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Simon Singh
Simon Lehna Singh, (born 19 September 1964) is a British popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist. His written works include ''Fermat's Last Theorem'' (in the United States titled ''Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem''), ''The Code Book'' (about cryptography and its history), ''Big Bang'' (about the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe), '' Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial'' (about complementary and alternative medicine, co-written by Edzard Ernst) and '' The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets'' (about mathematical ideas and theorems hidden in episodes of ''The Simpsons'' and ''Futurama''). In 2012 Singh founded the Good Thinking Society, through which he created the website "Parallel" to help students learn mathematics. Singh has also produced documentaries and works for television to accompany his books, is a trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry, a patron of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merseyside Skeptics Society
The Merseyside Skeptics Society (MSS) is a nonprofit organisation that promotes scientific scepticism in Merseyside and the United Kingdom. Founded in 2009, the society has campaigned against the use of homeopathy, challenged the claims of psychics, and hosts regular events in Liverpool, podcasts, and an annual conference in Manchester, QED: Question. Explore. Discover. As part of their Liverpool Skeptics in the Pub events the society hosts guest speakers, who have included Simon Singh, David Nutt, and Robert Llewellyn. It also organises the 10:23 Campaign against homeopathy. History The Merseyside Skeptics Society was founded in February 2009 to develop and support the sceptical community in Merseyside. The Society held its first speaker's meeting on 17 September 2009 at the Crown Hotel in Liverpool, England. Professor Chris French, editor of ''The Skeptic'' magazine gave a talk entitled "The Psychology of Anomalous Experiences". Merseyside Skeptics Society Limited was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anita Anand (journalist)
Anita Anand ( ; born 1972) is a British radio and television presenter, journalist, and author. Early life and education Anand was born on 28 April 1972 in London, England, to Punjabi parents who migrated to India shortly after the partition of India and then, later, to the UK. Her family, prior to the partition, originated from a village near the Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan. Anand was privately educated at Bancroft's School in Woodford Green in Redbridge, east London. Anand then entered King's College, London, in 1990, graduating with a BA in English in 1993. Broadcasting career After training as a journalist, Anand became European Head of News and Current Affairs for Zee TV, and one of the youngest TV news editors in Britain at the age of 25. She presented the talk show ''The Big Debate'' and was political correspondent for Zee TV presenting the ''Raj Britannia'' series – 31 documentaries chronicling the political aspirations of the Asian community in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme
The Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme (UAS) is a program in the United Kingdom devised to encourage students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs to enter teaching by awarding them with degree course credits. History Noting the declining enrollment in STEM subjects at UK universities, a team including author Simon Singh devised the idea with three aims: * to encourage undergraduates in those fields to go into teaching, * to support teachers and * to provide role models for school students who might otherwise never meet a young person who had chosen to study a STEM subject. UAS was set up to provide a structure to get undergraduates into the classroom, based on a model pioneered at Imperial College London, but adding the incentive of academic credit for program participants. After receiving approval to pilot UAS from the University of Surrey, Singh backed a launch of the program with his own money, with the assistance of Ravi Kapur and others. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humanists UK
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs" in the United Kingdom by campaigning on issues relating to humanism, secularism, and human rights. It seeks to act as a representative body for non-religious people in the UK. The charity also supports humanist and non-religious ceremonies in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Crown dependencies and maintains a national network of accredited celebrants for humanist funeral ceremonies, weddings, and baby namings, in addition to a network of volunteers who provide like-minded support and comfort to non-religious people in hospitals and prisons. Its other charitable activities include providing free educational resources to teachers, parents, and institutions; a peer-to-peer support service for people who face difficulti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Museum Of Science And Industry
The Science Museum Group (SMG) consists of five British museums: * The Science Museum, London, Science Museum in South Kensington, London * The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester * The National Railway Museum in York * The Locomotion Museum (formerly the National Railway Museum Shildon) in County Durham * The National Science and Media Museum (formerly the National Media Museum and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television) in Bradford Items in the SMG collection that are not on display are usually stored at the National Collections Centre in Swindon, Wiltshire. History The origins of SMG lie in the internationalisation and optimism of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which enabled the foundation of the South Kensington Museum in 1857. The term "National Museum of Science and Industry" had been in use as the Science Museum's subtitle since the early 1920s. Prior to 1 April 2012 the group was known as the National Museum of Science and Industry (NMSI). The N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Good Thinking Society
The Good Thinking Society is a nonprofit organisation promoting scientific scepticism established by Simon Singh in September 2012. Activities The society aims to raise awareness of and fund sceptical projects. During the 2014 World Homeopathy Awareness Week, the Good Thinking Society set up a website at homeopathyawarenessweek.org with the purpose of giving a factual scientific view on homeopathy. They also ran Psychic Awareness Month in October 2014 which included handing out leaflets to audience members before a psychic's shows in the UK. In April 2015 the organisation threatened legal action against the Liverpudlian Clinical Commissioning Group over its spending of £30,000 per year on homeopathy, with Singh saying "Homeopathic treatments when paid for by the NHS are a waste of crucial resources". Thereafter, Singh and project director Michael Marshall called on all remaining homeopathy-funding CCGs in the UK to follow the example of Liverpool to reconsider their funding po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Futurama
''Futurama'' is an American animated science fiction sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series follows the adventures of the professional slacker Philip J. Fry, who is cryogenically preserved for 1000 years and revived on December 31, 2999. Fry finds work at an interplanetary delivery company, working alongside the one-eyed Leela and robot Bender. The series was envisioned by Groening in the mid-1990s while working on ''The Simpsons''; he brought David X. Cohen aboard to develop storylines and characters to pitch the show to Fox. Following its initial cancelation by Fox, ''Futurama'' began airing reruns on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block, which lasted from 2003 to 2007. It was revived in 2007 as four direct-to-video films, the last of which was released in early 2009. Comedy Central entered into an agreement with 20th Century Fox Television to syndicate the existing episodes and air the films as 16 new, half-hour episodes, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Simpsons
''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical depiction of American life, epitomized by the Simpson family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield and parodies American culture and society, television, and the human condition. The family was conceived by Groening shortly before a solicitation for a series of animated shorts with producer James L. Brooks. He created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after his own family members, substituting Bart for his own name; he thought Simpson was a funny name in that it sounded similar to " simpleton". The shorts became a part of '' The Tracey Ullman Show'' on April 19, 1987. After three seasons, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and became Fox's first series to land in the Top 30 ratings in a season (1989–1990). Since its debut on Dece ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edzard Ernst
Edzard Ernst (born 30 January 1948) is a retired British-German academic physician and researcher specializing in the study of complementary and alternative medicine. He was Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, allegedly the world's first such academic position in complementary and alternative medicine. Ernst served as chairman of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) at the University of Vienna, but left this position in 1993 to set up the department of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter in England. He became director of complementary medicine of the Peninsula Medical School (PMS) in 2002. Ernst was the first occupant of the Maurice Laing, Laing chair in Complementary Medicine, retiring in 2011. He was born and trained in Germany, where he began his medical career at a homeopathic hospital in Munich, and since 1999 has been a British citizen. Ernst is the founder of two medical journals: ''Focus on Alternative and Complementary Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trick Or Treatment
''Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial'' (North American title: ''Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine'') is a 2008 book about alternative medicine by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst. Overview The book evaluates the scientific evidence for acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and chiropractic, and briefly covers 36 other treatments. It finds that the scientific evidence for these alternative treatments is generally lacking. Homeopathy is concluded to be completely ineffective: "It's nothing but a placebo, despite what homeopaths say". Although ''Trick or Treatment'' presents evidence that acupuncture, chiropractic and herbal remedies have limited efficacy for certain ailments, the authors conclude that the dangers of these treatments outweigh any potential benefits. Such potential risks outlined by the authors are contamination or unexpected interactions between components in the case of herbal medicine, risk of infection in the ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Bang
The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form. These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The overall uniformity of the Universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments. However, physics currently lacks a widely accepted theory of quantum gravity that can successfully model the earliest conditions of the Big Bang. Crucially, these models are compatible with the Hubble–Lemaître law—the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Cryptography
Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper. The development of cryptography has been paralleled by the development of cryptanalysis — the "breaking" of codes and ciphers. The discovery and application, early on, of frequency analysis to the reading of encrypted communications has, on occasion, altered the course of history. Thus the Zimmermann Telegram triggered the United States' en ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
