The Ninjutsu of the Internet-Savvy Skeptic at #SkepTech

Last week I gave a presentation at Skep-Tech in Minneapolis. It was a first-year conference put on by the student groups from three different universities in the area. They chose to focus it on technology and skepticism – which is right up my alley. So of course I was excited to speak.

I chose to focus on how skeptics need to cultivate specialized skills and learn new tools in our battle against irrationality on the world wide web. I decided to use the concept of a ninja as my metaphor. The video has already been posted and you can watch below.

After the jump you can see the slides that I presented and a list of links to tools and websites that I mentioned in the talk.

#TAM2012 Video: Skeptic Crowdsourcing Workshop

The James Randi Educational Foundation has posted video from the workshop I hosted at The Amazing Meeting (#TAM2012) last July.  Here it is:

 

Useful links from the workshop were previously posted.

You can also watch and read my plenary address (which covers some closely related topics) here on the blog. Other posts about TAM2012 are here as well.

Thank you to Derek Colanduno of Skepticality and Shane Greenup of RBUTR, both of whom you will see here presenting sections of the workshop.

This year’s Amazing Meeting 2013 will be held July 11 – 14, 2013 in Las Vegas.

Mabus Redux: Operation Archangel Gets Dennis Markuze Arrested

On Friday, November 16, 2012 Dennis Markuze was once again arrested by the SPVM (Montreal Police) for violating the terms of his May 22 suspended sentence. It took many people many months to track him down and convince the police to arrest him. This is the story behind that.

For quite some time the most read item on this blog has been the lengthy history of a character named David Mabus (in real life a troubled man named Dennis Markuze of Montreal, Canada). It tells the story of how skeptics, atheists and science writers organized on Twitter to pressure the Montreal police department to take legal action against him, after he made repeated violent threats over many years. It took many cooperating people, several police reports, a Change.org petition, numerous phone calls and faxes and much other work to make that happen.

This post is a continuation of that story.

In recent months, skeptics and atheists started to notice a series of eerily familiar posts posted under various names including “Operation Archangel”. They once again mentioned Nostradamus, James Randi and atheism. They began on YouTube, spread to forums and blogs, and finally arrived on email and Twitter by the fall.

Those of us who followed the case closely knew that Mr. Markuze had pled guilty to eight counts of making threats on May 22. We suspected immediately that it was him again. Others were not so sure. There’s much nonsense on the Internet, and some insisted this must be a copycat or troll, perhaps trying to rile atheists with the spectre of Mr. Markuze.

This post is the story of how those posts once again led to Markuze’s arrest by the Montreal Police. As in 2011 it took quite a bit of work to make this happen. Tedious, painstaking, often thankless work.  But this is the type of work skeptic activists need to be ready to do in order to get results.

You will also learn how the Canadian court system, at least in Montreal, appears to be less than optimal when it comes to finding a positive outcome for cases like Markuze’s.

Social Media is a Gold Mine for Cold Readers

At the opening reception of TAM 2012 I had an interesting conversation about potential uses of technology by psychics, tarot readers and mediums. A recent Belgian public service announcement dramatically demonstrates what I was talking about, in a humorous way.

As most skeptics know, many of these performers use a technique known as cold reading to convince clients they have access to hidden knowledge, when in fact the client provides all the clues themselves.

But cold reading can be notoriously hard to do in practice, and sometimes leads to spectacular failures. So some psychics look for other ways to know about their clients.  This is known as warm or hot reading. Peter Popoff was famously called out for using hot reading techniques at his faith healing sessions in the 1980s by James Randi.

Hot reading can be difficult too, often you do not get advance notice of who will be at the session, so how do you research the people without tipping them off? So it can work in some situations but not all.

But what if you were a psychic and your clients were voluntarily providing information about themselves to you on the Internet, free for the taking?  Read on for how this works…

Finding the Paper Behind the News Story: Two New Tools

Skeptic bloggers have always had a a love-hate relationship with science journalism, as Steve Novella mentioned on his blog last week. On one hand, they keep us in business by making mistakes that we can blog about. But on the other hand those mistakes also damage the public perception of science.

One small aspect of this is the common failure to link to sources online. The bread and butter of science reporting is an article about the results in a new scientific paper. And yet many of these articles will never mention the title of the paper, much less hyperlink to where it could be found online. This leaves skeptical readers at a loss to dig further on the topic.

Ben Goldacre has long hammered on this issue, and even badgered BBC to change their linking policy for quite some time.  Late in 2010 he succeeded in getting BBC to change their policy and to link to sources. But the BBC hasn’t been consistent about applying this policy since, and of course they are only one website.

Two new services emerged this week to attack this particular issue. Read on for more details.

How to Monitor the Reputation of Your Website

Because we criticize the claims of others, skeptics are often attacked. In the world of Internet skepticism, these attacks often come in digital form.

I’ve often written about using Web of Trust (and tools like it) to warn unsuspecting users about dangerous misinformation websites. It is inevitable that the owners of these sites will become aware of the negative ratings we’ve given them.  But what if they decide to retaliate against skeptics?

It’s not really a question of if.  Judging from a few instances I’ll document here, some are not only fighting to repair the reputations of their own sites in Web of Trust, but some are voting against skeptic sites in Web of Trust and other online site rating services as well. (Yes, there are other services that rate websites for end users beyond WoT).

So what’s a skeptic webmaster to do?  What’s the best way to become aware of malicious activity like this as quickly as possible?  Unfortunately there’s no one silver bullet, but I can recommend a few tips and one site that will let you monitor your site’s reputation in 30+ services in one fell swoop.

Read on for more details…

Twitter reaction to my #TAM2012 speech

I’ve gotten a fantastic reaction to my presentations at The Amazing Meeting 2012 (TAM2012) this year. Part of that reaction took place on Twitter during my talks and in the weeks since.

Twitter has a notoriously short memory, its search only goes a few days back. So comments on a live event can slip into Twitter’s memory hole alarmingly quickly. They’re actually all still there, but just inaccessible unless you know the URLs.

So I thought I would capture the live comments on my TAM2012 Plenary talk: You are the Future of Skepticism on the Internet. They give you an idea of what live-tweeting on a speech is like, and show what the initial reaction to the talk was.

I’ve included both positive and negative comments, as many as I could find.  These are presented in mostly chronological order, though I’ve reordered a few comments when it helps to follow the flow of conversation. And as you’ll see, I pulled out one sub-conversation so it can be read on its own.

#TAM2012 Skeptic Crowdsourcing Workshop links

The Amazing Meeting 2012 is underway as I type this. Yesterday I led a workshop called The Future of Skepticism Online: Crowd-sourced Activism. I talked about many of the topics you’ve seen here on this blog, such as Web of Trust, Wikipedia and so on.

Slides and video from that workshop will be posted sometime soon, but for folks who were attending, here are all the links that were mentioned during the workshop.

New Tools Are Opportunities – Take Advantage Of Them

I’m still heads-down getting ready for The Amaz!ing Meeting 2012 (#TAM2012), so no time for long posts. So today just a quick thought about an awesome video that was posted yesterday.

There’s lots of astronomy fans among the skeptics. Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait was President of the JREF; Pamela Gay is speaking at TAM2012 this year.

Pamela’s co-host on AstronomyCast, Fraser Cain recently started using a new Google product called Hangouts on Air to host virtual star parties online. Google liked what he was doing so much, for their developer’s conference that is going on this week they produced this documentary about what Fraser did:

Fraser didn’t ask permission from anyone to do this. He didn’t conduct any focus groups or conduct a study. He just saw an opportunity and took it. And the result was awesome.

Skeptics, take note. Keep an eye out for new Internet technologies being introduced. Think about how you might apply that technology to skepticism. And just go do it. You might build something amazing, like Fraser did.

Get some ideas from my Year of the Skeptool post or from any technology news site.

Paying Attention Pays Off

Please accept my apologies for the sudden dearth of posts here. As you know The Amazing Meeting 2012 is fast approaching, and I must prepare for my the workshop I am presenting.  So don’t expect any 5,000 word opuses in the next four weeks, although I will definitely be posting a few things, including my annual digital guide to TAM.

Today I thought I would offer a quick object lesson on skeptical preparedness. Things in the online world move quickly. One minute you’re the new darling (think Instagram) and the next minute you are yesterday’s lunch (think Myspace).

This extends to the skeptic sphere online as well. Sites go up and sites go down, and skeptics need to be ready to react. Last week UK skeptic Keir Liddle noticed something unusual in the logs of his website. By following up on it, and mentioning it on Twitter, he allowed skeptics to get a crucial leg up on reacting to a new attack.