3 February 2025
For those who have been around in skeptical circles for a while, you're probably aware not only of skeptic Brian Dunning and his Skeptoid podcast, but also of his conviction for wire fraud, in a case where he was accused of cookie stuffing. Wikipedia summarises it nicely on Brian Dunning's Wikipedia page:
19 February 2024
Previously I wrote about the Therapeutic Products Act which was due to replace the Medicines Act 1981 and the Dietary Supplements Regulations 1985. The NZ Skeptics Society made a written and oral submission.
29 May 2023
You'd have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) technology recently. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new announcement about it, or some controversy caused by it.
20 June 2022
One of the types of AI that is progressing at speed at the moment, in places like Google's AI labs and at a company called OpenAI, is Natural Language Processing algorithms. These deep learning algorithms are pieces of software that are “trained” by getting them to process (read) lots and lots of human written text, and try to infer a set of rules for how to create new text like it's been reading. This source text is usually documents from the internet (using software that crawls through websites, linking to new sites and saving all the text it finds). Once the AI has been trained, when given a new piece of text, like a sentence, it will try to guess which word is most likely to come next. When it does this repeatedly, it can form entire sentences and paragraphs, guessing as it goes - and because its learning algorithm has figured out not only the rules of grammar but also the ways in which humans usually communicate (which words are relevant to a topic, etc), the most recent NLP algorithms do a really good job of coming across as human. They can also use this same technique to draw pictures - Dall-E 2 is amazing at creating unique images given a prompt like “a cat dressed as Napoleon holding cheese” - with the phrase “a propaganda poster depicting a cat dressed as french emperor napoleon holding a piece of cheese” giving this result:
28 February 2022
Although Bronwyn's put together this week's newsletter, I couldn't help myself and wrote a small piece about the protesters' obsession with Nuremberg.
9 November 2020
I'm sure most skeptics will have heard of QAnon by now - the anonymously named Q who posts online about shadowy organisations, and talks about how president Trump is fighting dark forces in the US. QAnon tends to use lots of code names and obscure references, including the oft used acronym used as the title of this section - it means Where We Go 1, We Go All. Here are a couple of examples of QAnon messages:
1 May 2018
The Pharmacy Council has (finally) published their new Code of Ethics 2018.
1 October 2017
The Pharmacy Council recently ran a consultation about a new proposed Code of Ethics, after they tried to weaken their code a couple of years ago to remove the requirement that pharmacists could only sell alternative medicines where there was evidence that they work.
1 November 2015
In early October the NZ Skeptics submitted a response to the Pharmacy Council's consultation on a proposed change to their Code of Ethics. It had recently been pointed out to the Pharmacy Council (by the Society for Science Based Healthcare) that many pharmacies sell unproven health products, in breach of their current Code of Ethics. The Pharmacy Council's proposed solution is to alter their code to remove the part of the clause that is being breached.
4 October 2015
The Pharmacy Council is trying to change part of its Code of Ethics: Here is the old code:
1 May 2004
A Pakeha student whose necklace was forcibly removed by a teacher -- even though Maori students are allowed to wear their taonga (treasures) -- has quit school over the incident. Megan Church complained to the Human Rights Commission about the Marlborough Girls College dress code.
1 November 2001
This Bravo Award-winning item originally appeared as the editorial in the March 23 issue of the New Zealand Medical Journal
1 November 1997
The Bible (or, more precisely, the Torah) is a heavenly word-find puzzle, according to Israeli mathematicians.