A.R.T. had a good year, although not a great one. There were many good talks, mostly from our own membership. I gave two talks, one on creationists' views of astronomy and thermodynamics and another one on scientific method, culture, and critical thinking. As well as excellent talks by A.R.T. members including Joe Gastright and Wolf Roder, outside speakers gave good programs. My favorite among these was Artie Kidwell, who introduced us to the magician's view of the world and its chicanery. In all, the talks were interesting and enlightening.
Our newsletter has had an excellent year and is successfully transferring editorship from Dinny Jergens to Wolf Roder. Wolf's first issue, a special summer number, shows substantive and style changes reflecting the new editorship.
On a less serene note, our membership has slipped slightly. Efforts at using the newsletter as the primary recruiting tool have been stopped and will now only be used after other methods of contact insure the interest of the recipient. This will reduce a significant cost to the organization, allowing other creative forms of recruitment. Our first membership committee, led by Brad Bonham, has been formed for this purpose.
Investigations have mostly been in the arena of quack medicine with reports on therapeutic touch and magnetic healing.
Finally, media contact has had some limited success with the continuing accumulation and use of skeptical blurbs.
A.R.T. has some specific needs for the future. First, we must present programs of interest to the membership and the general community and continue our excellent newsletter efforts. We must also continue to improve our ability to affect the community through investigations and media contact. A.R.T. must find its voice. In this light, A.R.T. will probably set up its own web site this year. Finally, we must continue to find new members, expanding rather than just maintaining the current membership in the face of normal attrition. Good luck!
In October, I attended the inaugural Family Friendly Library Association meeting. Deploring the anti-science, anti-intellectual, intolerant position of this group, I taped a two-minute commentary on WVXU which aired in mid-December. I also gave an interview to Randy Katz at Everybody's News and Randy extensively quoted from my remarks in his feature article on Family Friendly Libraries. I had a letter to the editor printed in the Cincinnati Enquirer and in the American Physical Society Journal, Physics and Society. The editor of this journal was extremely supportive of our position and devoted his editorial column in the same issue to intolerance by religious fanatics. I spoke on this topic to Mainstream Network in January and I am told it was quoted by some local religious groups, including the Unitarians. An article submitted to Free Inquiry is in press.
I also attended a Sunday service at Landmark Baptist Temple which featured the leader of Answers in Genesis. One of the ultimate consequences was that I was asked to debate Mike Shannon concerning Ohio HB 692 on WNKU for an hour in May of 1996. Mike is a Ph.D. who teaches preaching at Cincinnati Bible College and speech at NKU. The debate was fun and I am told that I made the strongest case. It was supported by the National Center for Science Education which provided me with a book and some relevant articles. This was actually fun. By the way, NKU wanted to portray this as a religious contest, so they did not mention my A.R.T. affiliation, only my secular humanist connections. Incidentally, the bill was defeated in the House Education Committee by about 2 to 1.
In my opinion the Vice President should have no duties and be a kind of general spokesperson for the group. By luck and not design, this is how it worked out for me and it was not too onerous a burden. There is so much related reading and investigation which goes along with public presentations that there is not time for anything else.
From the viewpoint of the Association's Treasurer, the past year has been a balanced and hence a satisfactory one. Income and expenditures have run about equal. In general, income from memberships and donations amounted to $1345; expenses, mostly from newsletters and postage, were $1072. A slight balance remains in our account. There is no debt.
While the newsletters seemingly have been a bit more expensive than in previous years, the contents and quality have very much improved. A "quality product" is now what we have and I believe it is worth the expenditure.
With ongoing desire and work to overhaul membership dues, income will likely increase. Continued attention to obtaining additional members should likewise continue. As in all societies, however, there is both an increase and loss of members annually. Such is to be expected. On the whole, however, it has been a year of good, thought-provoking programs which w were able to maintain financially.
This year the secretary's job was divided. Brad Bonham sent lively and exceedingly colorful meeting reminder cards to the membership before each membership meeting. Bob Riehemann, Porter Henry and Virginia Jergens shared taking minutes for membership and Executive Council meetings and wrote reports on the meetings for the newsletter.
| Membership, September 1995 to September 1996 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sept. '95 | Sept. '96 | |
| Total (Members & Lapsed) | 77 | 83 |
| Members (paid up) | 64 | 58 |
| Lapsed (unpaid) | 13 | 25 |
| Courtesy | 62 | 68 |
New members for this year were six. These came primarily from personal contacts and only one from "cold" addresses. We gave a few honorary memberships of one year to several of our guest speakers. Of our 58 members, 19 gave contributions over the $15 dues. The average contribution was $10-15 with several people contributing more.
The Newsletter committee decided that we would no longer mail newsletters to large numbers of "cold" addresses from various directories, because this method was not producing any new members. Out of the 461 "cold" addresses we used last year and the 200 used in the beginning of this year, there was only one person who became a member. All of the other new members came from personal contacts.
I will be contacting the Skeptical Enquirer for an updated list of their subscribers in this area. We should be able to get some new members through it. Also, members are requested to send names and addresses of potential members to me or Brad. We will see that they get a copy of the newsletter. We will continue to send newsletters to some "cold" addresses, but only about 40-60 names, as many as we need to meet the 200 name minimum required by our non-profit bulk mailing permit.
This year, for the first time since A.R.T. was founded in 1991, we have had an active Program Committee. In September, the Executive Council met and provided ideas for programs. When I was unable to organize a program for the year solo as usual due to changing job commitments, Brad Bonham and Bob Riehemann joined me as our first Program Committee members.
Our first program last fall was Joe Gastright's lively introduction to Halloween customs. Other programs included magician Artie Kidwell's demonstration of the arts of deception, Roy Auerbach's talk on how creationists distort principles of physics and geology to promote their religious views, and Wolf Roder's exploration of three examples of the difficulty of accurately separating science from non-science. I want to thank Brad and Bob for their hard work in developing and presenting a year of entertaining and informative programs.
Because of considerable demands in the program area, I accomplished less work in publicity. Our ability to get a news release to the press in a timely fashion was greatly improved when Donna Loughry accepted the job of faxing press releases, which she can do from her computer. I transferred the mailing and faxing lists to Donna along with guidelines for the preparation of a standard press release. In my opinion, we greatly need to put more time and energy into developing a stronger publicity program. Developing A.R.T.'s strength depends on focused attention to this area.
An extensive report on the investigation of Therapeutic Touch activities was presented to the May meeting. This has been further expanded on page one of the June 1996 Newsletter.
As Media Coordinator my job was to stay in touch with the news media, especially to inform them about pseudo-science, quackery, and other nonsense in the community. To do this I kept a list of News Release Drafts for a variety of bunkum issues which may come up.
The News Release Drafts were formerly known as Skeptical Blurbs. I renamed them because I found as I used them that it was never possible to use a blurb "as is." Instead, the material had to be rewritten to focus on the immediate issue. The rewritten drafts are issued to the media as news releases. In the course of the year I edited many of the old blurbs and consolidated the list. A list of News Release Drafts was published in December 1995 (vol 5, no. 2) p. 6 as part of A Catalogue of Bunkum.
I obtained a complete list of media FAX numbers so I could send a FAX of our news releases to all local news media when the need arises. This list is being installed in several members' computers, so that we can distribute news releases. The process of creating a computer distribution FAX list requires some experience and double checking. None of the releases we sent succeeded in reaching all the media, and some went to only one or two newspapers.
I prepared news releases for these topics: Alien Autopsy Film, Homeopathy, Psychic fairs, and Creationism.
Cincinnati Skeptic has just completed its fifth year. The Newsletter Committee published four issues, October, December, February and April, each 12 pages, up from an average of 9.5 pages per issue during 1994-95. Print quality greatly improved when we moved from xerography to laser printing from an electronic Postscript file. Costs were about the same as last year, averaging 89 cents per mailed copy and 75 cents per copy used for other purposes, such as handing to prospective members, sending to CSICOP for the regional skeptics group newsletter exchange.
Two major policy changes occurred during the year. Almost since its inception, the newsletter has been used for two purposes: informing current A.R.T. members and attracting new members. Thus each issue was mailed to current members and to a group of prospective members. Each prospective member received two issues of the newsletter. The newsletter committee asked Donna Loughry, faithful keeper of the mailing lists, to check her records to see how many new members were actually recruited in this way. She found almost no new members who joined because of having received the newsletter. With the approval of the Executive Council, the newsletter committee dropped the use of the newsletter to recruit member. Mailings which in the past ranged as high as 400 copies per issue were cut to 200 copies per issue, the minimum required for the use of our non-profit bulk mailing permit. Now the newsletter is mailed to members and a list of local libraries, organizations, and TV, radio and newspaper reporters.
The Newsletter Committee suggested to the Executive Council that the money saved in eliminating mailings to prospective members be used to set up a web page to make material like the newsletter and skeptical blurbs available to A.R.T. members and other skeptics with access to the Internet. A web page could also offer links to other skeptical groups and information sources worldwide. Andrew Jergens, A.R.T. member and computer programmer, is chair of the new web page committee, in charge of designing and implementing the project, which the Executive Council has approved.
The Newsletter Committee also met with next year's incoming newsletter committee, Wolf Roder, Editor, and Donna Loughry, mailing lists, to turn over the newsletter files, share information about the newsletter, and plan for the coming year. The files included an archive collection of all of the newsletters published in the past five years, extra back issues, articles that arrived too late to go into the April 1996 issue, past expense reports, postal information and other materials.
Extraordinary thanks are due my fellow committee members for their hard work, adherence to a difficult publishing schedule, and willingness to help each other out whenever the need arose: Peter Jergens, Lay Out Editor; Donna Loughry, Mailing Database Manger and Membership Secretary; and Brad Bonham, Production Manager. Special thanks also to all the A.R.T. members who took seriously the statement in our By-Laws that all members are newsletter reporters and wrote articles, book reviews, letters to the editor, and reports for the newsletter: Porter Henry, Andrew Jergens, Andrew Lutes, Bob Riehemann, and Wolf Roder.
I greatly enjoyed my five years as editor of Cincinnati Skeptic, and am proud of the progress we have made since the first issue that Porter Henry hastily put together when A.R.T. was founded in 1991. And I look forward to seeing what improvements the creative hand of our new editor, Wolf Roder, will make.
The Annual Report was edited by Virginia Jergens.
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought