Annual scepticism

There are a few things that happens every year even in the world of scepticism. I will continue my series of highlights in the past and present year with something that did happen last year, one thing that has already happened this year, and something that will happen this year.

I have already mentioned the great success we (the Swedish sceptics) had with what we did at Almedalen last year but the thing I want to mention now is the biggest sceptical conference in the world The Amazing Meeting (TAM). I have been to a few TAMs and last year I got to go once more and I had a great time. For the interested reader I can recommend the soon to be published article I wrote for the Swedish sceptics publication Folkvett. I will update the blog with a link when the article is available online.

What has happened this year is that the Swedish sceptics has announced who won the two awards “årets folkbildare” och “årets förvillare”. Fortunately the news have actually been reported quite a lot in the media. I guess that the reason is that more and more people have heard of the organisation and heard about the awards. Though people tend to have heard about the “negative” award, the deluder of the year, much more than the “positive” award.
This year the positive award went to the children science show “Hjärnkontoret”. This is a very popular show that has been running for 16 years. Unfortunately only a few of the news media mentions this. Not surprisingly one is SVT, the Swedish state television that makes Hjärnkontoret. But also DN mention the winner of the positive award.
Of course even for DN the big news is who got appointed deluder of the year. This year it was the environmental board in Orsa and Mora municipality that got the award because they wanted to force telecommunication companies to change their antennas to remove all electro-magnetic radiation that allegedly caused great problems for one individual in that municipality. If the companies had been forced to follow the environmental board's decision half the area of the municipality would have no cellphone coverage or television.
The problem is that no one has been able to show adverse effects for the type of radiation that the antennas transmit. The reasoning the board relied on was shaky and included google as a source.
In SvD there is a short opinion piece where the chairman of the Swedish sceptics explain why the award was given to the environmental board.
One of the two big tabloids in Sweden also writes about the award (the negative one) and in their interview with the environmental board they uncover that they apparently still haven't understood that they have no scientific or rational standing in their argumentation.
Also the local radio for Orsa and Mora municipality have a short segment on the issue.
If one wants to learn more about how tax money are wasted on unproven and quite likely unnecessary removal of electro-magnetic fields Mats Reimer writes about it in his blog.
The announcements from the Swedish sceptics can be read on the Internet: årets folkbildare, årets förvillare.

Finally something to look forward to this year. Besides all the fun activities that will be arranged in Sweden like reccemottagningen, kulturnatten, and bokmässan there is the world sceptic conference in Berlin. As of yet I have no plans to go there but I really would like to.