Mafia using football show to send messages to jailed bosses
The Telegraph is making the claim that Italian gangsters are using a TV’s shows text ticker to send coded messages to their jailed bosses.
The Italian programme, which is hosted by a former showgirl, allows football fans to send SMS text messages which then run along a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen when the show is being broadcast.
Anti-mafia prosecutors believe that members of organised crime gangs have caught onto the interactive feature, sending seemingly innocuous comments and remarks which in fact contain important messages for imprisoned mafia godfathers, many of whom continue to run their criminal empires despite being behind bars. One of the messages, allegedly of significance for a jailed criminal mastermind, simply read: “All is well, Paolo”. Full article here.
This is not the first case of an incident like this – in the past there have been multiple claims about hidden codes displayed in public such as the very recent FBI accusations about Russian spies using US newspapers to hide messages in newspapers. This was also a main theme of the film A Beautiful Mind based on the life of John Nash, the inventor of Game Theory. So whilst it may seem inventive for some, the idea stetches back to the 1930′s.
The Diana Conspiracy – an alternative viewpoint
When you put it like this you see the Diana conspiracy claims in a different light. From the awesome Mitchell and Webb look.
Saturn Moon Loses Its Ring, Gains a Mystery
“Until this week Saturn’s small moon Rhea was the only known solid space object thought to have a ring. (Other known ringed bodies, such as Saturn, are mainly gaseous.) But a new study of optical images has failed to detect any signs of structures encircling the natural satellite.
Rhea orbits within Saturn’s magnetic field, which creates a bubble of charged particles—ions and electrons—around the planet. During a 2005 flyby of Rhea, scientists working with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft expected to see a dip in their readings where the moon’s surface intercepted the particles. The craft’s readings did show the moon’s wake, but they also revealed several unexpected dips in particle detections just outside the moon’s diameter. The best possible explanation seemed to be that something physical—a ring of debris around Rhea—was blocking the ions and electrons from reaching Cassini.
However, analysis of images taken by Cassini between 2008 and 2009 failed to turn up any evidence for rings around the Saturn moon. (See pictures of Saturn and its moons.) “We’re pretty confident that there is no solid material orbiting the moon,” said astronomer Matthew Tiscareno of Cornell University in New York. Tiscareno and his team analyzed 65 Cassini images of Rhea, some of which were taken with the sun behind the craft and some with the sun more or less in front of Cassini. “Those two geometries probe different particle sizes, because dust tends to scatter light forward whereas larger particles tend to reflect light backward,” Tiscareno explained. Instead, the pictures showed nothing illuminated around Rhea, disproving the ring hypothesis—although the new study doesn’t shed any light on what was responsible for the 2005 observations.”
Read more at National Geographic (Thanks @moonylein)
Brain’s reward system helps drive placebo effect
“Want to maximize the placebo effect? A good way to do this, according to a new study, is to tell someone they have a decent chance of getting the real treatment instead of a fake pill, but keep them guessing. In the study, Parkinson’s disease patients given a placebo after being told they had a 75 percent chance of receiving an active drug produced significant amounts of dopamine, a chemical key to the brain’s reward system that is scarce in the brains of patients with this disease. But no dopamine response occurred in patients given placebo after being told they had a 25 percent, 50 percent, or 100 percent chance of getting real treatment.
The findings show that expectations directly regulate the power of the placebo effect by kicking the brain’s reward system into gear, probably not just in Parkinson’s patients but in a number of different illnesses, such as chronic pain and depression, according to Dr. A. Jon Stoessl of the Pacific Parkinson’s Research Center in Vancouver, British Columbia, and his colleagues. “The greatest form of reward is really to get better, so expectation of improvement is akin to expectation of reward,” Stoessl explained in an interview.
Stoessl and his colleagues first demonstrated a relationship between the placebo effect and dopamine release in Parkinson’s patients nine years ago. Given dopamine’s role in the reward system, he explained, “perhaps it would be important for the placebo effect in other conditions.” In the current study, the researchers used PET scans to examine whether patients’ expectations of getting an active drug would be related to the amount of dopamine released in their brain after they took a placebo. They randomly assigned 35 patients to be informed that they had a 25 percent chance, 50 percent chance, 75 percent chance, or 100 percent chance of receiving an active drug. But all were given inactive placebo. “There was a substantial amount of dopamine released, but only when the stated probability was 75 percent,” Stoessl explained. “What that means is when you’re told that the outcome is certain, that there’s a 100 percent chance, you don’t activate reward pathways. At lower probabilities, you just don’t think there’s much chance, so you don’t activate the reward system either.”"
Read more at Reuters (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
“In case you haven’t noticed, this site (WIRED) is currently being bombarded with a certain strand of conspiracy theorist. I’m still not entirely sure what these people believe in, apart from being absolutely certain that the government is developing brain-eating vaccines, spiking the water with lithium and trying to subdue the population with “reactive” medicine. While it’s always sad to see so much angry ignorance on parade, it’s also a fascinating case study in cognitive dissonance.
The theory of cognitive dissonance – one of most influential theories in social psychology – was pioneered by Leon Festinger, at the University of Minnesota. In the summer of 1954, Festinger was reading the morning newspaper when he encountered a short article about Marion Keech, a housewife in suburban Minneapolis who was convinced that the apocalypse was coming. Keech had started getting messages from aliens a few years before, but now the messages were getting eerily specific. According to Sananda, an extra-terrestrial from the planet Clarion who was in regular contact with Keech, human civilization would be destroyed by a massive flood at midnight on December 20, 1954.
Keech’s sci-fi prophecy soon gained a small band of followers. They trusted her divinations, and marked the date of Armageddon on their calendars. Many of them quit their jobs and sold their homes. The cultists didn’t bother buying Christmas presents or making arrangements for New Years Eve, since nothing would exist by then.
Festinger immediately realized that Keech would make a great research subject. He decided to infiltrate the group by pretending to be a true believer. What Festinger wanted to study was the reaction of the cultists on December 21, when the world wasn’t destroyed and no spaceship appeared. Would Keech recant? What would happen when her prophesy failed?
On the night of December 20, Keech’s followers gathered in her home and waited for instructions from the aliens. Midnight approached. When the clock read 12:01 and there were still no aliens, the cultists began to worry. A few began to cry. The aliens had let them down. But then Keech received a new telegram from outer space, which she quickly transcribed on her notepad. “This little group sitting all night long had spread so much light,” the aliens told her, “that god saved the world from destruction. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.” In other words, it was their stubborn faith that had prevented the apocalypse. Although Keech’s predictions had been falsified, the group was now more convinced than ever that the aliens were real. They began proselytizing to others, sending out press releases and recruiting new believers. This is how they reacted to the dissonance of being wrong: by becoming even more certain that they were right.
There is, of course, something deeply troubling about cognitive dissonance, since it suggests that we double-down on our beliefs even in light of conflicting evidence. While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw – you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex – I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we’re all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance – and the paranoid style has always been a loud presence in American politics – we seem to squander ever more time on worthless conversations about Obama’s birth certificate or the spurious link between autism and vaccines. After all, thanks to Google we can find “evidence” in support of practically any belief. If you can imagine the conspiracy theory, there is a website out there ardently promoting it, and a clan of fellow believers who share your peculiar obsession with fluoridated drinking water and the New World Order. The end result is that we never have to recant. We can always find another link to “prove” that the government is trying to “zombify” us, or that aliens are going to destroy the earth at midnight.”
Read More at Wired
Ragbir Bhathal: Aussie Alien Hunter
“Just about a year ago Ragbir Bhathal was scanning the night sky for alien activity, just as he does every night. Except on this December eve Ragbir Bhathal found a strong, regular, repeating signal. Unless the whole thing stemmed from a huge glitch occurring simultaneously in all his million-dollar lab equipment, there stands a strong chance that Ragbir found a message sent by some intelligent, alien race.
Unlike most of the tin-foil hat wearing whackadoos in his field, Dr. Bhathal is a hard scientist working with university money to find extraterrestrials. In fact, he teaches the only Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life class offered in all of Australia. His hard-nosed approach perhaps explains why you’ve yet to hear this big news: Before he can broadcast his findings to the world, Bhathal must put them through rigorous examination. First, he needs to make sure it wasn’t caused by a glitch or some random, weird space phenomenon. After that, he’ll will need his findings peer-reviewed. Both steps require finding the signal again, which has taken nearly a year already
As proprietor of OZSETI, Dr. Bhathal combs the universe in search of light signals, not radio transmission. See, FM and AM can only travel so far, barely the distance between galaxies, before their signal’s lost in the noisiness of space. Light, on the other hand, travels far, fast, and without getting jumbled on the way to its destination. It was, in part, his interest in light-based contact that made Arthur C. Clarke put Ragbir on his shortlist of researchers who actually stand a chance of contacting alien life. With his recent findings, he goes straight to the top of ours.”
Read more at VBS Blog
Scientific evidence of poltergeist knocking?
I’ll just start by reminding everyone that the posts on this blog do not always represent our views, and they are just for good healthy discussion!
“Has science finally established a paranormal effect?
Paranormal rappings associated with apparent poltergeist activity have been described for many hundreds of years. It is only now that an interesting pattern has been discovered within the fine detail of the paranormal rapping sounds. No explanation can be found for this pattern at present.
The current edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), a learned publication dating back to 1882, carries an article by scientist Dr Barrie Colvin B.Sc., Ph.D., showing instrumental evidence for an inexplicable and objective banging sound detected in recordings made during alleged poltergeist activity.
Whereas raps and knocking sounds produced by ordinary means exhibit a normal acoustic pattern, those recorded in alleged poltergeist cases show quite a different sound signature.”
Read more at Society for Psychical Research (Thanks Tracey)
‘UFOs’ spotted in Reading
“Mobile phone footage has captured the moment that several UFO’s were spotted flying above Reading, Berkshire. The video was captured by Lizzie Zuowen Tang and Jo Mingjiao Xue who claim to have seen 21 flying objects between 4.45 and 5.53 in the morning.
Ms Tang said: “Their shapes were like rods which pointed in the direction they were flying, but they were rotating at the same time when flying forward. “They flew very slowly without the noise which planes generate when flying, so at first we thought they were meteors, but then we immediately realised that they were definitely not meteors because their speed was much slower. “We think that they were flying at a very high altitude and we saw two of them generate a very strong light flash for a few seconds when they were flying.”"
Being a skeptical lot we don’t beleive in UFO’s but are open to convincing evidence. This hardly counts as some as it’s so poor but it’s hard to make out what they actually are. Certainly not conventional aircraft of any sort – but maybe our readers have an idea?
Head over the The Telegraph to watch the video
Creationists suffer another legal defeat
“The Institute for Creation Research — one of the biggest nonsense-peddlers in the 6000 year history of the world — was handed a nice defeat this week. That link to the National Center for Science Education (the good guys) has all the info you need, but to summarize: the ICR moved from California to Texas. In the previous state, for reasons beyond understanding, they were able to grant Master’s degrees in their graduate school. But Texas didn’t recognize their accreditation, so they filed to get it approved.
Not so surprisingly, scientists and educators rose in protest, and in 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board — the organization that grants accreditation — denied the ICR. The creationists appealed. In the meantime, they also tried to extend their ability to grant degrees temporarily while the lawsuit continued. What happened this week is that the extension as denied.
And I mean denied. Check out what the court said:
It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff [the ICR] to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information.”
Read more at Discover Magazine
Video: The pattern behind self-deception
“Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.
Michael Shermer debunks myths, superstitions and urban legends, and explains why we believe them. Along with publishing Skeptic Magazine, he’s author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market.”
