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 previouslyreported 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 Bay Area Skeptics are proud to announce our new website, built on Drupal, the content management system used by such luminaries as The Onion. On this main page, you'll find our new BAS blog, featuring posts by our Board of Directors. We're also going to increase the online archive of BASIS, our newsletter; look forward to that in the next few months!
2025 is 100 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and 20 years after the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover court case, in which I participated while working at the National Center for Science Education. The Kitzmiller case included extensive expert testimony on the science of evolution, and the historical development of “intelligent design” and related antievolution efforts. While the case made in 2005 holds up very well, there have been interesting developments in both areas that I will review. These include work on the evolutionary origins of the bacterial flagellum done in a phylogenetic context, and work applying phylogenetic methods to trace the copying history of antievolutionist legislation. I will also reflect on lessons we learned during the case and how they remain rel
