Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Skeptics’

Leeds Skeptics recently invited David Frank to present a talk entitled “sex, love & marketing”. It looked at how people market themselves on online dating and what interesting information we can gather from large scale data releases by major online dating networks.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Online dating is rapidly becoming a mature industry with wide social acceptance – most people think it is a good way to meet people and 11% of Americans have used it
• It is predominantly used by middle-class urban dwellers with some university education
• “Do you like horror movies?” turns out to be a really good predictor of compatibility

And some tips for using online dating:

• Get your friends to pick your photos as you will instinctivly try and pick mirror images of yourself rather than the best photos
• Get your friends to peer-review your profile, just like you would a CV
• Use an interesting username that is neither boring nor contains words with negative connotations
• Use pictures taken on DSLRs – whether it is the skill of the user, the higher quality camera or extra care taken, the produce much more liked photos than camera phones
• If you must use a camera phone, turn the flash off
• People love some depth of field on profile pictures too
• Selfies are good for women, but bad for men
• Smile with teeth is best, followed by no smile, smile without teeth. A smirk is the worst thing you can do.
• T-shirts or casual shirts are the way to go for men – tank tops and topless are the worst ways to go
• Showing cleavage works for women, and this becomes even more successful as they age
• Do not talk about god in your profile
• Basically everyone hates misspellings, grammar, and short replies

Overall a really interesting talk. There was also a section on sex and fetishes. The entire thing was well supported by stats and evidence. You can find the full slides on David’s website.

For the June meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Georgina Binnie presented a talk “A Look at James Joyce and Photography”.

Earlier this month Professor Liane Benning presented a talk on life in extreme environments at Leeds Skeptics.

This collided with two unfortunate events. Firstly, due to the rare day of hot sunny weather, turn out was down. Second, due to time commitments I had not brought the video camera to record the talk as it takes a long time to process, edit and publish it. These were both big mistakes as Professor Benning presented one of the most interesting talks we have had.

It turns out that she has spent much of the last decade going to Svalbard and testing Mars rovers for NASA and ESA. Officially she is a biogeochemist and moved effortlessly between different scientific disciplines. By the end of the talk I was sitting there feeling like I had wasted my life while GabrielÄ— was trying to sign up to go on the next expedition.

I know Headingley Cafe Scientifique were trying to poach her to speak at their group too. if they do book her and you have not seen the talk, I highly recommend attending!

For the April meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Dr Paul Marchant presented a talk entitled “Casting Light on Evidence … & Evidence on Light”. The talk looked at how data is used on public policy making, to varying degrees of success.

Paul Hopwood had previously spoken at Leeds Skeptics on the topic of “You Know Less Than You Think”. If you missed it, you can watch it online. He has since developed a follow-on talk, “Widening the View – Looking at the limits of Human Perception”, which he delivered for us earlier this week.

As ever, Paul delivered an interesting talk, though it is hard to listen to it all the way through without having an existential crisis. Not to mention the many additions to my reading list!

When I saw Galileo Day fell on a Saturday I immediately thought that would be an ideal day to have a Skeptics event. Being only three days after Darwin Day, I asked GabrielÄ— to present a talk on how viruses affect evolution. She very kindly obliged.

For the January meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Anna Semlyen spoke on why Leeds should have a blanket twenty mile an hour speed limit.

I thought it was a fascinating topic as it is one that really challenges us to think about our views (as opposed to Big Foot, that is just us basically laughing at stupid people). She made some great points about safety, though the other points about public health benefit (people walk more when the speed limit is lower) remain unproven. It invoked some engaging debate and I really enjoyed the event.

You can find out more about the campaign on their website.

Earlier this month we were lucky to have Kate Smurthwaite visit us to present her show The News at Kate: My Professional Opinion. She is a comedian but also does a lot of work with women’s rights and generally telling stupid people that they are stupid.

Here is a good clip of her doing that on The Big Questions:

Her event was really entertaining and I highly recommend going to see Kate’s show if you get the chance.

IMG_3389

Last month John Fletcher presented a talk entitled “A Skeptical Look at Statistics” at Leeds Skeptics. It was great to see people there who were really interested in stats. It was also the first event we have held at the Hedley Verity and while it isn’t perfect, it is certainly an acceptable backup venue.

Last month, Simon Singh came to Leeds Skeptics to promote his new book, The Simpsons and their Hidden Mathematical Secrets.

Turn out was excellent, we had 85 people there, topping our previous record of 68. We had to move a lot of the tables out of the room, move extra chairs in and still had people queuing out of both doors.

Simon put on a very entertaining talk and it was a pleasure to host him.