International Skeptics United

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders   0:06:40 Are wind farms all hot air? Richard chats to Ketan Joshi about "Everything Syndrome". Are wind farms and smart meters making you sick?   0:29:30 A Week in Science The Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus) is a national scientific not-for-profit organisation with a mission to bring science to people and people to science.   0:33:20 Maynard's Spooky Action... Maynard chats to the crowds at the Australian Skeptics National Convention, including long time skeptic Barry Williams.

Forgotten Superheroes of Science: Rosalind Franklin; Edge Question: Artificial Intelligence; News Items: The Boy Who Didn't Go to Heaven, Biofortified GMO, Omniprocessor; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Deep Web Follow Up; Science or Fiction

  Adam is back from his vacation/reconnaissance mission in California where he investigates why everything in the State purports to cause cancer or birth defects. Pat addresses gender identity in an interview with friend of the show Sebastien LeBel. Lastly, Darren drops the question, “Which is the most bombed country on Earth?”  The answer may surprise you...

When dealing with dynamic systems that are potentially undergoing constant change, its helpful to describe what "state" they are in.  In many applications the manner in which the state changes from one to another is not completely predictable, thus, there is uncertainty over how it transitions from state to state.  Further, in many applications, one cannot directly observe the true state, and thus we describe such situations as partially observable state spaces.  This episode explores what this means and why it is important in the context of chess, poker, and the mood of Yoshi the lilac crowned amazon parrot.

Johann Hari is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian,Le Monde, Slate, the New Republic and The Nation among others. He was a columnist on the Independent for nine years and was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He has also been named […]

This week Derek has a conversation with Julien Musolino. Julien is an associate professor of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and Rutgers University and the author of the book "The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain from Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs". In this episode Julien describes why he argues that the existence of the soul is a testable hypothesis Ð one thatÕs failed time and time again to hold up against the weight of scientific evidence. And, despite these findings, why he and everyone else should not be sad, or depressed by this fact, but to embrace it and lead a happier and more productive life.

Most people spend around a third of their lives asleep, and yet we know almost nothing about what goes on in the land of nod. So this week we're going "under the covers" to investigate the science of sleeping including hearing from sleep talkers, probing the world of lucid dreaming and finding out what sleep deprivation does to the brain. Plus, in the news, the missing Beagle 2 probe is pinpointed, how the ingredients for life on Earth could have been cooked up in comets, and the computer that knows you better than your best friend...

David Niose has been the president of two major organizations, the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America. He currently serves as the AHA’s legal director. He’s also a lawyer who has argued in front of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court about why the Pledge of Allegiance shouldn’t be recited in public school classrooms. And he’s the author of the fantastic book Nonbeliever Nation. His latest book is called Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason. We spoke with David about how we can convince unreasonable people to embrace reason, why the election of George W. Bush was a turning point for organized secularism in America, and which atheist ad campaigns are the most effective.

Guest Rogue: Cara Santa Maria; Forgotten Superheroes of Science: Edward Lorenz; Movie Review: The Imitation Game; News Items: Younger Dryas Extinction, Robot Poker, New Antibiotics; Special Report: Suicide and Depression; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders   0:04:06 The Raw Skeptic Report This week Heidi Robertson looks at what happens when you visit a woo fest and ask questions!   0:27:40 A Week in Science The Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus) is a national scientific not-for-profit organisation with a mission to bring science to people and people to science.   0:32:18 Maynard's Spooky Action... Maynard chats to Michael Marshall part #2   Easter Egg anyone?

Curious who most made a skunk dick out of themselves in 2014? Who smelled the worst? How much of 2014 Chuck can remember? All this and more in this, the skunkiest of episodes.

Even with Adam away, TRC delivers!  Cristina blows in with an interesting breakdown of the Wind Chill Index, while Darren probes the book “Bad Pharma” by British physician and academic Ben Goldacre.  Finally, Pat flushes out the truth behind why bottled water has an expiration date.  

My guest this week is Anh Nguyen, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming working in the Evolving AI lab. The episode discusses the paper Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled [pdf] by Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, and Jeff Clune. It describes a process for creating images that a trained deep neural network will mis-classify. If you have a deep neural network that has been trained to recognize certain types of objects in images, these "fooling" images can be constructed in a way which the network will mis-classify them. To a human observer, these fooling images often have no resemblance whatsoever to the assigned label. Previous work had shown that some images which appear to be unrecognizable white noise images to us can fool a deep neural network. This paper extends the result showing abstract images of shapes and colors, many of which have form (just not the one the network thinks) can also trick the network.

Charlie Hebdo, ibuprofen, nematode worms and Gerson Therapy. Plus Sonic 2, turkey leftovers, giblets and really bad sound quality. With apologies, on many levels, it’s Skeptics with a K.

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents, London Noir and Krautrock. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman […]