All posts by djones

falsehood, mmr, rant

Fraud Exposed

6 Comments

Sometimes someone does something so odious that no rational person can ever forgive them.  To a scientist of any ilk, falsifying data is one such crime. Especially when it is done for commercial interest and harms the public health, it is totally unforgivable. Andrew Wakefield, sometimes with a decorative Dr. in front of his name is one who has committed such an act.  As detailed in the London Evening Standard, he was found “in breach of ethical and professional guidelines.”

His research (on only 12 subjects) was the major impetus behind the mass fear of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccinations. The idiocy was quickly seized upon by the autism groups and Jenny McCarthy. From the hearing:

The research has since been discredited by subsequent studies involving millions of children, which found no evidence for the link between the triple jab and autism. It has since been retracted by the Lancet, and ten of the original 13 authors disowned the research. But the claims sparked a massive drop in the number of children given the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates have still not fully recovered to levels before the scare.

Just causing the resurgence of MMR in the population is bad enough, but it also appears that Mr. Wakefield caused this wave of hysteria and disease at least partially for profit.  Once again from the hearing, Wakefield …

received £55,000 to carry out the research on behalf of solicitors acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR, but could not account for how at least half of this money had been spent and did not declare any conflict of interest to the Lancet, according to the fitness to practice panel.

So to echo crankylitprof over at Cranky Epistles, Wakefield falsified his data, a lot of hysterical people bought in to it, and a lot of kids have been harmed because of his duplicity.

We are all sympathetic to those afflicted or affected by autism in their search for a cause, but joining in hysteria seldom leads to anything good.  And in this case it has brought diseases once declared defeated back into circulation, causing yet more misery. And all because some idiot was intellectually dishonest as well as a liar by omission.

advice, mama kat, writer's challenge

Advice For The Lovelorn

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OK, so I lied. But the title go you to read didn’t it. It’s that time of the week – time for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week featured a number of prompts that didn’t enthuse me to the point of taking quill in hand (or finger to keyboard as the case may be). But at least number one came through and spoke to me:

1.) Share one piece of great advice you’ve received from someone who knows stuff…

Rather than one piece of advice, I thought I’d share several.

  • Water flows toward money. (From my grandfather, in reference to the fact that money can abrogate water rights quicker than a lightning flash.)
  • If a simple physical model can’t explain it, you have the wrong idea. (Richard P. Feynman on why complex mathematical models of reality are often wrong.)
  • There will be many people you can love and who can love you in your life. The one you marry will be the one you are in love with at the same time you both want to get married. (A paraphrase of a discussion with my mother.)
  • Don’t tease the sow. (My uncle, warning us to stay away from the vicious man-eater that was the old breding pig.)

So what is your good advice?

BTW, here are some tidbits of advice I found floating around Google:

Which one do you think is better?

social networking, tv, waste

Disturbing

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An article by Nicole Ferraro, “Intelligence Down, Social  Networking Up“, has some really disturbing statistics in it. The most disturbing is from our friends at A. C. Nielsen about the amount of time being spent on social networking sites by the populace of various countries.

Time Spent On Social Networking Sites

Add the fact the Nielsen also reports that Americans are glued to the boob tube 151 hours per month on average and you have a pretty good basis for understanding the decline and fall of American productivity. 151 hours a month comes out to 5+ hours a day. So we have 6+ hours on the social networking sites plus 5+ hours glued to the tube. It’s really fortunate that at least some people can multi-task; otherwise we would have only a few hours a day left to work and interact as normal human beings.

Inquiring minds want to know: do you find this as disturbing as I do? The loss of productivity, the increased obesity due to inactivity, the failure of normal human to human interaction and socialization – it all seems a high price to pay for things as mindless as TV and facebook and twitter, and …

ads, odd

Feel the …

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I happened to see an ad on TV tonight for a product that shall remain nameless (but you can find it here). The ad featured the catch-phrase “Feel the Heal”, trademarked by the nameless company, proving you can trademark anything. You can imagine what happened from there with my strange bent of thought. Heal came across as Heel, since that is what it sounded like. And from there I meandered down a hundred possible interpretations of the phrase, none of them good. Some examples:

Feel the Heel #1 – A picture of a rather elderly gentleman with a foot fetish sprang to mind. This poor fellow was kneeling at the feet of a beautiful model and trembling with awe and desire as she lifted her high heel clad foot to him with the words “Feel the heel”.

Feel the Heel #2 – A group of people are partying, dancing and drinking, having a great time. A group of young women are sitting around a table discussing the bad behavior of the cad at the club. One woman pipes in with “Feel the heel”. The others look aghast at her. She explains that he will undoubtedly be intimidated and go for safer prey.

Feel the Heel #3 – The star quarterback is lying on the field,writhing in pain. The head trainer turns to the team doctor and says “Feel the heel, feel the heel”.

So what comes to your mind now as I shout “FEEL THE HEEL’????

Does it change after seeing this picture?

interviews, Molly, weather

Sunday Going Down

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Just when you thought the weather couldn’t be any nicer for this time of year, today it is cooler and as the air pressure rises the winds are a-howling. In fact, the weather service is blaring this tidbit over the game I’m trying to watch:

Issued by The National Weather Service
Denver/Boulder, CO
1:02 pm MST, Sun., Jan. 24, 2010

… HIGH WIND WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM MST THIS EVENING…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN DENVER HAS ISSUED A HIGH WIND WARNING… WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM MST THIS EVENING.

* TIMING… STRONG WINDS WILL CONTINUE ACROSS THE AREA THROUGH THE AFTERNOON. THE WINDS WILL DECREASE THIS EVENING.

* WINDS… SUSTAINED NORTHWEST WINDS OF 35 TO 50 MPH WILL PERSIST THROUGH THE AFTERNOON… WITH GUSTS TO 65 MPH. THE STRONGEST WINDS WILL OCCUR ALONG THE WYOMING BORDER AND AREAS EAST OF INTERSTATE 25 IN THE AREA COVERED BY THIS WARNING.

* IMPACTS… THE STRONG WINDS WILL MAKE TRAVEL HAZARDOUS… ESPECIALLY ALONG INTERSTATE 76.

FYI, we are on I-76.

The warning blaring over the TV blocked out the kickoff and first three downs of the Colts-Jets game, so I’m really happy that the Colts didn’t do much. It is really annoying to miss a critical play because you are seeing a black screen with a computerized voice s.l.o.w.l.y reading the above announcement. Now if the weather critters can just hold it down for the rest of the game…

Yesterday was a busy day for me. My undergraduate alma mater does alumni interviews of applicants for admission since there are often 20 or more qualified applicants for each class opening. So early afternoon saw me interviewing a candidate. (I get the pleasure for the one or two applicants every few years out here in the boonies since there are no other alumni here. Many years ago when we were in California it was a group effort and we did 4-5 a day for a few weeks of Saturdays.)  The interview was fun and interesting.

Every once in a while you meet a spectacular young person who makes the  interview a pleasure. This was one of those. The young lady was one of the two most spectacular candidates I have seen in the last 30 years of doing such interviews. The pleasure of meeting a youngster that has not only lettered all three years of high school in three sports, but is also intellectually curious and knowledgeable and is involved in literally tens of charitable and community efforts as both a leader and a follower is all too rare. The interview ran an hour longer than normal just because of the interesting discussions on topics ranging from philosophy to literature to mathematics to politics. I really hope she is admitted; I think she would be a definite asset to the campus.

After spending an hour getting my notes into coherent form and filing them with the admissions office, it was time to go to a working meeting related to my real job. Dinner was catered in – by one of the attendee’s sons running to Sonic. It was that kind of a meeting. {*grin*} In any case, it was after 10pm when I walked in the door to the guilt inducing stare from Molly, asking “Where have you been? Where is my chewie? Huh?”

Molly is currently laying on the floor giving me the doggie evil eye:

She wants to go for a walk but the breeze outside and the game inside is making that a slim possibility. We’ll have to see if the guilt of not listening to Molly eventually exceeds the pleasure watching the game.