At the Sixth World Skeptics Congress in Berlin this year, I'll be presenting a talk on "Why Can't a Teacher Be More Like a Scientist? - Pseudoscience In Education". I wish I could take credit for the start of the title: I was initially inspired by a paper written by Mark Carter and Kevin Wheldall, published in the Australasian Journal of Special Education, back in 2008. Although it is now many years after that paper's publication, many of the things it discusses are pertinent to educators still - for me, it encourages collaboration with educators and educational systems, to prevent pseudoscience from entering classrooms and playtime. The paper by Carter and Wheldall investigates how teachers access good material and what influences their views on educational practices:

Just a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking about grassroots organization at the SkeptiCal conference in Berkeley. While our database of grassroots skeptics' groups shows that it's easier than ever to find like-minded critical thinkers in areas all over the world, there are still plenty of gaps to fill. In the U.S. alone, there are over a dozen states with no such organizations at all. There are plenty of great resources and role models for established groups looking for a way to spread skepticism to the wider culture, but what about those of us who are starting from nothing?

To help those people, the JREF is creating a definitive guide to creating a skeptics' group from scratch. How do you find fellow skeptics in your area? Where are the best places to meet? What sorts of things can your group accomplish? We'll answer all these questions and more. But we aren't interested in reinventing the wheel. With so many successful groups already in existence, there's a huge knowledge base from which to draw tried and true methods for making sure your grassroots organization runs smoothly.

Here is a rundown of the top stories in pseudoscience, paranormal and anomaly news from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

The big news this week was an outbreak of whooping cough, or pertussis. Cases have exploded in Washington state. Tragically, a baby dies in Idaho. In Australia,the ad commission required removal of homeopathic claims for pertussis. Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers are injecting misinformation into warnings about a real threat of disease spread with the upcoming Summer Olympics. For more anti-vax news, click this category link.

Good news regarding the forthcoming Mayan apocalypse: a newly discovered calendar does not show the world ending this December. And, just to be safe, even though you drop the lucky skull that will save us all, it should still work.

This week’s monster was a strange creature captured on a remote controlled underwater video camera surveying an oil rig.

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo in medicine.  

Plausibility bias? You say that as though that were a bad thing! (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/plausibility_bias/ Homeopaths criticize scientists for rejecting homeopathy because of bias against its implausibility. Good science requires considering plausibility and not wasting time and money on every crazy idea. Plausibility bias is reality bias: it’s a good thing.  

Homeopathy and Nanoparticles (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/homeopathy-and-nanoparticles/ An uncontrolled experiment in India allegedly demonstrated nanoparticles of the original substance in highly dilute homeopathic remedies that shouldn’t contain a single molecule. Their findings were likely due to contamination or experimental artifact; and even if nanoparticles could be convincingly demonstrated, that wouldn’t mean homeopathic remedies had therapeutic effects.