The amazing volume of rubbish promulgated by the commercial television networks in Australia has long ceased to amaze me, and yet I must shake my head in dismay at the credulous rubbish featured on Channel 7’s “Today, Tonight” this evening.

The item in question was a puff-piece for “leading UK Psychic Astrologer David Wells”. Wells like all of his ilk claims that he is able to communicate with the dead. He also claims that he can help people to realise their past lives. Apparently Wells’s real passion is “opening up other people’s wallets minds”.

Wells spouts the usual rot, for example “Ghosts are the very first level, they’re the very first thing you meet so when you deal with ghosts for want of another word, I prefer to call them astrals [sic] beings, that’s the first level beyond the physical.. there are many levels after that when you reach spiritual guides and masters then you’re dealing with bigger issues, you’re dealing with soul issues.” What? What are soul issues? What hierarchy exists among the dead? Who’s making this up?

Apparently the people that pay $80 to sit in the audience of his show “kind of use [his] energy to get into the past life, [he] give[s] them the technique and let[s] them go, let[s] them tell [him] what’s happening.” What type of energy is this exactly? If we do as Brian Dunning suggests and replace the word energy with “measurable work capability” this statement makes absolutely no sense. It would appear to be an easy day’s work to get people to tell you their past lives. None of this cold reading rubbish with the usual shotgun questioning technique when your audience actually tells you what they want to hear.

People believing in past lives always make me chuckle. Nobody was ever a street sweeper or any other mundane occupation and nobody existed previously in some unremarkable era. Rather they always claim that they were kings or queens or lived in some historically important (and well known) era. Perhaps Cleopatra’s Chief Eunuch.

Mr. Wells discovered his “gift” after having pnuemonia. Apparently he “had an outer body experience which wasn’t big old white lights and things it was an old lady who told [him] to go back into bed and was in fact already in bed”. So while febrile he had a hallucination.

The credulity of the producers of “Today, Tonight” and the manner in which stories such as this are presented disturbs me. Surely no program worthy of its salt would run a piece like this without asking for evidence. Where is Mr. Wells’s evidence? Where is the skeptical opinion? If, as he claims, he can use his “energy” to regress people to past lives, there must be some information that his victims clients produce that is historically verifiable and can shown to be previously unknown to them.

Sadly it is the details of where tickets to Mr.Wells’s show may be purchased at the end of the transcript that point directly to the motivation behind running this story. I can’t be certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr.Wells’s promoters had something to do with it.

Via Boing Boing.

I have noticed the above sign outside a beautician’s shop in my local shopping centre recently. Every time I have walked past the amazing claims it lists have made me raise an eyebrow. So after a few weeks of eyebrow raising I decided that I should investigate.

The text reads:

If you are living, eating, breathing…YOU need to DETOX

NO TABLETS, NO DIETS…

Detox & Re-energize the Easy way in 30 minutes with ION SPA

• Detoxify & eliminate harmful toxins.
• Boost Metabolism promoting weight loss.
• Rejuvinate cell tissues, slow aging.
• Boost energy and release endorphins.
• Relief from joint pain & enhance circulation.
• Enhance mind & body wellbeing.

An impressive list of claims no doubt. Ion Spa is easily Googled. Turns out that it is an American company selling a range of pseudo-scientific sounding foot spas for home and professional use. The IonSpa personal designed for the home is available for the very reasonable price of US$795. The IonSpa portable is US$995 and the IonSpa Professional is UU$1395. Quite an investment but if it works as claimed then surely a worthwhile one.

Let’s have a look at those claims they make. Turns out that the Ion Spa website limits its claims to the very vague – as it must due to regulations in the U.S. It refers to “positive ions” (I thought these were cations), “negative ions” and “electrolysis of water”. According to the website “the epidermis of the foot excretes many organic materials” and “when the foot’s epidermis is in contact with a soluble liquid such as water these excreted materials become soluble themselves and float off into the water.” Actually waster isn’t soluble - it is a solvent i.e. substances may be dissolved in it. In defining toxins mention is made of bee stings and botulism, but otherwise no specific toxins are mentioned other than “soaps, creams, and other products introduced to the epidermis by the person” and “any naturally released germs, bacteria, funguses” (I believe the plural is fungi) in other words things that most people have on their feet.

Apparently when the “organs responsible for ridding your body of wastes are over-stressed with environmental toxins” they delay the processing of other toxins. The makers of the IonSpa explain the mechanism of detoxification thus: “large quantities of negative hydrogen ions are released during electrolysis” these are apparently absorbed into the body via “osmosis through the epidermis of the foot” and then “act as an ultra high-powered antioxidant…helping to prevent cell and tissue damage that could lead to cellular damage and disease”. This seems to be in contradiction to the excretion of toxins model mentioned elsewhere on the site.

Leaving aside the claims on the sign, which I’ll return to shortly, let’s take a look at detox in general. According to the UK group Sense About Science detox is a word with “little or no scientific meaning” outside of drug rehabilitation. Further The Skeptics Dictionary in its newsletter examines claims about free radicals. According to the Skeptics Dictionary David Concar writing in The New Scientist states that:

Our bodies produce free radicals all the time as cells convert oxygen and food into chemical energy. Free radicals can damage DNA and cell membranes in ways that might lead to ageing. Virtually all organisms have natural antioxidants and enzymes to stop this happening. Supplement these with antioxidant vitamins or drugs that mimic the enzymes and you will slow down ageing. This is the theory that underpins much of today’s multibillion-dollar trade in vitamins and anti-ageing supplements.

The catch is that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never eliminate all the free radicals. Even if you could, it might be harmful—our bodies need a certain number of free radicals to maintain their immune defences. Besides, the body’s inbuilt defences against free radicals may be so good they’re hard to improve on….

And there are other signs that boosting defences against free radicals is not the key to eternal life. Two of the most important enzyme defenders are superoxide dismutase and catalase. Flies engineered to make more of these enzymes live at most 10 per cent longer and some even have shortened lives. When the same mutation pops up in human superoxide dismutase it leads not to a longer life but to the nerve disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. (”Forever Young,” September 22, 2001).

Further certain studies have found that antioxidents may be damaging.

All of this is beside the point, however, since there is no mechanism I could discover for “ultra high-powered antioxidants” to enter the body through the feet in any quantities to be significant. Ben Goldacre writing in his blog Bad Science tested another foot spa detox making similar claims to IonSpa. He concluded (after replicating an electrolysing spa with a car battery and rusty nails) that:

“Toxin” is classic pseudoscience terminology. Essentially, the Aqua Detox people are offering dialysis, through your feet. Urea and creatinine are probably the smallest molecules – call them “toxins” if you like – that your body gets rid of, in places like urine and sweat: if “toxins” were going to come out, anywhere, you’d expect those to come out, too. There was no urea or creatinine in the water before the Aqua Detox, and there was none in the water afterwards. Which means, I believe, that we win.

The brown sludge pictured below and on the sign? Rust and possibly some calcium carbonate already present in the water.

Since IonSpa offers no scientific evidence for their claims and based on the information above one must conclude that the claims made on the pictured sign are also not under-pinned by any real science.

According to the Trade Practices Act 1974 Section 55A ” A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is liable to mislead the public as to the nature, the characteristics, the suitability for their purpose or the quantity of any services.” I would say that the onus is on the company in question to provide some scientific evidence as to the efficacy of their product.

Have you ever had an idea that seems totally original and derived entirely from your own thinking, but actually turns out to have be quite well established when you look for information about it? This happened to me with evidence based education.

For some time now I have applied critical thought and skepticism to all facets of my life – to the point where it is automatic and I find that I have to think before I speak so that I don’t make people roll their eyes – work included. I think it was during a P.D. (professional development) session given by a speech pathologist that I first asked myself what evidence informed the concepts and activities that she was advocating. I didn’t give voice to my thoughts then but I must have carried it with me as I started to question all aspects of education practice.

In teaching there are a good number of things that we do that are based on conventional wisdom and carry the weight of tradition. Certain teaching practices it is believed work and are tried and tested. Many of these are informed by educational psychology and are based the stages of development that most children go through at a given age. An equal number seem to have no grounding in theory. Education is not inert and constantly evolves as new ideas come to the fore.

I had always assumed that these new ideas and ways of teaching were developed by academics in the education faculties of universities and based on research clearly demonstrating their effectiveness. I was mistaken. Often these new ways of doing things have been initiated by a teacher or teachers in a school, spotted by somebody else who has decided that it looks like a good idea and spread from there. Alternatively and academic might write a paper full of anecdotal evidence espousing the effectiveness of their latest idea and it is picked up by the education cognoscenti and implemented into education systems. Increasingly a third source of educational “wisdom” are those who seek to gain financially from spreading their ideas and products to as many people as possible.

Very little of what is done in schools is actaully based on any sort of scientific model. It seems logical that in order for a teaching method to be introduced or maintained that a hypothesis should be formed, experiments conducted as so its effectiveness and data collect, analysed and evaluated. Logic is often excluded in favour of opinion and belief. Not a recipe, one would have thought for success and this is evidenced in the rapid succession of new ideas that fall by the wayside of pedagogy. Look at outcomes based education, the whole language approach to teaching English and a myriad of other failed ideas.

In my research so far into evidence based education I have discovered a number of things. To some extent it does exist at a micro level. Schools collect data on the performance of their students and use this to assist their forward planning. In the case of learning areas such as maths such emperical evidence is easily collected and used. However, it is not used and cannot be used to evaluate specific strategies as these cannot be isolated in the data. Adjustments to curriculum are difficult to make and are either too small to be effective or too big, meaning that the data collected is not compatible with that which preceeded it.

Education policy is also moving toward a model of evidence based decision making. The tools used in this case are large scale standardised tests. Data is collected and poured over, but it is very difficult to link this to any large scale education policy. Policy, despite its lipservice to evidence continues to be driven by knee-jerk reactions and the popularist politics of decision makers. The top-down model of education policy formation.

Evidence based education provides an opportunity for real change at a grassroots level and bottom-up policy formation. A teacher, school, education district or education body can implement a new strategy and collect real evidence to inform further changes and refinement to their teaching strategies. By using groups of students in different contexts and creating control groups the real effectiveness of a new technique or model can be determined and its implementation evaluated. Instead of stabbing in the dark and hoping for success real success can be achieved.

Durham University in the UK has a department dedicated to the implementation of evidence based education their manifesto is interesting reading.

Google announced at their I/O developers conference a new communication tool called Wave. It is touted as how email would work if it were invented today and aims to encompassed multiple types of modern communication protocols and styles. It certainly sounds interesting and my interest was further piqued by the fact that it will be (a) open source and (b) has been developed up to now in Sydney.

Wave runs in the browser and uses the HTML 5.0 implementation, reinforcing Google’s platform independent stance and again reduce dependence on the desktop and desktop apps. The main idea appears to be that instead of a message email-like message being sent to the recipients mail server and then downloaded the email exists on a shared server and is merely viewed and interacted with by the recipients. Users interact on these messages if they are simultaneously online in an instant message style conversation. When further recipients are added they are able to review the conversation so far by playing it back.

Sharing images is accomplished by dragging and dropping from the desktop to the browser. So much more intuitive and all people who are privy to the conversation see the images and can share them and download them. Conversations can be embedded in web pages.

I didn’t watch the whole demo, but what I saw looked interesting. Currently Wave is only in developer preview but it certainly looks promising and could, perhaps replace traditional email. One bar to its success is the reluctance of people to move to the cloud. We like to have desktop applications and given that access to our precious data when it is on a server and not our desktops is subject to the vagaries of internet connections and server uptime, perhaps this is not totally irrational.

Keep and eye out for Wave. The developer preview demo can be viewed here.

It has been quite a while since I updated here. Mainly because I haven’t had anything to say, partly because I have been busy and partly because I missed the boat on a few recent issues.

The AVN (Australian Vaccination Network) have been a popular target of skeptical comment recently since Channel 7 produced an episode of their Sunday Night program exposing the dangerous nonsense that is spouted by the anti-vaccination lobby. Something that I discussed quite a while ago.

I couldn’t build up enough enthusiasm to tackle the media-hyped “Swine Flu” outbreak. The Daylight Saving referendum didn’t seem to be half as interesting as the local Perth media tried to make it and things have seemed pretty quiet on the Western Front.

I participated in the making of a film for the 48HOURS film festival in New Zealand. Not that I went to NZ, rather some NZ expats (formerly UK expats) who are friends of a friend of mine, entered and I was part of the team. The basic idea is that you are given a genre, a line of dialogue, a character and a prop and then have 48 hours to make a 1 to 7 minute film based on these. We were given real time (think 24), “It doesn’t fit”, Alex Puddle and a rock.

So we went with speed dating and wrote what I believe to be a cracking script. Filming took place at my house over the course of a Saturday and editing then took the rest of that day and night. Much fiddling with encoding and uploading later we had finished a really good film, made even better by the excellent cast. My personal contribution was Mac guru, script contributor, music and general dogsbody. It was so much fun we’re going to have a go at a short feature sometime soon.

Anyway, I have the bit between my teeth again now so you can expect to see a great deal more here soon.

Unlike poor old Odysseus I didn’t have to spend seven years floating around the Agean being seduced by witches and fighting the cyclops in order to get home. Neither did I return to a house full of suitors – I brought my wife with me. Mind you the return trip seemed to take an interminable time.

It is hard to believe that we got up yesterday morning in Athens. We had ventured out the evening before for dinner in the Plaka and enjoyed an evening stroll and an icecream among the tourist shops. Following a quick breakfast and shower we headed out to see some final pieces of the ancient settlement of Athens.

It was a lovely warm morning as we walked up the Aerogata Dionysus toward the Pnyx and through the gentle woodland that covers the Hill of the Muses. The sun was shining brightly in a blue sky and the birds were in full chorus.

We sauntered along until we discovered an urge to have one final search for a Starbucks and a coffee. As we trotted along in bewilderment trying to reconcile the map with our surroundings a kind and distiguished looking Greek lady on her way home from church took pity on us and showed us where we needed to go.

Two very expensive cups of coffee and pieces if cake later we were winding our way back to the hotel, regretting that we had only had one night in Athens. We resolved to return as soon as possible.

We checked out of the apartment after a brief chat with Nik, the owner who is from Perth and a good friend of our travel agent at Harvey World in East Perth. The bus stop for the airport bus (X95 if you are wondering) is about 700 metres from the apartments so we walked rather than take the metro. Through careful planning we managed to get our luggage on the bus and get seats.

We passed the three hours until our flight looking at duty free stuff and drinking coffee. From Athens to Dubai is only 3.5 hours and I spent the flight watching a documentary about the history of the Internet. Nothing I didn’t know but it was cool to see people like Marc Anderson.

Unfortunately we had a five hour wait at Dubai airport. We walked the entire length of the terminal. It is very impressive and very big. However, I can’t say a really like it. I thought that maybe I was being xenophobic, since the people were invariably exotic looking to my Western eyes, but that’s not it. I am lots if things but I am not a racist. In the end I decided that it was just that the place was souless and I felt quite isolated from anything familiar. We just didn’t really understand how a lot of things worked.

Finally it was time to board the plane. The graveyard shift at the airport behind us we looked forward to having a sleep. Which we did. I guess I must have slept for seven hours, although it seemed I just shut my eyes and opened then again.

Emirates are quite good. We had been told they were excellent, but I wasn’t overly impressed. Drinks were offered infrequently, even water, and the air crew seemed a little taciturn. I also became annoyed by the promos for Dubai and the fact that every flight began with 5 minute announcement in Arabic and then in English. Subtitles people. Still they got us back to Perth alive.

I won’t detail the tedium of processing through customs and immigration in Perth. I will say that they seem to have streamlined things a bit and, particularly with customs, filter people before they get to the red or green lanes, meaning if you have nothing to declare you now go right on through.

It was nice to get home and find everything as we left it. Kath will go and get the cats tomorrow and I am back to work.

We had a great trip and I haven’t finished writing about it yet. We took 1540 photographs while we were away. You’ll see some of them here soon.

It was quite sad to say goodbye to Santorini having called it home for the past 8 days. The island really grows on you. Apart from the language barrier we almost felt like locals and looked down our noses at recent arrivals and regular tourists, especially those off cruise ships – the ancient ruins as I referred to them, somewhat unkindly.

As I mentioned at the start of my blog posts about our holiday it is all about comfort zones. We had found one and now it was time to move on. Neither of us had much enthusiasm for Athens and could not think of a single good report we had heard about it.

It was with a dull mood, despite the blue skies and sunshine, that we rode in the back of the taxi to Santorini’s tiny airport.

The plane arrived on the Tarmac from Athens. It was not the tiny twin engined prop plane we had expected, rather an Aerospace A321. The flight was a rediculously short 30 minutes and it seemed that no sooner had we finished climbing than we began our descent.

We had planned to take the metro into the city, but discovered that it was closed for four months. So we took the bus. It must have stopped at every bus stop between the airport and the city. Over an hour later we arrived at the terminus and elected to walk to our hotel rather than take the metro for one stop.

Amazingly we navigated our way to the backpacker’s that the apartment we would be staying in was connected to without getting lost. A couple of young German tourists showed us how to get to the apartment from there. I mentioned the war once, but I think I got away with it.

We quickly got changed and headed off to see the Acroplolis. It was fortunate we had a map as the signs to it are vague and ambiguous. You would imagine that a city’s major tourist attraction would have big signs directing stupid tourists. Not the Acropolis.

Once you have paid the 12€ entrance fee (which incidentally gets you into lots of other places of antiquity) you climb rest of the hill to the Acropolis proper, past the Theatre of Dionysus. The first impression of the Acropolis is that it isn’t as big as you imagined.

The next thing that struck me was that after 2500 years you would have thought they would have finished it by now. The Parthenon is covered with scaffold in contradiction of a large sign stating that the restoration has been finished. Anyway, it is very impressive and quite breathtaking. It is hard to believe that the whole thing was blown up when the Venetions attacked the munitions dump that the Greeks had placed inside it in the 17th century. You havevto keep reminding yourself that it is actually the Acroplis. It is just one of those places you see so often on television you can’t believe you are actually there.

We wondered about a bit and then headed off to see Hadrian’s gate and the temple of Zeus down the hill. It too was impressive. Lots of Doric columns. It had a checkered past and took a couple of hundred years to complete, the job being done by Hadrian. He seems to be to Athens what Justinian was to Istanbul – he got things done. I always thought he just built a wall in Scotland. After the fall of the Roman Empire it even became an outdoor mosque when the pesky Ottomans overran Southern Greece.

From here we sought a Starbucks. Multinational chain though it is it is something we don’t have at home. The map proved inadequate for the job and after a lot of getting lost we gave up and stopped for a coffee near the hotel. It was coming on for 7 by now but undaunted we headed off in search if Ancient Agora, which we eventually found.

The temple to Herpheastus there is quite spectacular, more so than the Parthenon because it is virtually complete. The setting sun gave it a golden glow and the whole atmosphere was quite magical. As we wondered the grounds we simultaneously developed antiquity fatigue – there is really only so much old stuff the brain can take in.

The Greeks and the Turks seem to share the same attitude to their ancient monuments. Both here and at Ephesus there are random piles composed of bits of column, broken statues and large chunks of marble. Seemingly left to rot. It seems to say “Here is some old stuff that we found. We weren’t sure what to do with it so we put it here.” Like the Parthenon I am sure that in many countries the reconstruction would have been completed years ago at most of these sites, but in Eastern Europe they don’t seem to care. The only complete restoration we saw was funded by the American billionaire Rockafella and completed by an American university.

Feeling that we couldn’t stand anymore history we left Agora and from the gate chanced into a very European scene. The street we were on was lined with cafes with tables spilling onto the street packed with Athenians drinking coffee and socialising. It was a cosmoplitan idyll normally associated with Rome or Venice and quite a surprise to find in Athens.

In fact Athens has been a pleasant surprise and a nice end to our trip. The area around the Acropolis, particularly the Placka, has a feeling not unlike Paris or other more well regarded cities. Streets are narrow and cobbled, restaurants and cafes abound and people throng the streets well into the evening. I have to say I am impressed. Sure there are broken pavements, delapedated buildings, hawkers on the streets and a patina of dust, but it has character. Looking out from the Acroplis it is obvious how big the city is. It is like a sea of buildings washing up against the hills that back it, with occassional islands of green. But it is Europe and like everywhere we have been on our trip we are richer for having known it and will miss it.

Even so we are ready to return to Australia and our Pookies.

What a corker our last day in Santorini has turned out to be. We awoke to leaden skies and even the ever-blue waters of the Caldera appeared somewhat grey.

Wrapped in layers of clothes we mounted Quadropolous Motorcycladaes our faithful transport and headed down the hill to Thera to buy some souvenirs and look at the museum.

A cruise ship had come in over night and groups of elderly Americans puffed their way up the steep streets while we poked around looking for just the right things to take home. I had seen a statuette of two figures embracing made from the island’s volcanic rock that I really liked. So we went from shop to shop looking at similar things until I found just the right one.

The museum is small but the 3€ entrance fee is well worth it. The displays are of objects retrieved from the Pompai-like ruins of the Bronze Age settlement of the island prior to the eruption of the volcano. Among the amphoras and pottery are some real gems and the frescos are fantastic.

By the time we emerged from the museum the sky was blue and the sun was shining. We dropped the quad off to the rental place. The guy running it told us that in the summer we would have paid 30€ per day instead of the 8€ we did pay. Gives you an idea how much things are in the high season here.

By this point we were sweating even though we had stripped of as many layers as we decently could. We started the walk back to Imarogvili and, almost needless to say, got a little lost. We eventually found the right path. Walking along the edge of the Caldera offers some gorgeous views although the terrain is quite demanding.

When we got back to the hotel our wedding photos had arrived. The photographer had done a wonderful job and most of the shots are really good. Definitely something to treasure. Since she has provided all of the images on disk we will be able to print more of them. Expect to see them on Flickr with the rest of our holiday pictures soon.

As the day progressed yesterday we closeted ourselves in our room watching Russian music television and Kath started to get ready while I read my book.

The wind howled outside, but it was too late to think about postponing the wedding. It was going on despite the weather. At 6:30 we made our way up the hill to meet the wedding car. A few minutes later as we withstood the gale a black Mercedes E-class drifted up and we were greeted by the photographer and the driver. A few quick photos later and we were whisked through the narrow, winding streets of Santorini to the Chapel of Saint Irini.

We arrived to more photographs and, as the wind swirled around us, met with the marraige celebrant. Kath looked lovely and despite the efforts of the elements could not have been more been more beautiful. It was as though she challenged the weather to spoil our day.

The ceremony, first in Greek and then in English, was quite brief. The vows were simple and heartfelt. We were both very happy.

The photographer and videographer then stage managed us around the chapel and surrounds to take their pictures while we sipped champagne. It was quite surreal with the sunset behind us, the wind around us and the Greeklish instructions of the photographer.

Very soon It was over and we were being swept through the deepening evening back to our hotel. We had dinner at the Blue Note restaurant just down the hill and then retired for the night.

A very exciting and quite amazing way to marry and something we’ll remember forever.