Atlanta Skeptics in the Pub

From the archive: 1992 Georgia Skeptics Conference. James McGaha - On UFOs

From the archive: 1992 Georgia Skeptics Conference. Keith Parsons - On Critical Thinking

From the archive: 1992 Georgia Skeptics Conference. Robert Baker - His talk on Hypnosis, and Dr. George Gannaway's Hypnosis experiment.

We will discuss how a misunderstanding of statistics can lead to very unskeptical thinking.

Humans are inherently bad at judging risk and the probability of events. This can lead to belief in the supernatural, psychics, and 'fate'.

Even scientists fall foul to bad statistics, and a basic understanding of how statistics work can help weed out the good studies from the bad.

We'll be keeping this very light, 'statistics minus the numbers' :) There will be fun demonstrations of bad statistics in action, and we'll outline some basic concepts and ideas to arm you against the next person who claims that they must be psychic because they can predict who is calling when the phone rings.

Mark W. Gura: The Three Possibilities: A System for Classifying Religions and Philosophies

Join the Atlanta Skeptics for the 2013 Atlanta Skepticamp May 3-4, 2013 in Atlanta, GA.

For more information and to sign up, please visit http://www.atlantaskeptics.com/skepticamp

We bring you not one, not two, but three Atlanta podcasters, all smashed up into one big pot of simmering live skepticism. For one night only, they have the power. There may be tears but it will be a fun ride!

Derek Colanduno co-hosts Skepticality, one of the longest running skeptical podcast.

Monster Talk's Blake Smith regales listeners with stories of things that go bump in the night.

John Snider of American Freethought fame, encourages us to think for ourselves.

ER physician Angie Mattke discusses the claims alternative medicine.

We will delve deeper into life of one of the founders of the modern skeptics movement, Martin Gardner.

American man of letters and numbers -- and logic and magic and patterns and puzzles -- Martin Gardner (1914-2010) wrote about 100 books, starting with "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" sixty years ago. That led to his playing a founding role in CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), and the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He was most well-known for his book The Annotated Alice (in Wonderland), the 300 columns he wrote for Scientific American, mostly on recreational mathematics, and the huge body of magic he created. We'll survey his legacy and touch on his Atlanta connections. Follow @WWMGT on Twitter to find out What Would Martin Gardner Tweet?

"Card Colm" Mulcahy (@CardColm) teaches mathematics at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. He knew Gardner for the last decade of his life. He blogs at Huffington Post, Aperiodical and MAA. He's the author of the upcoming book Mathematical Card Magic (AK Peters).

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We have had quite a few new people join up in recent months, as such we are going to dust off the old introduction to skepticism session. Find out what skepticism is all about, the various groups, the lingo we use, and about our goals. We will also be experimenting with what we hope will become a couple of semi-regular segments. Lastly we will also be wrapping up any DragonCon Skeptrack open items and showing video of some key sessions for those of you that missed them.

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Released and distributed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 United States license

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

You are free to:

Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Remix - to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution - You must attribute the work (but not in any way that suggests that the Atlanta Skeptics, the Speaker(s) nor AbruptMedia, LLC endorses you or your use of the work) to the Atlanta Skeptics (http://www.AtlantaSkeptics.com/), the Speaker(s) and AbruptMedia, LLC (http://www.AbruptMedia.com).

Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.