Why you should support One Law For All

I'm shocked to learn that Sharia Law operates in the UK. This legal framework is essentially governed by those who interpret Islam in a similar way that some fundamental Christians use the bible to stop women speaking in public, consider homosexuality a sin that should be punished, and other morally dubious conclusions. We don't hand over legal power to such extreme Christians, so why has power been handed to their Islamic counter parts?

Before continuing to read, please be clear with the terms being used here. I'm arguing against giving power to those intent on imposing extreme theocratic values into the legal system, I am not arguing against the right to believe, have faith, and to worship. If you're unclear on the terms used please read this post.

The Sharia courts are sanctioned by the UK legal system and they consider a women's testimony to be half that of a mans. Legal decisions are made in these courts that denigrate women in ways I find not only shocking, but also depressing - I thought we had stamped out this kind of thinking in the UK. This court system only delays, and in some cases, puts a stop to equality and justice. These courts were put in place in the 80's and still operate today in the UK.

Part of the reason why women are worth half that of a man, and why they are not allowed to file directly for a divorce under Sharia Law in the UK is below (taken from the Sharia Council website):

"In many other matters, the nature of women are considered. For example, the right of divorce is vested in the hand of the man while she is allowed to ask for divorce either directly or through a Qadi (Judge). Why? Because the women are kind-hearted human beings who are governed by their emotions, a character strongly needed for bringing up the children. On the other hand, man is governed by his mind more than his emotions."

For more reasons why women are worth less than men under Sharia Law, please visit the Islamic Sharia Council's website. http://www.islamic-sharia.org/general/on-the-testimony-of-women-2.html

The One Law For All campaign wishes to put a stop to this. We should have one legal system in the UK that applies to all people, regardless of what religion they subscribe to. We are all equal and it's a disgrace that, in the UK, this is simply not true. 

Support One Law For All to put an end to such shocking injustice within the UK and across the world.

http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/

Edit: Who does the above apply to and how does it work? As a Muslim woman (or man) living in a Muslim community within the UK, you can be encouraged/pressured/required by your community to visit a Sharia Court. There are roughly 85 of them in the UK. In this court, which has official legal authority in the UK, the things above apply. The Sharia courts deal in family matters such as marriage, divorce, custody of children, etc. As a woman in these courts, your testimony is worth half that of a mans. You are not equal. You are not considered. The only genuine hope of help is to try to peruse your legal rights through a UK civil court. However, many don't make it to this stage. And for many this means you are expelled from your community and have to escape from your home, your support, and your family, to seek justice. All of this is legal in the UK. Help stop this and support One Law For All.

QEDcon: Saturday Evening

The entertainment for the Saturday evening at QEDcon was fantastic. Richard Wiseman presented an award ceremony called the Ockham Awards. A list of the awards and winners are below.

Editor's Choice Award - Mike Hutchinson from The Skeptic
Best Skeptic Video - Tim Michin's Storm
Best science video - Daniel Keogh and Luke Harris
Best skeptic blog of 2011 - Skepchick
Best Podcast - POD Delusion
Best Event/campaign/outreach - Robin Ince

The award winning videos are below.

We had stand up comedy from Robin Ince and Alun Cochrane. We also had a music performace from Sarah Angliss. And of course we had Paul Zenon with his magic and comedy.



The night continued on the dance floor and at the bar into the small hours of the morning.

Photos in the header image are from Your Funny Uncle. His photos of the QEDcon evening (and more) can be seen on his Flickr page.

QEDcon: Richard Saunders - The Delights and Dangers of Being a TV Skeptic

Richard Saunders is a film/ TV actor and a skeptic. Perhaps his most famous show is called "The One". 

We're first presented with an important message. Skeptical activism should be done and seen and heard by as many as possible.

He worked on a show called the one in 2008 & 2011. The show focused on trying to find a real-life psychic. The process to choose contestants was not very thorough, and looked for characters really. Marketing slogans said "Search for Australia's best psychic". 

The idea was to whittle the contestants down to three, and public would vote for the remaining ones. Skeptical judge was Richard Saunders. The believer judge was Stacey De Marco who self described as a witch.

Richard says the show was "Good fun". He seems to look at it warmly, but not too seriously.

When the show went to air the networks encouraged the audience to tweet about it. The producers received live feedback as the show was aired. Richard said he enjoyed watching the twitter feed. It seems to be divided into two camps, believers and skeptics. The twitter battles turned out to be more entertaining than watching the show.

The producers relied heavily on Richard to recommend test protocols. Unfortunately not everyone knows how to run tests, however, the focus was on good television and not scientific tests. Do not read too much into whether the contestants do well or badly.

He then talks about the false balance on morning TV shows etc. On one such show a peice of ghost footage was shown. He played us the Ghost footage.



I thought it was a fly crawling across the lens. The psychics said it was real. Richard said it was a moth or spider crawling across the dome of the night security camera. The show took it to a video lab who agreed with the psychic.

Being a prominent skeptic led to an interesting situation regarding power balance bands. In 2009 Richard saw a report on TV advertising a wrist band with extraordinary claims. He recognised what the power balance test was. It's an old trick that has more to do with the balance of the person and angle of pressure than anything else.

Richard soon found out a lot more about power balance. They are all over world. Marketing claimed that it will even out the force fields in your body.
Why were people convinced? Scientific words. And the demonstrations used were convincing people.

Michel Marshal "volunteered" to have the tests done on him so we could all see what Power Balance were using as a test.

The video below was played later in the talk but I've included it here as it shows the tests.



Richard set up his own video showing how to do this. He also set up a guide for students called F.A.K.E.

Future 
Amazing
Kinetic
Energy

There are 4 tests. Arm balance, back balance, tip test and flexibility. The tests are shown in the video above. They have a trick to them that can fool the person being tested into thinking things are improving.

There's also the matter of perception. Sport stars backed the products. Presumably they were also fooled by the tests & marketing. "Give a man a reputation of an early riser and he will sleep til noon." The enthusiasm of Power Balance had people convinced it was real.

Richard flew to Adelaide to meet Tom, the distributor of power balance in Australia and set up tests. The test is shown in the video above. All he had to do was find which of the six people had the real Power Balance hologram. Tom failed five out of five times.

Richard says that he thinks Tom was a true believer. He says he thinks Tom was out to help people, and was conned by the product he was selling. The reason Richard thought Tom was a true believer was that he was happy to be tested on TV. A con artist would probably shy away from TV and testing. Tom agreed to fair conditions and was puzzled when he kept failing. No ready excuses. Tom later wrote off the tests as silly TV games. Victim of the ideomotor effect?

Richard made a video on YouTube called applied kinesiology. It explained the scam.



Power Balance was told to make retraction of their claims. An official government retraction saying product doesn't work. The ACCC called the product a con, a fraud, a sham.

A company can't really come back from that kind of publicity. Power Balance were required to place a corrective ad in all publications previously advertised in and to offer a full refund to all. 20 publications had the retraction published.

Then one day the Power Balance Australia website was gone. The parent company had removed all trace of the Australia distributor.

But a class action suit was launched in the USA. The American company was forced into bankruptcy. Power Balance used Tom as the scapegoat for failure. The company Power Balance was eventually sold to a Chinese manufacturer

Lessons for skeptics:
1. Know your topic
2. Spoon feed the media
3. Keep it simple
4. In the end it may take government action

Unfortunately you can still buy variations of Power Balance all around the world. For example, Ion band. This was sold in the same chain in Australia who were selling power balance.

Richard wrote an open letter to Rebel Sport and NRG against power bands and posted this on twitter. After many people tweeting about it and complaining, the retailer decided to remove the product from sale altogether.

QEDcon: Massimo Polidoro - The Search for Superman

Massimo Polidoro has worked extensively with James Randi, is the co-founder and head of the Italian skeptics group CICAP, and is the first professor of Anomalistic Psychology in Italy at the University of Milano. He is also the author of over thirty books.

His talk is essentially about his experiences trying to find a real-life psychic, or a person with other super powers. The search for Superman, people who claim to have amazing powers like Uri Gellar, etc.

In the 1970's the general attitude was that something must be out there with regards to psychic powers and that we just need to find it. 

In recent years the question has changed into are psychic powers actually real? Massimo has never found any evidence in all his investigations. However, it's still important to search without being disrespectful.

In his experiences, Massimo Polidoro has noticed there are different types of individuals who claim to have special powers. He goes through each type for us.

Naive psychics: People who live in a world of their own, see mysterious things in everyday life. For example, "magnetic man" thought he was a human magnet as when he placed cutlery on his chest they stayed there. But once he realised what really happening (sweaty body plus gravity), the magic disappeared. The man was simply asked to bend forward and the cutlery fell. Man said he was now a non-believer.

Deluded psychics: people who have decided that they have supernatural power and nothing will shake this belief. They believe they can correctly identify cards without looking, guess what items their husband put in a box without looking, discern from a single picture if the person in the photograph is current alive or dead, etc. What they have in common is when they were asked to demonstrate the powers, they could not do what they claimed. However, as they were performing they thought they were dong alright.

These people do hot have an understanding of how to perform a test and adapt excuses to explain the negative result. They always think they are right.

Unlikely psychics: they tend to find a power that no one felt the need for. Many of these powers are shown in comic book hero forms. Madam Fatal (a guy who dresses as a granny), arm fall off guy (can grab one arm with the other, take it off his body, and beat someone with the severed arm), and of course.... bending metal with your mind.

The example in this category was the case of a girl believing that she could mummify eggs. She waved her hands over the eggs, then left the eggs for several days, and they were mummified. Why? An experiment was done where one egg was given to her to mummify, and 9 other eggs were just left without her hand waving powers. A week later, all ten eggs looked same. It turns out that if you break an egg onto a plate and leave it for a number of days, they look a little "mummified". She said that it only proves we all have these powers.

Bereaved psychics: These people have really suffered, but only by imagining they have some power connection to another reality can they cope with the grief/loss. Automatic writing, seances, etc. Any testing is fruitless and frustrating. The only position you will find yourself in is telling them that their loved one is dead, which isn't a nice position to be in.

Psychiatrist's case psychics: these people have mental issues and should be avoided. Unfortunately it's not always clear until you actually engage. For example, a friend of Massimo said he was receiving distressing signals, preventing him from doing anything, sleeping, eating, etc. His friend said that by doing some calculations he found the location of the signals. He went to the house where he thought the source of the signls was with a gun, and stayed all night. Lucky for anyone living there, no one came out.

Another example is that a man claimed that he could make the figures of a simple digital clock move. To do this he had to follow a ritual. He put on a big heavy jacket, had two scoops of honey, put on exercise bands, then he was ready to look very carefully at the clock. At this point he stretched out his arms, pointing to the clock, and shook his head up and down. Because he was moving up and down and looking at the clock, the clock appeared to move to him. The test was (obviously) over at this point. But the person being tested thought that he had passed.

Cunning psychics: Not necessarily dishonest, may have found seemingly strange things happen when they are around and feel special. Actually found these situations are pretty common, but sometimes transform into "miracles".

Frau... "differently honest" psychics: these people typically steer away from testing. One not so bright psychic tried to convince skeptics. A lady claimed to be a psychic detective found a missing girl drowned in a lake. Huge media attention. However, a year or so before this event, the paper reported that a girl last seen leaving club was thought to have slid her car from the road into the lake during a drive home. The car was known to probably be at the bottom of the lake. But this paper report was presented as a psychic vision. Volunteers dedicated weeks to searching for missing person. They found the car right where the newspaper had reported it. Psychic took credit.

Another case is when the National Geographic channel called saying a man had developed Jedi like power to knock people out. We were shown a video.



Listen to the "experts" explanation of why it didn't work. Blatant bull? What is happening is that people have the expectation to react in a certain way to the suggestion of the punch, and fall over when expected. It's a known psychological effect.

So how do you test a psychic? 
 
1. Exactly define the claim - have them write down details and conditions etc
2. Agree on shared protocol - agreed on success and failure, control of experiment
3. Have them perform a demonstration - same way would at home, sign paper say just demonstration not test.
4. Add the control - double blind or whatever might be needed
5.See what happens and wait for the excuses 

Inevitably they will come, people rarely admit they were wrong.

But why test psychics at all? Because if something really was out there it would be an amazing find. But to date it has proved to be a fruitless search.

QEDcon: Sarah Angliss - Voices of the Dead

Sarah Angliss makes robots and is a historian of sound technology. She completed a number of visual and audio demonstarions during her talk. To see the performace at the end of her talk please skip to the bottom of this post.

In 1933 Howard Flynn heard a dead woman speak in his company store room when he found a tube lying undisturbed in a box. The cylinder, covered in mildew, was the type used in an Edison Phonograph to play sound. It turned out to be the long lost voice of Florence Nightingale recorded in 1880.

In scientific American, an advert reported a device which will enable the voices of the dead to be heard. The technology was young and they didn't quite understand a use for it T this stage. Looking back at the marketing, it's now clear that they were looking for a quick fix to market the device.

An excerpt from the recording of Florence Nightingale is played for us. It says "when I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life." she had interest in the idea that her voice would survive after her.

But the "killer app" was not in recording your voice for it to survive your death, but in music.

We had a demonstration of recording something on a phonograph. A new head and wax cylinder was used to record the voices of two members of audience. This was played back and the audience members sounded very similar to Florence Nightingale.

When you hear a recording made with a phonograph, there is a strange sound and timbre. Many of the Victorian stereotypes come from these artefacts. But they most likely sounded very different from their recordings.

Believers in paranormal phenomenon used the phonograph to try and communicate with the dead. But sound recordings were also used in wonderful ways. People could travel the World and bring back recordings from the source.

We listened to a new recording. It sounded human but very odd. It turned out to be a seal named "Hoover". The seal learned the sounds of humans. He was found and looked after in swimming pool, raised by humans. Recording sounds very human. Seals are primed to imitate.

We are then introduced to the idea of teaching bird songs to sing. There was an industry of books and Recorders (musical istrument) that focused on teaching birds songs. These songs were written for birds to learn.

But is this really possible? In the 1950s a study was done but the bird didn't learn anything. But birds can learn tunes but perhaps not that complex.

Sparky Williams, the worlds most talented budgie, spoke 500 words allegedly. But was this in fact a case of ventriloquism?

The talk finishes with a live performance using a Theremin, bells, and a disembodied ventriloquist's dummy head...