Archive for the ‘News’ Category

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Sunrise Conference 2011, our second annual conference on community leadership and activism. Join us on Saturday 3rd September for a day of learning and sharing ideas and experience in running local community groups.

Sunrise ran for the first time in 2010, featuring talks, workshops, seminars and discussions from community groups leaders from across the UK.

This year’s event will be run as a virtual conference, streamed live across the internet so you can attend from wherever you are based. Best of all, registration to this year’s event is free, so it is accessible to everyone.

Registration is now open, so sign up today to reserve your spot.

Today, we’re proud to launch our latest project, Worfolk Lectures! The site is an online archive of academic lectures on a variety of ever expanding topics, all available to download or stream in full high definition.

Over the past twelve months we have been rapidly recording and editing together lectures from a variety of talks, conferences and events and after a long and hard slog, we’re finally able to bring this content to the world.

As well as issues with transferring and editing the content together, the final piece fell together in June when Dailymotion offered us a partnership agreement to allow us to host the content, in full HD.

There are already ten lectures available on the site and we will be releasing a new video every Friday in something we’re hoping to coin the Friday lecture. No prizes for guessing how we managed to come up with that name!

Speakers will include Professor A. C. Grayling, Processor Chris French, Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Dr Antony Lempert, Dr Terrence Kee and many others. You can follow us on Twitter to keep up with all the latest updates.

We’re pleased to announce that free stock photography website Atheist Stock is now out of beta!

We launched the site in March 2010 and since then we’ve been working to add to the collection and road test the functionality. In October, we reached 1,000 images and the collection is still growing!

Given everything seems to be in working order and we’re now moving into the next phase of development, we’ve now removed the beta sticker from the website. If you haven’t had use of the thousands of available images, then perhaps now is the time to browse our collection.

Earlier this month, the Top500, the project which measures and ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers, unveiled the latest instalment of their twice-yearly list. It had a new number one – Japan’s K computer.

Of course, an even faster computer is in itself very exciting, this is especially exciting because the project, pronounced kei, aims to be the first computer to reach ten petaflops per second when it becomes fully operational in November 2012.

Ten petaflops is a key number because, despite there being much discussion of its accuracy, ten peraflops is the number put forward by Kurzweil for the upper boundary of estimates on the processing power of the human brain.

That means that, once the K is fully operation, for the first time we will have a computer more powerful than the human brain.

That’s pretty exciting!

Of course, it could be entirely inaccurate. Some think the brain is capable of 38 petaflops per second, or even higher – other estimates have suggested 100, or even 1000 petaflops.

But considering the exponential growth of computer power, even if that is true, that doesn’t actually delay the arrival of such a computer that much time.

Consider Cray’s new XK6. It is aiming to hit 50 petaflops (http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/229700091) and they say it will be ready later this year! Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet, but presuming it does, this represents a significant step forward in the chase to beat the brain.

Even if you assume that the brain does, in fact, operate at 1,000 petaflops per second, 100 times faster than Kurzweil suggested, the release of the XK6 this year means that within seven years, 2018, we will still achieve a computer faster than the human brain. Soon enough that I very much hope my grandparents will still be around to see it.

We’re pleased to announce that online video site Dailymotion has accepted us into their content partner programme!

Over the past twelve months, we have been building up an archive of the academic lectures and events that we and our follow groups have been staging and we will now be able to bring this collection to the world – all in full 1080 HD.

Look out for more exciting news on this topic in the upcoming weeks and months, but for now you can browse our newly opened Dailymotion channel. The first lecture we have posted is Dr Terrence Kee delivering the 2010 Worfolk Lecture on “did life on Earth originate on Earth?” and we are adding new talks on a regular basis.

Some of you may have been aware that there was recently a royal wedding.

Actually, I didn’t find the media coverage that overbearing. There was plenty of coverage of it, but then that is the media no matter what is happening – whether it’s the latest deadly pandemic, political scandal or international football competition.

What really annoyed me, was the amount of people who spent so long moaning about it. Every time I logged on Facebook, every time I looked at Twitter, every time I read someone’s blog, they seemed to be moaning about the amount of media coverage the royal wedding was receiving.

I mean, it’s not just me that thinks there is a certain level of irony that most of the coverage I have seen of the royal wedding, is people moaning about how there is too much coverage, right?

We’re pleased to announce that today we are launching the first in what will be a series of guides by the Humanist Action Group. HAG does great work in Leeds and if you have ever thought about running such a group in your local community, these guides are for you.

The guides have been under development for a while and we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to them.

The first guide we are making available is the organiser’s guide which explains the basics of organising a group, finding and recruiting volunteers, staying on top of everything and making sure you have the correct paperwork in place.

The second guide we are launching today is the homeless guide which explains how to run a simple feed the homeless programme. If you would like to get a copy of these, just get in touch!

We have further guides under development also, to keep an eye out for those.

The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire is a society with considerable history, having been around for over forty years now. One thing it hasn’t had, at least in the past decade anyway however, was a logo. Which has proved somewhat annoying when launching the group onto social media platforms.

Wanting to rectify this, I asked Emma Bryce, currently serving as the president of Durham University Humanist and Secularist Society and press secretary of the AHS, to use her graphic design skills to come up with something for us. We’re pretty impressed with the result!

You can check out some more of her amazing work here.

Yesterday, the first session of Intimate Details took place at Leeds Atheist Society. Intimate Details is a course which looks at sex, relationships and surrounding issues from a secular perspective – and indeed given it covers a lot of the same material as UCCF’s Pure course, some have cheekily nicknamed it “Impure.”

Yesterday’s session looked at sexuality and the various sexual orientations that exist, taboos and fetishes and the attitude towards sex in society such as sex in the media and education system as well as pornography, prostitution and religion.

Next week’s session will be looking at dating, relationships and sex. You can join us for that at 7pm on Friday 10 December.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to my sister Katie who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in theatre costume design on Monday.

The degree is accredited by Teesside University which I’m told is currently University of the Year being the first new university to win the award. This to me seems somewhat analogous to Stewart Lee’s “world’s tallest dwarf” (very impressive in relation, but still never the less a dwarf, and therefore restricted by law from holding positions with a minimum height requirement such as a firefighter, or owner slash operator of an enchanted beanstalk).

Never the less, I’m sure most of us are all too aware of just how much work there is to earn a degree in any subject that doesn’t contain the word “media” in the title, so congratulations are certainly in order.