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By Joshua Edison and Liam Bartlett

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Post #3 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Image)

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Post #3 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias (Image)

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Definition:
Confirmation Bias is the term used to describe people's tendency to interpret information in a way that is consistent with one's beliefs.

Connection:
Those who are used as eyewitness testimony regularly find themselves victims of Confirmation Bias. It is very rare for a witness to see the entire crime play out, instead of seeing only a small portion of the crime. Witnesses regularly make assumptions based on their perspectives that are consistent with their beliefs. A limitation of eyewitness testimony is that humans' memory and perception are not perfect, we can make mistakes or mishear things. Our memory is influenced by our perceptions.

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Post #4 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Video)

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Post #4 Red Flag: Ideological Support (Video)

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Definition:
The red flag of Ideological Support is often linked to people's religious beliefs. Some people use their beliefs to frame their understanding, causing a sort of bias that's not based on factual evidence, but on their ideology.

Connection:
The video included demonstrates the Ideological Support red flag because the religious belief of god is the evidence used to explain Jesus's Ressurection. Thus basing the claim of Jesus resurrecting on something that we have no scientific evidence of. The Critical thinking process and skepticism should be applied to the claim that Jesus was resurrected. Is the Source credible? Is there Supporting evidence based on scientific truths? What biases are at Play?

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Post #5 Red Flag: Suppression by Authorities (Article)

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Post #5 Red Flag: Suppression by Authorities (Article)

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Definition: Suppression by Authorities will often come from those with the power and resources to suppress anything they deem suitable. Authorities in this instance can be teachers, governments, agencies, companies, gangs and many more based on the situation.

Connection: This article contains examples of Authority suppression through media control. In this article, a scientist who has done extensive research on climate change and global warming is being suppressed by the government. A media control center would become the middle man censoring what information is passed from the scientist to the publisher. The pseudoscience watchlist is that emotions are at play and are trumping rational thought. The scientific proof of global warming dangers is real and current. However, the fear of reality is causing the denial and suppression of these facts.

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Whenever he got an interview request from a journalist, Max Bothwell felt a sense of dread. He knew what was about to happen.

It was 2013, and Bothwell was a government scientist with Environment Canada (now Environment and Climate Change Canada), the country's environmental watchdog. The biologist's work was fairly non-controversial at the time-he studied a microscopic algae that formed on rocks near streams, affectionately known as "rock snot" -but that didn't matter. Whenever a journalist reached out to him or any of his fellow government scientists, a clear series of steps followed.

First, the scientist had to contact a special media control center that dealt with these requests. These media relations staffers served as middlemen, modifying the message slightly to suit political goals, according to Bothwell and other Canadian scientists who worked during this all-too-recent era in Canada's history.

"We were all under a clear understanding that we could be dismissed for talking directly to the press," Bothwell says.

Next, the media control center would contact the journalist to request written questions, and then go back to the scientist to get written answers. Then, they would decide whether to send these directly to the reporter or to change or omit parts of the answers. This bureaucratic thicket became so dense that, at one point, it surfaced that a request from a journalist from The Canadian Press to speak with Bothwell resulted in 110 pages of emails between 16 different government communications staffers.

Other times, the strategy was just to delay a response until it was past the reporters' deadlines. Bothwell says he experienced this when outlets like the Vancouver Sun and even National Geographic tried to contact him about his work.

"That was deliberate. That wasn't accidental, that was policy," says Ian Stirling, an Arctic biologist who worked for Environmental Canada for 37 years doing research on polar bears. "They'd simply stall until you went away."

Besides frustrating scientists themselves, such political interference prevents the public from hearing about crucial work. Environment Canada-like the United States' Environmental Protection Agency, which came under a media blackout and a temporary freeze on grants and contracts during the first week of the Trump Administration-was a taxpayer-funded agency meant to serve the public by providing key information on climate change, air pollution and water quality.

"Disservice is too mild a word" to describe the effect of this muzzling, says Steven Campana, a shark scientist who spent 32 years working for Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "It's a cheat for the taxpaying public because it's the taxpaying public that is funding this government research. When that research leads to very positive things, or even if it's negative, the people that paid for it deserve to hear about it."

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been in power since 2006, but it wasn't until his party won a majority in 2011 that he was given a broader mandate to rule. One of his first steps was to create new restrictions on how and what government scientists could communicate to the public.

Early on in his administration, Harper boasted that Canada would become an "energy superpower" built on the growth of the Athabasca oil sands in the western part of the country. This oil-rich region would subsequently become a driving economic force for the country, until low global oil prices caused the the loonie (the Canadian dollar) to crash. Climate change science-and environmental regulations -posed a hindrance to that ambitious vision.

Over the next few years, government scientists would experience a tightening of media control, unreasonable approval procedures and drastic funding cuts to climate change research. This muzzling is well-documented: Canadian journalists tracked everything from the shuttering of oceanic research libraries to the attempted defunding of a research station that studied upper atmospheric space winds. A 2013 survey of scientists by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada elaborated on how scientists felt the impact of this political interference.

Yet throughout this process, the Harper administration vehemently denied that any muzzling was taking place. "While ministers are the primary spokespersons for government departments, scientists have, and are readily available to share their research with Canadians," said Scott French, a spokesperson for Ed Holder, Canada's minister of state for science and technology at the time, in 2014.

In November 2015, the current administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that government scientists would henceforth be allowed to speak directly to the media. Today, the right for federal scientists to speak openly about their research is written into their contracts, as Erica Gies reported for Hakai last week. Yet the effects of that tumultuous political era continue to leave their mark.

"The public willingness to put trust in government to make good, balanced decisions has been seriously eroded. That's taking a while to come back, if at all," said Chris Turner, a Canadian journalist and author of The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Willful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada, in an interview with The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang.

Now, Canadian scientists who lived and worked through that era fear that a parallel fate will befall their colleagues under President Donald Trump. "In Harper's era it was open warfare with the media," Bothwell said in an email. "I suspect something similar is about to happen in the U.S."

...

The effects of Harper's policies went beyond politically charged fields like climate change. Basically everything government researchers did was censored from the media, according to Canadian scientists who worked during that time. Taken together, these policies led to "a culture of fear of talking about anything," in Turner's words.

"Especially in the latter half of the Harper administration, our access to the media was clamped down severely to the point where it was virtually impossible for the media to talk to me for even the most trivial of topics," says Campana.

For instance, as head of the Canadian Shark Research Laboratory, Campana conducted 30-40 interviews a year about his work. As he puts it, "sharks are very media friendly." But once the new policies were put in place, the number dropped to around three a year.

In 2014, Campana and a team of government and university researchers released groundbreaking research that was the first to find a new way to determine the age of crustaceans like lobster, shrimp and crabs. "It was such a good news story, because with ages you can do stock assessments much more accurately," Campana says. "It was huge." It had nothing to do with climate change.

To get the word out, Campana sent a request for permission to speak to the media about his findings to the communications people. Then he waited. And waited. The days turned into weeks. Two months later, when one of his university coauthors spoke at conference in the U.S. about their work, and perked the interest of American news outlets.

Situations like this didn't seem to fit into any kind of political narrative, Campana says-they were a side effect of the government's broad efforts to control climate science.

Bothwell experienced something similar. In 2013, he got a call from a local radio station in Victoria to talk about his rock snot research. Bothwell reached out to his public relations branch, who said they would arrange the live interview with CBC. But there was a catch: Unbeknownst to the Canadian radio listeners, the media control staffers would be listening in on the phone line as well.

"I told the CBC I was not going to do it, and they said 'Ditto, we are not going to talk to you under those circumstances,'" Bothwell recalls. "Basically, mission accomplished."

If they broke these rules, scientists were disciplined accordingly.

In 2014, a Canadian TV outlet once contacted Campana for comment on an incident when a great white shark followed a kayaker into U.S. waters. "There were no implications for Canada whatsoever, and no conceivable way that something like that could embarrass the government," he says. So he went ahead and gave the interview-without prior approval.

He recalls swiftly receiving a letter of discipline in his file and a threat of severe punishment upon a second infraction.

"Working under those conditions was demoralizing to many," he said in a follow-up email. "But to me it was even more frustrating. The working conditions were destroying our productivity, because it was forcing unnecessary inefficiency on us. We were having our hands tied-although we still kept our jobs, we basically were prevented from actually doing any science."

Other scientists opted to keep their heads down to avoid drawing the government's ire. Stirling recalls that in 2012 year, colleagues and friends of his were allowed to attend a big Arctic conference in Montreal. However, he recallst hat they were escorted around by government chaperones who would shield and filter possible media questions, listen to them speak to other scientists and track which research posters they read.

Stirling and his colleagues were working on long-term data sets that tracked the effect of climate on polar bears (he literally wrote the book on polar bears and climate). The only way they were able to pull this off was by quietly seeking secondary funding sources and conducting the work simultaneously with other studies. "We just kept a low profile," Stirling says.

...

The Harper administration also employed a more direct tactic: Funding cuts.

One high-profile case involved the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, which had its funding source pulled in 2012 (some funding was later restored). Another was the attempted shutdown in 2012 of the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), one of the most important facilities in the world for tracking the long-term effects of climate change, pollutants and other factors on freshwater ecosystems and fish.

When the government announced they would no longer fund the ELA, there was a public outcry, says the ELA's current executive director, Matthew McCandless. Environmental activists protested the cuts, while scientists and politicians criticized the government. "It was thought there was a war on science and this was the battle royale," says McCandless. "Canadians really rallied behind this cause, and then the Harper government relented and said they would transfer it to a private operator."

In the end, a budget bill called Bill C-38 cut $2 million from the ELA's federal funding, but the facility was not shut down. The provincial government in Ontario picked up some of the funding from the government, while the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit independent research organization, ran the project.

"We would have lost so much," says McCandless, who took on his position after the ELA transferred to private ownership. "These lakes have told us untold things about how the climate has changed since the '60s. For example, there are two weeks a year less ice cover in these lakes. They're getting warmer, they are getting darker. Fish in these lakes are getting smaller."

If the government hadn't caved, McCandless says, "It would have made it a lot harder to understand future threats on water resources."

...

What can scientists do to protect their data and voices when muzzling begins? Michael Rennie, now a Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Ecology and Fisheries and an assistant professor at Lakehead University, found out the hard way. In 2010 year, he got a "dream job" with the ELA as a research scientist, he says. Then the federal government stopped funding the facility.

Frustrated at the way things were going- it took five clearance forms just to hire a summer student to work for his department-he found an outlet in an anonymous blog. "It was my attempt to let people know what was happening on the inside and at the same time try not to risk my job," he says.

In a recent article in Scientific American, Canadian scientists suggest more drastic ways to protect the U.S.'s scientific legacy based on their own experience:

Canadian scientists are working with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania library and a nonprofit called the Internet Archive to back up environmental data sets and materials-including research around air pollution and greenhouse gases-that they believe could be vulnerable under a Trump administration. "The Harper government closed many of the different science libraries in Canada," Duck says. "It was done in a very chaotic fashion and we have almost certainly lost data that we used to have."

Rennie left in 2014 for a job at Lakehead University in Ontario. But he now works for the ELA again through a fellowship program in collaboration with the university, and has continued to write about his experience. This week, he offered American government scientists advice on a blog post titled "A survivor's guide to being a muzzled scientist."

Among them: Get a personal e-mail address, start your own blog and make sure there are multiple copies of your datasets. "Get anonymous, get online. Let people know what's going on," Rennie says. "Folks that are in academia, that have tenure, that have a bit more job security and have more of an ability to speak their mind can help those in the public service that are challenged with these situations."

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Canadian Scientists Explain Exactly How Their Government Silenced Science

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Whenever he got an interview request from a journalist, Max Bothwell felt a sense of dread. He knew what was about to happen. It was 2013, and Bothwell was a government scientist with Environment Canada (now Environment and Climate Change Canada), the country's environmental watchdog.

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Post #6 Red Flag: Ancient Wisdom (Video)

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Post #6 Red Flag: Ancient Wisdom (Video)

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Definition:
Ancient Wisdom red flag is the belief in any ancient secrets, powers and knowledge rather than the scientific explanations or findings.

Connection: This video discusses the many different beliefs and reasons that jade was used throughout the years. The Ancient wisdom from certain cultures and religions would vary. For some, it was a sign of wealth, and for others, it would be the stairway to heaven. This Pseudoscience watchlist is that Money is the motive. Those who could get their hands on this gem would often use this to make a large amount of money off those who thought of it more than just jade encouraging its magical powers.

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The Origins of Jade | Nephrite, Jadeite, and more!

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Reasons for belief #1 Patternicity (Image)

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Reasons for belief #1 Patternicity (Image)

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Definition:
Patternicity is defined as the tendency of people to look for meaningful patterns in questionable places.

Connection:
Patternicity is demonstrated by this image by showing you a picture of a cloud, your mind seeks to find a pattern, leading to the conclusion that a supernatural being that looks like a bunny is watching over you. A pseudoscience watchlist is shown: You must believe in the magical properties(of the cloud) based on faith.

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Reasons for belief #2 Emotional Connection (Video)

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Reasons for belief #2 Emotional Connection (Video)

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Definition:
The Emotional Connection reason for belief represents the bias that comes from people's emotions, clouding their judgment and affecting their perception. This can cause people to be more willing to believe something, preventing them from thinking critically.

Connection:
This video is a demonstration of the Emotional Connection Belief because Theresa Caputo (a medium who "talks to the dead") talks with families of those who have passed away, giving them a sense of closure and relief. They want to believe her because of their emotional investment, causing their beliefs to sway to match what they want to hear. A pseudoscience watchlist is shown: Emotion trumps rational thought.

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Theresa Caputo talks to the Dead | Long Island Medium

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Post #2 Red Flag: Mystical Energy (Article)

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Post #2 Red Flag: Mystical Energy (Article)

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Definition:
Mystical Energy's red flag involves applying "energy" to a supernatural or magical idea to give it credibility. By using the Scientific term 'Energy' meaning "The Ability to measure work" we can easily evaluate the claim.

Connection:
This article demonstrates the Mystical Energy red flag because the author references mystical subjects like "Awakening our Race to a higher power" Providing Ancient Wisdom in the form of magic from the Crystal Skulls. One connection to the pseudoscience watchlist is that it convinces on faith and belief - There is no evidence that crystal skulls will awaken you to a higher power. One limitation is the inability to prove the claims made.

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Define Problem:
I chose to evaluate the video The Resurrection of Jesus
Gather Information:
This video is made by a youtube channel called BibleProject. It is an animated video based on the bible, demonstrating the story of Luke 24, based on how the bible describes Jesus being resurrected.
Evaluate Evidence:
The story of Luke 24 has no scientific evidence or proof of these claims being true or false. As told by Luke, Jesus' resurrection entails descending from the sky making him the "divine king of the world". There is no definitive physical or archeological evidence that Jesus existed, let alone resurrected. There are accounts from witnesses but that's all we have to go on.

Recognize Assumptions, Emotions, and Biases:
As there is no scientific evidence on those who believe in this retelling of Jesus to base their findings, they are forced to interpret Luke's story through faith and how the stories are recounted through books and stories. Having no evidence to prove which stories are true or false allows for many different interpretations and assumptions in the story of Luke 24.

Synthesis Evidence, Identify Alternatives:

Alternative Solution 1: Jesus Existed and was Resurrected, Supported by the Bible(Eyewitness claims).

Alternative Solution 2: Jesus didn't exist and wasn't Resurrected, supported by Physical and Archaeological evidence.

Select Best Alternative:

I conclude that Jesus wasn't resurrected

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Definition: Simplicity reason for belief is when there is a science behind the subject at hand. However, rather than listening to science, we chose to instead go with an old tale that has been passed down or our own beliefs.

Connection: This article states Eskimos have an old story that has been passed down in Greenland that the lit-up skies at night would be the spirits of children that had passed away in the process of childbirth. The reason this represents simplicity is that the northern lights have a scientific explanation, but the Eskimos of Greenland choose to believe in their own reasoning behind them.

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The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) have enchanted viewers for thousands of years. And it has long been known that the best seat on Earth for viewing this spectacular light show is in Greenland.

The best place to see Northern Lights

High amidst mountains and ice, the airport settlement of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, boasts 300 clear nights a year. You can witness Aurora Borealis here - a port of embarkation for several of Quark's Greenland expeditions - every year from the end of September to the middle of April.

Today, the fluctuating colors of the Northern Lights, from green to red to blue and every hue in between, is one of the many, many reasons to visit east Greenland.

The lights have been explained as the result of a union between gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere and those ejected from the sun's atmosphere. But more fascinating, perhaps, are the thousand-year-old legends and folklore of days past, passed down and shared by the Inuit people. Among these stories are claims that the Northern Lights could predict the weather, and even communicate with the dead.

Northern Lights fables and folklore

Because of their animated hues, the Northern Lights have often been associated with dancing and lively, happy movements. As a result, they've long carried an air of spiritual significance, representing souls of ancestors, and even children.

The east Greenland Eskimos, for example, believed Aurora Borealis to be the spirits of children who died at birth. These playful souls were said to be dancing in the heavens, causing the streamers and draperies of the aurora to flow and spin around in the night sky.

The movement of the lights, coupled with the low light conditions required to view them at their best, can make them quite difficult to do justice in photos. Brush up on your low-light photography skills using these tips and on tricks for smartphone polar photography, before embarking on your cruise to Greenland.

Some stories recount that the liveliness of the lights was believed to be caused by spirits playing ball games, or soccer, with walrus skulls serving as the ball. Conversely, Nunivak islanders believed the moving lights were walrus spirits, kicking around human skulls.

The sound of the Northern Lights

In 1932, Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen wrote of the Greenland Inuit's belief in the heavenly soccer match, "It is this ball game of the departed souls that appears as the Aurora Borealis, and is heard as a whistling, rustling, crackling sound. The noise is made by the souls as they run across the frost-hardened snow of the heavens."

Although scientists have said there is no reason you should hear anything from the lights themselves, as Rasmussen mentioned, many people have claimed to have heard sounds such as whistling, crackling and hissing from the lights.

Greenland Inuit legend, according to Rasmussen, said that if you returned the whistle, the light would come near to you, out of curiosity, or even dance for you. However, others believed whistling during the light display could lead to contacting the dead, with the lights taking you directly to them. This could be the reason many also cautioned against whistling when the lights were low, in an attempt to avoid great misfortune, or even death.

It has been concluded by many through the years that although you may be able to communicate with the lights by way of a whistle or other means, you probably shouldn't - unless, maybe if you whisper, as explorer Ernest W. Hawkes writes in his book, The Labrador:

"The whistling crackling noise which sometimes accompanies the aurora is the voice of spirits trying to communicate with the people of the Earth. They should always be answered
in a whispering voice."

Northern Lights from your Greenland cruise

While today we know the exact origin of the Northern Lights, people from many nations still carry forward their own legends and beliefs. Some believe that children conceived on a night when the lights are visible will be particularly intelligent. Further, elders often warn children to behave, as the lights have been known to disappear completely from the sky - taking errant children with them.

Versions of past and present stories vary from playful to spiritual but continue to be as magical and fascinating as the lights themselves.

Experience the Northern Lights up close in East Greenland with Quark Expeditions this coming season, and revel in the folklore and legend surrounding this spectacular show.

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Of Legends and Folklore: Greenland's Northern Lights

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The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) have enchanted viewers for thousands of years. And it has long been known that the best seat on Earth for viewing this spectacular light show is in Greenland. High amidst mountains and ice, the airport settlement of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, boasts 300 clear nights a year.