It's been a short 12 months since the Advertising Standards Authority started to regulate marketing claims made on the Internet. In that time, the Nightingale Collaboration has given the ASA possibly their most serious challenge yet: curbing the misleading claims made on CAM websites. Many practitioners have realised their responsibilities and taken down long lists of 'what homeopathy can help with...', etc.

But much more needs to be done and we can't rely on the ASA to do everything, so we've been using other regulators as well, particularly the medicines regulator, the MHRA.

Find out more about what we've been up to and what our plans are for the next 12 months.

Deborah's talk is on the Cultural & Physiological aspects of the religious and superstitious experience.

• When do the dead chew in their graves?
• Why do vampires strike in autumn?
• Why do ghosts live in electric clocks?

We are delighted to be hosting Deborah Hyde who has been writing about the folklore of the macabre for eighteen years. Her book, ‘Unnatural Predators’ will be published this year. She blogs on belief in the supernatural as ‘Jourdemayne’, but often suffers from mission creep. Her daytime, grown-up job is a makeup effects coordinator in the film industry – more vampires and zombies, then.

It may seem premature to be discussing the elimination of human aging as a cause of death, when so little progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two facts undermine this assessment. The first is that aging happens throughout our lives but only causes ill-health after middle age: this shows that we can postpone that ill-health without knowing how to prevent aging completely, but instead by molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of subsequent, incremental refinement of big technological breakthroughs is usually fast enough (so long as public enthusiasm for them is strong) to change those technologies almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. In this talk I will explain, first, why therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of typical 60-year-olds may well arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and will thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies “longevity escape velocity”. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

Skeptic and legal writer David Allen Green is the convenor of Westminster Skeptics in the Pub and has recently been appointed Legal Correspondent at the New Statesman. David also writes the popular "Jack of Kent" blog for which he was shortlisted for the Orwell blogging prize last year. He has been involved in many recent legal issues of interest to the skeptical community such as The British Chiropractic Association vs. Simon Singh, the Twitter Joke Trial, and defending Sally Bercow against libel accusations from the right-wing MigrationWatch UK.

David gave an excellent talk at Leicester Skeptics in the Pub in November 2009, and with all he has acheived since this talk promises to be even better.

For more than half a century the view that radiation represents an extreme hazard has been accepted. This talk challenges that view by facing the question How dangerous is ionising radiation? Briefly the answer is that radiation is about a thousand times less hazardous than suggested by current safety standards.

For many this will come as a surprise. Why are people so worried about radiation? Should we choose nuclear power or face climate change? Education, understanding and simple scientific fact, not popular fear inherited from the days of the Cold War, are essential to mankind's survival on Earth.

Professor Wade Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford.

As individuals and groups, humans are very bad at both estimating and comparing dangers. We will accept different amounts of risk depending on how the question is framed. We will pay less to avoid danger than we would want to be paid to accept the same danger. More importantly, when presented with two equal threats, we will sacrifice convenience, money and liberty to avoid one, but insist that it is an inalienable right to subject ourselves to the other.

Dr Andrew Rae is a safety and risk researcher. He ponders the question of how to reasonably assess and regulate risks in a society where safety officials face more danger driving to work than they protect the public from by performing their occupations.

Drew reports for the Pod Delusion podcast on issues relating to science and skepticism.

Top skeptical podcast The Pod Delusion will be recording a live episode at Leicester Skeptics in the Pub.

The Pod Delusion podcast is a weekly news magazine about a broad variety of issues, all approached from a skeptical viewpoint.

The line-up for the evening will be a panel of speakers each talking on a wide variety of topics - the only rule is that they must be interesting. In the past a wide variety of topics have been covered from politics, to science to culture and philosophy, it's newsy commentary from a secular, rationalist, skeptical, somewhat lefty-liberal perspective, and was recently nominated for the Secularist Of The Year award.

http://poddelusion.co.uk/

A look at creationism in the UK.  Should we be worried about creationism in the UK?  What are UK based creationist groups up to?  What can we do about it? 

Especially for Skeptics we will discuss "How to Argue with Creationists".  Richard Dawkins says it isn't possible to argue with creationists using logic and evidence.  We will examine some arguments that can work with creationists that don't depend on evidence or logic.

Does the name "financial adviser" break the rules on treating customers fairly?

Why do they mislead customers about risk? 

Why don’t they turn more customers away?

Paul Lewis regularly appears on BBC television and BBC radio 4 advising on all things financial.  He appears most Saturdays on BBC 1 discussing finance and consumer issues, and his appearances on Radio 4 have included his regular presenting of Money Box Live and occasional programs such as “The Truth about Goldman Sachs”.

As Paul's expenses are paid for by the taxpayer, he insists on publishing everything he claims online at www.paullewis.co.uk.  Most honourable.

This is an attempt to step outside the typical skeptic topics and discuss why we should be skeptical about the financial advice industry.

Quacks not only deceive (and sometimes harm) patients but the culture of managerialism that tolerates them in universities has a more serious consequence, the corruption of real science.

Professor D Colquhoun, FRS held the established (A.J. Clark) chair of Pharmacology at UCL, and was the Hon. Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology. In October 2004, he became a Research Fellow. Like many previous holders of the chair (in particular, A.J. Clark, J.H. Gaddum, H.O. Schild and J.W. Black) his interests are in quantitative analysis of receptor mechanisms.

He graduated from Leeds with a BSc and then went to Edinburgh to work for a PhD. After doing research at University College from 1964-69 on immunological problems and completing a book on statistics, he went to Yale University to work on nerve conduction. After returning from the USA he eventually returned to the Pharmacology Department at UCL in 1979, and has worked on single ion channel mechanisms since then.

In 2004, he was made an Honorary Fellow of University College London.

David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on culture, international affairs, politics and the media. A former television researcher, producer and programme editor, he has previously written for The Independent, The Guardian and The Observer, winning numerous accolades, including Columnist of the Year 2003 and the 2001 Orwell prize for journalism. He has appeared on Have I Got News For You, presented a number of radio and television series and programmes on current affairs and historical topics. His first book, and account of a journey by kayak on the rivers and canals of England, Paddling to Jerusalem, was published in 2000 and won the Madoc Prize for travel writing. In 2009 he published Voodoo Histories, a book on conspiracy theories, which will be the subject of his talk.

David Aaronovitch's official website is www.davidaaronovitch.com.

"Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses whether or not it is true. As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs."

I wouldn't normally use a quote from Wikipedia as a blurb for a talk, but there is a very good reason in this case. Tonight's speaker, Martin Poulter, rewrote the entire Confirmation Bias article on Wikipedia over a period of several months. His efforts were recognised, when his article was made Wikipedia's "Featured Article" for Friday 23 July 2010. These articles are considered to be the best articles in Wikipedia, and as such just 0.09% of articles are held in such regard.

In tonight's talk, Martin will explain exactly what confirmation bias is and how it can lead us to make bad decisions, and continue to hold our false preconceptions as true.

Martin Poulter first encountered skepticism while a teenager. He has a Philosophy and Psychology degree from Oxford University and a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the University of Bristol. Martin first came to speak to Glasgow Skeptics in the Pub, on Scientology, back in January 2010. He has been a Scientology-watcher since 1995, when he was threatened with legal action over material he posted online. He is an ordained minister in the Church of the SubGenius, which offers eternal spiritual salvation or triple your money back.