May 13 - The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project

 Presented by Rob Palmer, "Skeptical Inquirer" Columnist

Saturday, May 13, 2023, 1:30pm - 3:00pm
Central Library
Barbara M. Donnellan Auditorium
1015 North Quincy Street
Arlington, VA
(Virginia Square-GMU Metro station)
FREE admission – Everyone welcome, members and non-members

The speaker will be joining us virtually.  This event will also be live-streamed at https://youtube.com/live/dR3PtgRl-vM?feature=share

In 2021, "The Skeptic Zone" producer and CSI Fellow Richard Saunders completed his 12-year project dubbed the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project (GAPPP) – an analysis of almost 4,000 published paranormal predictions made by over 200 people claiming paranormal powers in Australia. 

The scoring of the predictions was performed by an international team of volunteers of which Rob Palmer was a member. In this presentation, an expanded version of the talk given at CSICon 2022, Rob will share details and the results of this unique investigation into the precision (or lack thereof) of the published predictions of prominent, public, paranormal practitioners.

Rob Palmer is a retired aerospace engineer. He has been a spacecraft designer, spacecraft tester, computer programmer, and software systems engineer. Rob became a skeptical activist in 2016 upon joining the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia team, and in 2018 became a columnist for "Skeptical Inquirer." To date he has had over 70 articles published by "Skeptical Inquirer" as well as in other publications, and the Wikipedia articles he’s written have garnered over 13 million pageviews.

Rob writes about contemporary skeptical issues and has interviewed individuals as diverse as scientists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Bartholomew, Penn Jillette, Ann Druyan (producer and writer for the modern Cosmos series), Seth Andrews (host of "The Thinking Atheist" podcast), and John de Lancie (Star Trek’s Q).

Rob is registered with the Center for Inquiry’s Speakers Bureau and has given presentations for various skeptic and humanist groups and conventions, including: We Can Reason, Dragon Con, and three times at CSICon (the annual science and skepticism conference in Las Vegas). His topics have included: Critical Thinking, the Wikipedia editing project he volunteers for (GSoW), the harm in believing in psychics and mediums, and the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project. He has been interviewed about these subjects on various podcasts and YouTube shows, including "The Skeptic Zone," "Big Picture Science", "Be Rationable," "The Phil Ferguson Show", "Banachek’s Brain,"" 502 Conversations," Recovering from Religion, Point of Inquiry, and "The Thinking Atheist."

All of Rob’s skeptical work can be found at: https://linktr.ee/thewellknownskeptic.