Dear Readers,
First of all, thank you. Thank you for coming here, for reading what I (and my students!) have had to say over the past year. It’s been a year of tremendous growth on GPS (and on Skeptic Ink as a whole), and that’s due to your continued support. Some fun numbers about GPS:
- Saw a 400% increase in traffic for 2014 compared to 2013, with over 145K views this past year
- Published 92 posts in 2014, over double what was published in 2013
- About half those posts came from student work, either in my Psychopathology or Science vs. Pseudoscience classes
The top 10 posts from the past year, hits-wise, were the following:
- Dear Oklahoma: Satanists Don’t Actually Believe in Satan
- Can One get PTSD via Twitter?
- Let’s grade some papers on Pseudoscience!
- Trigger Warnings and the Problems Therein
- Two guys went to the Black Mass protests. You’ll never believe what happened next!
- Things atheists are outraged by (after Carrie Underwood’s latest song)
- “PTSD?! But I’m not a Veteran!” and Other Misconceptions*
- The “Pro-Ana” Movement*
- Myths & Misconceptions about Animal Hoarding*
- Palm Reading – Science or Pseudoscience?*
The asterisks indicate ones that were written by my students, and I couldn’t be prouder of their hard work. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing a variety of voices on GPS over the past year, and I hope to keep adding new ones.
Now, looking ahead to 2015, I have some exciting news. My SIN colleague Jacques Rousseau and I were awarded a book contract with Springer towards the end of last year for a text tentatively titled “Science, Pseudoscience, and Critical Thinking: Why You Can’t Trust Your Brain.” We are currently hard at work on the manuscript, and plan to deliver it this spring. This will be my sixth book, following the soon-to-be published Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Etiology, Phenomenology, and Treatment (more details on that as the publication date nears).
What this means for you, dear readers, is that I will be significantly scaling back my writing output here at GPS for the next few months. I’ll still try to post a few times a month, but they will likely be shorter articles or videos of some talks I’ve given, rather than in-depth analyses of issues. If there is something that comes up that needs my immediate attention, however, I’ll certainly jump back in to the fray, as it were.
So, once again, thank you for reading. I hope that 2015 will be another great year for GPS and SIN. As always, if you’ve got something you’d like me to write about or comment on, feel free to contact me!
Best,
Caleb
