Articles tagged with "committee"

Tena koutou katoa. A warm welcome to all who are attending this AGM during our conference lunch break.

A few days ago Craig Shearer messaged the rest of the NZ Skeptics committee with the below photo, and asked us all “What's a skeptic to do?”:

It's less than two weeks until our conference in Christchurch, and we're busy sorting out the last few loose ends. We now have tickets available for our Saturday evening soiree, so if you're coming to the conference and want to chill out with other skeptics, the committee of the NZ Skeptics, the SGU and some of our other weekend speakers, make sure you grab your tickets soon! It's only $40 for an evening featuring entertainment, canapes, and cheap booze.

We had our AGM last night, which was well-attended and ran smoothly. We now have two new committee members, Dave la Rooy and Tony Lord (and as a skeptic I have to assume it's just coincidence that our two new committee members are a Lord and a King). It's great to have them on board, and as a committee we look forward to working with them both over the coming years. Bronwyn will continue on as our capable Chair, and it was pointed out that our new constitution has a five year limit for the Chair role - as a way to ensure we have fresh blood at the helm. This means that we only have three years left to squeeze all we can out of Bronwyn's amazing abilities, although I'm presuming from her passion for skepticism that she'll stay on the committee long after her term as Chair is over. Tim Wright has been reconfirmed as our Treasurer for the next year, and I'm staying on as Secretary - mostly because nobody else seems to want to take on either of these roles! If you're interested in what happened at the AGM, you can read Bronwyn's report on our last 12 months below. I'll also try to remember to add the minutes of our AGM to a future newsletter, once I've written them up properly.

In lieu of my usual blathering, this week we have an update from our chair, Bronwyn, about our plans for our conferences this year and next:

We recently had a member decide not to renew their membership, because of concerns about our submission to the Therapeutic Products Bill. They told us:

After many months of radio silence, the odd Global Flourishing group that I wrote about last year briefly stirred before going quiet again. Rest assured, if anything comes of this, I'll be watching it closely and writing about it. Here are the messages that appeared on the group's Discord channel last week:

Although we've reduced our newsletter output to biweekly, that doesn't stop us from releasing an issue on Christmas day! Wherever you are, and whatever, if anything, you're celebrating, I hope you have an awesome day.

It's weird not having had a newsletter out last week. Hopefully you didn't miss us too much! As our sole editor I'll be keeping to a biweekly schedule for now - although if we get more content coming our way from readers and committee members, who knows, I may be able to return to producing the newsletter on a weekly basis. For now, you can expect to read something from myself, Bronwyn and Craig every fortnight, and then we'll be recording our podcast in the days following the newsletter's release, and chatting about either our articles or something else that tickles our fancy. If you feel moved to write an article for us, just send your article to news@skeptics.nz and we'll let you know if we plan to publish it, which is very likely to be the case as we love reading all your thoughts on skeptical topics, and I'm sure our audience does too. And, once your article's been published, we'll probably want you to join us on the podcast to talk about it as well - but only if you're comfortable with doing that.

Apologies for the slightly late delivery of this issue of our newsletter - I'm currently tapping away on my keyboard on the ferry at Picton, waiting to start the final leg of our journey back home to Wellington from the conference.

As mentioned above, during the Sunday lunchtime of the conference we'll be holding our Annual General Meeting. If you're a member of NZ Skeptics you can come along (even if you're not attending the conference) and hear all about our business. We'll also be attempting to run a livestream of the meeting in case you can't attend in person.

I've got a broad collection of items this week. I start off looking at the recent spat between a couple of prominent alleged psychic mediums and their tours around New Zealand.

Jonny Grady, a long-time committee member, sent an image he'd taken of a “UFO” to the committee last week:

We've been promoting making submissions to the Therapeutic Products Bill. The NZ Skeptics committee has met and put together its official submission, and I've put in a personal submission.

This is my first newsletter for the year. I had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year and had some nice time off from work.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

This week's newsletter is all about those sweet, sweet sounds. There's a story about Spotify, starring Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Joe Rogan. And one about expensive audiophile-level computer hardware. On top of this, some of you might be interested to hear that we're going to try something new with the newsletter soon, something audio related...

In this week's newsletter I spend far too much time debunking a baseless vaccine injury claim about Celine Dion, convince my wife to use tin foil to treat what ails her, and talk about a tragic, and avoidable, death in New Zealand from COVID. And, after all of that, committee member Bronwyn has returned with another great article, this time looking with a critical eye at some claims that have been made about the damage fireworks can cause.

NZ Skeptics has its Annual General Meeting on Sunday 12th December. We'll be holding this online, and we'd encourage any interested members to come along.

I'm sure Alex Jones is no stranger to most skeptics. The Info Wars host has an illustrious history of pushing nonsense ideas about the US - from the ridiculous (chemicals in the water supply are turning the frogs gay) to the downright dangerous (restriction of gun rights will cause a second revolution in the US). And somewhere in the midst of all that nonsense, Alex Jones decided to start pushing the ridiculous theory that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children in the US was a false flag operation, secretly organised by the government as a way to push for tighter gun controls.

There's some classic skepticism in this week's newsletter - numerology, an American conspiracy theory and a scam that looks, walks and quacks like a Ponzi Scheme. And, as well as my usual ranting, we have a report from Barry Lennox. Barry was a committee member a few years ago, and he recently visited the Christchurch Home Show. You probably won't be surprised to hear that Barry found several stalls pushing unproven nonsense in amongst the spa pools and heat pumps.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

If you're in or around Christchurch, you may be interested in attending the Christchurch Skeptics in the Pub. One of our NZ Skeptics committee members, Jonathan Harper, is giving a talk about skepticism. It's at the Pegasus Arms, 6pm on Thursday 8th April. You can register your RSVP on the group's meetup page.

Mark Honeychurch recently covered a Newshub story by Sarah Templeton in our newsletter (Reiki is Here To Save Us All) about a visit to a Reiki person by the reporter. (Practitioner, in my humble opinion, is probably the wrong word).

A big portion of this week's newsletter content was contributed by NZ Skeptics Committee member - Jonathan Harper.

This year the NZ Skeptics Annual General Meeting was held separately from the conference, on 7 September in Wellington. Among the business attended to was the election of a new chair-entity, Mark Honeychurch, replacing Gold who takes on the new role of Head Geek, responsible for technological support. The NZ Skeptic took the opportunity to ask Mark a few questions about himself, and his vision for skepticism in New Zealand.

Making a submission to a parliamentary committee proved to be a worthwhile exercise.

The following changes to the constitution of the NZ Skeptics have been proposed and will be considered at the Annual General Meeting in Christchurch on Sunday, 28 August 2011. This notice is published in accordance with the society"s rules which require 21 days" written notice of any such change.

Over the last few years, there have been frequent suggestions that the Skeptics organisation in New Zealand should have a new name. At present, our formal name is the New Zealand Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal Inc. Originally, this was an adaptation of the name of our sister organisation in the US, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The American organisation has recently changed its formal name to Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. This has been a prompt for our committee to re-open the issue here. The reasons put forward for change, both here and in the US, can be summarised as:

I'm pleased to welcome you officially to the 21st century, which I suspect will need Skeptics every bit as much as the last century, judging by the general level of activity over the past year.

THE committee notes with sadness the sudden death of George Errington. George and his wife Helen joined NZCSICOP in 1986 and have been active, enthusiastic members. He was a "behind the scenes" worker who shunned the limelight. For that reason, his loss is perhaps particularly keenly felt by the Secretary; he gave his time and creative and engineering skills generously to the increasingly onerous task of preparing this newsletter for distribution. His last contribution to the New Zealand Skeptics was to assist in devising a new system for managing our growing membership and subscription list. He will be greatly missed.

(from the New Zealand Herald 1/5/90)

The 1989 Annual General Meeting of NZCSICOP was held at the Science Lecture Theatre, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, on 3 September 1989.

The New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Inc.) seeks nominations for its annual journalism/media awards for 1987-1988. Awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the Committee, held this year at the University of Auckland, August 20-21.

For most individuals the result of a consultation with a psychic is a good laugh. But some get hurt.

The New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Inc.) seeks nominations for its annual journalism/media awards for 1986-1987. Awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the Committee, held this year at Victoria University in Wellington, August 29-30.

Former Star news editor Josh Easby has collected . an award for journalistic excellence for his "psychic duel" with an Auckland clairvoyant.