Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Last week, we headed up to Headingley for the Finnish Christmas Carols concert.

It was held at the Lutheran Church in Headingley, and there were around twenty people there, mostly Finns. Mixed in with the hymn, which had an organ for the first time this year (in previous years, they have just sung, without music), they had a short play as well, about how you should be dishonest in order to achieve personal gain (not quite why you would include a play with such a message, but there you go).

I’m not sure about the idea of getting a nation of people famous for being rather introverted to sing, but Elina seemed to enjoy it, so job done I guess.

After, everyone headed into the church house in which there was some Finnish food laid on. There were also feedback forms, in which I suggested it would be great if the church could get wifi installed.

This year, I attended GRAM – Group Representatives Annual Meetup, first the first time. GRAM is an event organised by the British Humanist Association, that brings together the leaders of affiliated groups to talks, discussions and ideas.

The event was held at the Quaker headquarters on Euston Road, which turned out to be a really nice building. I was expecting it to be someone bare, given Quakers are often minimalistic, but it was actually very well furnished inside.

While a lot of the talks weren’t that interesting, it was certainly inspiring to hear other group leaders talk about what they have been doing in their group – something like what we used to do at the AHS, where each group would deliver a quick update, would have worked really well.

There were also some heated discussions between some of the BHA representatives and some of the local groups, regarding the much tighter restrictions being placed on local groups by the BHA. For example, if you try to search for your local humanist group, some groups are now excluded from the map.

Overall, it was reasonably useful. It’s somewhat different to how I imagined, and how we run things like Sunrise Conference, but was useful for catching up with the latest developments on a national level.

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side:

Photos from this year’s Pride event. As ever it was an enjoyable day, though the parade was disappointing. I commented last year that there were a lack of floats, and this year there seemed to be even less effort. Still, that should only provide motivation to have a great parade next year – I’ve even got it in my calendar this time, would be great to have a humanism float.

Also, let it never be said that we weren’t doing our bit 😉 .

It’s been a while since I last stopped by York Brights, so I decided it was high time to turn up to a meeting. It was a somewhat intimate affair, with only six of us there (usually there are loads of people these days), but the conversation was never the less it’s usual excellent standard. We also noticed an item on the menu we hadn’t seen before.

The mega mixed grill burger as it is known is just that – a mixed grill in a burger. They start off with a huge burger, was at least half a pound, if not more – I just don’t really know how much a pound is but it was definitely at least as big as two McQuarters. They then put a fried egg, a gammon steak, a chicken fillet, a pineapple ring and a sausage, wrap it all in the world’s largest bread bun and surround it with chips. Amazing.

Recently, Leeds Salon hosted Ken McLaughlin, author of Surviving Identity: Vulnerability and the Psychology of Recognition.

The book itself is a good read. I found the first chapter or so, which discusses the transition from the old social movements (such as traditional labour and trade union movements) so the new social movements that we say today, went over my head somewhat. Not that it wasn’t well written or easy to follow, but I won’t claim to understand the nuances of the historical development of sociology. But beyond that, I settled into an enjoyable read.

Ken’s thesis looks at the increasing prevalence of the “survivor mentality” – once a term used for people who survived the Holocaust, now an increasing number of groups describe themselves as survivor groups, even though the category of things you can die from had been left long behind.

He also commented on the increase of people classified as “vulnerable adults”, which only 40 years ago was restricted to those with mental health issues that explicitly put them at risk of serious abuse, to today’s standard where simply being old can qualify you as a vulnerable adult, in which everyone who comes near you must be rigorously CRB checked, of which the extended CRB checks can include information like accusations – even if you are found innocent. Such restrictions don’t help the field of social care, but more importantly, they don’t help the people they are designed to protect.

If interested, you can find the book on Amazon.

This is the first of three blog posts I have coming out regarding the debate points that have been raised recently around inviting controversial speakers to Skeptics events. In my first post, I want to discuss the situation at hand in a little more depth.

At the start of the year, we booked Steve Moxon to speak at Leeds Skeptics, on the topic of “why aren’t there more women in the boardroom?” On Monday, 9 June, we announced that we were cancelling the event.

The decision was reached after we had received a significant amount of concerned messages from people who attend our events, as well as new information being brought to our attention and after review, we eventually concluded that it would not create a positive debate as we had hoped. Here is what the Leeds Skeptics officially said:

After careful consideration, we have decided to cancel Steve Moxon’s upcoming talk. As a Skeptics group we strive to host events that are both interesting and challenging, however, based on feedback from those who attend our events, and new information being brought to our attention, we now believe that it is unlikely that the event would create a healthy and positive debate on the matter.

It was a very tough decision to reach though. On one side, we don’t want people who turn up to our events to be offended, at the same time, we do want to host events on thought provoking subjects and not be limited on topics by those that are on the approved skeptics list.

In the end, the question of censorship was a moot point – even if we did cancel the event, it wasn’t a case that we were censoring anyone – it’s our forum, we can invite who we like, and we ultimately called off the event because Steve would not have been well received, nor would it have created a proper debate on the subject. The subject itself remains as a topic worthy of debate.
After this had all taken place, someone asked if Leeds Skeptics was in the habit of giving radical speakers a platform – the implication being that we didn’t, so we shouldn’t give Steve one.

So, Leeds Skeptics, do you regularly hold events where creationists are given an uninterrupted platform? Do you regularly invite anti-vaxxers to speak at Skeptics in the Pub and blurb their work in the same tone? Isn’t the appropriate form to engage with someone whose views are controversial and that you want to see ripped to shreds a debate, not a lecture?

However, the answer to this question is yes. We have previously invited speakers from the Zeitgeist Movement and We Are Change. They’re both good examples of when we have invited controversial speakers, with views at odds with those of most Skeptics, backed up with some very questionable science. Naturally, they were both taken to task in the Q&A.

That said, they are tame compared to the kind of events that Leeds Atheist Society puts on. They regularly give an uninterrupted platform to members of the religious community, who often have strong and open views against women and homosexuals. I remember one of the Reason Week debates was opened by the Islamic speaker making the following joke.

50 years ago homosexuality was a crime, today it’s accepted, in 50 years time it will probably be compulsory.

He got booed for it. So he should, it’s rare that you hear something that offensive said in public. But there was no question as to whether we should be challenging this kind of bigotry – of course we should be. That was in the context of debate, but through the interfaith talks, it’s more normal for a religious speaker at LAS to get an uninterrupted platform where they can say what they like without rebuttal. I’ve never heard of anything avoiding such events because of the controversial things the religious speaker had to say – we’re there to learn, and to challenge prejudice.

At no point throughout any of these events could it ever have been implied that they were legitimising such speakers, associating themselves with such with such groups or providing a platform for such detestable views. As Skeptics, we’re here to challenge ideas – that is the definition of skepticism.

I have more to say on such speakers, and will discuss that in my next blog post, but I hope the above helps to elucidate the thought process we went through.

It was a big we had been waiting for, for 15 months.

Why? Because I bought tickets in March last year, for a July gig. Normal enough. But a few months later, Blink cancelled their tour saying they needed another year to finish their album. So here we were a year later, finally on our way to see them.

As a bonus, You Me At Six had been replaced by All-American Rejects, who’s lead singer may or may not have been heavily intoxicated while performing. Blink-182 themselves were excellent and only played five of the twenty odd songs they did from their new album. Stick with the classics, that’s what we’re all there for 😀 .

Plus, they seemed very happy to be here. “We come for your women. And your Nando’s,” commented Tom DeLonge.

For the June meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Rob Lyons, deputy editor of Spiked and author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, joined us to discuss his book.

I had invited Rob up after seeing him give a similar talk at Leeds Salon and have previously blogged about it. It’s an excellent book and I highly recommend giving it a read – grab yourself a copy from Amazon.

Last month, I went to a talk by Richard McIntyre on “The Future of PHP”.

Turns out, it’s JavaScript.

More and more these days, web applications are being developed with fat front end clients loaded with JavaScript, and the server-side processing is primarily used for data processing and APIs. So we’re seeing a shift from PHP being used as a somewhat front-end technology to merely (I say merely, there is a lot of work to do it) delivering the content in a format the JavaScript front end can consume.

Perhaps this is why we’ve seen a rise in the number of microframeworks, such as Silex, that I recently blogged about.

I think the overriding message I took away from the talk though is that they’re inventing development platforms faster than I can learn them! I’ve already got a large list of technologies and libraries I need to review and I think I came away from this talk with another half a dozen!

Really enjoyed the talk though, and if you’re interested in PHP and in the Leeds area you should definitely check out the Leeds PHP User Group who host such events on a monthly basis.