The paper linked MMR to autistic gastrointestinal syndrome in 12 patients, not the development of autism. It was the head of the study who made the link to autism itself, via a press conference; he was being paid to consult on cases making that claim at the time. It wasn't necessary to discredit the original paper because even it didn't support the claim he was pushing.
Just for clarification MMR was introduced about a decade (late '80s) before any of this happened. It wasn't a new vaccine by any means.
You're complaining that they compared total case reports one year to the same statistic in the preceding year? And you want them to, instead, compare two completely different measures of a disease's prevalence at different times?
Specifically, that the mortality for those conditions was elevated, i.e. more people died from those things in the study period. Without a corresponding reduction in mortality from other causes - there was none - that corresponds to an increased overall death rate. In other words, you don't live as long.
It's like driving without a seatbelt on. You're fine, because you're unlikely to have a car crash. Maybe you can drive like this for a decade, until one unlucky day, a drunk guy goes through a red light and into the side of your car at 30 miles per hour. Suddenly not having a seatbelt becomes a huge problem.
Similarly, this community could sit there with its low vaccination levels quite happily, because it's surrounded by a big country mostly composed of people with the common sense to get vaccinated, and because of that, measles has a hard time getting around and reaching these poorly-vaccinated areas. Until one day, someone who happens to have the virus moves in, and it has the run of the place.
It's not like he held a press conference calling for a cessation of MMR vaccination and making a causal connection to autism.
It's not like he was secretly being paid over £400,000 by vaccine damage lawyers while the study was being performed, to draw conclusions that the study hadn't made yet.
It's not like he was trying to launch multi-million-dollar biotech companies that depended on the study's results coming out in favour of his hypothesis.
It's not like the data in the paper differ from the original patient records in ways that, by some amazing coincidence, all support the paper's claims.
If you can find it, James Gleick's essay "The Digital Attac: Are We Becoming Amnesiacs? Or Pack Rats?" (collected in "What Just Happened") engages with this dilemma.
My point is that making sense is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a bit of fiction to be acceptable. It's about as effective a defense of Episode 1 as "actually contained moving pictures and synchronised sound". This is by no means a defense of the later movies, mind you.
No, they didn't "live long enough to develop cancer", they literally dropped dead (from various conditions) sooner than the people who weren't on supplements.
No, it was an obvious mistake; no biologist or medic would look at one patient outcome like that and go "eureka!". It was an inevitable mistake, yes - he was a hardcore physical scientist with a background in crystallography, and we're used to dealing with fairly clean data in large sets - but it was still a result of him having the hubris to make profound statements beyond his expertise.
I read The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the 1970's swine-flu-scare edition of his Vitamin C book in parallel during my PhD. Boy was that an interesting week. I wound up hunting down my own copy of the former and returned the latter to the out-of-hours drop box when nobody was looking.
You don't need cameras to disprove Claim C, we've been digging up thousand-year-old glass artefacts for centuries now, and not one of them has shown any evidence of flow.
A sheet of letter-sized paper simply stating the events of Episode 1 would've set up the trilogy too, that doesn't mean it would be entertaining. It probably would've involved less monologues about trade embargoes though.
If it's got ads you were only ever renting it in the first place. If the dev lets you keep playing without ads, or shuts down the app automatically, is their perogative.
What if it's an app with a legitimate function the user simply declines to use? I don't want my Twitter posts geotagged with my position, but I don't want them all geotagged with randomly chosen locations in central Borneo either.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper linked MMR to autistic gastrointestinal syndrome in 12 patients, not the development of autism. It was the head of the study who made the link to autism itself, via a press conference; he was being paid to consult on cases making that claim at the time. It wasn't necessary to discredit the original paper because even it didn't support the claim he was pushing.
Just for clarification MMR was introduced about a decade (late '80s) before any of this happened. It wasn't a new vaccine by any means.
You're complaining that they compared total case reports one year to the same statistic in the preceding year? And you want them to, instead, compare two completely different measures of a disease's prevalence at different times?
It's no good as a preservative when it ceases to be ascorbic acid.
Specifically, that the mortality for those conditions was elevated, i.e. more people died from those things in the study period. Without a corresponding reduction in mortality from other causes - there was none - that corresponds to an increased overall death rate. In other words, you don't live as long.
Err, Attic. Attic Attac is something else.
It's like driving without a seatbelt on. You're fine, because you're unlikely to have a car crash. Maybe you can drive like this for a decade, until one unlucky day, a drunk guy goes through a red light and into the side of your car at 30 miles per hour. Suddenly not having a seatbelt becomes a huge problem.
Similarly, this community could sit there with its low vaccination levels quite happily, because it's surrounded by a big country mostly composed of people with the common sense to get vaccinated, and because of that, measles has a hard time getting around and reaching these poorly-vaccinated areas. Until one day, someone who happens to have the virus moves in, and it has the run of the place.
It's not like he held a press conference calling for a cessation of MMR vaccination and making a causal connection to autism.
It's not like he was secretly being paid over £400,000 by vaccine damage lawyers while the study was being performed, to draw conclusions that the study hadn't made yet.
It's not like he was trying to launch multi-million-dollar biotech companies that depended on the study's results coming out in favour of his hypothesis.
It's not like the data in the paper differ from the original patient records in ways that, by some amazing coincidence, all support the paper's claims.
No, Andrew Wakefield is clearly beyond reproach.
If you can find it, James Gleick's essay "The Digital Attac: Are We Becoming Amnesiacs? Or Pack Rats?" (collected in "What Just Happened") engages with this dilemma.
My point is that making sense is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a bit of fiction to be acceptable. It's about as effective a defense of Episode 1 as "actually contained moving pictures and synchronised sound". This is by no means a defense of the later movies, mind you.
Steve Jobs was responsible for Apple's 2013 bond issue? They've got better tech than I thought.
No, they didn't "live long enough to develop cancer", they literally dropped dead (from various conditions) sooner than the people who weren't on supplements.
Who do you think is manufacturing the vitamins? Pfizer just bought out a supplement firm; they're huge profit centers.
No, it was an obvious mistake; no biologist or medic would look at one patient outcome like that and go "eureka!". It was an inevitable mistake, yes - he was a hardcore physical scientist with a background in crystallography, and we're used to dealing with fairly clean data in large sets - but it was still a result of him having the hubris to make profound statements beyond his expertise.
I read The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the 1970's swine-flu-scare edition of his Vitamin C book in parallel during my PhD. Boy was that an interesting week. I wound up hunting down my own copy of the former and returned the latter to the out-of-hours drop box when nobody was looking.
How do you cook a molecule to death? Enlighten me.
You don't need cameras to disprove Claim C, we've been digging up thousand-year-old glass artefacts for centuries now, and not one of them has shown any evidence of flow.
On the timescale of an earthquake pitch is essentially solid. There'd be more risk of it smashing than anything else.
A sheet of letter-sized paper simply stating the events of Episode 1 would've set up the trilogy too, that doesn't mean it would be entertaining. It probably would've involved less monologues about trade embargoes though.
I know you're just saying that to screw with pedants... but I hate you anyway.
If it's got ads you were only ever renting it in the first place. If the dev lets you keep playing without ads, or shuts down the app automatically, is their perogative.
What if it's an app with a legitimate function the user simply declines to use? I don't want my Twitter posts geotagged with my position, but I don't want them all geotagged with randomly chosen locations in central Borneo either.
iOS does exactly what you want, except for web access (I think iOS7 adds a toggle for that).
Indeed. I think the current version of iOS returns "null" if there's no permission, and a valid but empty dataset if no data is available.
iOS 6 I'm afraid. You get location permissions and that's it.
More to the point, what happens if an untrained but well-meaning valet finds a bomb and tries to be a hero?