A chance to bring evidence-based practice to the fore at City of York council

At our latest meeting Councillor Anna Semlyen asked us for help giving evidenced-based decision-making a higher profile in York politics, by introducing it as a topic for this year's scrutiny committees.

Scrutiny is where backbench councillors challenge cabinet members and council policy by doing research on chosen topic areas. They are committees comprised of cross party councillors not on the cabinet. Evidence-based practice affects all scrutiny. There are 5 scrutiny committees;  scrutiny management, economic and city development, health, learning and culture, and community safety. Cllr Semlyen has suggested evidence-based decision making as a topic for scrutiny management and an overarching theme for all 5 scrutinies.

She is asking for help to get this topic adopted (chosen by the committee) by writing to the chair of scrutiny management committee Cllr John Galvin cllr.jgalvin@york.gov.uk and scrutiny staff dawn.steel@york.gov.uk and melanie.carr@york.gov.uk copying in cllr.asemlyen@york.gov.uk.


Our member Paul Hopwood has already written to them, and has been asked to make a three minute presentation in support of evidence-based practice at the relevant meeting on the 15th of July. We're not asking everyone to attend, but writing a letter would be very helpful, and if anyone else would like to make a presentation, that would be great.


Here is the text of Paul's email, in case you'd like an idea of what to write:

To Whom it may concern,

As someone who is a very passionate promoter of science, skepticism and evidence-based research; I would like to suggest that York City Council's Overview and Scrutiny for 2013/14 should be focused on looking at Evidence-based decision-making by the council.

If you wish to discuss the matter further, or require any more information, don't hesitate to ask.

Yours Sincerely

Paul Hopwood

I shall be writing a similar email soon, and would urge our members to do the same. The deadine to do this is the 14th of July but the sooner, the better. Let see if we can help to raise the profile of evidence-based practice in York.

The stone tape projector; what is it?

This post is an eye-witness account of what was said and seen during a demonstration of Richard Felix's stone tape projector at Ghostfest 2012, followed by my opinion of it. It follows on from my assessment of the theory behind the device.

The device

At the core of the stone tape projector is a large box, approximately 50cm at each side. It was reported that the box contained a police scanner and that various components were made of Bakelite, due to its high silica content. There was a blue light, which was emitted from the top of the box. Next to the box was a plasma globe, which was described as a Van de Graaff generator. A cable ran off the stage and was attached to the stone of the prison building. A smoke machine was arranged so that its stream passed through the blue light. We were told that this was no ordinary smoke machine. It allegedly emits special ‘high-silica’ dry ice. The sketch below should give an idea of the arrangement of the components which make up the projector.

Diagram of the Stone Tape Projector

The machine was started up and the beam from the blue light illuminated the stream from the smoke machine. Images of spirits would be displayed on the smoke. The audience were encouraged to take photographs of the smoke and if anything interesting appeared, to come to the front to show everyone. There were a few dozen people who came forward, and some of the pictures they had taken did have reasonable facsimiles of faces in them. Here is an example taken by York Skeptics that night. Unfortunately none of our photos contained such a face.

The Stone Tape Projector in action

An engineer’s perspective

In my opinion the entire machine is a prop. The plasma globe and blue light seem to be there only to make it look scientific. I don’t believe the box contained any kind of scanner, or any Bakelite. Even if it did I struggle to see what difference it would've made. The claim about Bakelite being high in silica is also incorrect; it contains none. If the smoke did contain a quantity of silica then breathing apparatus would be required by the audience and crew. In addition to this the same smoke machine had been used earlier on in the show. If the smoke machine was so special it seems very unlikely that it would be used for stage effects.

I think that a better name for this device would be a pareidolia generator. As far as I could tell, the only essential components of the machine were the smoke machine and the audience’s cameras. If one was to take repeated pictures of any cloud, be it dry ice, water, or smoke from a fire, one would be able to identify all sorts of objects in the images.

In conclusion the stone tape projector is, as far as I can tell,  a gimmick. It is based on scientifically flawed concepts, and is poorly implemented. Even the name does not seem to be original. The BBC made a drama in 1972 about a haunted house, where the haunting was the replaying of events which had happened in the past which were stored in the fabric of the building. This programme was entitled The Stone Tape.

The theory behind the stone tape projector

This post is the first of two that will form a report based on Richard Felix’s presentation and demonstration of the stone tape projector which took place on Saturday 15th September 2012 in York as a part of Ghostfest 2012. This first part is an explanation of the theory he described, followed by my opinions of it. I will follow with a post about the device itself.

Richard Felix

 

Richard Felix is an historian who has appeared with the psychic Derek Acorah on the TV series Most Haunted, where they visited locations which were allegedly haunted and attempt to gather evidence of the hauntings and information about the spirits involved. Derek would converse with the spirits (through his spirit guide) and obtain details of the spirits and happenings of the time. Richard would then comment on the known history of the location and show consistencies with Derek’s report.

He currently runs Derby Gaol and arranges ghost walks in the Derby area. His new book What is a ghost  deals, according to him, 'with the realities of ghosts rather than the Scooby Doo side of things.'

The theory

 

Richard Felix believes that only 40% of hauntings and apparitions are actual spiritual intelligences; the remainder are the replay of events which have occurred in the past. This explains why in some ghost reports the spirits are said to not respond to viewers. The ghostly woman walking along the corridors of a stately home retracing the steps she took in life, and the roman soldiers marching blindly through a building which didn’t exist in their time are examples of this phenomenon. These images are stored in the fabric of the building and replayed later; the more powerful the event, the stronger the images. How could these images be stored?

Here's how Felix thinks this could happen: Many buildings are made of stone. Stone contains large quantities of silica, which is primarily composed of silicon. The integrated circuits (ICs, or chips) of computers are also made of silicon, and they store information. Therefore stones are capable of storing information. Certain stones (such as sandstone) also contain significant amounts of iron oxides. The tape within audio and video cassettes is nothing more than iron oxide spread on an acetate tape. Acetate is also claimed to be high in silica (which it is not). All is needed is a suitable device to extract this information and display it somehow. This device is the stone tape projector.

The science

 

I cannot comment on the nature of ghosts, or whether images are stored in the fabric of buildings. I can, however, discuss the science behind the proposed mechanism.

Put simply there is none.

Stone does contain silica, and integrated circuits do contain silicon, but there the similarity ends. The circuitry inside an IC is made by building up many layers of silicon and other compounds to make transistors, which in turn are arranged into logic gates, some of which can be used to store data. The arrangement of crystals within a rock is simply too random to allow it to function even as a crude diode, never mind even a single byte of memory.

Some rock does contain oxides of iron, but again the arrangement of these is random. The only reason that audio tape stores anything is because it has been exposed to a specific magnetic field by the recorder. Even if a person emitted a massive magnetic field when they died (which I doubt) it would not be able to affect the iron oxide molecules in the rock. The orientations of these molecules are used by scientists to deduce the state of the Earth’s magnetic field when the rock sedimented; this would be impossible if anything dying in the vicinity affected it. Also, audio tape works because it is continually moving under the write/read head. If it were to stay still there would be no way of discriminating between the different sounds recorded as time progressed.

I hope this post sums up the theory behind the ghost tape projector. I’ll follow it up with a post discussing the device itself.

Psychic and science show with Derek Acorah and Richard Felix

OK, so an unusual title for the show in York: Psychic and Science!

Here's a brief resume of what happened. Harry Martindale, the man who saw the Roman Legion in the basement of the Treasurer's House gave his story. We all know about this famous York ghost sighting, but this was the first time I'd heard it first hand. Derek then did some readings for members of the audience. A number of hits and a number of misses here, although none of the misses appeared to be a fault with Derek or his spirit guide Sam, clearly the audience member had forgotten the person who was now a spirit who was looking over them. I found this to be great news really. Its nice to know that if all this is real, we will have loads of people, including people we don't really know, looking out for us. Then again, perhaps it just means that life after death is so boring you'll poke your nose into anyone's business. A couple of the hits were obviously not due to random chance as the names were too unusual, but in other cases I think the spirit must be having a laugh and feeding false information to Derek. Oh, that would be so tempting wouldn't it? Other interesting things that Derek's spirits know are the future (one woman will get pregnant next October or November, and a friend called Steve will present a good plan to make money) and how to heal people (one audience member with an occasional bad back will feel better in the next few weeks). Well, maybe that's not so good on the healing side, I'm sure some sufferers of asthma, psoriasis, eczema, or depression could have done with the treatment.

Richard Felix then led a glass divination with 6 members of the audience chosen by Frisbee. The 'glass' correctly answered a number of questions (although did not seem sure if it was male or female) before Derek had a revelation that the spirit involved was a young lad hung for stealing three horses that were actually stolen by his dad.

Just before the break, Derek mentally projected an image of an object that was in a small flat case and asked people to text their thoughts. Amazingly someone guessed an old pistol - who'd have thought! And this was the first time in 18 or 20 shows that someone got it right. Why did the right guess happen tonight - Richard did not know.

In the second half, we had a human pendulum controlled by a spirit, a walking table, eight people holding a seance in Dick Turpin's cell and one person having a solo vigil in the cell. This last item was very entertaining. Finally - and I'd been waiting all evening for this - the science bit. A collection of objects and leads and a crystal Van der Graaf were set up on stage to project the images recorded in the stone of the building into a cloud of steam caused by dry ice. The audience were invited to take lots of photographs and look for faces. I took over 150 and did not see a single face, but other people were much more fortunate, with a number of ghostly apparitions caught on camera. Strangely the building only ever recorded faces, no bodies, and no images from the back or underneath where you might expect(!) a building to notice events.

So my conclusion. An impressive bit of reading (but I have never witnessed this before), a variety of ideomotor effects and a strong 'dousing' of pareidolia. The show promised that it would "break away from the normal Hollywood or TV ghost show, where the scare factor was always prominent. “Instead we’ll conduct various experiments and demonstrations and test theories to open people’s eyes and prove that the realities behind ghosts are far more fascinating than the Scooby Doo side of things.” Well it had a complete lack of experiments, no science (unless a useless box and wires is included as science) and no proof on "the realities of ghosts". An entertaining evening, but there was no way this could be argued to have any science or experimental content - a breach of trading standards perhaps.

Addendum: Skeptical paranormal researcher Hayley Stevens has written a more in-depth article about the "Stone Tape Projector" used in the show.

August Meeting

On Monday 27th August 2012 we had our monthly meeting at the Phoenix Inn, George Street, York. A very informative and entertaining talk was given by Ash Pryce, entitled "How to be a Psychic Con-Man". Ash used simple magic tricks to recreate spoon bending, remote viewing, ESP and psychic surgery (thanks Rob - I hope you're now feeling better!).

This then led to an interesting discussion on the ethics of such feats (whether genuine or not). If a magician uses a trick to fool someone about their ability then this is seen as OK, but if done by a "psychic" then when does this become unethical? The same information, or advice, given to one person may simply lead to introspection of their life, whereas another person may follow the same advice blindly and end up in a worse position. One outcome has a beneficial ending and another a detrimental one. Is the advice given unethical, or is it only unethical if the claimant says they have a supernatural ability (when they do not), or perhaps only if they have 'charged' for the advice?

Overall a very interesting discussion on the grey areas that inhabit life. If only everything was black and white.