[anonymous]

Thanks Leo!

I found these to be especially interesting:

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o..._research.html

Martin Gardner wrote:

But as Honorton pointed out, “Gardner does not attempt to document this assertion, nor could he. It is pure fiction. Look for the skeptics’ experiments and see what you find.” For the most part, skeptics have simply criticized from the sidelines, and have produced no experimental research of their own.

One notable exception to this rule has been British psychologist Susan Blackmore .... she wrote in 1996: “When I decided to become a parapsychologist I had no idea it would mean 20 years of failing to find the paranormal. These claims led parapsychologist Rick Berger to critically examine the Blackmore experiments in great detail, and he found that “The claim of ‘ten years of psi research’ actually represents a series of hastily constructed, executed, and reported studies that were primarily conducted during a 2-year period.’” These consisted of a set of experiments conducted between October 1976 and December 1978 for her PhD dissertation.

So, how does Blackmore reconcile the fact of 7 successful experiments out of 21 with her often-repeated claim that her own research led her to become a skeptic? Simple: results from successful experiments were dismissed as due to flaws in the experiment, yet study quality was simply ignored when the results were nonsignificant.

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o...vanLommel.html

In his "Skeptic" column in Scientific American in March, 2003, Michael Shermer cited a research study published in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, by Pim van Lommel and colleagues. He asserted this study "delivered a blow" to the idea that the mind and the brain could separate. Yet the researchers argued the exact opposite, and showed that conscious experience outside the body took place during a period of clinical death when the brain was flatlined. As Jay Ingram, of the 'Canadian Discovery Channel' commented: "His use of this study to bolster his point is bogus. He could have said, 'The authors think there's a mystery, but I choose to interpret their findings differently'. But he didn't. I find that very disappointing" (Toronto Star, March 16, 2003). Here, Pim van Lommel sets out the evidence that Shermer misrepresented.

http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/wiseman.html

With the help of his assistant, Matthew Smith, he did four experiments with Jaytee, two in June and two in December 1995, and in all of them Jaytee went to the window to wait for Pam when she was indeed on the way home. As in my own experiments, he sometimes went to the window at other times, for example to bark at passing cats, but he was at the window far more when Pam was on her way home than when she was not. In the three experiments Wiseman did in Pam's parents' flat, Jaytee was at the window an average of 4% of the time during the main period of Pam's absence, and 78% of the time when she was on the way home. This difference was statistically significant. When Wiseman's data were plotted on graphs, they showed essentially the same pattern as my own. In other words Wiseman replicated my own results.

I was astonished to hear that in the summer of 1996 Wiseman went to a series of conferences, including the World Skeptics Congress, announcing that he had refuted the 'psychic pet' phenomenon. He said Jaytee had failed his tests because he had gone to the window before Pam set off to come home.

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o...scientists.htm

Natasha Demkina, a 17-year-old Russian schoolgirl celebrated in her home town of Saransk for making accurate diagnoses of people's medical ailments just by looking at them, was brought to New York (a gruelling 24-hour journey by train, flight and bus) to have her 'paranormal claims' tested by the self-styled world authorities.

She was required to match seven written diagnoses against seven corresponding test persons wearing black-lens spectacles to avoid any eye contact. She said from the outset that two of the diagnoses were outside her range, but she was kindly reassured by Wiseman that she would pass her test if she scored five out of five on the other trials. Under these fairly taxing conditions she was in fact correct in four out of the seven trials, a result yielding a significant p value of .02, an outcome calling for a fair degree of congratulation.

But there were no congratulations for Natasha. While noting (in passing) that the odds against this result being due to chance were around 50 to 1, Wiseman told her that she had failed, and the patronising Hyman advised that she should forget her delusions and pursue her proposed medical studies (his own delusion being presumably that the diagnoses of medical practitioners are invariably correct). The commentator crowed that the girl would now return to Russia discredited. Mission accomplished!

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/m...rtin-gard.html

"Records of Mrs. Piper’s séances show plainly that her controls did an enormous amount of what was called 'fishing,' and today is called 'cold reading.' Vague statements would be followed by more precise information based on how sitters reacted. Mrs. Piper usually held a client’s hand throughout a sitting, sometimes holding the hand against her forehead. This made it easy to detect muscular responses even when a sitter was silent. Moreover, her eyes were often only half closed, allowing her to observe reactions."

Somehow, Gardner forgets to tell us that many of the readings involved proxy sitters - people who did not know the facts of the case they were inquiring about. Strange how this little fact was overlooked. Could Gardner have forgotten to mention it because cold reading is useless in a proxy sitting?