And also we don't track if encephalopathy turns into autism, even though most of the symptoms are seen in autism'....You guys are smart.... don't be fooled
You don't have to be all that smart to look up the symptoms of autism and encephalopathy and discover that while encephalopathy may occasionally have symptoms that resemble autism, encephalopathy typically includes a whole bunch of other symptoms that are rarely seen in autism. Indeed, most forms of encephalopathy are associated with evidence of gross brain damage, whereas typical autistic brain differs from normal brain only in very subtle ways, in the levels of certain neurotransmitter receptors and slight changes in cell distribution--all of which fit with a host of other evidence that indicates that autism is a developmental disorder, almost certainly of genetic origin, that begins well before symptoms become obvious, rather than a form of acute brain damage such as encephalopathy.
Antivaxxers believe that all of these serious disease--smallpox, polio, measles, pertussis, rubella--just by coincidence, decided on their own to go away just about the time the vaccine became available. Of course, most of these infectious diseases exhibit a "boom and bust" pattern, because after an epidemic, the must susceptible individuals are dead or immune, so the incidence declines until immunity wanes. So the disease rates rise and fall. But virtual elimination of an infectious disease of this nature requires a vaccine.
However, there is not much incentive for plaintiffs to do so, as the rules of evidence are more favorable to the plaintiff in vaccine court, and the plaintiff's legal costs are covered, win or lose. So if somebody can't win in the vaccine court, the chances that they will prevail in the civil courts are pretty dismal.
Of course, the costs would come out of the public's pockets even if the Vaccine Court did not exist, because vaccine manufacturers must charge enough to cover their costs, including the costs of litigation and potential awards. In the worst case, fear of liability might become so great that no commercial firm is willing to manufacture the vaccine, in which case the public would also be saddled with the costs of the inevitable disease outbreaks, and probably eventually with the cost of the federal government itself producing the vaccine.
No surgery is trivial. If you're opening someone up, that requires a great deal of skill and traiing. Do you really want someone that hasn't had years of anatomy training digging around in your organs?
If you need surgery, the surgeon you want is the guy who does that particular operation, day in and day out, and nothing else. Experience with the specific surgery is the strongest predictor of a favorable outcome. In our culture, the people who do that have general medical degrees, as well as a surgical residency with training in many surgical procedures--and most of that expertise they hardly ever use. We could probably get outcomes just as good, if not better, by training technicians to specialize in specific surgical procedures, with a doctor versed in general surgery available to take over if the surgical technician encounters anything unexpected.
Funny you should mention that... the vaccine for whooping cough does not prevent the spread of whooping cough, it simply allows the immune system to destroy the toxin it produces that attacks the lungs, so you don't whoop.
I have followed Dr. Wakefield's ethical case, and understand that his methods were at question, and his results have not been duplicated in humans. Although there is a new study which calls the vaccine regimen of the 1990s into question.
That's putting it mildly. Not only did Wakefield conceal conflicts of interest, but it has been shown that the description of the work and how it was done was false. Your statement that it has not been duplicated "in humans" is technically correct--others have tried to reproduce Wakefield's claimed results and have gotten contrary results--but it could be misunderstood as indicating that it has been duplicated in nonhumans. This is not true.
And the study you cite was originally co- authored by Wakefield (although they demoted him to an acknowledgment when the extent of his scientific malfeasance and unethical behavior became widespread public knowledge), and also has major scientific problems.
Yeah, that I understand, but what I don't understand is why the NVICP makes irrational decisions that favor the people who claim that their injury was caused by a "plausable" mechanism.
Indeed, the Vaccine Court tilts toward the plaintiff in multiple ways. The government pays the plaintiff's lawyers, win or lose, so there is a big incentive for lawyers to take such cases, even if the chance of winning is slim. And the standard of evidence is lower in the Vaccine Court--basically, compensation is awarded if it is at all plausible that a person's injury could have been caused by the vaccination. And if the plaintiff loses, they still have the option of suing in regular court.
However, I think that this is reasonable. Vaccination does not just benefit the person being vaccinated, it benefits society, because the main way in which vaccination prevents disease is not by protecting the individual from infection, but rather by making it impossible for an epidemic to get started in the first place. Immunity to disease (whether from vaccination or previous exposure to the disease) is not absolute--the risk of contracting the disease is reduced, but not to zero. The reason most people do not contract diseases like measles, whooping cough, or polio is that an infection is unable to spread through the population, because on the average an infected person ends up infecting less than one other person. When that is the case, the disease cannot spread, and simply peters out.
But when immunization is successful, the disease is virtually eradicated from the entire population. Vaccines are some of the safest effective medical treatments known to man, but they do have risks, albeit very small. But when a disease is nearly eradicated, the risk of the disease to each individual is less than the risk of the vaccine--so long as all of his neighbors are properly vaccinated. So the situation is tailor-made for a "tragedy of the commons," in which each individual pursues his own selfish self interest, and as a result, everybody suffers far more than would have been the case if everybody had cooperated to share a small risk in order to avert a much greater one.
So it makes sense to provide a public safety net to compensate everybody who suffers a genuine vaccine injury--because people who get vaccinated are performing a public service. Yes, this will means some people will be compensated who would have gotten sick anyway, and Hannah Poling is very likely one of these. Mitochondrial diseases can be triggered by many stressors, including very minor illnesses, so there is a good chance that something or other would have triggered Hannah's illness even if she hadn't been vaccinated. Indeed, children like Hannah may well be at greater risk if they are not vaccinated, but that is obviously of little comfort to anybody after the fact.
So just as our criminal justice system occasionally lets real criminals go free to protect the innocent, the Vaccine Court sometimes rewards unscrupulous lawyers who exploit parents of autistic children, and sometimes provides compensation to people who probably aren't really entitled to it. But that is a small price to pay for providing just compensation for those who actually do suffer genuine harm from vaccination
Even if you manage to implement a translator that plays Flash via web kit but is not a "plug in," there is still another obstacle. From Apple's guidelines:
2.7 Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected
However, there is Cloud Browse which runs Firefox with Flash remotely, and then streams the display to your iPhone.
Maybe for people who have a real home theater setup with fixed seating, but I think the market will be limited. I don't think the average consumer is going to buy a TV that requires you to sit in particular spots to avoid a double image--unless it doesn't cost extra, in which case they'll probably keep the 3D effect mostly turned off. I suppose that it might be possible to develop a system that tracks you around the room and adjusts the parallax barrier for your position.
5. Too Private. This is a big issue that Nintendo bumped up into with the Virtual Boy. If nobody can watch you play, playing video games becomes an inherently anti-social activity.
Other people being unable to watch you play has not impeded the popularity of hand-held gaming systems and phone games. Even for games on console, the social interaction is mostly one way: people can watch you play, but you are too involved with he game to interact with them (an exception being turn-based games like bowling). But with multiple player games, social interaction can occur within the game.
By the way, Full-sized parallax barrier screens, like the one in the 3DS, have been available in Asia for some time. Due to content shortages, they're mostly relegated to displays. But they're out there, and they work.
However, the available parallax barrier screens have a very small "sweet spot." This is a big limitation for a large display. With a handheld display, you will automatically hold it in the spot that gives the best image. I gather that there are technologies in the works to expand the sweet spot or provide multiple sweet spots.
The glasses are big enough to fit over regular lenses. Avatar was designed from the outset to be 3D, and Cameron did substantial technology development, but it is still early days for 3D as a serious filmmaking technique.
The problem with the "helmets" is there that is no way that you can actually run around in the 3D world because you'd bump into walls and trip over the furniture, so you still need a controller. Directing your gaze with a helmet instead of a joypad is not enough of a convenience to justify the inconvenience of the headset.
I do think that people will be resistant to wearing the glasses routinely. They work better in a darkened theater than in the more social context of TV watching. And of course the active glasses currently being used for 3DTV are expensive, unlike the passive movie glasses. Game playing will be the main impetus driving the acceptance of 3DTV. Most of the general public will buy 3DTVs only when the cost comes down to the point that you effectively get 3D capability for free (it actually costs the manufacture very little, although they are currently charging a big premium).
On the other hand, small 3D screens that do not require glasses will likely be a big success for individual video watching and game playing, with the new Nintendo 3DS being the first of these. Within 3 years, I expect that all smartphones being sold will have 3D capable displays.
Yes, I noticed this with Avatar also. You feel like you should be able to focus your eyes, because you have converged the images, but you can't. Film directors like to use focus to direct attention, but I wonder if in a 3D film, it would be better to have everything in focus. Of course, that would require either a very stopped down lens (and a lot of light) or some fancy digital post-processing. Or perhaps it would seem odd to have everything in focus. I wonder if Cameron did experiments on this.
When you "focus" your eyes on something in 3D, you do two things: you adjust the lens of your eye so that the light rays from the object are focused on the object, and you also adjust the convergence of your eyes to put the image of the object on a corresponding region of the retina of both eyes. With a stereoscopic image, you don't have to do the former, but you still have to do the latter.
My nephew told me that he was a fan of William Shatner. I asked him if he knew what role Shatner was most famous for. "Boston Legal," he replied. "No, before that" (blank look) "He was the first captain on Star Trek." He looked puzzled, then asked, "You mean the bald dude?"
It seems unlikely that closing off this route of advertising will do much to discourage prostitution. On the other hand, it will make it harder for women to offer sexual services as independent operators, and will tend to force more of them into exploitive arrangements in which much of their income is taken by "management." So it is a lose for the women, but a big win for the pimps.
There's a free app called Cloud Browse for iPhone that lets you run Firefox on a remote server, including Flash. Not really the sort of thing that you'd want to use for video or games, but it is handy for web sites that require Flash for basic functionality. I don't know if there is a similar alternative available for the Android platform.
That's nice to know--I was looking for a point-and-shoot camera with this feature some months ago and couldn't find one. Of course the S95 is brand-new and costs as much as the top of the iPod Touch line (although it has other desirable features, and doubtless better optics).
The automated HDR looks like a very cool feature, and addresses what I find to be the biggest limitation of simple cameras--the limited dynamic range with automatic exposure. I don't know of any point-and-shoot camera that does this.
Mann's hockey stick has recently been completely falsified, even assuming all of his data and methods are sound, by professional statisticians.
This is simply untrue. While the original statistical approach that Mann chose was not ideal, and is subject to certain types of error, multiple subsequent studies have shown that his approach did not invalidate his conclusions.
The paper that you cite comes up with larger error bars using a different method of analysis which has not previously been tested or validated for this kind of data, so it logically cannot falsify the hockey stick. The authors do not compare their method to that used Mann or by others who have carried out reproduced his conclusions, and provide no evidence that their approach is in any way superior.
In short, the error bars are so large that we _cannot_ say that we're currently warmer than during the MWP.
We also cannot say that the MWP was as warm as today, or even that the MWP was a global phenomenon rather than a regional one. It has been known all along that the error bars get large when you try to extend the analysis that far back, and this was acknowledged in Mann's work.
Actually, Mann's original "hockey stick" went back only to 1400, and a subsequent paper extended it to 1000.
From the NRC report
Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.
This is basically in agreement with Mann's published reports, which acknowledge greater uncertainty as the reconstruction is pushed back further in time, with error bars expanding greatly for dates before about 1600.
Nevertheless, the NRC report found it
plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.
The result was that if you put any red noise through Mann's filters you get identical data. Basically it is all a con
Actually, you don't. You can get it to turn up a bit at the end, but nobody has managed to reproduce the magnitude of Mann's hockey stick blade with red noise. So if you think that, you have yourself been the victim of a con. Reanalysis using other methods still yields a hockey stick. That's why the 2006 NRC peer review ended up concluding
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
As Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof
And given what has been known for many decades about the radiative properties of atmospheric CO2, it would indeed be extraordinary if we could increase CO2 by so much and not experience substantial changes in climate.
"The real proxies are less predictive than our ”fake” data. " which to me sounds about as close to call Mann a baldfaced liar as your going to hear in a professional journal.
Actually, Mann was trying to do something that had never been done before, pulling together indirect data from a wide variety of sources to get an idea global climate history. Very rarely is the groundbreaking work on a scientific problem absolutely perfect--usually there are errors and omissions that are corrected in subsequent work. But that doesn't make the pioneer a liar. Both Mann and others have improved upon Mann's original methods, but his general conclusions have held up pretty well over the years. For example, a 2006 peer-review by the National Research Council of the US National Academies concluded,
It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to be all that smart to look up the symptoms of autism and encephalopathy and discover that while encephalopathy may occasionally have symptoms that resemble autism, encephalopathy typically includes a whole bunch of other symptoms that are rarely seen in autism. Indeed, most forms of encephalopathy are associated with evidence of gross brain damage, whereas typical autistic brain differs from normal brain only in very subtle ways, in the levels of certain neurotransmitter receptors and slight changes in cell distribution--all of which fit with a host of other evidence that indicates that autism is a developmental disorder, almost certainly of genetic origin, that begins well before symptoms become obvious, rather than a form of acute brain damage such as encephalopathy.
Antivaxxers believe that all of these serious disease--smallpox, polio, measles, pertussis, rubella--just by coincidence, decided on their own to go away just about the time the vaccine became available. Of course, most of these infectious diseases exhibit a "boom and bust" pattern, because after an epidemic, the must susceptible individuals are dead or immune, so the incidence declines until immunity wanes. So the disease rates rise and fall. But virtual elimination of an infectious disease of this nature requires a vaccine.
False. Vaccine manufacturers may be sued directly if a plaintiff does not prevail in the vaccine court.
However, there is not much incentive for plaintiffs to do so, as the rules of evidence are more favorable to the plaintiff in vaccine court, and the plaintiff's legal costs are covered, win or lose. So if somebody can't win in the vaccine court, the chances that they will prevail in the civil courts are pretty dismal.
Of course, the costs would come out of the public's pockets even if the Vaccine Court did not exist, because vaccine manufacturers must charge enough to cover their costs, including the costs of litigation and potential awards. In the worst case, fear of liability might become so great that no commercial firm is willing to manufacture the vaccine, in which case the public would also be saddled with the costs of the inevitable disease outbreaks, and probably eventually with the cost of the federal government itself producing the vaccine.
If you need surgery, the surgeon you want is the guy who does that particular operation, day in and day out, and nothing else. Experience with the specific surgery is the strongest predictor of a favorable outcome. In our culture, the people who do that have general medical degrees, as well as a surgical residency with training in many surgical procedures--and most of that expertise they hardly ever use. We could probably get outcomes just as good, if not better, by training technicians to specialize in specific surgical procedures, with a doctor versed in general surgery available to take over if the surgical technician encounters anything unexpected.
False in two respects. First, it is not true that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine only immunizes against the toxin. Second it is not true that immunizing only against the toxin does not reduce the spread of the disease. (hardly surprising that preventing a symptom--coughing--that spreads disease would reduce the spread of that disease)
That's putting it mildly. Not only did Wakefield conceal conflicts of interest, but it has been shown that the description of the work and how it was done was false. Your statement that it has not been duplicated "in humans" is technically correct--others have tried to reproduce Wakefield's claimed results and have gotten contrary results--but it could be misunderstood as indicating that it has been duplicated in nonhumans. This is not true.
And the study you cite was originally co- authored by Wakefield (although they demoted him to an acknowledgment when the extent of his scientific malfeasance and unethical behavior became widespread public knowledge), and also has major scientific problems.
Indeed, the Vaccine Court tilts toward the plaintiff in multiple ways. The government pays the plaintiff's lawyers, win or lose, so there is a big incentive for lawyers to take such cases, even if the chance of winning is slim. And the standard of evidence is lower in the Vaccine Court--basically, compensation is awarded if it is at all plausible that a person's injury could have been caused by the vaccination. And if the plaintiff loses, they still have the option of suing in regular court.
However, I think that this is reasonable. Vaccination does not just benefit the person being vaccinated, it benefits society, because the main way in which vaccination prevents disease is not by protecting the individual from infection, but rather by making it impossible for an epidemic to get started in the first place. Immunity to disease (whether from vaccination or previous exposure to the disease) is not absolute--the risk of contracting the disease is reduced, but not to zero. The reason most people do not contract diseases like measles, whooping cough, or polio is that an infection is unable to spread through the population, because on the average an infected person ends up infecting less than one other person. When that is the case, the disease cannot spread, and simply peters out.
But when immunization is successful, the disease is virtually eradicated from the entire population. Vaccines are some of the safest effective medical treatments known to man, but they do have risks, albeit very small. But when a disease is nearly eradicated, the risk of the disease to each individual is less than the risk of the vaccine--so long as all of his neighbors are properly vaccinated. So the situation is tailor-made for a "tragedy of the commons," in which each individual pursues his own selfish self interest, and as a result, everybody suffers far more than would have been the case if everybody had cooperated to share a small risk in order to avert a much greater one.
So it makes sense to provide a public safety net to compensate everybody who suffers a genuine vaccine injury--because people who get vaccinated are performing a public service. Yes, this will means some people will be compensated who would have gotten sick anyway, and Hannah Poling is very likely one of these. Mitochondrial diseases can be triggered by many stressors, including very minor illnesses, so there is a good chance that something or other would have triggered Hannah's illness even if she hadn't been vaccinated. Indeed, children like Hannah may well be at greater risk if they are not vaccinated, but that is obviously of little comfort to anybody after the fact.
So just as our criminal justice system occasionally lets real criminals go free to protect the innocent, the Vaccine Court sometimes rewards unscrupulous lawyers who exploit parents of autistic children, and sometimes provides compensation to people who probably aren't really entitled to it. But that is a small price to pay for providing just compensation for those who actually do suffer genuine harm from vaccination
Even if you manage to implement a translator that plays Flash via web kit but is not a "plug in," there is still another obstacle. From Apple's guidelines:
However, there is Cloud Browse which runs Firefox with Flash remotely, and then streams the display to your iPhone.
Maybe for people who have a real home theater setup with fixed seating, but I think the market will be limited. I don't think the average consumer is going to buy a TV that requires you to sit in particular spots to avoid a double image--unless it doesn't cost extra, in which case they'll probably keep the 3D effect mostly turned off. I suppose that it might be possible to develop a system that tracks you around the room and adjusts the parallax barrier for your position.
Other people being unable to watch you play has not impeded the popularity of hand-held gaming systems and phone games. Even for games on console, the social interaction is mostly one way: people can watch you play, but you are too involved with he game to interact with them (an exception being turn-based games like bowling). But with multiple player games, social interaction can occur within the game.
However, the available parallax barrier screens have a very small "sweet spot." This is a big limitation for a large display. With a handheld display, you will automatically hold it in the spot that gives the best image. I gather that there are technologies in the works to expand the sweet spot or provide multiple sweet spots.
The glasses are big enough to fit over regular lenses. Avatar was designed from the outset to be 3D, and Cameron did substantial technology development, but it is still early days for 3D as a serious filmmaking technique.
The problem with the "helmets" is there that is no way that you can actually run around in the 3D world because you'd bump into walls and trip over the furniture, so you still need a controller. Directing your gaze with a helmet instead of a joypad is not enough of a convenience to justify the inconvenience of the headset.
I do think that people will be resistant to wearing the glasses routinely. They work better in a darkened theater than in the more social context of TV watching. And of course the active glasses currently being used for 3DTV are expensive, unlike the passive movie glasses. Game playing will be the main impetus driving the acceptance of 3DTV. Most of the general public will buy 3DTVs only when the cost comes down to the point that you effectively get 3D capability for free (it actually costs the manufacture very little, although they are currently charging a big premium).
On the other hand, small 3D screens that do not require glasses will likely be a big success for individual video watching and game playing, with the new Nintendo 3DS being the first of these. Within 3 years, I expect that all smartphones being sold will have 3D capable displays.
Yes, I noticed this with Avatar also. You feel like you should be able to focus your eyes, because you have converged the images, but you can't. Film directors like to use focus to direct attention, but I wonder if in a 3D film, it would be better to have everything in focus. Of course, that would require either a very stopped down lens (and a lot of light) or some fancy digital post-processing. Or perhaps it would seem odd to have everything in focus. I wonder if Cameron did experiments on this.
Oops, that should have been "the light rays from the object are focused on the retina.
When you "focus" your eyes on something in 3D, you do two things: you adjust the lens of your eye so that the light rays from the object are focused on the object, and you also adjust the convergence of your eyes to put the image of the object on a corresponding region of the retina of both eyes. With a stereoscopic image, you don't have to do the former, but you still have to do the latter.
My nephew told me that he was a fan of William Shatner. I asked him if he knew what role Shatner was most famous for.
"Boston Legal," he replied.
"No, before that"
(blank look)
"He was the first captain on Star Trek."
He looked puzzled, then asked,
"You mean the bald dude?"
It seems unlikely that closing off this route of advertising will do much to discourage prostitution. On the other hand, it will make it harder for women to offer sexual services as independent operators, and will tend to force more of them into exploitive arrangements in which much of their income is taken by "management." So it is a lose for the women, but a big win for the pimps.
There's a free app called Cloud Browse for iPhone that lets you run Firefox on a remote server, including Flash. Not really the sort of thing that you'd want to use for video or games, but it is handy for web sites that require Flash for basic functionality. I don't know if there is a similar alternative available for the Android platform.
That's nice to know--I was looking for a point-and-shoot camera with this feature some months ago and couldn't find one. Of course the S95 is brand-new and costs as much as the top of the iPod Touch line (although it has other desirable features, and doubtless better optics).
Shorter appletv = fail: "OMG appletv is not a computer!"
The automated HDR looks like a very cool feature, and addresses what I find to be the biggest limitation of simple cameras--the limited dynamic range with automatic exposure. I don't know of any point-and-shoot camera that does this.
This is simply untrue. While the original statistical approach that Mann chose was not ideal, and is subject to certain types of error, multiple subsequent studies have shown that his approach did not invalidate his conclusions.
The paper that you cite comes up with larger error bars using a different method of analysis which has not previously been tested or validated for this kind of data, so it logically cannot falsify the hockey stick. The authors do not compare their method to that used Mann or by others who have carried out reproduced his conclusions, and provide no evidence that their approach is in any way superior.
We also cannot say that the MWP was as warm as today, or even that the MWP was a global phenomenon rather than a regional one. It has been known all along that the error bars get large when you try to extend the analysis that far back, and this was acknowledged in Mann's work.
Actually, Mann's original "hockey stick" went back only to 1400, and a subsequent paper extended it to 1000.
From the NRC report
This is basically in agreement with Mann's published reports, which acknowledge greater uncertainty as the reconstruction is pushed back further in time, with error bars expanding greatly for dates before about 1600.
Nevertheless, the NRC report found it
Actually, you don't. You can get it to turn up a bit at the end, but nobody has managed to reproduce the magnitude of Mann's hockey stick blade with red noise. So if you think that, you have yourself been the victim of a con. Reanalysis using other methods still yields a hockey stick. That's why the 2006 NRC peer review ended up concluding
And given what has been known for many decades about the radiative properties of atmospheric CO2, it would indeed be extraordinary if we could increase CO2 by so much and not experience substantial changes in climate.
The funny thing is that the paper ends up with a hockey stick that doesn't look that different from Mann's.
Here's some discussion about what that paper does and does not show
Actually, Mann was trying to do something that had never been done before, pulling together indirect data from a wide variety of sources to get an idea global climate history. Very rarely is the groundbreaking work on a scientific problem absolutely perfect--usually there are errors and omissions that are corrected in subsequent work. But that doesn't make the pioneer a liar. Both Mann and others have improved upon Mann's original methods, but his general conclusions have held up pretty well over the years. For example, a 2006 peer-review by the National Research Council of the US National Academies concluded,