Weekend Variety Wireless - Hour 2 - 23/09/18

This hour, Skeptic Siouxsie Wiles joins Ryan Bradley in for RadioLIVE's Graeme Hill to expose this weeks woos and scams. First up Siouxsie and Ryan take a look at some Crowdfunding quackery. The BMJ have just published a report on the amounts of money being crowd funded by people in the UK for cancer treatments. There are worries that huge sums of money are being raised for treatments that are not backed by evidence and which, in some cases, may even do patients harm. Then Siouxsie gives us a look at what she has coined grief vampires. The family of a Northland woman who has been missing since February have been contacted by a psychic who says she has information on what happened. The psychic apparently claims the woman was picked up in a white, double-cab, flat-deck truck and taken somewhere way up north with a red barn where she was punched in the head, had her jaw broken, stabbed under the left rib, raped and killed, and her body dumped there. The psychic has apparently even given a description of the perpetrator rough with a beard, wearing camouflage gear, and a ring on his left third finger that has a greenstone on it. Apparently the missing womans son has called it a load of s**t and reported it to the police. Ryan and Siouxsie explore the massive increase in advertising spending on vitamins and supplements. And finally the pair explore how the people behind Baa Baa amber teething beads are trying to open up the market to pets. They are selling them as a way of controlling fleas on your pets and theyll cost you between $45 and $120. According to their website they act as a flea repellent in two different ways. Because Baltic amber contains resinous aromatic terpenes, when the beads are worn on, the friction from your pets fur absorbs this resinous smell which repels the ticks and fleas. That friction also generates a mild static electrical charge, this is also said to deter ticks and fleas. Then, Ryan Bradley explores the winner of the Westpac Champion Supreme Award for the medium/large enterprise category. Seequent, who took out the award, is the Global leader in the development of visual data science software and collaborative technologies. Graham Grant, the chief operating officer of Seequent joins Ryan Bradley to discuss exactly who they are, and what they do. Mr Grant describes the company as New Zealand best technology export secret that is relatively unknown even in their own home of Canterbury. Seequent is essentially a very high tech software company thats building software that models the sub-surface. This effectively means they help companies see underground to make very critical business decisions. Their focus is to innovate the grounds sub-surface and own it from a software perspective. Weekend Variety Wireless with Graeme Hill, 8pm - midnight Saturdays and Sundays, on RadioLIVE and streaming live to the Rova app on Android and iPhone.