SkeptiCamp Phoenix today

Today is the big day for SkeptiCamp Phoenix, starting at about 12:30 p.m. this afternoon.

Magic Tony, one of our presenters, will be live-blogging the event at his blog, and there may also be twittering at #skepticamp. No live video this time, but there will likely be video of at least some talks put online after the event, along with photos, presentations, and recaps.

I received the t-shirts last night (the back of which is shown in the photo) and the official SkeptiCamp 2009 banner earlier in the week, and I've got boxes of Skeptic magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, and some books for distribution to participants. Thanks to the generous contributions of our sponsors, the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the James Randi Educational Foundation, who provided the materials and funds for the t-shirts (which will also defray a portion of our dinner tonight after the event at Tempe's Rula BulaBoulders on Broadway).

It looks like we'll have about twenty people physically present at the event, and twelve or thirteen presentations, some 30-minute presentations and some 10-minute presentations. The current list of presentations:

Tony Barnhart, Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic
Abraham Heward, What's the difference between skepticism and denial? (led discussion)
David Jackemeyer, Henry Hazlitt's Thinking as Science
Don Lacey, Words Important to Skepticism (PowerPoint 2007)
Jim Lippard, Positive Side-effects of Misinformation (SlideShare)
John Lynch, Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design (SlideShare)
Shannon Rankin, Skepticism for Dummies
David Weston, Creating Skeptical Happiness (PowerPoint)
Jack Ray, Skeptical Dating
Mike Stackpole, Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism
Charlie Cavanaugh Toft, Teaching Critical Thinking
Xarold Trejo, Why I am a Skeptic

SkeptiCamp Phoenix will be the first live-blogged SkeptiCamp event, and this is also the first day on which there will be two SkeptiCamp events in the same day--the other one going on today is SkeptiCamp Vancouver, which is occurring this afternoon at Langara College, with the sponsorship of the BC Skeptics.

UPDATE (April 2, 2009): Don Lacey of the Skeptics of Tucson, who participated in SkeptiCamp Phoenix, offers his thoughts at the James Randi Educational Foundation's Swift blog. ScienceBlogger and SkeptiCamp Phoenix participant John Lynch gives a recap at his blog.

Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith, in Spanish

Dan Barker's book, Losing Faith in Faith, has been translated into Spanish and is available as a free PDF download, Perder la fe en la fe.

Corrupt drug cops in Philadelphia

From the Philadelphia Daily News:

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop.

Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam.

The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties.

“I so scared,” said Eunice Nam, 56. “We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants.”

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail.

The Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.

The Nams’ story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in South Philadelphia.

Via The Agitator. Officer Cujdik has other issues.

Immigration and jobs

Despite the common concern that immigrants to the U.S. take jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens, immigrants actually create jobs and promote innovation. Two recent articles in The Economist look at this topic. In the March 7, 2009 issue, a study by Harvard economist William Kerr and University of Michigan economist William Lincoln looked at how patent production changes in response to changes in the number of H-1B visa holders, immigrants with technical skills. When the number of H-1B visas was increased by 10%, total patenting increased by 2%, caused mostly by patent activity by immigrants. However, rather than reducing the number of patents by the native population, those also increased.

In the March 14, 2009 issue's special report on entrepreneurship, it's noted that H-1B visas are capped at 85,000/year, and a maximum of 10,000 from any one country, increasing the wait for large countries such as India and China, where the wait time is about six years. There are over one million people waiting. This issue also notes that about half of Silicon Valley's startups are founded by immigrants, and about 25% of all U.S. science and technology startups have a CEO or CTO who is an immigrant, and these companies employ 450,000 people and generate $52 billion in annual revenue. A quarter of U.S. patent applications in 2006 name foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors.

Physical spam

On our dog walk this evening, we found that two neighborhoods to the south of us have been targeted by a new sort of marketing technique--in each yard was a bag containing a few rocks and a business card, apparently dropped by someone driving by who was too lazy to deliver them to the front door. In one neighborhood, these were like the ones pictured, in a ziploc bag with a card advertising a landscaping service. In another neighborhood, they were in twist-tied baggies with a piece of paper advertising a cleaning service.

This doesn't seem to me like a very effective method of advertising. The door hanger flyers are annoying already, but these are worse--it's like tossing trash into people's yards.

Some interesting technology

The March 7th, 2009 issue of The Economist Technical Quarterly has some items of interest:

Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California is using balloons as solar energy collectors.

Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found a way to turn coffee grounds into biodiesel.

David Whitten of the University of New Mexico and Kirk Schanze of the University of Florida have built "micro-sized 'roach motels'" for capturing bacteria in hospitals and on the surfaces of ships.

Nicholas Kotov and his team at the University of Michigan have come up with a way to coat cotton threads with carbon nanotubes which can be used to carry electricity, and to add an additional material that reacts with human serum albumin, in order to detect bleeding, which might be used by the military in monitoring soldiers.

The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal

Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001, and Glenn Greenwald discusses the evidence that he says shows it has been "an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."

Answers in Genesis censorship turns old-earther into young-earther

Commenter Tim H pointed me to a post at Tim Martin's Beyond Creation Science blog about another Answers in Genesis controversy. Old-earth creationist Charles Spurgeon delivered a June 17, 1855 sermon (four years before Darwin published Origin of Species) in which he stated that the earth had to be "many millions of years" old. When Answers in Genesis published that sermon on their website, they omitted that sentence, "We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be-certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam."

After Martin pointed out the omission, Answers in Genesis inserted a footnote containing the omitted sentence, stating that this footnote was inadvertently omitted from their publication of the sermon. But they made no apologies for removing the sentence in question from its proper context and relegating it to a footnote.

UPDATE: AiG did more than just remove that sentence--they revised language throughout the sermon, which in some other areas also changed the intended meaning to bring it in line with young-earth creationist dogma.

The U.S. Nazi dirty bomb plot

Remember how the press was all over the story of the 29-year-old millionaire white supremacist and fan of Adolf Hitler in Maine who was building a dirty bomb that he planned to set off at Obama's inauguration, but it didn't happen because his wife shot and killed him?

Me neither, but James G. Cummings of Belfast, Maine, had (quoting Wikileaks) "four lots of one gallon containers of bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium (also radioactive), lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium (radiation booster), boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon" which he somehow planned to set off at the inauguration. Personally, I don't think that volume of material could have been easily smuggled in anywhere near the inauguration activities without raising suspicion.

Why no press coverage of this story, apart from the Bangor Daily News?

Wikileaks has a summary; Wonkette has summarized that; the Washington D.C. Regional Threat and Analysis Center report (PDF) is here.

Pat Robertson on Christians studying the Koran

From the J-Walk blog:

Pat Robertson answers a question from a "pastor of a ministry to international college students" who asks whether his ministry leaders should be permitted to study the Koran in order to understand Islam, which he thinks is a bad idea since "there are plenty of Christian resources out there to get information on other religions."

Robertson's reply:

Kelly, it won't be wrong if somebody studies Islam, but they need guided study, because somebody needs to go along and point out the incredible inconsistencies in that book. And if you have a guided study of the Koran and see how much in there is just repetitious, how much comes out of the Old Testament and the New Testament, how much is just plagiarism from the Bible, etc.?.

If you will go through it with them, I think it would be a very helpful exercise. But I doubt very seriously by reading the Koran they're going to get converted to Islam. I wouldn't worry about it. But I think they need to see it. They need to see what is in there. Many people who are Muslim don't know what the Koran says. And when you begin to tell them, they say, "Well, I don't believe that." And you say, "Well, it's in your sacred book. It's supposed to be holy words." So it won't hurt, but guided study.

Blogger John Walkenbach responds: "Now, turn that answer around a pretend it's in response to a Muslim asking if he should study the Bible. It still works!"

Indeed, with a few small changes. (Hat tip to Dave Palmer at the SKEPTIC list for the pointer to Robertson's Q&A.)