Who gets phished and why?

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First, just to ensure we are all on the same page here, the word “phishing” is where some scam artist sends you an email that claims to be from a trustworthy entity such as your bank or a well recognized entity such as Amazon or eBay and manages to trick you into giving them your password or even your credit card number. For example, it might be an email that perhaps claims your account has expired and you need to enter a new password, so you clink on a link that takes you to a site that looks exactly like you bank’s … but it not … and so you are tricked into entering your password, thus giving them full access.

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New branches on the tree of life

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Now this is simply fascinating to me, and hopefully to you as well. Venter, Eisen and colleagues report in the journal Public Library of Science One that they have analysed marine DNA and discovered genes that look quite different from any seen before. To clarify, the tree of life, as we know it was basically … Read more

Venter vs Joyce

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Apparently US geneticist Craig Venter is being slapped down (legally) by the estate of James Joyce!!! To clarify, thats the very dead James Joyce, the Irish Writer. So what the heck did Venter do to offend the dead? Easy, he created new life, and then stamped the DNA with a quote from Joyce’s semi-autobiographical 1916 … Read more

The 2011 Pigasus Awards

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Every year, since 1997, The JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) has published the Pigasus Awards, and of course this year is no exception.

So what is this all about? Well, its about exposing the frauds and con-men out there, It was originally called the Uri Award, after Uri Geller, and was first announced in the appendix of Randi’s book Flim-Flam!. The 1982 book listed the awards “recipients” in 1979, 1980 and 1981.When describing it there, Randi writes…

“I am personally responsible for the nomination of the candidates. The sealed envelopes are read by me, while blindfolded, at the official announcement ceremony on April 1. Any baseless claims are rationalized in approved parapsychological fashion, and the results will be published immediately without being checked in any way. Winners are notified telepathically and are allowed to predict their victory in advance.”

So then, are you curious to know who this years collection charlatans and swindlers are? OK, here is the list

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How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously – AC Grayling

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The philosopher, AC Grayling, was interviewed in last Sunday’s  Guardian about his new book, “The Good Book: A Secular Bible”.  You really should read both the interview, and of course the book itself. To temp you, here is a small extract from the interview:

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The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

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Bullshit Detection – “Endorsements are just Hype”

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I started out with a posting on “Woo Words“, then moved on to “Evidence not Credentials“. Now I’m adding more thoughts that will hopefully help to enrich your Bullshit detection kit.

I do hope this one is obvious, really obvious. In fact I’d be astonished if it was not, and yet so many of us still fall for it.

When somebody famous is engaged to push a specific product we all know in our heart of hearts that its just marketing hype, so why does it still happen? Well, basically because it works. The celebrity in question gets a wad of cash for their services, so they are quite happy to do or say whatever is required, and the advertiser reaps a jump in sales.

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