The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
 

Skepticast #36: March 29th 2006 (Download MP3)



Topics:

Issue #1. News Items: Solar Eclipse, The Woman who Never Forgets

Issue #2. Your E-mails: Panspermia, Hydrino power, Bigfoot, Microwaves

Issue #3. Interview with Rick Ross

Issue #4. Science or Fiction





Issue #1. News Items


News Item #1 Solar Eclipse
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/sun_earthday2006.html

News Item #2 A study on the accuracy of the free online resource Wikipedia by the prestigious journal Nature has been described as "fatally flawed".
The report, published in December last year, compared the accuracy of online offerings from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

Nature found that both were about as accurate as each other on science.

Encyclopaedia Britannica has hit back at the findings, calling for the paper to be retracted.

In a document on its website, Encyclopaedia Britannica said that the Nature study contained "a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results".

The scholarly slanging match prompted an equally robust response from Nature.

"We reject those accusations, and are confident our comparisons are fair," it said in a statement.

Nature said it did not intend to retract the original article.

Online collaboration

The original study was conducted by the Nature news team. They asked a number of scientists to assess 50 pairs of articles from relative newcomer Wikipedia and from the well established encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and is based on wikis, open-source software which allows anyone to edit, add, delete, or replace an entry. It relies on volunteer contributors to update its pages.

Topics in the Nature study were as diverse as the Archimedes Principle and Dolly the sheep. The reviewers were asked to check for errors, but were not told about the source of the information.

The study found only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, four from each encyclopaedia.

However, Nature also claimed to have found other factual errors: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica.

Wikipedia criticisms

Although the longer established encyclopaedia does not claim to be error free, it said that the research "grossly exaggerated Britannica's inaccuracies" and that according to the figures "Britannica was far more accurate than Wikipedia".

In a lengthy document, it went on to rebut more than 50 specific points raised in the study.

Following the Nature study, both Wikipedia and the Britannica made corrections to some of their entries.

Late last year, Wikipedia came under fire for the accuracy of its articles.

In particular, prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler attacked an entry that incorrectly named him as a suspect in the assassinations of President John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert.

The false information was the work of Tennessean Brian Chase, who said he was trying to trick a co-worker.

Wikipedia responded to the criticisms by tightening up procedures.


News Item #3 The woman who never forgets





 

Issue #2. Your E-mails: Panspermia, Hydrino power, Bigfoot, Microwaves

E-mail #1 Panspermia and Hydrino power
Steve and team, a big gidday from Wellington New Zealand, and a very avid listener. You have brought sceticism to life for me, even better than Steve Mirsky's column in Scientific American for me. Still, enough flattery, I have a question for you after hearing your discussion about panspermia last week. Scientific American has a long article about the potential detrimental effects of gamma rays, etc on long space flights (i.e. Humans to Mars) on DNA. The article talks about having shields of up to 5m of water around the ship to protect its dna-carrying content. So how could microbes survive 1 million years in deep space, on small rocks between planets subject to the same radiation?

Hope you find this sufficiently interesting to explore and discuss on my behalf.

Keep up the great shows - you and a number of others provide a welcome improvement on the infomercial diet that masquerades as science journalism these days.

By the way, what do you know about something called hydrino power. Sounds like magic to me.

Best wishes
Paul Irving
Wellington, New Zealand

Primary proponents of hydrino power (Dr. Randall Mills funded by Blacklight power), basically claim they can get free energy out of hydrogen atoms by forcing their electrons into an energy state below the prior-known ground state. Unfortunately, this violates quantum mechanics. http://www.blacklightpower.com/

Register article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/07/hydrino_generator/

E-mail #2 More on Bigfoot
Hi guys,
Listened to one of your podcasts yesterday, the one in which you interviewed the guy from the Penn. Bigfoot Society (or somethinbg like that). Nice job, generally, but I have one criticism for you...

After you ended your conversation with the guy and you were talking among yourselves, saying what you thought of what he'd said... one of you dismissed the "dermal ridges" in cast tracks line of evidence out of hand - "that's obviously bogus," to that effect. Maybe the one who said that has looked into it carefully and can say it's bogus, but I doubt it. I suspect it was more "that just can't be true so I'm saying it isn't." Maybe you heard some suggestion as to why the dermal ridges aren't real and so dismiss them because you like to latch onto whatever goes with what you'd like to think...

Anyway, it reminds me of a lesson that is SO important involving this kind of bad thinking, I would say: Creationists so readily dismiss the evidence for evolution... and they don't understand, or even know about, the evidence. But they're predisposed to dismiss it because they "like" an alternate theory (God did it). So they stupidly bash away at something they don't even know understand.

It seems like you did that with the dermal ridges thing, which, from what I understand, is compelling evidence not easily explained away.

Best Regards,
Curt Nelson

SI articles - http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/dennett03.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n5_v18/ai_16334418/print Believer article on dermal ridges -
http://www.geocities.com/tomkinson99/footprints/footprints.html

E-mail #3 Microwaves
Put this to rest! Are microwaves unsafe?
http://www.herbalhealer.com/microwave.html

Thanks!

Huxley1870
P.S. You NESS Guys kick ass! I've heard a bunch of skeptic podcasts on iTunes and most of them are boring or just not interesting (skepticality's Swoopy, her voice kills me.) You make Skepticism fun. You guys should have your own show on XM Radio and get PAID!! Please, fix the Audio Mix!!
Official FDA info on microwaves: http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/microwave.html

 

Issue #3. Interview with Rick Ross

The Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements
http://www.rickross.com/



 

Issue #4. Science or Fiction


Each week our host will come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake and you can play along.

Theme this week: Microbes
Item#1: Biologists have genetically engineered a pig that produces healthy bacon
Item #2: Fossil evidence confirms that the arctic polar region was once home to lush tropical forests.
Item #3: Scientists have produced gravitomagnetic fields in a laboratory one hundred million trillion (1x1020 ) times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts.
Answer:
Item#1: Science - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060327084435.htm Item#2: Fiction see Arctic Never Tropical below
Item#3: Science - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.htm

From the March 21, 1936, issue of Science News
ARCTIC NEVER TROPICAL
Forests that grew ages ago in the lands around the North Pole were never tropical, as old-time natural history books used to say. For theoretical reasons, they couldn't have been. And when the theory is checked up by examining fossils from the Far North, the fossils give strong evidence that the theory is right. Thus another favorite notion of our younger days is outlawed to the limbo of facts that have been turned into fictions.

Not that there never were any forests around the North Pole. There were; great and luxuriant ones, if the wealth of fossil leaves and other plant parts is any indication. Where the tallest trees are now little willows 6 inches high, in such places as the islands north of Canada and Siberia, there were once woods as pleasant as any to be found in Ohio or Oregon. But the point is, they were such woods as can be found now in Ohio or Oregon, or perhaps Georgia and Arkansas, and not such jungles as those of Brazil or Burma, as was once imagined.

The destruction of the myth of the arctic tropics is the result of the rubbing together of two scientists' minds. Both of the men are Johns Hopkins professors, and both are interested in plants, though in widely different phases of plant affairs. One is the Dean of the University, Prof. Edward W. Berry, whose scientific specialty is the study of fossil plants of the long ago. The other is Prof. Burton E. Livingston, plant physiologist, who pries into the life processes of plants now in existence. It was Prof. Livingston who set off the theory, and Dean Berry who checked it up by looking over the fossil records, and found it was so.