Canberra Skeptics

The upcoming elections and the latest budget have placed school education reforms high on the public agenda. As politicians and practitioners work to improve the quality of education for every Australian child, we need to examine if the proposed reforms are actually addressing one of the key influencing factors – teachers' beliefs about the subjects they teach. The quality of teachers tomorrow will largely depend on their experience as students today. This is especially true in science.

Anthropogenic climate change has been debated in scientific circles for at least 150 years but it was not until 1979, with the publication of the Charney report, that it became politicised.

Today, the findings of mainstream science are discussed by alarmists, activists, sceptics (as opposed to skeptics) and deniers. It is not surprising that much pseudo-science has taken hold in the conversation, not only in the pub and at the barbeque but also in the boardroom and party room.

Ghosts, Spoon Bending, Mind Tricks, Talking with the Dead, Water Dowsing and the Anti-Vaccination movement all come under the microscope in this talk and demonstration. There will also be a look into the skeptical movement around the world with reports from Norway, Ireland and the UK.

2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of the British science fiction
television series Doctor Who, a program that has often grappled with science-related
themes during its illustrious history. The immense popularity of Doctor Who's new
series, as rebooted in 2005, has prompted a number of science communicators in
the 21st century to publish books or organise events on 'the science of Doctor Who',
examining the accuracy of the program's science or the plausibility of its fanciful
technologies.

Space debris in Low Earth Orbits (LEO) especially is of concern to all nations on Earth – those that are space faring and the rest, including Australia, that are space dependent. Before mitigation and remediation strategies can be contemplated, a great deal more information, in a great deal more detail, is needed to characterise the problem. At present there are no ground-based Space Situational Awareness sensors in the Southern Hemisphere, leading to large gaps in coverage, especially relating to space objects launched from North Asia.