*Sorry for the random sound issues in the middle – apparently passing taxis were interfering with the radio mics. It was not – repeat NOT – any kind of nefarious hacking tactics from the tabloids…

The challenge we offered to Sally, which she did not take up, is still open – if at any point Sally feels that demonstrating to her critics, and indeed to her fans, that the services she sells are genuine, she need only get in contact and we’ll happily arrange for the test to take place. Collaborating with the JREF, we had the test set up as an official preliminary test for their $1m challenge, and a future test for Sally would fall under a similarly official remit.

Each Halloween, we intend to give those with paranormal claims the opportunity to demonstrate what they believe they are able to do. More details of the focus of next year’s challenge will be announced late next year.

Below you can watch the press conference we held, including talks from Simon Singh, Chris French and myself.

Part 1: Introduction from Mike Hall, and talk from Dr Simon Singh:

Part 2: Talk from Prof Chris French

Part 3: Prof Chris French Q&A

Part 4: Talk from Michael Marshall and Q&A

Note: Although it shouldn’t need to be pointed out, it’s worth clarifying that the Merseyside Skeptics Society don’t condone or support people publishing contact details for Sally, her office, her lawyers or anyone, nor do we support anyone sending her abusive phone calls or emails (if indeed anyone has done this). Our challenge was offered in an open and respectful way – we wish Sally no personal harm, we just want to establish whether the extraordinary claims she makes and the wholly-unproven services she sells are genuine, or not.

In the first half, in a pained and distressed voice, Sally linked to a spirit who had committed suicide. She linked the spirit with a woman in the audience. She then proceeded to explain that the deceased man had tried to commit suicide four times. This was news to the woman in the audience. Sally also said that the spirit was “furious at the reason” he had to commit suicide. Not only does the woman in audience have to consider telling her family that their deceased relative is still angry, but she also has to explain that they might have missed three previous attempts at suicide, which could be interpreted as three cries for help that were ignored by his family and friends.

In the second half, Sally spoke to another woman in the audience and revealed that her uncle had drowned many years ago. As far as her family were concerned, the uncle had gone abroad as a boy to live with relatives and had never returned to Britain, but now Sally was filling in the gaps by introducing a tragic event. She had also removed any hope that the relative might still be alive. Again, it is easy to imagine how such a message could cause upset within a family. Indeed, it is quite possible (based on something else that was mentioned by the woman in the audience) that the elderly mother of the deceased boy is still alive. She might now have to cope with this revelation.

Scary stuff. Scary, but unfortunately not uncommon, as Simon goes on to point out:

The impression I get from others who see Sally’s shows is that a spirit who committed suicide is a fairly standard part of the show. (Of course, Sally has no control over which spirits will choose to speak to her.)

It may well be that suicide victims are disproportionately likely to be drawn to a genuine psychic. Or, it may well be that those who have lost a loved one to suicide find it exceptionally hard to deal with their grief, seeking out ‘psychics’ to offer some scant and empty comfort for their loss. And it may well be that a non-genuine psychic would be well aware of the particular vulnerability of someone whose loved one committed suicide, and will therefore play the odds by ensuring at least one suicide connection per show – be it an open question of ‘I’m sensing someone lost someone close to suicide’, a vague hint with ‘and, in some ways, he was partly to blame for his death, wasn’t he?’, or even through a good old-fashioned hot reading (where the psychic has read for the sitter before, and invites them along to the theatre show to ‘connect’ with their loved one further – feeding back snippets of past readings amongst unremarkable details, astonishing the rest of the audience with their insight).

It is, of course, impossible to tell how Sally Morgan’s regular claims to contact the spirits of suicide victims come about – we can but speculate. However, what we can do is put Sally’s wider claims to the test – can she really contact the dead? Do the spirits of the deceased really reach out to her?

Regular followers of the Guardian online will already have read that Simon Singh is working with us to devise just such a test for Sally. Very soon we’ll be offering Sally the opportunity to silence her many critics, and demonstrate that communication with the deceased is indeed possible. More details to come very soon – watch this space.

 by Michael Marshall

When: Thursday, December 15th, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

“You can’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

Everyone knows this, but few people realise this truism extends far beyond the celebrity pages and gossip columns, and spills into ‘real’ news. Here, the near-invisible influence of PR companies is often pivotal in deciding what news gets told, and how it gets reported. By taking a brief look at the history of modern journalism, and using real examples taken from recent headlines, Michael Marshall will show why you really, really can’t believe everything you read in the papers.

Michael Marshall is the co-founder and vice-president of the Merseyside Skeptics Society and appears on the “Skeptics with a K”, “Righteous Indignation” and “Strange Quarks” podcasts. Besides organising national and international campaigns against homeopathy, he writes about the often-unsuspected role of PR in modern media. He was once called by Ben Goldacre ‘a mighty nerd from Liverpool’. He was also once rather amusingly called a very rude word by self-proclaimed psychic Joe Power.

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Now you might think that’s because there was a recent hoax survey which claimed that a psychometric testing company had analysed the IQ of users of different browsers, and had determined that users of internet explorer 6 are most likely to be flat-out dumb, but that’s not actually why I’m calling you idiots. It just a shit browser, massively outdated and an all-round piece of trash, and if you’re using it, you’re objectively an idiot.

That aside, there is something interesting about this hoax survey story. For those that haven’t heard of it, last month the media was all over this story, and not just the usual suspects. The short version is that AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Company published a press release claiming that after surveying 101,326 people for their IQ and broswer of choice, and mapping this into a good solid graph, they were able to establish that internet explorer users had a ludicrously low IQ, around the 80 mark.

“The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser,” AptiQuant concluded. “From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”

Under an approximately common model, an IQ of 70-80 would be termed ‘borderline deficient’, and anything below 70 being ‘Definite feeble-mindedness’, so it was a pretty staggering correlation if true. Staggering enough to catch the eye of the BBC, CNN, the Daily Fail, the Telegraph and pretty much everywhere else (though many have deleted the initial news story now, annoyingly). At the time, I saw it (I obviously have a google alert to tell me when a new survey story appears, particularly one that’s in the Daily Mail), and I thought ‘huh, that’s clearly PR for this company AptiQuant’ and left it there. I never smelled a hoax, I just didn’t see it worth looking into any further. More on that in a moment.

However, it turns out it was a hoax after all, and soon after some digging work by the BBC uncovered the reality behind the story, newspapers left right and centre updated their coverage to reveal the massive hoax, how everyone had been had and how it was all the fault of one wag who made up the story. Again, more on THAT in a moment too.

The wag in question was one Tarandeep Gill, a web developer pissed off at having to keep supporting ie6 when it’s an old and useless browser, and figuring the story would be a fun way to shame people into upgrading and generally make them aware of the fact that ie6 should be phased out.

What I find particularly interesting is that at the same time that Tarandeep’s quote ‘elaborate hoax’ was being picked apart in the media, detailing how he fooled them and how his con trick was undone by good old-fashioned journalism, the following stories were in the newspaper:

From the Daily Mail:

It has always been considered rude to ask a lady her age. But it seems it’s also a step too far to inquire of her shoe size.

Women are becoming increasingly touchy about the length of their feet as average sizes go up.

Many are embarrassed because they think having large feet is masculine.

The result, according to a study, is that half of women fib to their friends and partners about the size of their shoes.

And 82 per cent of those with size eight or nine feet say their large footprint makes them feel particularly ashamed.

Debenhams, which carried out the research, said soaring demand for size nine shoes had prompted it to increase stocks of larger sizes by 80 per cent.

So, women are ashamed and embarrassed about their big feet, says store advertising a change in its larger-sized-shoe policy.

From the Guardian:

A culture of celebrity and television shows such as Big Brother and The Apprentice have impaired the confidence of a generation of British youngsters, according to a survey of 16- to 24-year-olds.

The research, overseen by academics from Teesside University, found that 82% of British youngsters said the UK’s celebrity culture had created “unachievable role models” which were damaging to their self-esteem.

Teesside youth and communities expert Professor Tony Chapman said the representative sample of 1,500 young adults was part of a long-term study into youth attitudes undertaken by O2, the mobile phone company, looking at the generation who entered adulthood and the job market during the downturn.

O2, of course, being the mobile phone providers who were the primary sponsor of Big Brother for the time it was on Channel 4.

From the Telegraph:

A fifth of married couples go a full week without kissing – with older people among the least romantic.

Even when couples do kiss it is usually a quick affair lasting no more than five seconds, according to a survey.

But younger sweethearts are more romantic with those aged between 18 and 24 saying they lock lips with a partner 11 times a week on average.

The findings have been released to launch a campaign by the British Heart Foundation to teach lifesaving skills such as the kiss of life to school children as part of the national curriculum.

And from the Mail again:

The magical combination of 6-7-8 has been hailed by psychologists as the happiest time of the year.

The sixth day at 7pm in the eighth month – or 7pm on August 6 – is the day people feel most content because of the high temperatures, school holidays and prospect of a summer break.

A study by loyalty scheme Nectar revealed that we smile most between 7pm and 8pm each day, are at our cheeriest on Saturdays and love August more than any other month.

And from the Express:

THE average family kitchen is the setting for 384 arguments, 192 heart-to-hearts, 26,280 meals – and seven sex romps, a study revealed yesterday.

Researchers found the typical family lives in a house for eight years during which time their kitchen sees the entire spectrum of life.

It will play host to 16 burned dinners, 1,824 kisses and six life-changing decisions. And it will be redecorated and refurbished twice.

The study also revealed 13 per cent of couples decide to get married after a kitchen discussion while 15 per cent settle for a divorce.

The survey of 3,000 people was commissioned by Siemens Home Appliances to mark the launch of a fridge freezer.

And from the Express:

RESEARCHERS have uncovered the top 20 tricks women use to make themselves feel seductive.

And it seems the oldest methods are the best – including lipstick with matching nail varnish and an alluring hint of cleavage.

Interestingly, a simple spray of favourite perfume comes top of the list for helping women feel sexy. A new hairdo and a happy smile also rank highly.

Women also hailed settling down into a warm bath, showing off their well-maintained legs and wearing a push-up bra as quick fixes for achieving the “it” factor.

The report also revealed that the average woman only feels truly irresistible once a week – usually on a Saturday night.

Sara Wolverson of Superdrug, which commissioned the research, said: “This poll clearly indicates that while women know exactly what they have to do in order to feel sexy, they obviously aren’t doing it often enough.

These are all from around the same week as the AptiQuant hoax, and trust me I could go on. And this is what I think is particularly interesting about the IQ hoax story – it’s an interesting definition of the word ‘hoax’. The hoaxer, Gill, identified a goal – to get the media to cover the crapness of ie6, invented some realistic-sounding findings – IE6 users are dumb, and presented the press release-friendly story as if true. And this was the ‘elaborate’ hoax the media congratulated themselves on seeing through and giggled about having been ‘had’ by.

Whereas we’ve seen a kitchen appliance brand, reward card scheme, cosmetics shop or whatever identify a goal – getting their name in the press, generating some realistic-sounding findings (often through the biased survey tactics and dodgy research methods I’ve gone over many times), and then presenting a press-release-friendly story as if it’s true… and that’s the news. Nobody says a word. It gets printed as if it wasn’t a carbon fucking copy of the method used by Gill.

It’s kinda like calling out a Bigfoot film as a hoax, because it was faked by an amateur rather than faked by a Bigfoot-film-faking professional. The fact is, it wasn’t so elaborate a hoax. The real elaborate hoax is the dodgy marketing researchers and public relation firms who not only successfully push the products that form their goals AND make a living out of this kind of thing, but even make the journalists who print their work completely oblivious to the fact that in so many cases, there’s almost nothing to tell them from the hoaxers they congratulate themselves in over-turning.

Sometimes, that’s not too difficult – it turns out the world is in fact facing genuine climate change, and the US government were not involved in 9/11, and that dog’s CAN look up.

Still, there was one that caught me out for a little while, when a colleague of mine casually mentioned avoiding cheese before bed, so as to avoid getting nightmares. This is something that’s a real piece of received wisdom here in the UK – I’m not sure of it elsewhere in the world – but it’s something most people would have heard of. It’s the kind of thing your mum says to you, like the thing about not feeling the benefit of your coat if you wear it indoors. It’s also the kinda thing Mythbusters would look at, although it would represent a bit of a low-fi myth to bust, a bit like proving that once you pop you can actually stop if you like.

Now, I was fairly certain that it would be unlikely, as I couldn’t imagine a mechanism, but that doesn’t mean as such that it’s untrue, and I’m often wrong – probably more often than not. No, wait, that’s not right. See, I’m at it again. So I thought I’d check it out. First stop, Google, which picked up a few Daily Mail articles and the BBC Focus Magazine, the latter of which suggested:

“Any heavy meal before bed can make you spend more time in REM sleep and therefore dream more. But there is no evidence to suggest that cheese is particularly effective at causing dreams, good or bad.”

This seemed decent information, but a little obvious. How would a folk myth arise when the answer was so simple? I wasn’t sure, so I thought I’d look into it a little more. Which brought me to Wikipedia’s entry for Cheese:

Effect on sleep
A study by the British Cheese Board in 2005 to determine the effect of cheese upon sleep and dreaming discovered that, contrary to the idea that cheese commonly causes nightmares, the effect of cheese upon sleep was positive.

The majority of the two hundred people tested over a fortnight claimed beneficial results from consuming cheeses before going to bed, the cheese promoting good sleep. Six cheeses were tested and the findings were that the dreams produced were specific to the type of cheese.

Although the apparent effects were in some cases described as colorful and vivid, or cryptic, none of the cheeses tested were found to induce nightmares. However, the six cheeses were all British. The results might be entirely different if a wider range of cheeses were tested.[27] Cheese contains tryptophan, an amino acid that has been found to relieve stress and induce sleep.[28]

This struck me as rather interesting, as it sounded like a bit of a PR stunt to me, too – not least because, now, if you Google cheese and nightmares you find references to this study by the British Cheese Board EVERYWHERE. Really. It’s a successful bit of PR, that’s for sure. One of the places I found references to it was on the British Cheese Board website from September 2005, unsurprisingly, titled:

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Cheese

Lovely bit of punning there, I’m sure you’ll agree. The Daily Mail agreed, as they kept this as the title of their news article based entirely on this press release.

The age old myth that cheese gives you nightmares has finally been laid to rest this week following the release of a new study carried out by the British Cheese Board.

The in-depth Cheese & Dreams study, a first of its kind, reveals that eating cheese before bed will not only aid a good night’s sleep but different cheeses will in fact cause different types of dreams.

Of the 200 volunteers who participated in the week-long study, 72% slept well every night, 67% remembered their dreams and none recorded experiencing nightmares after eating a 20g piece of cheese half an hour before going to sleep.

So, it appears in this study at least, cheese doesn’t give you nightmares. But they go further than that:

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

Commenting on the study, Neil Stanley, PhD Director of Sleep Research HPRU Medical Research Centre at the University of Surrey says: “The Cheese and Dreams study conducted by the British Cheese Board is the first study of its kind and suggests that eating cheese before you go to bed may actually aid a good night’s sleep.

What is particularly interesting is the reported effect different types of British cheese have on influencing the content of dreams. It seems that selecting the type of cheese you eat before bedtime may help determine the very nature of often colourful and vivid cheese induced dreams”

There’s also a note on the history of the myth, which proved useful:

The origins of the cheese gives you nightmares’ myth are inconclusive. Some believe that it may have originated from Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, who blamed “a crumb of cheese” on his night-time visitations; others people believe that its origins may lie with a Fifties’ health scare when cheese was found to be problematic for people taking a certain anti-depressant.

This last point about the anti-depressants seems to be genuine – as attested by Chris Smith of the hugely-popular and iTunes-chart-ruling Naked Scientists, also from 2005:

“Famously, when some of the first antidepressants were invented they worked by blocking the breakdown of monoamine / indolamine nerve transmitters including dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin by inhibiting an enzyme called MAO (monoamine oxidase). But when patients on these drugs ate cheese it could provoke periods of life-threateningly high blood pressure and a racing heart rate, through the uncontrolled release of adrenaline as there was no MAO to breakdown the tyramine in the diet.”

So, looks to be a genuine potential source of the myth, then. But, going back to the press release the don’t stop with just dispelling the myth, annoyingly:

“Now that our Cheese & Dreams study has finally debunked the myth that cheese gives you nightmares we hope that people will think more positively about eating cheese before bed,” says Nigel White, British Cheese Board secretary. “In fact, our results show that eating different types of British cheese can make your dreams more interesting so sleep could now become a whole new adventure.”

Hmm. Sounds bullshitty to me. Let’s take a look at the study:

The British Cheese Board’s Cheese & Dreams study was undertaken during a seven day period with 200 participants (100 male and 100 female). Six different types of British cheese were given to an equal number of participants. The cheeses included: Stilton, Cheddar, Red Leicester, British Brie, Lancashire and Cheshire.

During one week, each participant ate a 20g piece of cheese 30 minutes before going to sleep and recorded the type of sleep and dreams that they experienced.

So we have a pretty poorly-controlled study here, then – subjective self-reported outcomes, no placebo wing, etc. The results are therefore pretty dubious, too – I’ll read you them, and you can see if you can spot what’s potentially going on here:

• Red Leicester proved to be brilliant for helping participants to get a good night’s sleep – one quarter slept well every single night of the study, and 83% of all nights under the influence of Red Leicester were good sleep experiences. As for dreams, Red Leicester is the cheese to choose if you are feeling nostalgic about your past – over 60% of participants eating this cheese revisited their schooldays, or long-lost childhood friends, or previous family homes and hometowns.
• Stilton-eating participants enjoyed their sleep too – over two thirds had good sleep experiences during five out of the seven nights. However, if you want some vivid or crazy dreams, the King of British cheeses is the one for you – particularly if you are female. While 75% of men in this category experienced odd and vivid dreams, a massive 85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most bizarre dreams of the whole study – although none were described as bad experiences. Highlights included talking soft toys, lifts that move sideways, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.
• British Brie caused all participants to sleep very well, but dreams varied between males and females; women tended to experience very nice dreams, such as Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in their kitchens, or relaxing on a sunny beach. By contrast, the men who ate Brie experienced rather odd, obscure dreams, such as driving against a battleship, or having a drunken conversation with a dog.
• If you are thinking of changing career, or just suspect there could be a slightly more ideal job out there, snack on a lump of creamy Lancashire before bed and you might get some guidance; two thirds of all Lancashire participants had a dream about work – but only 30% of these involved the participants’ real-life occupations. One ambitious dreamer saw herself as a successful Prime Minister – one of her popular reforms involved teaching useful finance in schools, including how to choose the right mortgage.
• Cheddar-eating participants tended to dream of celebrities, ranging from the participant’s family sitting in a pub with Jordan, to a Glaswegian old firm football match with Gazza and Ally McCoist. Ashley from Coronation Street also featured, as did the cast of Emmerdale – and one lucky girl helped to form a human pyramid under the supervision of Johnny Depp.
• However, if you just want a good night’s sleep without too many dreams, then choose lovely crumbly Cheshire . In this category, over half of all nights were dreamless, while participants stated that 76% of all Cheshire-induced sleeps were either “quite good” or “very good”.

Essentially, there’s no baseline – how often do people dream of celebrities, of work, of old places they knew, without eating cheese? Without a general read on their dreams as standard, you’re data-mining. What if the person dreamt of a celebrity in their old hometown – would that go down to Red Leceister or Cheddar? And Brie made women dream of Jamie Oliver, apparently – is he not a celebrity? This is, essentially, like a dairy form of astrology.

For a final say, I thought I’d go to the source – so I emailed the Cheese Board to get their data. After being popped from pillar to post, I was passed to Dr Neil Stanley – the sleep expert who was quoted in the press release. Having looked him up, he looked legit, so I asked him more about the data.

“Thanks for your email, a few years ago I was asked to provide a quote on the cheese and dreams study you mention however I was not involved in the study in any way and was only given headline results, so unfortunately I don’t have anything to give you.”

Fucking PR for you, there. I told him I understood, but would be interested in his feel for the findings:

“I will try to summarise the issue but essentially I am joining dots to make an explanation, any explanation!, of the cheese and sleep story.

As you know cheese contains an amino acid called tryptophan, (also found in turkey, milk, eggs, nuts, chicken, fish, soy and tofu), which is a precursor for serotonin which is implicated in helping you get to sleep. Cheese also contains tyramine (also found in other foods) which is a precursor for noradrenalin; noradrenalin has been implicated in an increase in sympathetic nervous system activity during sleep which could potentially cause sleep disturbance. The old monoamine theory of sleep says that serotonin and noradrenalin modulate various stages of sleep, although we now know that it is vastly more complex than that. You only remember a dream if you wake up during it, so anything that disturbs sleep will potentially cause you to remember more dreams.

An alternative and just as plausible explanation is that cheese is very high in fat and in burning off those calories overnight causes sleep disturbance, again other food are also high in fat so no explanation accounts for the supposed particular action of cheese on sleep and dreams.

There is no hypothesis about how cheese in particular, and not the other foods, affects the content of dreams but of course the more dreams you remember the more likely you are to have an ‘interesting’ dream.”

So, that’s that then. Lesson of this story – being a skeptic in the office is a time-consuming and exhausting affair. But at least I’ve learnt that a cheese sarnie before bed will help me sleep the exhaustion off. That said, I wonder if white bread makes you sleepwalk… back to Dr Google I go…

by Jon Ronson

When: Thursday, November 17th, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

When the journalist Jon Ronson is contacted by a leading neurologist who has recently received a cryptically puzzling book in the mail he is challenged to solve the mystery behind it. As he searches for answers, Jon soon finds himself, unexpectedly, on an utterly compelling and often unbelievable adventure into the world of madness. Jon meets a Broadmoor inmate who swears he faked a mental disorder to get a lighter sentence but is now stuck there, with nobody believing he’s sane. He meets some of the people who catalogue mental illness, and those who vehemently oppose them. He meets the influential psychologist who developed the industry standard Psychopath Test and who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are in fact psychopaths. Jon learns from him how to ferret out these high-flying psychopaths and, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, heads into the corridors of power.

Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of two bestsellers: “Them: Adventures with Extremists” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, and two collections, “Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness” and” What I Do: More True Tales”.

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Lori Neill is a former occupational nurse in Colorado Springs, who recently resigned from her job. She is also, she believes, psychic. And she believes those two facts are related, and I’m inclined to agree, though doubtlessly for very different reasons.

Lori’s story is that her psychic abilities made her supervisors uncomfortable, and that on the occasion she had told her supervisor he might be suffering from a life-threatening illness, and that he should seek medical help, he was so angered that he made up allegations about her, to force her out of work.

Officials at the hospital and city, however, tell a different story. They have accused Lori of accessing the medical records of around 2,500 patients. Given that Lori worked not for the hospital but for the city, they argue she had no medical need to look at those records. Especially given that most of the accessing happened outside of work hours. Their implication is that Lori is not actually psychic, or able to spiritually intuit the illnesses of people by tuning into the other side (where diagnosticians are ten a penny, I’d presume). They claim instead that the reason she was able to accurately tell people what ailments had befallen them, was that she’d read their medical records.

Of course, Lori denies this entirely, stating that she did not check medical records in order to fake psychic ability. Not at all. The reason she accessed the encrypted and protected database was to check the phone number of a friend of hers, whose number she’d misplaced, which she claims is routine practice. Oh, and to check her supervisor’s record, so as to see if he’d sought the help she’d recommended for the life-threatening condition she definitely knew about before she checked a record of any life-threatening conditions he might have. Presumable the other 2498 records she viewed were in error. Maybe her cat sat on her keyboard at an inopportune time.

So which is it – a paranoid and creeped-out hospital supervisor pressurising a worker caught innocently checking a phone number in 2500 private medical records she had no right to view, or a phony psychic caught in the act of hot reading for having the balls to hot-read her boss’s records? Without further evidence, or the ability to speak to Lori, it’s impossible to tell. But Neill smells a rat. Quoting the Colorado Gazette:

Niell, who said she has had three near-death experiences, said she was often able to get a psychic reading from people she was around. Once, she said, she was recognized by the city after correctly warning a patient he was close to a heart attack and advised him to seek immediate treatment.

“The city gave me a plaque for life-saving intervention,” she said. “They liked it when it worked for them but didn’t like it when I made them uncomfortable.”

Personally, it seems a lot more likely to me that the ‘personal reasons’ she’d been accessing 2500 patients’ information, and the fact that she admits she’d been writing a book about her psychic skills – this all would suggest that she’s a hot reading psychic way more than an innocent. Gather enough testimonies and accounts of correct predictions of past illnesses (remembered from having actually read an account of the past illness), and you’re more than on the way to becoming psychic. That’s not to be too harsh on Lori – perhaps she believed in her ability, perhaps from the one time she did correctly diagnose a potential problem, earning her a plaque. I’ve little surprise that an occupational nurse might be able to notice symptoms of a pending heart attack – or even get dumb lucky in predicting one, once. I certainly don’t need to leap to psychic powers to explain it, and nor should anyone else.

The article continues:

She suspects the city made her case public because officials are worried about information she has from a deceased city employee who has been speaking to her from beyond the grave.

“It’s a power play,” she said. “They are showing me how strong they are. I know for a fact that they are pushing me because there is a dead city employee with important information who I have access to.”

She would not elaborate on the name of the dead employee or the type of information she had.

As for the conspiracy angle – if she does have something to go on, why make it public that she has something and not say what it is, at this point? It’s a classic diversionary tactic, muddying waters to hide the fact she got caught with her hand in the database.

One thing this whole affair did make me think, though – if there actually WERE psychics, how would we cope with things like doctor patient confidentiality, information privacy and the like? At a time when listening to people’s voicemails is bringing down major newspapers, it does make me wonder why, if we’re really to believe that people are capable of tuning in to people’s thoughts for real, there aren’t more psychics either a) in jail for invasion of privacy, or b) working for News International.

by John Walliss
When: Thursday, October 20th, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

On 21st May 2011 the end of the world should have begun. This prophecy, from evangelical Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping, however, did not come to pass. Christians all over the world were not raptured, the Tribulation period did not begin, and Camping, who has subsequently suffered a stroke, and his followers are having to come to terms with the apparent failure, or at least delay, of the prophesied events to occur.

Camping however, is not unique in religious history. Numerous other prophets and religious leaders have made claims that the world will end on a specific date with events subsequently proving them wrong.

John will examine the phenomenon of prophetic failure, drawing on the wealth of literature that we have developed in the social sciences over the last 60 or so years. In doing so he will hope to answer such questions as what happens when prophecy fails and does prophecy ever really fail?

John Walliss is the senior lecturer in the sociology of religion and Director of the Centre for Millennialism Studies within the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University..

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 by Stuart Ritchie

When: Thursday, September 15th, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

Is pornography turning us all into sex offenders? What effect does it have on societal attitudes towards women? Is porn taking over the internet? If certain recent books – such as ‘Pornland’ by Professor Gail Dines – are to be believed, pornography is having all these effects and more, and is a hugely detrimental force in our society.

But what does the best scientific evidence say? Stuart Ritchie, a PhD Psychology student at The University of Edinburgh, takes a skeptical look at the arguments for and against pornography.

NOTE: This is a replacement talk for “How to be a Psychic Con-man” by Ash Pryce, which has been postponed until further notice.

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