News Briefs
Chelse McKee, staff
Photo by Magally Zelaya
Meet your Greens
After little more than a month of applying and campaigning the political group, Young Greens of Canada have announced their second election results and a managing editor for their publication, the Understory, since their erection in 2006.
Even though the party now has one year under the belt, John Esposito, newly elected external communications councillor, says the group saw less applicants than the year previous.
“We actually had less this year. For our first one . . . there was a lot more excitement for it. We had a lot more contested positions. I believe, personally, it was timing because it was during holidays, our election.”
The party was originally developed as a means to get young people not only interested in the Green party but in politics as well.
“I know when I set up a table at the club day there’s always people that aren’t even interested in politics because of the online parties,” Esposito says. “[They] see a new way of doing politics and are really interested and enjoy what the Green party has to offer.”
The Young Greens of Canada’s website is www.youth.greenparty.ca
- 2008 Young Green Councillors
- Co-chair (female) — Katie Gibbs
- Co-chair (male) — Jason Hammond
- Internal communications — Dave Bagler
- External communications — John Esposito
- Francophone communications — Pierre Cloutier de Repentigny
- Organizing chair (Female) — Amanda Judd
- Organizing chair (Male) — Matthew Laine
- Organizing chair (Teen) Victoria Cate May Burton
- Managing editor, the Understory — Toby Bartlett
Study says you couldn’t see this coming
Harvard researchers Sam Moulton, a graduate psychology student, and Stephen Kosslyn, a psychology professor, have developed a new study to determine the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP). ESP has been attributed to clairvoyance, the direct knowledge of remote events, telepathy, the direct knowledge of another person’s thoughts, and precognition — the knowledge of the future.
Moulton and Kosslyn determined that the best starting point for the experiements would be to start at the root of ESP: the brain. During the experiment, which included showing the participants stimulus, they scanned the brain.
The stimulus was shown twice to the same subject but in different ways. The first was directly to the subject but the second showing was done to test the clairvoyance, telepathy, or precognition of the subject.
For example, in the telepathy portion, experimenters showed an identical photograph to the subject’s identical twin, friend, or loved one in a separate room. In the clairvoyant section, the researchers showed the photograph on a digital computer screen. Finally, for the precognition segment, the photographs were once again shown to the subject in the future.
So what did the study reveal? Something no one could have seen coming: the non-existence of ESP. After seeing the stimulus, the effects on the brain were identical.
But Moulton tells Harvard Science that this study doesn’t disregard the existence of ESP.
“You cannot affirm the null hypothesis,” Moulton says. “But at the same time, some null results are stronger than others. This is the best evidence to date against the existence of ESP. Perhaps most important, this study offers scientists a new way to study ESP that avoids the pitfalls of the past approaches.”
