Sylvia Browne

Sylvia Browne (1936-) is a self-styled psychic and spiritual medium. She used to appear regularly on the Montel Williams Show where she gave audience members advice on subjects such as love, finances and missing family members. She seems to have been remarkably unsuccessful when it comes to locating missing people - In 2010 the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine analysed the 115 predictions she made on Montel Williams and claimed her success rate to be precisely zero.

Despite this, she has remained one of the US's most high profile psychics (together with James van Praagh) with a huge number of followers and admirers. However, this week she is facing her biggest challenge, and a considerable backlash on social media following the escape of Amanda Berry from her abductors ten years after she was kidnapped (together with two other women - Gina deJesus and Michelle Knight, and Amanda's own daughter). Browne told Louwana Miller, the mother of Amanda Berry, on the TV show 'She's not alive, honey. Your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call'. Louwana Miller died in 2006 unaware that her daughter was still alive.

James Randi has been a constant critic of Sylvia Browne and consistently states that belief in psychic readings is dangerous. I think psychics are largely immune from criticism since there is a general feeling that their predictions can't do any harm and may in fact be useful. Randi argues that they prey on the vulnerable and naive and may lead people to come to false conclusions which may be damaging to individuals and families. He makes this claim in the podcast below, recorded for CBC Radio:

Philosophy Postcards

As tweeted by Richard van de Lagemaat on his TOK Tweet this week, here is a series of images by graphic designer Genís Carrerasin in which he uses simple images to describe many philosophical concepts covered in TOK. In describing his work, Carrerasin says “I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant. For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.”

Best viewed full screen in order to make out the written definitions.

Tok postcards from Michael Smith

Conspiracy Theories

An article in Scientific American this week looks at the reasons why some people are so ready to believe in conspiracy theories, even if they contradict each other. Similarly to articles I've posted previously, the author suggests that a willingness to believe in such ideas correlate with a mistrust of science (and western politics). It also appears that some apparently outlandish ideas are a lot more mainstream than you might think, with 37 percent of Americans believing that global warming is a hoax, 21 percent believing in a US government cover up of alien existence and 28 percent believing in a secret elite conspiring to take over the world.

Moon Landing Faked 

The World's Smallest Movie

Researchers at IBM have created an stop-motion animation using individual carbon atoms as pixels. The atoms were moved around between frames using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Intuition and Bad Mathematics

One would hope that the justice system is one aspect of everyday life based firmly on reason rather than intuition. However, the article below investigates how court judgements may be flawed if they are based on a weak grasp of statistics. Since scientific and forensic evidence has to be presented in terms of statistics, this does lead to a rather worrying state of affairs and means that the interpretation of expert opinion is vitally important in court judgements.

Bad Maths in Court

Pseudoscience

The Role of the Catholic Church

Here's a good debate from intelligencesquared.com which considers the motion 'This house believes the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'.