What if your club, institution, or company had access to a lot of the Science-interested public for a few days? What if they come to you, or meet you in a nice venue? What messages would you most want to get across? What could those contacts be best used for? What if you had 10 months to prepare? Around San Francisco, the Bay Area Science Festival is planned for October 29 - November 6, 2011. But hardly anyone I talk to has heard about it yet! One indication that the planning's cast in Jell-O?? rather than concrete is that they say it's going to be a 10-day event, but the days they list total 9. So it's not too late to get involved. If you're in the Bay Area, think through your optimum result from such a festival. Think through how to achieve it. Then contact the Festival folks to make sure you get included. I'd guess that the more self-contained your package, the easier it should be for them to include. Here's what I've gleaned so far: The University of California San Francisco is said to have received a grant to organize this as a "first annual" science-for-the-public event. Dr. Bruce Alberts, Editor of Science Magazine, heads the project. The Director is Kishore Hari, Science and Health Education Partnership, UCSF, Kishore.Hari@ucsf.edu. Their target audience includes 25% youth and families with little access

At Oakland North, a project of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, reporter Alyssa Fetini asks the pressing question: "Psychics are ubiquitous in Oakland, but are they for real?." Fetini interviews several store-front "psychics," as well as the proprietor of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, which purports to train anyone to exercise psychic powers. After allowing the psychics to offer their own claims, she gives UC Berkeley psychologist Kyle Jennings a chance to respond. "Psychologists," Jennings explains, "would not believe that a person was actually psychic." Fetini then reviews some of the recent reports of psychics defrauding customers (as previously reported at BAS). Director of the Berkeley Psychic Institute Richard Pozzuto gets the last word, denying that his trainees have anything to do with such scams, insisting "we train people to find their own answers." The Institute's website refers to its programs as "psychic kinde

Happy 200th (posthumous) Birthday to Charles Darwin. He doesn't look a day over 190... This year marks the 200th year since Darwin was born, on February 12, 1809. Celebrating this date, known as Darwin Day, is celebrating science, skepticism and humanity; and most of all, our better understanding of the way the world works. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the evolutionary biologist's seminal work, On the Origin of Species. To celebrate these two anniversaries, there are festivities throughout the world, and of course, across the Bay Area. The festivities have already begun, with a lecture by our own Dr Genie Scott at the University of California Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley. The event was extremely popular! On Sunday 8, 2009 the tireless Genie will be also be speaking at Evolutionpalooza!, a Darwin Day celebration to be held at San Francisco Main Branch Public Library. There will be other speakers, guests, games, drinks, and cake! On Darwin Day itself, there will be an informal lecture at the California Academy of Sciences

 

The “Monkey Trial” Centennial provides an opportunity to examine the widespread misunderstanding about how ideas of evolution and eugenics were implicated in the famous Scopes controversy.  George William Hunter’s textbook Civic Biology was the focus of the case. It endorsed evolution, a theory “that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” —content prohibited by a 1925 Tennessee law.

The Hunter text also contained a brief discussion of eugenics. In recent years an elaborate mythology ha