2 things to point out 1 CSI and PsiCOP also do a form of reading and perception distortion they are natural sceptics they look for only what they want to see (hence teh critisim already mentioned secondly it was 4 not 5 (one down frmo me )
however
In May 2004 Demkina traveled to
New York, where she appeared in a documentary; titled
The Girl with X-Ray Eyes produced by the Discovery Channel. In New York, her abilities were tested under in a more scientific environment than the London experiments.
[1]
Preliminary tests was arranged by
Ray Hyman and
Richard Wiseman of the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and Andrew Skolnick of the
Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH). The experiment was designed it to look for a
strongly demonstrated ability, apparent
weak or erratic abilities were decided to be non-viable given the nature of her claims, and were therefore determined to pose no interest.
[5]
Hyman, Wiseman, and Skolnick arranged seven volunteers. Six of whom had undergone documented medical procedures, and one of whom was a control subject. Demkina was then given a list detailing the conditions that she was looking for, and was asked to identify which condition matched which volunteer. It was agreed in advance that the experiment would be considered a success if she managed to correctly match five of the seven patients to their conditions
[5]. Medical conditions that were not on the list presented to her were deemed to be unimportant.
Over the course of 4 hours, Demkina correctly diagnosed four of the volunteers (including the control subject); falling below the requirements of the experiment. From these results, researchers concluded that she had not demonstrated sufficient evidence of an ability to warrant further study and no further experiments were carried out.
[2][6]
After the experiment, Wiseman publicly attributed Demkina's score to a combination of
cold reading and external observation.
Professor Richard Wiseman: "At best, she's done this a lot and she has a real expertise at being able to look at people and make reasonably accurate diagnoses."
Now even if this is a highly developed form of cold readin, its still as i mentioned before of intreste as other doctors have stated it is an ability that is useful to the medical profession , remember the reason this girl was pointed out in the first place is she was making good one to one diagnosies with very little medical knowledge 1 to 1 not continious people in one go , why did they choice to have a criteria of the test as multipule people when she normally only (as a medicla practioner would ) do one at a time.
PsiCOP have changed the criteria in one area and declare it a totally failure they are looking for paranormal powers not abilities that might be useful and are within in a norm, and this is the problem im not arguing the girl had abilities beyound and paranormal but most likley some form of built in ability to detecte abnomalities (and had she been listed as being able to see in organic abnormalities or only organic ?)
Also
In their defense, those behind the New York Experiment stated that statistical calculation indicating that a result which is higher than could be expected though random chance should not be considered proof in the case of paranormal abilities, such as those claimed by Demkina, because of the need, though
Bayesian inference, to compensate for the possibility that Demkina could have harvested clues about a patients condition through keen observation and
cold reading, thus allowing her to make informed choices rather than random guesses.
[6]
Josephson However contends that by using inference to minimize the probability of a false positive occurring, the experiment also had an also enhanced the probability of a false negative occurring. In this case, a moderate/weak correlation being recorded as no correlation because of the inference level being set too high.
[8] Bayesian inference can be contentious because the validity of a result depends on the validity of the prior distribution; which cannot be assessed statistically, sometime leading it and can lead to leads to
confirmation bias.
[9]
The Bayes factor of the experiment was calculated by professors Persi Diaconis and Susan of the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
In most clinical trials, a result is considered to be statistically significant if the probability that the difference between groups could have occurred by chance alone is 20 to 1 or below.
[10]
SO the results she got were statiscly higher then guessing (technically an informaed Guess is a diagnosies ), again my issues is not with skeptic we need them but with biased ones looking for one set of criteria to prove them absolutley right (or make sure they don't give away $1,000,000 they cant afford)) they are as bad as people who blindly believe what their told .
