We sell these at our MISkeptics store.

Our May Get Together will be on May 12th at 4 pm.This will be out first time at the new location, this one promises privacy and quiet. Plus they won’t lose our reservation causing us to have to find a new place at the last-minute.

This month is our social event and we have plenty to talk about. At our April Get Together, Val Morris stopped by to meet with us. Her article came out not too long ago and had a great review of us. Also it was our Hitchens tribute and we showed in public for the first time our Thank Hitch video that featured people from around the world thanks Chris for all the great work he has done.

We will also talk about our plans going forward with achieving non-profit status! This will help us with get famous speakers, collect grants, and will help play for all the great prizes we give out during our games and raffles. Plus all people who give can claim it on their taxes.

So you can see the Donate buttons below and over there on the right? We need your donations to help us do what we do. Please go click on that button and donate what you can for promotion critical thinking in Michigan!

So please head over to our Meetup site and RSVP. We look forward to seeing you all!

Val is a Christian Reporter for Examiner.com she is also a local traffic reporter.

At our April Get Together,  we had a special guest. Val wasn’t here to present to us or to deliver a lecture. She was here to learn about us. Val “Berry” Morris is a reporter for the Examiner.com. She reports on Christian topics in the Detroit area. She came here to learn about something she had no experience with, the world of Skepticism and Atheism. She had never been exposed to either and wanted to learn about us and talk about what she learned.

I want to thank everyone that spoke to her and to everyone for making her feel welcome and at ease. She did not know what to expect and expected possible hostility. She learned that we are no different from anyone else and are a warm and welcoming group. She has expressed interest in doing this again and I agreed that it would be fun to do. There are a lot of misconceptions  about Atheists and Skeptics out there. It’s good that we can educate people about us.

She broke the article into two parts, because it was so long.You can find the first part here and the second part here.

Everyone should comment on the article and thank her for the great work she did. If you don’t want to register with Examiner.com you can comment here or send them via our contact us page.

Once Again, thanks to Val for coming out and meeting us. And thanks for the great article!

A collection of skeletons mounted in museums of various dinosaurs. source: Wikimedia

Last week, Paleontologists were required to respond to claims that dinosaurs were actually semi-aquatic creatures and stayed in water to support their great size. A theory that was thoroughly and completely debunked in the 1960s. The Smithsonian Magazine reports:

Earlier this week, the rotting corpse of a discarded dinosaur idea rose from the depths. Brian J. Ford, a television personality and self-styled independent researcher, decided that Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and kin just looked wrong ambling about on land. Unfettered by the accumulation of scientific evidence about how dinosaurs moved and the environments they lived in, Ford decided to set scientists straight by floating an idea that had been sunk decades ago—that all large dinosaurs spent their lives in water. And, like the bad science it is, the idea strained to explain everything about dinosaur biology. Not only did the idea supposedly explain why non-avian dinosaurs went extinct—their watery homes dried up, of course—but the aquatic setting also explained the small arms of the tyrannosaurs. The great tyrants, Ford said, would catch fish and hold them close for visual inspection before downing the sashimi. Ford’s speculation is a buffet of nonsense. There is so much wrong with it, it’s hard to know where to start.

Brian J. Ford is a British Journalist and television personality. He doesn’t have a college degree but has been an advocate for science and education since he dropped out of college in 1961. His article, published in the April edition of Labratory News, (apparently with a video trailer) purports to not only provide evidence for, but actually concludes that dinosaurs were aquatic.

Now Mr. Ford is a very accomplished person but he is no Paleontologist. He also doe not appear to do research. If he did he would have found that there has been extensive study using evidence from both sedimentology and biomechanics to show that land based dinosaurs were terrestrial creatures.

Ford certainly has a right to his opinion. The weight of the evidence absolutely crushes his ill-formed idea, but there’s no rule against making poorly substantiated claims on the internet. Heck, much of the web is sadly founded on such sludge. But I was taken aback by how many news sources not only took Ford seriously, but cast him as a kind of scientific underdog. In a BBC4 Today interview—which helped spread this swamp of insufficient evidence and poor reasoning—host Tom Feilden cast Ford as a Galileo-type hero, boldly defending his revolutionary idea while the stodgy paleontological community refused to budge from its orthodoxy. Despite Natural History Museum paleontologist Paul Barrett’s admirable attempt to set Feilden straight, the radio host concluded that Ford’s idea was a new and exciting notion, even though the image of wallowing sauropods was part of the old image of dinosaurs that had been cast out in the 1960s. As artist Matt van Rooijen highlighted in his latest Prehistoric Reconstruction Kitteh cartoon, it would seem that the old is new again.

Other news sources followed Feilden’s lead. At the Daily Mail, a source not exactly known for reliable science coverage, reporter Tamara Cohen recapitulated Ford’s argument. Paul Barrett again offered a dissenting view at the bottom of the article, but the article promotes Ford’s idea anyway. “Dinosaurs DIDN’T rule the earth: The huge creatures ‘actually lived in water’ – and their tails were swimming aids,” the headline gasped. Hannah Furness did much the same in the Telegraph, summarizing Ford’s statements at length before, in the last line, plunking down a quote from Barrett saying that Ford’s idea is nonsense. Elsewhere, FOX News and Australia’s Sky News ran a syndicated version of the story that followed the same form, and the Cambridge News didn’t even bother to get a second opinion on Ford’s work. But my favorite howler came from the internet-based TopNews, which concluded that “it had [sic] become all the more imperative that further research is done on [Ford's] theory so that some sort of conclusive findings can be presented.” No, it isn’t imperative at all. Ford’s idea is not even close to a theory, or even science. Ford’s evidence-free approach doesn’t make any testable predictions, and there is no actual scientific debate to be had here. Repeating “Dinosaurs look better in water” ad infinitum isn’t science, no matter how many journalists are enamored with the idea.

I'm pretty sure he's holding a gun. Wielding a gun increases a person's bias to see guns in the hands of others, new research from the University of Notre Dame shows.

Research from the University of Notre Dame that shows a person’s bias to see guns in the hands of others is increased when the subject is holding a gun. The research, which will be published in the soon-to-be released issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance showed that subjects holding a toy gun were more likely to perceive the image of a person they were looking at to be holding a gun as opposed to another type of object.  The research was performed by Notre Dame Associate Professor of Psychology James Brockmole along with an unnamed colleague from Purdue University.

In five experiments, subjects were shown multiple images of people on a computer screen and determined whether the person was holding a gun or a neutral object such as a soda can or cell phone. Subjects did this while holding either a toy gun or a neutral object such as a foam ball.

The researchers varied the situation in each experiment — such as having the people in the images sometimes wear ski masks, changing the race of the person in the image or changing the reaction subjects were to have when they perceived the person in the image to hold a gun. Regardless of the situation the observers found themselves in, the study showed that responding with a gun biased observers to report “gun present” more than did responding with a ball. Thus, by virtue of affording the subject the opportunity to use a gun, he or she was more likely to classify objects in a scene as a gun and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior, such as raising a firearm to shoot.

“Beliefs, expectations and emotions can all influence an observer’s ability to detect and to categorize objects as guns,” Brockmole says. “Now we know that a person’s ability to act in certain ways can bias their recognition of objects as well, and in dramatic ways. It seems that people have a hard time separating their thoughts about what they perceive and their thoughts about how they can or should act.”

There is no detail of the experiments performed in the press release, so we do not know the number of subjects involved, the length of the sessions, the number of slides in the deck of images, or potential data that might bias the research.

 The researchers showed that the ability to act is a key factor in the effects by showing that simply letting observers see a nearby gun did not influence their behavior; holding and using the gun was important.

“One reason we supposed that wielding a firearm might influence object categorization stems from previous research in this area, which argues that people perceive the spatial properties of their surrounding environment in terms of their ability to perform an intended action,” Brockmole says.

For example, other research has shown that people with broader shoulders tend to perceive doorways to be narrower, and softball players with higher batting averages perceive the ball to be bigger. The blending of perception and action representations could explain, in part, why people holding a gun would tend to assume others are, too.

“In addition to the theoretical implications for event perception and object identification, these findings have practical implications for law enforcement and public safety,” Brockmole says.

If the research pans out, and the experiments are properly replicatable, I would like to see the potential biasing factors included into the work. Would proper gun training influence the outcome? What if the person was a victim of a previous gun crime? The problem I sometimes find in psychological studies is the subjective nature of perception. Sometimes past experience affects our present judgment and can bias the outcome. As a person with broad shoulders, I can attest.

The Great Bearded Hitch. Photographed in the wild.

This Month is going to be our tribute to Christopher Hitchens. As you remember, we were supposed to do this in January but had to do something different because the venue closed down at the last minute. So, as April is his birth month, we are going to pay tribute to him today.

We will be watching the IQ2 debate where where he and Stephan Fry eviscerate the Catholic church. We may also watch a debate from Brazil. But most importantly we will be watching the Thank Hitch video we put together and sent off to Hitchens himself. Only a few people have seen it including Hitch himself.

Come and join us for lively discussion, drinks, dinner and debate! This is a good event for Skeptics of Michigan to come together and discuss local, national, worldwide items affecting skeptics. All are welcome to listen and participate.

We also have special guests and speakers that contribute to the conversation and/or debate.

Please be sure to RSVP so I know how many are coming. That way I can modify the reservation if necessary.

Also make sure to join our Meetup Group for future Get Togethers and other great events.

I hope to see you all there!

The results were clear. "We found nothing," Ritchie said.

LiveScience is reporting on experiments done by researchers at three universities trying to replicate Daryl Bem‘s 2010 claim that he had found scientific proof of psychic ability. The researchers Stuart Ritchie of the University of Edinburgh, University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman and University of London psychologist Christopher French all conducted the experiment separately at their respective universities with 50 participants each.

 The researchers chose the strongest of the eight positive findings that Bem originally published. In the experiment, Bem’s participants seemed to reverse the usual cause-effect sequence of time. They saw a list of 48 words flashed onto a computer screen and were then treated to a surprise memory test in which they were asked to type in as many of the words as they remembered.

Next, a random sample of 24 of the previous 48 words was presented again. The participants did some practice exercises with these words, and then the experiment ended. Analyzing the memory-test results, Bem and his colleagues found that the students were more likely to recall the words that they’d soon see again than the words that were not on the later exercise list, as if they could see the future.

“It’s almost as if you study for an exam, you do the exam and then you study for it afterwards and then you get a better mark,” Ritchie told LiveScience. “So you can see why we were kind of surprised by that.”

Bem encouraged replication of his results, and he put the computer program he used in his experiment online so other researchers could use it.

The results of the experiments were very clear. They found nothing.

There was no evidence that studying for a test afterwards did anything to increase performance. So what does that say about the results in Bem’s work?

“It might just be because the statistics were a fluke,” he said. “You’re going to get some false positives sometimes.”

Bem wrote a response to the soon-to-be published findings, stating that it was too early to make any definitive claim. There need to be multiple replication attempts to thoroughly disprove findings.

“This does not mean that psi[psychic phenomena] results are unverifiable by independent investigators, but that we must begin regarding the experimenter as a variable in the experiments that should be included in the research designs,” Bem wrote.

Richard Wiseman, a prominent Skeptic, has a rather long list of attempts to replicate Bem’s work and plans to analyze the results together into one study.

One big problem facing the work is reluctance on the part of journals to publish studies with negative findings, especially those that are replications.

When Ritchie and his colleagues submitted their paper to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the journal that had originally published Bem’s work, they were told that the journal does not publish replications.

“There’s a real problem with finding shocking findings and then not being interested in publishing replications,” Ritchie said.

In that way, Bem’s surprising psychic study has been a boon to psychology, Ritchie said.

“It’s kicked up a huge debate about how scientists do work and how journals publish that work, and I think that’s very valuable in itself — even if I’m not that confident that these findings are real,” Ritchie said.

Coast Guard Cutter Katmai Bay breaks ice for freighters navigating through the St. Mary's River in the Great Lakes. During winter, paths must be made in the ice for freighters to continue shipping goods. Photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class William B. Mitchell.

The American Meteorological Society says that the amount of ice covering the Great Lakes has decreased over 71% in the past 40 years. A drop that the author of the report attributes to climate change, El Nino and La Nina. The report published last month said only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this year.

Researchers determined ice coverage by scanning U.S. Coast Guard reports and satellite images taken from 1973 to 2010. They found that ice coverage was down 88 percent on Lake Ontario and fell 79 percent on Lake Superior. However, the ice in Lake St. Clair, which is between Lakes Erie and Huron, diminished just 37 percent.

The study doesn’t include the current winter, but satellite photos show that only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this winter. That’s a steep drop from years such as 1979, when there was as much as 94 percent ice coverage. On average, about 40 percent of the surfaces freeze over.

The results are consistent with other studies that have found higher surface water temperatures on Lake Superior in recent years.

Jia Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Ann Arbor, Mi, the lead author of the publication states that  that diminished ice can accelerate wintertime evaporation, causing water levels to fall. The lack of ice could also lead to earlier and increased algae blooms that can damage water quality, and could speed up erosion by exposing more shoreline to waves.

Even Lake Superior’s protected Chequamegon Bay, just north of Ashland, Wis., has been remarkably free of ice. It usually freezes enough for trucks to drive on it, but the ice was never thick enough. That forced the local Madeline Island ferry to operate all season, which has only happened once before.

When: Thursday, April 26, 2012, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Where: Fountain Street Church, 24 Fountain NE, Grand Rapids, MI

Cost: TBD

Join us for a debate featuring two prominent authors and political commentators, Dinesh D’Souza and Susan Jacoby on the topic “Is Christiantity Good for American Politics?” This event is co-sponsored by ISI, Center for Inquiry–Michigan and the Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University.

About the Debaters

Dinesh D’Souza

Dinesh D’Souza has a distinguished 25 year career as a writer, scholar and intellectual. A former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, D’Souza also served as an Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute as well as a Rishwain Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Called one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country” by Investor’s Business Daily , D’Souza quickly became a major influence on public policy through his writings.Illiberal Education , his first book publicized the phenomenon of political correctness in America’s colleges and universities and was on the best seller list for 15 weeks. Subsequent best sellers, include Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader , The Virtue of Prosperity, Finding Values in an Age of Techno Affluence, What’s So Great About America, Letters to a Young Conservative, What’s So Great About Christianity, and The Roots of Obama’s Rage . His latest work, Godforsaken , responds to the problem of evil.

A prolific, writer, persuasive debater, D’Souza has been named one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times. In the fall of 2010 Dinesh D’Souza was named the President of The King’s College, a Christian College located in the Empire State Building in New York City. The mission of The King’s College is to transform society by preparing students for careers in which they help to shape and eventually to lead strategic public and private institutions.

Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby is the author of ten books, a frequent contributor to national magazines and newspapers, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2001 appointment as a fellow of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers.

An outspoken advocate of reason, she writes “The Spirited Atheist” column for On Faith at The Washington Post. Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age is Susan Jacoby’s tenth nonfiction book. Her most recent books include the New York Times bestseller, The Age of American Unreason (2008) and Alger Hiss and The Battle for History (2009).

Susan Jacoby has been the recipient of many grants and awards, from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is also a member of the advisory boards of the Secular Coalition for America and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Susan Jacoby lives in New York City.

Contact: Jennifer Beahan, michigan@centerforinquiry.net, 616-698-2342

For $30, The Action kit includes a t-shirt, bumper sticker, bracelet and become an "Advocate of Awesome"

Last week Invisible Children, a non-profit organization founded and head by film maker Jason Russell, released a 30 minute documentary video called “Kony 2012“. The documentary details a Ugandan warlord/rebel named Joseph Kony and the crimes he has committed against civilians and children.  The documentary video went viral in a few days with over 37 million views.

Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) a militant group that is an offshoot of an armed resistance in Northern Uganda called the Holy Spirit Movement. The Holy Spirit Movement was formed by Alice Auma in 1987 as a resistance army protected by the holy spirit.

The Holy Spirit Movement fought as a regular army – taking and controlling territory, as well as holding pitched battles with NRA forces – but had a number of practices that outsiders found bizarre. Spiritual “controllers” were integrated into each unit. Along with duties such as tending to Alice Auma while she was possessed, they smeared blessed oil on combatants that was supposed to stop bullets if the combatant’s soul was pure. [via Wikipedia]

Kony splintered the LRA off from the Holy Spirit Movement when they differed on a few small differences. Alice did not want to kill prisoners of war, kill civilians or kidnap children. The LRA is accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, sexual enslavement of women and children and forcing children to participate in hostilities. There have also been reports of cannibalism. So it goes without saying that Kony is a pretty nasty character, right up to calling himself the spokesperson of god. But how does the documentary do on getting it’s facts straight about him?

First off, Kony is NOT in Uganda. He has not been in Uganda since 2005. The documentary does state this at around 15 minutes into the video but it is easy to miss.

As the LRA began to move into other countries, Jacob [one of the children filmed in Northern Uganda in 2003] and other Ugandans came to the US to speak on behalf of all people suffering because of Kony. Even though Uganda was relatively safe they felt compelled to tell the world that Kony was still out there and had to be stopped.

They also alludes that he is “branching out” to other countries in the region. That is not fact. Kony and the LRA fled Uganda due the withering assault from the NRA (Ugandan Army). The video also alluded to the LRA having an army consisting of 30,000 brainwashed children. While it is true that he has abducted drugged and brainwashed children into fighting in his army, the numbers cited in the video are way off. Accurate numbers cannot be produced but the U.N. has estimated that 30,000 children have been adbucted since the 80′s. There is no huge army of brainwash children hiding and waiting to strike. In fact, according to Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama, the 30,000 number is a vast over-estimation;

To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement. While it draws attention to the fact that Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, is still on the loose, it’s portrayal of his alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era. At the height of the war between especially 1999 and 2004, large hordes of children took refuge on the streets of Gulu town to escape the horrors of abduction and brutal conscription to the ranks of the LRA. Today most of these children are semi-adults. Many are still on the streets unemployed. Gulu has the highest numbers of child prostitutes in Uganda. It also has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis.

It was not even accurate enough to report that Kony has at most two or three hundred troops hidden deep in the Congo jungles. Invisible Children, Kony 2012′s creators are not without some criticism as well. The Guardian broke down their 2011 expenses:

Invisible Children’s accounts show it is a cash rich operation, which more than tripled its income to $9m (£5.68m) in 2011, mainly from personal donations. Of this, nearly 25% was spent on travel and film-making. Most of the money raised has been spent in the US. The accounts show $1.7m went on US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in “professional services” – thought to be Washington lobbyists – and $1.07m in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on offices in San Diego.

So where does the money raised from selling the Kony 2012 Action Kit, (only $30, complete with t-shirt, bumper sticker and bracelet)? Jason Russell Announced Friday on the Today Show that they have sold over 500,000 Action Kits and signed up to be “Advocates of Awesome”. At $30 a piece, they made $15 Million alone in sales last week, which is pretty impressive. In one week they have almost doubled their operating budget from last year. So what are they going to give to Africa? According to Invisible Children’s Director of Ideology, Jedidiah Jenkins, they are not an aid organization. Only 37% of the budget goes to African Related Programs. The majority of the budget equally to film making and salaries.

[T]he truth about Invisible Children is that we are not an aid organization, and we don’t intend to be. I think people think we’re over there delivering shoes or food. But we are an advocacy and awareness organization.

Even more criticism has been leveled at Invisible Children’s operations. Many groups have accused them of secretly having an evangelical agenda. Several extremist, Right-Wing Christian organizations list Invisible Children in their IRS 990 forms including Caster Family Foundation, The Call, National Christian Foundation, ProVision Foundation, Christian Community Foundation, Inc. (also known as “Waterstone”) , Philip Anschutz, and the Malachi 3 Foundation. On November 11, 2011 Russell spoke at Liberty University‘s Convocation about evengelical outreach through Invisible Children.

So does this mean that Invisible Children is in fact an evangelical organization disguised as a secular political organization? Not really. Jason Russell is an evangelical Christian, but that does not mean he is using his organization to for Christian outreach. They are funded by many Right Wing Christian organizations but that does not mean that they are pushing an evangelical agenda on Uganda. Invisible Children’s main goal is admittedly, movie making. So it remains unclear what their actual outreach programs in Uganda are doing. While they are funding schools, we do not more than that. We can only guess if there any motives beyond what they state in their mission statement, and that is not good Skepticism. Though who funds them give me great pause and would probably now give them money for that reason, I do have to worry about that because I have another reason to give to them.

I think the main goal you should be focusing on when you decide whether or not to give money to an organization such as Invisible Children is to determine what your money will actually be used for.Will buying a “Kony 2012″ Action Kit and becoming an “Advocate of Awesome” help Africa? The “Kony 2012″ video is an awareness campaign. Bringing awareness to Kony’s atrocities in Uganda. Wearing a bracelet or a t-shirt will not stop the LRA. It points more towards slacktivism than activism and more arrogant than worldly. You are better off saving your $30 dollars and phoning your Senator. Whether or not they are evangelical or whether or not they support the Ugandan Anti-Gay bill currently in their Parliament. The simple answer is that, I will not give money to Invisible Children because I do not want my money to go to movie making. There are many relief efforts out there. If you truly want to help Uganda, The American Institute of Philanthropy has a list of relief organizations along with their rating on them.

Sources

The Best Way To Assist In Providing Emergency Relief In Uganda

KONY 2012: Is the Viral Campaign a Scam?

On Kony 2012

Invisible Children “Kony 2012″ Leader Suggests It’s About Jesus and Evangelizing

Guest post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Why Can’t Anyone Stop the LRA?

Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis

Acholi Street. Stop #Kony2012. Invisible Children’s campaign of infamy

Invisible Children Funded By Antigay, Creationist Christian Right

‘There’s a Rabid Hunger to Criticize’: A ‘Kony 2012′ Creator Defends the Film

Child abductee featured in Kony 2012 defends film’s maker against criticism

Social Media, Slacktivism, And Kony 2012 

My thoughts on KONY 2012 (and a defense of Invisible Children?)  

Visible Children: KONY 2012, viewed critically

A Cafe Inquiry get-together consists of everyone participating in a discussion about several predetermined topics in a casual, thought-provoking way.  You can find out more about the event over at CFI’s website.  Jennifer Keller Baker is the organizer.  Hope to see some of you there!