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584819481NYRPYETZUENOSED.20120316194149Don't miss skeptic and professional MMA fighter Brent Weedman in the Bellator Lightweight Tournament Championship tonight, Friday, May 25 at 8/7C. You can watch a free live stream on Spike.com or on cable and satellite television stations MTV2 and Epix HD.

We recently interviewed Weedman about his support of scientific skepticism and his work to advance it within the martial arts world.

D. J. Grothe: You are a prize-winning MMA fighter. How did you get into such a demanding sport? 

Brent Weedman: My father was a police officer and martial arts instructor growing up. I was heavily involved in full contact martial arts my entire life. When I was18 or so I entered a 4 man amateur MMA tournament because I enjoy the competition. Slowly my involvement grew, and I had a few opportunities for larger and larger fights. After a serious of discussions with my now-wife Emily I decided to throw all of my energy into a career as a prize fighter.

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Google announced a significant enhancement to their search engine called Knowledge Graph, which Skeptic History Iconhas just become available to users in the United States.  It should become available in other countries soon. I was immediately curious how this new technology would affect searches for topics relevant to skepticism.

The most obvious component of the new product is a panel that appears to the right of many search results (in place of the ads). This box contains results derived from Wikipedia and other sources, and is intended as a quick answer to your search.  It often contains a list of three to five related searches. If you search for a person, the related searches will be other people.

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Back in March a study came out, though it was only recently hyped up in the media, which explored an interesting intersection between psychology, vaccination, and the communication of risk. This study by Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse (2012) covered two experiments in which the researchers looked at how the wording of vaccine risk messages affected participants’ perception of the safety of vaccines.

The idea of these experiments was to explore what the researchers call the negativity bias. This bias is a tendency for negative messages to influence our perceptions of risk more than positive ones. This creates a problem for the communication of negating messages—messages that downplay a risk or offer contradictory evidence against a risk. So, relating to information about vaccines, how strongly should we word our pro-vaccine arguments?

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This week in Doubtful News:

There were three big mysteries making news this week. First, a package makes a postal worker ill. But what really happened is a story that is messy in many aspects.

A pilot has a close encounter over Denver that has UFO theorists intrigued.

Rocks collected on the beach gave us a genuine case of spontaneous combustion, resulting in a woman with burns and a question about where the reactive material came from.

Some consumer issues also made the news this week. U.S. trade officials declared a $40 million settlement over deceptive claims about toning shoes.

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  1. So Many Flavors of Medical Nonsense
  2. TAM 2011 on YouTube
  3. Skeptic History: Doyle vs. Rhine
  4. Pseudoscience In Education - Seeking To Solve The Rabbit Out Of A Hat Fallacy