Mysterious Universe has a little article on a cheapskate German version of Randi's Prize, with a link to a Google Translate version of a news report on one claimant:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/09/w...per-power/
MU calls the organisation offering the prize "The Society for the Scientific Investigation of Para-Sciences", though Googe Translate interprets it as "Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasitic Sciences". Their website has the subtitle, "Die Skeptiker" and a large picture of Randi on the main page. Apparently the challenge has now grown to 50,000 Euros, and is aimed specifically at homeopathy. The probability of succeeding by chance seems to be about 2x10^-9.
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - following a conference about the Supernatural in Contemporary Society in Aberdeen Leo Ruickbie has launched a mailing list "as a place to share news and information relating to the study of the ‘supernatural’, broadly defined." The list will go under the name of "Society for the Academic Study of the Supernatural", and details can be found here:
http://ruickbie.com/index.php/2018/09/18...ernatural/
(2018-09-03, 07:57 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]Courtesy of the Anomalist, Michael Prescott has a new blog post entitled "Medley of malodorous musings":
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/micha...sings.html
It includes mention of a recent book about psi, "Our Secret Powers", by Terje Simonsen:
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Secret-Powers...895604334/
It has been enthusiastically reviewed (by Dean Radin and Stanley Krippner among others), though it sounds as though it's pitched as an overview of the field aimed at the general reader, rather than an in-depth study.
There is a less enthusiastic review by Nemo C. Morck on the SPR website:
https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/our-se...g-simonsen
Morck is critical of the accuracy of the parts of the book covering material he is familiar with, and therefore wonders about the rest of it. He concludes:
The book is chatty and easy to read, some readers will also enjoy Simonsen's humour, the book should however be regarded as more entertaining than scientific.
Joshua Cutchin has an interesting blog post in which he worries that as anomalistic phenomena become more acceptable to the mainstream, anomalists may lose control of the narrative. He's concerned that mainstream converts don't give enough credit to earlier researchers, and particularly that they don't pay adequate attention to evidence from indigenous peoples, which he sees as a manifestation of racism:
https://www.joshuacutchin.com/single-pos...p%E2%80%9D
Mostly he talks about Bigfoot, psychedelics and UFOs, but he has a parenthetical comment about parapsychology:
"(The one field that seems to avoid this problem is psi studies, whose most visible current mouthpiece, Dean Radin, continuously cites his predecessors and values the testimony of ancient folk traditions. I suspect the reason we haven’t seen a DeLonge/Pollan step in to endorse psi phenomena is because it is still taboo. To me, it’s the most believable of all these topics—it literally has some of the most ironclad scientific research behind it—but it is still the hardest to swallow for many folks. Possibly because it has the most profound implications for Materialism.)"
(2018-05-26, 08:07 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's the advance online publication of a paper that's due to appear in the journal American Psychologist (the official peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Psychological Association). It's by Etzel Cardeña, and is entitled "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review."
The abstract reads:
This article presents a comprehensive integration of current experimental evidence and theories about so-called parapsychological (psi) phenomena. Throughout history, people have reported events that seem to violate the common sense view of space and time. Some psychologists have been at the forefront of investigating these phenomena with sophisticated research protocols and theory, while others have devoted much of their careers to criticizing the field. Both stances can be explained by psychologists’ expertise on relevant processes such as perception, memory, belief, and conscious and nonconscious processes. This article clarifies the domain of psi, summarizes recent theories from physics and psychology that present psi phenomena as at least plausible, and then provides an overview of recent/updated meta-analyses. The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them. The article concludes with recommendations for further progress in the field including the use of project and data repositories, conducting multidisciplinary studies with enough power, developing further nonconscious measures of psi and falsifiable theories, analyzing the characteristics of successful sessions and participants, improving the ecological validity of studies, testing how to increase effect sizes, recruiting more researchers at least open to the possibility of psi, and situating psi phenomena within larger domains such as the study of consciousness.
http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10...amp0000236
Unfortunately the text is available only as a purchase, for $11.95. But as it's a high-profile publication, I presume we can look forward to quite a bit of discussion of its contents in the next few months.
Here it is Chris... get it while you can...
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's a short interview with Chris French:
https://www.all-about-psychology.com/chris-french.html
On the existence of psi, he says:
Results from well controlled experiments potentially could convince me that paranormal forces really do exist. But, to date, parapsychologists have failed to come up with a single paranormal phenomenon that can be reliably replicated. To me, that speaks volumes.
I typically find that, with very few exceptions, paranormal claims become less and less convincing the more one digs down into the details of the claim. But an important part of scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that new evidence may come along which proves one wrong. For that reason, we will continue to test paranormal claims as fairly as we can despite the fact that none of our previous tests has ever produced compelling evidence to support a paranormal claim.
Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's quite an interesting article on the Pyschology Today website by Steve Taylor (Leeds Beckett University), entitled "Open-Minded Science: If the evidence for psi is convincing, why isn't it more widely accepted?":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...ed-science