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Originally posted by loves a conspiricy
I suggest all you dowsers do the test then....$1,000,000 for anyone that can prove it works
Its funny how no dowser can find a bottle of water under a box yet they claim they can find all sorts of other things...from gold, to oil....treasure etc.
Its all down to luck, chance, and coincidence.
Give me some dowsing rods and chances are il find water..."chances"....not because they actually work, but because we live on a water planet.
Ive seen other people do similar tests as the guy offering $1m....the outcome is always the same. The dowser will come up with a plethora of excuses as for why it never worked. "i wasnt wearing my lucky pants", "its too small amount of water", "i got up on the wrong side of the bed", blah blah blah nonsense.
If this really worked they could ditch the millions of £$ worth of equipment they currently use to locate metals, water, oil etc. Hire a dude to wander about looking for these things at very little cost.
Why arent dowsers all billionaires? Why cant they find oil fields in their spare time???
The second requirement will be that the applicant must provide an endorsement of an academic nature. That means some sort of validation from an appropriately-qualified academic....
Once these qualifications have been offered, we will follow up on them, asking for validation; we’ll require that the cited authorities verify that they did make such a statement about the applicant, or that they hold such an opinion, and that they still stand by that statement. Anecdotal material will not be accepted.
The offer of cash prizes as an incentive to so-called psychics to prove their claims is not new. In 1922, Scientific American offered two $2,500 awards, one for the first person who could produce an authentic spirit photograph under test conditions and the other for the first medium to produce an authentic "visible psychic manifestation" (Christopher 1975: 180). Houdini, the foremost magician of the period, was a member of the investigating committee. Nobody won the prizes. The first to announce she was ready to be tested was Elizabeth Allen Tomson, but after she was caught with twenty yards of gauze taped to her groin, flowers under her breasts, and a snake in her arm pit, she was never formally tested (Christopher 1975: 188). The honor of being the first medium tested by the Scientific American team went to George Valiantine. He didn't know that the chair he sat in during his séance in a completely darkened room had been wired to light up a signal in an adjoining room every time he left his seat. Oddly, phenomena such as a voice speaking from a trumpet that floated about the room happened only at the exact moments the signal lit up.
One would think that after more than 150 years of scientific testing of psychics, there would be at least one who could demonstrate a single psychic ability under test conditions.
Originally posted by loves a conspiricy
reply to post by BadNinja68
What you mean is, when these people cant cheat or manipulate the test they cant pass it.
Read down that article...this made me laugh
The offer of cash prizes as an incentive to so-called psychics to prove their claims is not new. In 1922, Scientific American offered two $2,500 awards, one for the first person who could produce an authentic spirit photograph under test conditions and the other for the first medium to produce an authentic "visible psychic manifestation" (Christopher 1975: 180). Houdini, the foremost magician of the period, was a member of the investigating committee. Nobody won the prizes. The first to announce she was ready to be tested was Elizabeth Allen Tomson, but after she was caught with twenty yards of gauze taped to her groin, flowers under her breasts, and a snake in her arm pit, she was never formally tested (Christopher 1975: 188). The honor of being the first medium tested by the Scientific American team went to George Valiantine. He didn't know that the chair he sat in during his séance in a completely darkened room had been wired to light up a signal in an adjoining room every time he left his seat. Oddly, phenomena such as a voice speaking from a trumpet that floated about the room happened only at the exact moments the signal lit up.
And this
One would think that after more than 150 years of scientific testing of psychics, there would be at least one who could demonstrate a single psychic ability under test conditions.
People cannot do these things under test conditions...because they cant really do them. Its an illusion...like magic.
In the ganzfeld telepathy test the meta-analytic hit rate with unselected subjects is 32% where chance expectation is 25%. If that 32% hit rate is the "real" telepathy effect, then for us to have a 99% chance of getting a significant effect at p < 0.005, we would need to run 989 trials. One ganzfeld session lasts about 1.5 hours, or about 1,483 total hours. Previous experiments show that it is not advisable to run more than one session per day. So we have to potentially recruit 989 x 2 people to participate, an experimenter who will spend 4+ years running these people day in and day out, and at the end we'll end up with p < 0.005. Randi will say those results aren't good enough, because you could get such a result by chance 5 in 1,000 times. Thus, he will require odds against chance of at least a million to 1 to pay out $1 million, and then the amount of time and money it would take to get a significant result would be far in excess of $1 million.
Furthermore, applicants must first pass a 'preliminary test', before they are allowed to progress to the actual 'formal' test which pays the million dollars. So an applicant must first show positive results in a preliminary test (yielding results against chance of at least 1000 to 1, apparently), then once through to the next stage they would then have to show positive results against much higher odds to claim the prize (by all reports, at odds of around 1 million to 1). Failure in either test means no cash prize, and a fail beside their name. It many respects it would be like telling a professional golfer to shoot 63 around Augusta National, then come back and shoot 59, to prove that he can play golf. In the words of Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics:
If Randi were genuinely interested in testing unusual claims, then he would also not insist upon odds of at least one million to one against chance for the results. Anyone familiar with scientific studies will be aware that experimental results against chance of say, 800,000 to one would be considered extraordinary; but results this high would be, according to Randi, a “failure.”
Originally posted by loves a conspiricy
Dowsing does NOT work.....you may come across water by pure chance but there is no science behind it.
Water is everywhere below our feet, so these people often find it by chance rather than skill.
www.popularmechanics.com...
Now comes a massive set of data that suggests there may be some validity to dowsers' claims. The encouraging words are contained in a study financed by the German government and published in the Journal Of Scientific Exploration, www.jse.com... which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published at Stanford University.
The project was conducted by the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit in the hope of finding cheaper and more reliable ways of locating drinking water supplies in Third World countries.
Researchers analyzed the successes and failures of dowsers in attempting to locate water at more than 2000 sites in arid regions of Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia and Yemen over a 10-year period. To do this, researchers teamed geological experts with experienced dowsers and then set up a scientific study group to evaluate the results. Drill crews guided by dowsers didn't hit water every time, but their success rate was impressive. In Sri Lanka, for example, they drilled 691 holes and had an overall success rate of 96 percent.
"In hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 percent or 20 percent," says Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, who headed the research group.
"We carefully considered the statistics of these correlations, and they far exceeded lucky guesses," he says. What's more, virtually all of the sites in Sri Lanka were in regions where the odds of finding water by random drilling were extremely low. As for a USGS notion that dowsers get subtle clues from the landscape and geology, Betz points out that the underground sources were often more than 100 ft. deep and so narrow that misplacing the drill only a few feet would mean digging a dry hole.
As impressive as this success rate may seem, it doesn't do much to change the minds of skeptics. Their preference is to test dowsing under more controlled conditions. Back To The Lab
Anticipating this criticism, the German researchers matched their field work with laboratory experiments in which they had dowsers attempt to locate water-filled pipes inside a building. The tests were similar to those conducted by CSICOP and JREF, and similarly discouraging. Skeptics see the poor showing as evidence of failure. Betz sees the discrepancy as an important clue. He says that subtle electromagnetic gradients may result when natural fissures and water flows create changes in the electrical properties of rock and soil. Dowsers, he theorizes, somehow sense these gradients and unconsciously respond by wagging their forked sticks, pendulums or bent wires.
Low-Energy Sensor
There is ample evidence that humans can detect small amounts of energy. All creatures with eyes can detect extremely small amounts of electromagnetic energy at visible light wavelengths. Some researchers believe the dark-adapted human eye can detect a single photon, the smallest measurable quantity of energy. Biologists also have found nonvisual electric and magnetic sensing organs in creatures from bacteria to sharks, fish and birds. Physiologists, however, have yet to find comparable structures in humans.
Betz offers no theories of how dowsers come by their skill and prefers to confine his speculation to his data. "There are two things that I am certain of after 10 years of field research," he says. "A combination of dowsing and modern techniques can be both more successful, and far less expensive, than we had thought."