debate can give proponents of pseudoscience a rhetorical weapon when there’s the appearance that no one is willing to challenge their arguments. This can, to a large extent, be defused if you can point to resources that refute the proponent’s claims in detail, and make the counter-argument that the proponents views aren’t deserving of a public forum. But in cases where the proponent’s views have received a large public following and there aren’t comprehensive resources that refute them, or such resources are little-known, I think that builds a case for debate. I think Dunning is right that it’s generally better to produce direct responses to pseudoscientific claims in a one-way format, but even that can be a form of debate to the extent it actually engages the proponents and they respond. What’s distinctive about a debate–at least a good one–is that it does involve engagement by both sides with the arguments and evidence of the other, and produces a record of that engagement for others to examine. That has advantages over siloed separate arguments that never directly respond to each other. I think that such engagement should be beneficial for scientists by identifying forms of misunderstanding that need corrections in the form of better communication, as well as locating possible weaknesses in their own evidence and arguments that need further work. It’s also beneficial for the proponent of pseudoscience in that it puts them into a situation where they must, at least momentarily, think about the arguments and evidence against their positions. ...

ApostAZ podcast number 17 is out: Episode 017 Atheism and Voluntarily Free Thought in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Special Guest Representatives of AZ Coalition of Reason Matt Schoenley, Jim Lippard, and Apostaz hosts Shannon and Brad. AZCoR, Who What what not Why and why not? Tam 7 and Skepticamp. http://arizonacor.org http://discord.org http://meetup.com/phoenix-atheists Intro- Greydon Square ‘Cubed’ from the Compton Effect. Outro- Vocab Malone ‘Track 12’.This was my first time sitting in on the whole recording, rather than just contributing a short skepticism segment. While this was mainly about the Arizona Coalition of Reason, I did talk a little bit about TAM7 and SkeptiCamp Phoenix. ...

This is the sixth and final part of my summary of TAM7, covering the last day’s events on Sunday, July 11. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, part 5 is here, and my coverage of the Science-based Medicine conference begins here. Sunday’s continental breakfast was served while an old James Randi television appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show from 1986 was shown. This brought back some old memories–I think I have the show on videotape in my archives, as I think we showed it at a meeting of the Phoenix Skeptics. Randi appeared with a faith healer (“Amazing Grace”), a psychic (Joyce Keller), and an astrologer (Irene Hughes), which led to some entertaining and ridiculous exchanges of words. Randi showed his footage that exposed Peter Popoff using a wireless transmitter and receiver to fake the “word of knowledge,” and did some spoon bending. Joyce Keller claimed she was entitled to his $10,000 prize, and Oprah mistakenly claimed that Randi had brought his own spoons, which she corrected herself about after a commercial break. This was followed by the Sunday refereed papers, which were again organized and moderated by Ray Hall, professor of physics at California State University, Fresno and at Fermi National Labs. Don Riefler, “Teaching Critical Thinking in a Therapeutic Setting” Don Riefler, Direct Care Supervisor at the Jessie Levering Cary Home for Children in Lafayette, Indiana, gave a talk about strategies he’s used to teach critical thinking to underprivileged/institutionalized children at the Cary Home, complete with positive reinforcement in the form of candy distributed to members of the audience who gave good answers. He discussed several categories of common “thinking errors” which included both logical fallacies and heuristics that lead to problems when overgeneralized. As part of his teaching, he has kids conduct ESP experiments with Zener cards, which he uses to teach them about erroneous inferences they draw about their skills. This provoked the first critical question (from regular ScienceBlogs commenter Sastra), asking whether his referral to “success” and “failure” in the Zener test suggests to kids that it’s a matter of effort. (I neglected to record his response.) In answer to a question of how he deals with religion he said that he avoids it and shuts down talk of religion or ideology. David Green, “Patently Ridiculous: The Perfect Sommelier” David Green, a Senior Patent Examiner at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, gave a talk that was essentially a sequel to a talk he gave at TAM5. He spoke about “The Perfect Sommelier,” a product that claims to “align tannin molecules with magnets to age wine faster.” He compared how the patent application for this product was handled in the U.S. vs. Canada. In the U.S., patent examiners made two objections to the application, first, that it was obvious or already known, and second that the “subject matter is inoperable–the theory of operation cannot be correct.” The first objection failed, since the invention was sufficiently different from prior art in various ways (such as having magnets at both ends of the bottle, not just at one end). And, based on the Longer (“lawn-jay”) test, under which the description of the invention must be accepted as true unless there’s a reason to doubt it, it passed on the second as well, and was granted two U.S. patents. Green said that it essentially comes down to a he-said/she-said debate, and the patent office has to be biased towards issuance of the patent. In Canada, the same objections were made as in the U.S., along with a third. David Green had read a Swift article about a test of the product, so the third objection was a rejection on the basis of double-blind research evidence showing that the product doesn’t work, published in the Journal of Wine Research. That study concluded that “no evidence was found to suggest that The Perfect Sommelier improves the palatability of cheap red wine.” The manufacturers responded to the first two objections in the same way they did in the U.S., but for the third, they asserted that their evidence in the form of testimony overrides the double-blind research. And then they abandoned their patent claim in Canada. The reason they did this, Green explained, is because of “U.S. file wrapper estoppels”–that what you do in a foreign patent application can affect your patent in U.S. court. If they had continued with their claim in Canada and been denied–or if they had failed to file a response to the objections–that could have impacted their U.S. patent. What this demonstrates, Green argued, is the importance of doing solid investigations and research on such products, and getting them published and spreading the information around (e.g., online), so that patent examiners can find it. It can make the difference between a nonsensical product getting a patent or being denied a patent. At this point I took some time to chat with Ray Hyman, and came in a little bit late for the next presentation. Adam Slagell, “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: The Pillars of Justification for Cyber Security” Adam Slagell, Senior Security Engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spoke about claims made for security and security products that we should be skeptical of. He pointed out that there’s no such thing as perfect security, and there are always tradeoffs to be made between security and usability/convenience/etc. He spoke a little bit about TSA “security theater,” pointing out the gaping flaw in the “no fly lists” that comes from the separation of checking ID and boarding pass at the security checkpoint from checking your boarding pass at the gate. He also questioned the point of shoe removal, which led to the first comment on his talk from Ian, an airport security officer at Gatwick, who argued that forcing shoes to go through the X-ray machine does close a genuine vulnerability. (Ian also argued that the liquid restriction makes sense, though he didn’t respond to Slagell’s point that you can carry multiple 3-ounce containers and combine their contents with those of your associates after you go through screening. Most interestingly, Ian said that airport metal detectors go off randomly in addition to when they detect metal.) Slagell argued that signature-based antivirus products are obsolete, since polymorphic malware and use of packers are extremely effective at eliminating signatures, and observed that companies are starting to create products based on white-listing, only allowing pre-defined sets of software to run on a machine. (At last year’s New Mexico InfraGard conference, Anthony Clark and Danny Quist spoke in some detail about different kinds of packers, and offered a set of criteria for measuring AV effectiveness that included use of methods other than signature-detection, such as anomalous behavior detection.) He unfortunately didn’t have time to talk about passwords. Another questioner asked what users behaviors are useful to stay secure, to which Slagell replied that you should keep systems patched and backed up. (There is actually some argument, at least for corporations, to be somewhat selective in patching, since many patches aren’t applicable, have other mitigations, and have potential for reducing availability themselves–but there is no substitute for having a vulnerability management program in place.) Steve Cuno, “The Constructive Skeptic: Rebranding Skepticism at the Grassroots Level” Steve Cuno, chairman of RESPONSE Agency, Inc., gave an excellent talk last year at TAM6, and he gave another great presentation this time as well. He started by saying that skeptics have a branding problem. What is a brand? Is it a name and logo? A great slogan? What you say about yourself? He gave some counterexamples for each of these, including some nice vintage ads (e.g., “They’re happy because they eat lard” from the Lard Information Council). AIG had the slogan “The strength to be here.” (He didn’t mention any of my favorite unintentionally ironic bank slogans.) He gave an example slogan for skepticism: “Skepticism: Doubt worth believing in.” He called all of these proposed brand definitions “brand flatulence: you may like the sound and smell of your farts, but nobody else does." He gave as his prototypical example of what branding really is the example of Nordstrom’s. There’s no particular logo or slogan involved, but people think of Nordstrom on the basis of the values that are expressed by the company through its employees and the experience you have as a customer. The essence of creating a brand is creating a positive customer experience. And the way for skeptics to give skepticism a good name is by self-policing “to deliver positive brand experience." He suggested that the way to do this is to delay giving yourself a label, and when you do identify yourself with a label, anchor it in something positive. Instead of saying “I don’t believe in …”, think through and express what you do support. For example: I believe in what the evidence supports.I believe in honesty, integrity, equal rights, and treating one another with dignity and respect.I believe in and defend the right of all people to believe as they choose.Do things that are positive. He gave the example of the GLBT protests at the annual April Mormon Church Conference, which, rather than picketing and protesting, engaged in protest by cleaning up parks, visiting shut-ins, and doing positive and helpful things in the name of their cause. The result was to get tons of positive press. He heartily endorsed TAM7’s vaccination support and food drive, and further added that we should play nice. Being controversial and using insults may work for media figures, but not for the grassroots. Be sure that messages are well-timed. And remember that some people just don’t care–to quote Will Rogers, “Never miss a good opportunity to shut up." A summary of Cuno’s talk may be found on his blog. Brian Dunning, “What Were the ‘Lost Cosmonaut’ Radio Transmissions?" Brian Dunning’s talk was a sequel to one of his Skeptoid podcasts on Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, a pair of Italian brothers who built equipment to monitor radio transmissions from spacecraft at an installation they called Torre Bert. They successfully recorded the October 1957 launch of Sputnik I, Sputnik II with Laika the dog in November 1957, and then a few oddities. In February 1961, they recorded what they reported as a “failing human heartbeat,” when there was no known flight. In the same month, they recorded a “voice of a dying man,” again with no known flight. In May 1961, they recorded the voice of a woman, Ludmila, speaking about how she was “going to re-enter,” which they attributed to a secret female cosmonaut mission that resulted in her death. There are no corroborating reports of these transmissions, despite the fact that the U.S. Defense Early Warning system began in 1959. And there were no female cosmonauts in 1961. The female cosmonaut program wasn’t approved until five months after the recording, and the first five women selected for the program a year later. Yuri Gagarin had just launched in Vostok 1 in May 1961, and for the Vostok 2 launch in August 1961, they had to scavenge Gagarin’s space suit to make a suit for the second cosmonaut. So there was no way there was a female cosmonaut launch in May 1961. At the time, the U.S. was flying X-15s. Did the Soviets have some kind of space plane? The Soviet Kosmoplan never got off the drawing board, and its Raketoplan was developed, but wasn’t ready for testing until 1962. A jet fighter? The YC-150 didn’t fly high enough. Dunning also ruled out the Mig-21 and high-altitude balloons. The conclusion–get your own Russian translators. Dunning got four Russians to listen to the recording, and found that it didn’t say what was claimed, but instead was almost 99% unintelligible, with the rest being numbers. He also found that the source of the transmission was not moving, but was at a fixed position. Although he didn’t come to a definitive conclusion, he was able to at least eliminate a number of possibilities–sometimes that’s the best you can do. Christian Walters and Tim Farley, “How Are We Doing? Attracting and Keeping Visitors to Skeptical Websites” Tim Farley was another return speaker, this time with Christian Walters. They talked about how the over 650 skeptical websites should measure acquisition of visitors and take actions to keep them and to obtain high search engine rankings. First, how you’re acquiring visitors can be measured by looking at rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), Google PageRank, and Yahoo link strength measurements. These measures are all increased by receiving links from other web sources, of which important sites are social media sites like digg, reddit, delicio.us, Facebook, and Twitter. Another important factor is having good page titles, which include popular search terms. The META keyword tags are no longer so important. By using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can find what popular search terms are. Sometimes they are surprising–for instance misspellings of some terms (like accupuncture) get more search hits than the correct spelling. It’s also a good idea to put the keywords from your title into the URL, rather than use URLs as some blogs do that only have a page ID in them. The anchor text of hyperlinks to your pages should also contain the appropriate keywords, and so your internal links within a site should make a point of using them. It’s important to describe your site with an XML SiteMap or via RSS feed, which you get for free with blogs. When you link to other sites, you are dividing up your own link strength among the sites you link to, unless you use the NOFOLLOW tag, which you should do when linking to sites you don’t want to promote in search engine results. NOFOLLOW is also a good idea when linking to sites that may engage in spam or other abuse, to prevent that abuse from reflecting on your site, as it might in Google search engine results, for example. The Million Dollar Challenge: Dowser Connie Sonne Everyone had to leave the auditorium for preparation for the JREF Million Dollar Challenge, with Danish dowser and former police detective Connie Sonne (who has described her alleged powers in an interview with Alison Smith of JREF). Everyone had to sign an agreement to remain silent and not disturb the proceedings before filing back in–and everyone remained quite quiet for the hour or so that it took for the test. This was a preliminary test, with a 1 in 1000 probability of success by chance, which, if successful, would allow Connie Sonne to go on to the official challenge for the JREF’s $1,000,000. The protocol for the test was developed in conjunction with Connie Sonne and both sides approved. She signed paperwork describing the protocol and agreeing that she woudl go ahead with the test. Connie Sonne claimed to be able to use a pendulum to identify playing cards without looking at them, and she successfully did this when she was able to see the cards. Sets of playing cards, A-10, for each of three suits were placed separately into envelopes. Each of those envelopes for the same suit was placed into a larger envelope, with the suit written on the outside. Banachek ran the test (I thought to myself at the time that this was a likely source of future complaint, given his skill at illusion), opening each of the three suit envelopes, one at a time, and rolling a 10-sided die to indicate which card from the suit Connie Sonne was required to locate. The ten individual card envelopes were spread out in front of her, and she used the pendulum to identify which envelope she believed contained the appropriate card. For the first set, she was supposed to find the 3 of hearts, for the second, the 7 of clubs, and for the third, the ace of spades. The cards she picked were the 2 of hearts, which was in the second envelope of the first set, the ace of clubs, which was in the seventh envelope of the second set, and the 2 of spades, which was in the first envelope of the third set. Banachek opened all of the envelopes from each of the three sets so that she could see that there was no trickery, and she agreed that all was done fairly. At the subsequent press conference, she continued to maintain that all was fair, but that there was some reason she wasn’t supposed to reveal her powers to the world yet. But by the next day, she decided that she had been cheated somehow by Banachek. Her main point of evidence was that Banachek identified the ace of spades from the third set before pulling the card out of the envelope–but it was the last card of the set to be opened, and he identified it after the end of the envelope had been cut off and as he started to pull it out. The cards were visible inside the envelopes once the ends were opened. On July 13, she made her accusation of cheating on the JREF Forums: Hi out there…now I know why Banacheck was “the card handler”. I have been cheated. I did find the right cards. And there is one more thing. At the stage, Banacheck said to me BEFORE he even looked in the envelope I had cut…and here is spade ace, the one you looked for!!!! I first hit me now about that ….but maybe you can see it yourself if someone get the video. I dont care about the money, that wasnt the reason why I came. So no matter what you think out there……I was CHEATED!!!!! ConnieIt was a typical response to the Randi challenge from an honest proponent of a claim who doesn’t understand why the claim failed under test conditions, resolving the cognitive dissonance by placing blame on the experimenter. That concludes my summary of TAM7–I look forward to attending TAM8 next year. ...

Concluding the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, volume 4 (1990-1991) is here, and volume 5 (1991-1992) is here, and volume 6 (1992-1993) here. Volume 7 was edited by Mike Stackpole. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 7, no. 1, Summer 1994: "Oh No--Spooks in a Skeptic's Home" by Hans Sebald "Skeptics Predictions for 1994" "Meeting Schedule for 1994" "Where Have We Been?" "What Harm Superstition?" by Michael A. Stackpole "Skeptically Entertaining" by Michael A. Stackpole While that was the last issue of The Arizona Skeptic published, there have been at least two published lists of skeptical predictions by the Phoenix Skeptics, for 1996, 2006, and 2007, and the group continues to meet on a monthly basis--at 12 p.m. (noon) on the first Saturday of each month at Jim's Coney Island Cafe in Tempe, 1750 N. Scottsdale Road, on the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and McKellips. There is also now an active Phoenix Skeptics in the Pub meetup group, which meets at 7 p.m. on the first Wednesday of each month at D'Arcy McGee's Pub at the Tempe Marketplace, 2000 E. Rio Salado Parkway. UPDATE (March 18, 2010): Phoenix Skeptics in the Pub now meets at Four Peaks Brewery--see the meetup group link. UPDATE (September 17, 2014): The Phoenix Area Skeptics Society has been active since 2012.

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, volume 4 (1990-1991) is here, and volume 5 (1991-1992) is here. Volume 6 was edited by Jim Lippard and has been available online since original publication as ASCII text. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 1, July/August 1992 (text version): ...

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here, and volume 4 (1990-1991) is here. Volume 5 was edited by Jim Lippard and has been available online since original publication as ASCII text. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 1, July/August 1991 (text version): "Rosenthal Lecture" by Jim Lippard"Book Review: Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism by Paul Kurtz" reviewed by Bill Green"Book Review: Pitfalls in Human Research: Ten Pivotal Points by Theodore X. Barber" reviewed by Jim Lippard"Book Review: They Call It Hypnosis by Robert A. Baker" reviewed by Jim LippardEditor's ColumnCORRECTION: To "Dissension in the Ranks of the Institute for Creation Research"Upcoming MeetingsThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 2, September/October 1991 (text version): "Dianetics: From Out of the Blue?" by Jeff Jacobsen"Book Review: Bryant's Law and Other Broadsides by John Bryant" reviewed by Jim Lippard"Hypnosis and Free Will" by Jim LippardNext IssueUpcoming Meetings: October speaker Don Lacheman of Sun Magic, November speaker Louis Rhodes of the Arizona Civil Liberties UnionArticles of NoteThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 3, November/December 1991 (text version): "Postscript to 'Some Failures of Organized Skepticism'" by Jim Lippard"Book Review: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie" reviewed by Hans Sebald, Ph.D."Book Review: The Unfathomed Mind by William R. Corliss" reviewed by Jim Lippard"Book Review: Labyrinths of Reason by William Poundstone" reviewed by Mark AdkinsLetters (from Mark Adkins, Beth Fischi)"Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? An Episode of Human Folly" by Mark AdkinsArticles of Note"October Meeting: 'Magical Moments'" by Ron Harvey: speaker Don LachemanNext IssueUpcoming Meetings: December: 1992 predictions, January: Rene Pfalzgraf on neuro-linguistic programmingThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 4, January/February 1992 (text version): "Predictions for 1992!" compiled by Mike Stackpole"Comments on Lippard's Review of They Call It Hypnosis" by Robert A. Baker"Book Review: Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? by Chaz Bufe" reviewed by Terry Sandbek, Ph.D.Next IssueUpcoming MeetingsThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 5, March/April 1992 (text version): "About 'The Vitality of Mythical Numbers' and 'Truth Almost Extinct in Tales of Imperiled Species'" by Jim Lippard"The Vitality of Mythical Numbers" by Max Singer"Truth Almost Extinct in Tales of Imperiled Species" by Julian Simon"Book Review: Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Michael A. Persinger and Gyslaine F. Lafrenière" reviewed by Jim LippardNext IssueUpcoming MeetingsRequest for SubmissionsArticles of NoteThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 6, May/June 1992 (text version): "An Observation of the Famous Marfa Lights" by James Long"The Marfa Lights" by Hal FinneyLetters (from John Bryant)Editorial Note Regarding the "Mars Effect""Book Review: The Mind Game by Norman Spinrad" reviewed by Jim LippardUpcoming MeetingsArticles of NoteVolume 6 continued for just short of another year under my editorship, with five issues published for 1992-1993.

Continuing the postings of The Arizona Skeptic; you can find volume 1 (1987-1988) here, volume 2 (1988-1989) here, volume 3 (1989-1990) is here. Volume 4 was edited by Mike Stackpole. An index to all issues by title, author, and subject may be found here. The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1, July 1990: "Self-Deception and the Paranormal" by Michael A. Stackpole"The Curious Case of the Cross of Chaos" by Michael A. Stackpole"Book Review: But Is It Science? edited by Michael Ruse" reviewed by Jim Lippard (duplicate)Editorial Prattle"July Meeting" by Ron Harvey: speaker James McGaha on astronomy"The Return of Scapegoats" by Michael A. StackpoleThe Arizona Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 2, December 1990/January 1991: 1991 Predictions of the Phoenix Skeptics"Note of Importance" by Michael A. Stackpole (re the Plimer/Price controversy)"Ralph Epperson: Clueless Creationist" by Jim LippardMeeting Announcements: January: G. Harry Stine on the neurophoneEditorial Prattle"December Meeting" by Ron Harvey: speaker Jim Speiser on UFOsThat was it for volume 4--publication got back on a regular schedule again with volume 5, when I took over as editor.