International Skeptics United

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders   0:04:30 Interviews from TAM13 Sharon Hill from Doubtful News Prof. Bruce M. Hood about Speakezee    0:22:26 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.   0:26:00 Interviews from TAM13 Ben Radford and his investigations.

Pat sets the tone with a segment on high fidelity audio players and whether Neil Young’s new Pono device is as ‘righteous’ as its name claims. Darren reflects on popular misconceptions around sunscreen. Finally, Cristina tips-off with a segment about how some cutting edge technology called the Catapult GPS is being used in elite sports training.

Live from TAM 13; Interview with James Randi and Ray Hyman; Introducing Cara Santa Maria; Forgotten Superheroes of Science: Henrietta Leavitt; News Items: Pluto Close Approach, Village on the Moon, Giant Fighting Robots, Depression App, Teaching Science Wrong, New Winged Dinosaur, Pentaquark; Science or Fiction

This episode explores the k-nearest neighbors algorithm which is an unsupervised, non-parametric method that can be used for both classification and regression. The basica concept is that it leverages some distance function on your dataset to find the $k$ closests other observations of the dataset and averaging them to impute an unknown value or unlabelled datapoint.

Iain Sinclair a poet, film-maker, essayist and the author of many acclaimed books, including Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, Edge of Orison, Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, Dining on Stones, Ghost Milk and American Smoke and London Overground, his account of a one-day walk around […]

With The Amazing Meeting ending only a couple days ago, Derek doesn't wait to give you the first recorded interview from the event. Derek talks with Jim Baggott, author of many books on the nature of reality and physics. His latest work, "Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth". Baggott argues that there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics: super-symmetric particles,super strings, the multiverse, the holographic principle,or the anthropic cosmological principle. These theories are not only untrue, it is not even science. It is fairy-tale physics: fantastical, bizarre and often outrageous, perhaps even confidence-trickery.

This amazing chess-playing automaton toured the world for more than 80 years beginning in the 1700s, beating all the top chess players.

This week, we're investigating the Millennium Prize Problems - a set of mathematical equations that, if solved, will not only nab the lucky winner a million, but also revolutionise the world. Plus, the headlines from the world of science and technology, including why screams are so alarming, how fat fish help the human fight against flab, and what's the future of money?

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders and Jay Novella.   0:03:10 Interviews from TAM13 A 'live' interview with Susan Gerbic from Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.  Tim Farley joins us from What's the Harm.   0:24:10   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.   0:27:10 Interviews from TAM13 Carbon Dating with Kyle Sanders Jeff Wagg and his College of Curiosity.   Sign off with James Randi

Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of Vaccinology and Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He’s written tons of published peer-reviewed papers and received countless awards for his work. His latest book, Bad Faith, is all about how religious belief can undermine modern medicine. On the day of taping, California had just passed a law making vaccinations all but mandatory, Jim Carrey had gone on a Twitter rant about vaccines, and a woman had died of measles. We spoke with Dr. Offit about why people still don't get vaccinated, how he responds to the most common arguments offered by anti-vaxxers, and why Bill Maher is wrong when he says we don't need to get flu shots.

Wassup TRC'ers! Darren kicks things off with a detailed segment about Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, aka GSoW. Adam serves us a lighthearted look at whether McDonald’s Happy Meal Minions are swearing at us.  Finally, Cristina asks the burning question, what’s the science behind “The Munchies”?

How do people think rationally about small probability events? What is the optimal statistical process by which one can update their beliefs in light of new evidence? This episode of Data Skeptic explores questions like this as Kyle consults a cast of previous guests and experts to try and answer the question "What is the probability, however small, that Bigfoot is real?"

Flat Earthers, soy beans, arsenic soup, and kettles. Plus Anne of Cleves, vaccines, ten pin bowling, and Mike’s t-shirt. Last chance to donate to the Merseyside Skeptics charity walk.

Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, where he studied under John Keegan. A regular officer with the 11th Hussars, he left the Army to write. He has published four novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. His books include The Spanish Civil War;  Crete — The Battle and the Resistance, which was awarded a […]

In the 100th episode of MonsterTalk: The Science Show About Monsters, DNA researcher and author Bryan Sykes discusses the research behind his landmark book The Nature of the Beast: The First Genetic Evidence on the Survival of Apemen, Yeti, Bigfoot and Other Mysterious Creatures into Modern Times; plus, thoughts and reflections on 100 episodes of MonsterTalk, including hearing from many listeners about their own favorite monsters… READ the episode notes