It was a mammoth conference and so I will split this review into the various morning and afternoon sessions. Some talks are covered in more detail than others!

Day One Morning Session

The host and compare of the weekend was the excellent Richard Wiseman. More on him later.

The event kicked off with a performance from the Amateur Transplants, Dr Adam Kay and Dr Suman Biswas. They performed a series of parody comical songs mostly dealing with medical subjects. Perhaps best known for their parody of The Jam’s Going Underground, they were an unexpected highlight from Saturday and were the perfect tool for disarming an audience that was perhaps a little worse for wear at having to get up rather early on a weekend.

James Randi then took to the stage to a standing ovation, I understand a similar gesture was made last year to a video presentation when Randi was unable to attend due to ill health. So it was fantastic for the audience to get to show their appreciation in person and to see him in such good health. It was an honour to be part of such a genuine show of affection for a man that has done so much for skepticism. After a short opening speech Randi passed back over to Wiseman who introduced our first speaker;

Susan Blackmore

A wiki introduction: PhD, (born 29 July 1951) is an English freelance writer, lecturer, and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal, perhaps best known for her book The Meme Machine.

Title of talk: Corners

Choice Quote: “What if it is all bunkum?”

Detail: Susan’s talk described her adventures as a parapsychologist and her long quest to try and prove the existence of psychic abilities. It all started for her when she was at university and had a “life-changing” out of body experience. Susan pointed out that these experiences should not be simply dismissed as hallucinogenic since to the person that has the experience they are deeply real and indescribably profound. It was such an experience that made Susan become a true-believer and led her on her journey.

She went onto describe the various tests she performed over the years and the subsequent failures; each failure leading to a new corner of investigation. These were;

Corner 1. Testing students in a lecture hall

Corner 2. Testing kids

Corner 3. Testing twins

Corner 4. Testing ‘real’ psychics

Corner 5. Testing Tarot Readings

Corner 6. Testing ESP in the Ganzfeld

Corner 7. Out of body experiences

Corner 8. Alien abductions.

Susan’s tests always came out showing no results or none better than chance despite other people in the same field getting ‘positive’ results, most likely down to their poor experiment construction. Such was Susan’s reputation that she became known as the psi-inhibitory experimenter!

References: Charles Honorton (Ganzfeld), Carl Sargent (Ganzfeld), James Basil (‘Alien implant’), Olaf Blanke (Scientist who recreated out-of-body experiences using electrodes on the brain)

Best Bit: Either the story of the person that asked Susan to bake an apple crumble to attract his aura to her kitchen (food tastes great in the other realm)! Or the gradual realisation from the audience as they interpreted the results of the mass spectrometer of James Basil’s ‘alien implant’ which showed it was a simple tooth filling.

Final Thoughts: Susan was a great way to start TAM London, her journey from true believer to skeptic was one that I think we all have some experience and sympathy with. Her delivery was a little erratic, occasionally jumping topics, and while I know this troubled some I thought it added to her charm as a speaker and merely emphasised the wealth of experience she has as a parapsychologist.

Richard Wiseman then took to the stage to quickly describe why Teletubbies are evil before introducing the next speaker;

Richard Dawkins

A wiki introduction: FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Title of talk: Evolution: The New Classics

Choice Quote: “Science is the poetry of reality”

Detail: Richard was on top form and delivered a speech that was a call to arms for a discipline that remains under threat from the religious right. His speech made the case that like the classics of Ancient Greece, evolution is in fact an interdisciplinary subject. From it a whole host of other subjects can be taught;

Teaches us our rootsHow to present and argue a case – not just due to attacks from religious groups but from controversy within the subject. As a science it is still developing/learning.

Taxonomy – “puts us in our place and punctures the balloon of self-importance.”Geology – the evolution of the planet and with that humility of our place within it.

Philosophy – “The evolutionary perspective makes you realize that it’s a sheer accident that we able to set up a morality that is so human-centred.”

Politics

Geography – distributionPhysics – dating of fossils by radioactive isotopes

Engineering – designing for economy, this is why bridges are so beautiful. He also talked about the evolution of flight and the trade off between stability and manoeuvrability. How this same trade off is represented in nature and in manufactured flight.

Computer Science

Mathematics

Statistics – “If more of our political masters understood statistics, the world would be a better place.”

Anthropology

Medicine – how antibiotics fighting off infection are a perfect opportunity to explain evolution

Psychology

Agriculture – selective breeding for high/low oil content in maize.

Cosmology – although he did point out that saying stars evolved was a slight misinterpretation

Linguistics

History of Ideas

For each topic Dawkins made a compelling argument and gave a real sense of how important evolution is as an idea. Not just in nature but as a tool that can be applied to give us a fundamental understanding of many systems from artificial to abstract.

References: There were loads so sorry if I’ve missed a few. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet, Peter Singer author, Ingo Rechenberg (evolutionary engineering), Sewell Wright (mathematics, also may have accidentally used guinea-pig as blackboard eraser!), Sir Ronald Fisher (statistics), Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse and George C Williams, Steven Pinker (linguistics)

Best Bit: Hard to say. At one point Dawkins talked about our ancestral linage and that if we held hands with our mothers, and they with theirs, back to our common ancestor with chimps the chain would only be 200 miles long. That image has kept with me since.

Final Thoughts: “Science is the poetry of reality [...] we teach it for the good of their souls” these words really capture the heart of what makes science so exciting and important. Dawkins talk was peppered with advice that was not preaching but almost conducting. He spoke a few times of how evolutionary theories are humbling and put us as humans in our place. What I always admire about Dawkins is the poetry and emotion of the language he uses that define him out as one of the great science communicators of our time.

Cory Doctorow

A wiki introduction: (pronounced /?k?ri ?d?kt?ro?/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Title of talk: Didn’t really give one so I’ll call it Copyright in a Digital Age

Choice Quote: “Yesterdays pirates are today’s admirals”

Detail: Doctorow talked about the current problems with copyright law in an internet age. He discussed the recent Digital Economy Act in the UK. He then spoke about the very worrying development in France of the HADOPI law which is means if you are found guilty of three acts of copyright infringement then you are cut off from the internet for a year. Other countries, including the US, are looking into bringing in similar laws. He discussed how the current copyright laws for music, TV and film are perhaps unnecessary. Using the example of fashion, in fashion they have copyright laws that allow for copying and yet money is still invested in the top designers and people still pay a premium price for labelled products. Despite this branded clothes are often made in the same factories as their rip-offs.

Doctorow said copyright laws should encourage diversity. At the moment Viacom are suing Google (youtube) for not checking all 29 hours of material that their users create per minute, an impossible task, on the basis that some of that material is theirs. Why should this service be shut down to protect someone that creates 20 hours of footage per year?

He said how people that controlled the previous method of sharing creative content always accused the new method of piracy. Records were piracy, then radio was piracy, then tapes or VCR’s were piracy, now the internet. “Yesterdays pirates are today’s admirals”

A copyright system should be evidence based, that protects peoples’ right to get a fair price for their creative output should they want to but also allows for diversity of participation in culture.

References: HADOPI law

Best Bit: I though the question and answers session brought out some really good answers from Doctorow. Especially when he was asked what he thought the future of copyright should be. Paraphrasing – “We definitely shouldn’t extend copyright retrospectively, which is what they are trying to do now Elvis and The Beatles copyright is coming up; I mean how many more records is Lennon going to make if we extend his copyright for another 20 years?”

Final Thoughts: Doctorow spoke quite quickly and coupled with his Canadian accent I found him hard to follow at first. Once he got going though I got used to the sound of his voice and found myself becoming more interested in what he had to say. Despite effecting all of us, I thought copyright law would be quite a dry subject but Doctorow did a fantastic job of keeping it interesting. He really came alive in the question and answer session and, in this respect was perhaps the best of all the speakers at TAM London. I didn’t know much about Doctorow before TAM, but he was a highlight for me and I will be checking out his books.

Adam Rutherford

A wiki introduction: Adam Rutherford does not exist according to wiki. Other sources revel that he is a professional geek. He is an editor at the science journal Nature, and presents television and radio programmes, most recently ‘Cell’ for BBC4. The views he expresses here are entirely his own and are not necessarily those of the journal Nature

Title of talk: I’m going to talk to you about Jesus

Choice Quote: Rutherford’s life philosophy was fantastic, see a picture below.

Detail: Rutherford’s talk detailed his experience of the Alpha Course. He started by outlining a recent survey by Pew Research that showed atheists and agnostics are the most knowledgeable about religions, although Christians and Mormons know the most about Christianity. There are something like 70% of Brits that consider themselves Christians but most of these are ‘dechurched’, the Alpha Course is designed not to convert agnostics or people from other religions but to turn one type of Christian (those that don’t attend church) into another far more passionate believer.

The whole strength of Christianity relies on the existence of Jesus, what is interesting is that there is no compelling evidence for the existence of Jesus. This point is rarely raised by historians, Rutherford theorised they probably can’t be bothered will all the attention and hassle such a study would bring.

There are two key texts to the Alpha Course, bizarrely these are Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. They tend to use seemingly profound quotes like “You can only destroy death from inside” like Frodo, but really these don’t actually mean anything. Rutherford confessed to hating the Narnia books and said that Lord of the Rings was boring it is essentially “a story about walking”.

There are hypocrisies within the teachings of the Alpha Course, while they reject all forms of demonism or witchcraft all diocese are required to have exorcists.

There is plenty to suggest that the Alpha Course is fundamentally homophobic, they say that “homosexual orientation is something acquired or learnt” and when Rutherford went to quiz the founder of the Alpha Course Nicky Gumbel he said on homosexuality “God created us good and we have fallen away from that”

References: Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings by J.R.Tolkien, Pew Research on Religious Knowledge, Nicky Gumbel

Best Bit: Two highlights, when Rutherford was explaining how most of us have a basic knowledge of Christianity he managed to get a room full of atheists to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Rutherford’s story about when he went to meet the founder of the Alpha Course Nicky Gumbel and he had some jam on his trousers. “I’m suspicious of people in power, doubly suspicious when they’re nice, and triply suspicious when they have jam on their crotch.”

Final Thoughts: Rutherford was engaging, funny and knowledgeable about his subject. His talk was one of the best of the weekend however he seemed uncomfortable during the question and answer session. Particularly when Dawkins asked a question, which I guess would be daunting for anyone. Maybe I am being unfair, I would welcome another take on this. Given the strength of Rutherford’s talk I was surprised he seemed so nervous under questions from the audience.

That was the end of the Saturday morning session.

There is no doubt that S-OIV H1N1 can be dangerous but it is important to keep a little sense of perspective on the subject. Data at this stage can be misleading but at the moment, according to a paper recently published by the British Medical Journal, this is a disease which has a case-fatality ratio similar to seasonal flu (around 0.5%).   

Anyway, if you do want more information about Swine Flu it is best to go to a reputable source, don’t take it from the papers or the TV, or me for that matter. Here are a couple of great resources for all your swine flu needs;

The NHS run a fantastic service called Behind The Headlines which “provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news.” Or health stories without the bull shit.

This is their page on Swine Flu.

If you want to delve further and you don’t have access to medical journals then I suggest you check out The Lancet’s page on swine flu (emphasis mine).

“The Lancet‘s H1N1 Resource Centre is the result of a collaborative effort by the editors of over 40 Elsevier-published journals and 11 learned societies who have agreed to make freely available on this site any relevant content. All papers have been selected by a Lanceteditor, grouped by topic and fulltext pdfs made available to download free of charge.”    

What more could you ask for? Here’s a link!

UPDATE

Ben Goldacre just linked to this article on his twitter page. Having critised the media in this post, credit where credit is due.

The first thing to consider is that astrology is made up of two distinct camps, there is the side of it we all know, this is sun signs, newspaper columns and phone lines. Then there is the more studious side which is more complex and involves charts, journals, and data from astronomers. It is important to note that although astronomy and astrology were perhaps indecipherable in the past the two are now very different and separate disciplines. One is science the other, well, let’s see shall we…

Without going into too much detail the general overlaying principle of astrology is that the movement of celestial bodies, both real and hypothetical, have a direct influence on our personalities. From extrapolating data from the position of celestial bodies and their movements astrologers create birth charts which are used to aid interpretation of past and present events and also make predictions for the future. The very stripped down form of this that we are all familiar with are the twelve signs of the zodiac that we all supposedly fit into depending on the month of our birth. I cannot give a precise example of, say, all Libras are supposedly introvert or all Aquarians are argumentative because as we will see later no two astrologers can agree. It is in this fundamental premise of astrology that lies its biggest problem. As yet there is no known or proposed mechanism or force that is created by celestial bodies that should have a direct effect on our personalities. As far as astrologers are concerned it just effects us, don’t ask why unless you are happy with the nebulous answer of its ‘energy’. Energy is detectable, no such energy that should have a manipulative effect on our personalities has been detected.

As I touched on early another large underlying problem is that you can rarely get two practitioners of astrology to agree. With no coherent standardised method or practice to adhere to it seems that they can just interpret the charts however takes their fancy.   Various studies have been conducted to find out precisely how well astrologers agree on what a given birth chart indicates. To date a total of 28 studies have put this to the test using a total of 559 astrologers and 762 birth charts. Each test looked at how well 5 to 30 astrologers agreed on what a given chart indicated about its owner. Despite some of these studies involving the world’s best astrologers the average agreement among astrologers was 54.9%, or better than chance in barely 1 out of 10 cases.

As if this study alone isn’t bad enough, here is an extract from a review of the meta-analyses from 300 empirical studies on the fantastic website astrology-and-science.com.

“When applied to nearly 300 empirical astrological studies, many of them by astrologers, meta-analysis reveals zero support for effect sizes of around r = 0.7 that are representative of astrological claims. Mean effect size and number of studies are: sun sign self-attribution 0.070 (26) and controls -0.020 (9), matching birth charts to owners 0.034 (54), picking own chart 0.020 (11), agreement between astrologers 0.098 (26), Gauquelin’s tests of signs and aspects 0.007 (62) and planets 0.044 (35), lunar effects 0.012 (50), and radio propagation effects 0.010 (10). If you are looking for something where nothing is true and everything is permitted, then astrology seems to be an excellent choice.”

Those numbers in brackets are the numbers of studies by the way not the number of participants. There is no astrologer out there that can reasonably claim that astrology has not been given a fair chance by science.

So a glaring question now presents itself, if there is all this evidence against astrology why do people still believe it? How do people get fooled? The majority just read the newspaper columns and take it as a bit of fun, then there are those that take it further; It is easy to think that these people are naive or foolish but it wouldn’t be fair. People believe this because they are convinced they have seen it work. Much like the cold reading technique that ‘psychics’ use astrologers can be just as adept at picking up clues from looking at their subjects, seeing their posture, fashion sense, age or simply listening to their accent/dialect. These clues combined with a creative use of language and an ability to make blatantly ambiguous statements seem profound can be very convincing, especially when you don’t have all the evidence in front of you to call on. And more importantly, especially in an environment arranged by the astrologers themselves, not test conditions.

For further reading on astrology

http://www.astrology-and-science.com/   

Astronomical Society Pseudo-Science: A Skeptic’s Resource List

A great study was conducted by a researcher at the University of California named Shawn Carlson. A decent review of this study is worth reading here: http://psychicinvestigator.com/demo/AstroSkc.htm

Or you could read the full article in Nature here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v318/n6045/abs/318419a0.html

Here’s another study in which “participants were unable to identify their own astrological charts at a greater-than-chance level.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18649494

Here’s another one, which states “this test leaves no doubt that astrology does not have any predictive power as far as academic ability is concerned.” http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/mar102009/641.pdf