May 25, 2012
Installing Ubuntu

I get the urge about this time every year to put Linux on something. It started back in the early aughts, when I mailordered(!) a copy of Yellow Dog Linux for my old black PowerBook. I tried YDL and then Mandrake, and while both were reasonably useful, the lack of print drivers and poor wifi support made me throw in the towel.

I’ve tried a number of other distributions on my netbook, including Suse and Ubuntu, and unsurprisingly found Ubuntu to be the most useful, and I’ve installed distros on older laptops for other people. I ran Ubuntu for a full summer on my Lenovo netbook a couple of years back, and it was fine for basic browsing and writing, but the lack of printing out of remote desktop was a show-stopper for work. Also, I need to use Exchange calendars more than I’d like to, and while Evolution was able to connect to the server and generally display the correct information, it wasn’t as smooth or easy on the eyes as I would have preferred.

I decided to put Ubuntu on my older iMac, which is a Core 2 Duo; it was my wife’s main machine, and the “family” computer, but she recently upgraded, so I took the iMac as machine to play with. I reformatted the hard drive back in the fall and did a clean install of Lion, and the truth is, the old girl runs great. This Saturday, I used Disk Utility to clear off about 50 gigabytes from the hard drive for Ubuntu 12.

Restricted Drivers

That which most open source advocates dislike about Ubuntu makes it usable for me: the restricted drivers. I can get Ubuntu to recognize my wifi card because of the Broadcom drivers, and in no case have I ever installed Linux on a machine that was hard-wired only.

The Fun Begins

rEFIt seemed to be getting a lot of attention from the dual-boot crowd, so I followed the instructions for manually installing it. I then downloaded an .iso of Ubuntu 12 “Precise Pangolin” and followed the directions posted by Canonical for burning the image to a USB memory stick.

No dice: the Mac could not recognize the stick after the files were copied over, which I thought seemed like a bad sign. I burned the .iso file to a DVD, which also resulted in an unrecognized disk. (I have had a lot of problems with this machine burning DVDs —- CDs burn fine —- so I was not especially surprised about the DVD. Still, I was able to boot from the DVD, and I was happy to learn that Ubuntu was recognizing my Apple Wireless keyboard and bluetooth mouse.

I went for the install: upon reboot, rEFIt recognized the Ubuntu DVD, and I selected it. Once in the installer, I selected the free space, and carved out both swap and boot partitions (which is not the most intuitive process from the installer; curiously, it’s much easier to boot the live CD and install from there; the partation manager seems to handle things much better than the one you use from the installer.) I set my time zone and user name and password, and waited.

Things Fall Apart

Towards the end of the install, I got a message (I don’t remember what it was) saying that a fatal error had occurred. I rebooted, figuring that the bad install media was probably to blame. Low and behold, though, I found a CD of a Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11) install on the spindle of blank media on my desk. I booted to the live CD, and this time used the partition manager from within the live environment to fix the partitions.

Ubuntu wasn’t recognizing my keyboard, however, and I had to get an old Kensington wired mouse to move around the interface. This wasn’t terribly problematic when playing with the live environment, but it made the installation challenging, to say the least.

Mousing Around

I told Narwhal to go ahead and install itself. The distro recognized the Ubuntu 12 install and recommended that I overwrite all of that data, to which I agreed. All was fine until I had to actually type in some data: the system, of course, wanted me to set up a username and password. I was able to find the character map application, and double-click every last freaking letter that I wanted to use. I figured that I would be able to install the restricted drivers after or during the installation, and that would solve my keyboard woes. So after painstakingly setting up my user name and password, I let Narwhal install itself.

The install was successful; I was prompted to remove the installation media and hit the Enter key. But hey, guess what? No keyboard. It doesn’t work yet! I took the CD out and held down the power key, forcing a restart. I was hoping this wouldn’t hose the install, but forcing the machine to power off and reboot seemed like an inauspicious start.

I saw the familiar grey screen that accompanies a boot on a Mac, and then I got the GRUB menu. There were a few choices for me there: boot Ubuntu 11, boot into a safe mode, boot into Mac OS X. Not that I was able to select any of them: my keyboard still wasn’t recognized. It was Ubuntu or nothing.

Without forethought, I had set Natty up to require my password at logon. This is, of course, a challenging process without a keyboard; on the other hand, Ubuntu saw fit to make the on-screen keyboard available to the user at the boot screen (they do it in the name of accessibility, but I think they know the deal with Linux and spotty hardware support). I was able to log in, but the screen keyboard was nowhere to be found once I was logged in. It was back to the character map application to enter my password when so prompted.

My next mission was to get wifi working. I looked around online to try to download the restricted drivers directly, since the Additional Drivers application and the dialog that a fresh Ubuntu install throws at you wasn’t finding any drivers for me. It is difficult to express the feeling of needing a wifi connection in order to set up your computer to access you wifi connection; with most laptop situations, I would simply pull the Cat 5 cable that connects my cable modem and my router, get the Linux box set up, and the get the home network back together. I was not, in this case, going to lug my iMac around the house.

One of the central requirements to using Linux is that you have to have a working computer around to help you get everthing working. I used my Macbook Air to research, troubleshoot, and type up my password and some terminal commands on a text file, which I copied to a flash drive, so that I could copy and paste on the Natty install.

I wasn’t having much luck with the broadcom drivers until I read that you can add the install CD as a data repository in the Synaptic Package Manager. I popped the disk back into the iMac and used that data to install the drivers. Nothing happened. I’ll admit to being a little bit dumb about this: I needed to restart the machine in order to use the driver. Ubuntu doesn’t recommend this, though, so I had to try it for myself after being flustered about the drivers not working. I installed and reinstalled before I realized what I was missing. The restart solved the problem, and happily, I was connected to my home network. Well, after using the character map to mouse in my WPA2 password.

I was still not having any luck with my keyboard, and I wasn’t sure that any of the bluetooth matches I was seeing in Synaptic Package Manager were drivers or not. Feeling a bit stuck, I figured I’d download Ubuntu 12 and try that out; after all, it had recognized my hardware from the Live CD.

Ubuntu 11 has a very nice, simple Update Manager to update your system software. Unlike Windows or the Mac, and because it is free (as in beer) to download and install, Ubuntu can update itself to each new OS release. The Update Manager revealed that I could update to 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, so I it the update button and waited.

Just Let This Sink In for a Moment

Things hummed along for a while, and I occassionally check the update’s progress. As I helped prep dinner, the screen went dark, as it is set to do to conserve energy and preserve the screen’s longevity. On a walkby, I wiggled to mouse to see what was happening. That’s when I was greeted with an error that some “module” was “unknown” at the boot page. Mind you, I had already set Natty to stop asking for my password at boot; I wanted to make things very easy for me until I had a keyboard. So there was no getting into the system to see where the machine was with the installation; all I had was a login page with an “unknown module.” Turns out that this was an issue for lots of people updating to the Ocelot.

I don’t want to exagerate this error, but just think about what would happen if to someone who isn’t very tech literate. I am by no means a hacker or programmer, but I’ve been farting around with computers long enough to be able to scratch my own itch and get things done. The notion that you would have to ssh into a machine via the command line reinforces what I said before: if you’re going to play around wiht Linux, you need to have some kind of working setup handy to troubleshoot the install. And for as good as Ubuntu has gotten, this seems like a pretty significant bug. Reset PAM? Huh? Without a keyboard?

I saw no way of dropping into the shell, and I didn’t have a keyboard even if I could have gotten there, so I did the only thing I could think of: I waited way longer than the install was supposed to take, and then I forced the machine to restart. So that was two forced restarts, one on a fresh install, one on an update.

Dawn Breaks

Happily, I was greeted by the updated look and feel of 11.10. Meanwhile, on my Macbook, I downloaded a build of Ubuntu 12 Precise Pangolin (since the DVD was probably hosed). Once I logged onto the 11.10 install, I learned that still my keyboard was not being recognized1, and the bluetooth application didn’t present me with any way of adding a device. I found plenty of instructions for using the shell to add a bluetooth device, but without a keyboard, I wasn’t in any position to execute terminal commands.

Back to the Update Manager I went, and found that I could indeed update to 12.04 straighaway. I copied and pasted my password into the required dialog box for what I hoped would be the last time.

And it was! By the time the evening had grown long, I had a working install of Ubuntu 12.04, with bluetooth keyboard and mouse support. I was able to type a few things, do a Google search, and then finally shut the thing down for the night.

I took my USB keyboard home from work the next evening, and things improved measureably. One of my first orders of business was to install Dropbox. It is available for installation from the Ubuntu software center, but trying to install it returns errors about nautilus-dropbox.

Turns out, you have to install it from the command line. This isn’t difficult, but it certainly isn’t intuitive…especially when it’s ostensibly available directly from Ubuntu.

Future Plans

I’m excited to run Ubuntu on the old iMac. It looks great and runs smoothly; I can transfer my (limited) knowledge of bash to Ubuntu’s shell; I can use Dropbox to share data. I don’t know how useful it will be relative to my work and home setup, because I will not switch tools that work for ones that kind-of work on both platforms (ie Evernote or Tomboy Notes vs. Yojimbo, or OmniFocus for just about anything else). I’ve gotten this far before, though, and never found Linux useful enough for day-to-day use to warrant a switch from Mac OS X. If perhaps I set my the bar a bit lower —- some web browsing and farting around —- I’ll appreciate it more this time around.


1That’s not entirely accurate; I was able to add the keyboard, but the icon in the connnection manager kept blinking on and off, suggesting that it was alternately connecting to and losing the connection with the keyboard.

May 17, 2012
Don’t Pay Attention to the Two Wars and the Tax Cut Behind the Curtain!

Ezra Klein on “Spending-Driven Debt”:

So if you read the chart carefully, you would say we should reverse the tax cuts, stop launching so many deficit-financed wars, and make sure we regulate the financial sector so it doesn’t blow up again. But that’s not exactly the Republican agenda right now.

Link

May 10, 2012
Vaccine Epidemic

A friend, and, I should note, vaccine refuser, recently offered me a copy of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coerce Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children. As a person who follows the vaccine schedule for my children and does not agree with the positions of the those who refer to themselves as in favor of vaccine “choice,” I had hoped to write a review of the book, and in so doing, publish a larger work that demonstrated how scientists develop and study vaccines, and show the anti-vaccine crowd the errors of their ways. But I realized a few things about the issue:

  • Epidemiology is complex: vaccine refusers probably don’t understand it very much, and my ability to understand the science is limited;
  • Much of what is available to common readers is information designed to convince parents to either vaccinate or not vaccinate; most of us are not going to dig into the annals of JAMA in order to make a decision;
  • For some people, this is a religious matter. Writing about it isn’t going to convince some people.

Regarding that last point: I just listened to an interview with John Updike on NPR’s Fresh Air, and Updike stated that writing is an act of aggression. That’s partly true; men and women the world over take to the decidedly more constructive pen in favor of the sword to win their battles. Ultimately, if you “win” with writing, you do so by convincing people of something. That’s what I was trying to do. I also realized that other people are saying what I want to say, but better.

It’s worth reading about vaccines as much as possible if you have to make decisions for yourself or your children about them. The main takeaway for me was that it is worth following your doctor’s (or your pediatrician’s) guidance on the matter. Anti-vaccine campers or vaccine choice advocates, as they like to be called, often pretend or play at being knowledgeable about the subject, but as is often the case with politics, for example, people read sources that confirm their biases and suppositions, and ignore sources to the contrary.

The challenges that face parents attempting to make their own decisions about vaccination are amply evident in Vaccine Epidemic and other sources from which choice advocates find succour:

  • The democratization of information, divorced from the experience to understand it;
  • relatedly, poor reporting by understaffed press and the increasingly democratized spread of information via independent news sources on the internet;
  • a pageview culture;
  • lawyers playing lawyerball;
  • a premium placed on intuition rather than reason, knowledge, and understanding of the evidence;
  • an assumption of a risk-free existence.

In writing this, I had hoped to expose how Vaccine Epidemic embodies the wrong approach to addressing each of these challenges. It’s a larger project than I can hope to tackle, and in reading other sources online and in print it became clear to me that there are people writing about the issue now that are doing a better job of it than me.

Faith, Cynicism, and Unrealistic Expecations

L. Shaka from Vaccine Times reminds us why there’s no reasoning with the anti-vaccination crowd:

These beliefs are wrong and not supported by evidence, however it is clear to see that once one accepts these premises as true, the decision not to vaccinate does follow logically. Their conclusion is wrong, as they are starting with the wrong premises, but they are not stupid or idiots, at least the majority aren’t. They are in most cases just as intelligent, if not more intelligent and educated, than the average person. The only difference between anti-vaccine proponents and pro-healthers is the required standard of evidence. If you really look at it, all disagreements boil down to one question: “What is to be considered acceptable evidence?”

This unfortunately means that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, to change the mind of an anti-vaccine believer, since in order to do that, you’d have to completely change how they assign weight to evidence, akin to trying to convince a religious person to become an atheist on the basis of rational arguments.

It’s not science or research that drives the movement. It’s more akin to religion or faith. And perhaps that’s why it seems that even conclusions that aren’t especially difficult to arrive at, in fact, never are.

If you read Michael Belkin’s account in Vaccine Epidemic, or Amy Pingel’s devastating story about her daughter, Zeda, who was healthy prior to receiving the HPV vaccine, you might be inclined to rankle at the thought of having your child receive the shot. But if this NPR report is to be believed:

The CDC has examined 35 deaths that occurred among 35 million young people who received the vaccine. It also concluded there is no evidence of cause and effect.

Refusers might castigate the CDC’s conclusions, but 35 deaths in 35 million? If (and that’s an if) you ignore the CDC’s conclusions and assume a one-to-one correlation between the vaccine and cause of death and compare it to the 4,000 people who die of cervical cancer yearly, you have to even still conclude that most sane people would at least consider the shot. I am not inclined to make judgements about sacrificing people — and I can sympathize with parents who would feel that they had indeed sacrificed a child — but if you are considering risk tolerance or calculating the odds of something happening to you or a loved one, those are not unreasonable numbers.

The inverse is invoked in Allen Tate’s discussion of the utilitarian ethic of mandated vaccines, to wit, that there is a “uncomfortable underside” to this conception of vaccination: the notion of sacrifice. But what is never considered is what level of sacrifice must others make to protect choice? In the name of choice, how many must be sacrificed?

There’s the curious, if somewhat common, expectation of 100% safety from anti-vaxers; nothing that isn’t guaranteed 100% safe is not to be tolerated. Consider the advice that Judy Converse, writing for Nutrition Care, gives to parents who face a pediatrician determined to vaccinate their children: demand from your child’s pediatrician that the vaccine is 100% safe:

I have also fully informed my patient/ patient caregiver / patient parent that in case of any injury, adverse reaction, or death sustained as a result of the vaccinations administered at my behest and/or by myself or any of my staff, I hereby make myself personally and fully accountable for any and all costs, losses, and needs associated with said injury, adverse reaction, or death, for the lifetime of the victim, including but not limited to costs of any and all medical care, health care, equipment, rehabilitative occupational/physical/speech or other therapies, attorney’s fees for protection of free and appropriate education (FAPE) as specified under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other civil rights, educational/remedial/tutoring costs, costs of child care, respite care, in home nursing care, long term care, or residential and custodial care, or any costs for any items, care, equipment, travel, loss of income, pain and suffering, or housing associated with this injury, adverse event, or death resulting from vaccination(s) administered by me, by my staff, or at my behest.

I, (Dr. Name), MD, hereby accept all financial, custodial, and medical responsibility and liability, as described above, for any and all short or long term adverse event, reaction, illness, injury, disability or death that may be caused by vaccination(s), which I have administered to my patient on this day (date).

Who expects this much certainty in anything?

Parts of Vaccine Epidemic reveal a cynicism one often observes in politics. It would seem that, on one hand, a criticism of the vaccine schedule is that there isn’t any evidence that it’s effective. So more research must be done. But then, that would be unethical.

Vera Hassner Harav, in “Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine”:

A public policy that puts the well-being of a child at risk—-for the good of others or, more likely, for commercial reasons—-violates fundamdental moral principles and devalues the child as a human being.

While, in a discussion of utilitarianism, Allen Tate says (in “The Greater Good”):

The benefits of vaccination must verifiably outweigh great costs and suffering. Whether the benefits truly yield a tremendous good is simply unknown.

This pitting of two opposing requirements as prerequisites of a vaccine schedule —- the need for more research and the unethical practice of conducting this research —- illustrates the ultimately cynical heart of the anti-vaccine movement.

Personal Examples (or, The Dangers of Induction from Lousy Sample Sizes, or The Anecdotal Fallacy)

Supporting an argument by providing compelling human stories is a way to appeal to a person’s sense of the personal and immediate. Take Michael Belkin’s story above. Or Lisa Marks Smith’s chapter, “Get Your Affairs in Order,” in which she makes the case that receiving a flu vaccine at a local big-box pharmacy caused her to contract Guillain Barre. Even if you grant causation in both of these cases, you have to consider the other side of the coin: deaths due to the illness the vaccine ostensibly prevents. Consider Guillian Barre: 3,000 to 6,000 reported cases per year in the United States, irrespective of vaccine status (I know, Refusers: suspect source), with low mortality. Flu? Around 40,000 deaths per year.

I had a Facebook friend (who un-friended me due to my pointing out that correlation does not imply causation when she claimed that her chiropractor husband cured her daughter’s fever by cracking her back) who blithely asserted that she had never had a flu shot, and had never had the flu. Impressive, I suppose, and bully for her; but a sample size of one is not an argument for or against anything, including vaccination. Anecdotes can be piled up on both sides of the argument until they become meaningless. In The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin describes the harrowing affair of Kelly Lacek and her son, who contracted Haemophilus influenzae type b – after skipping the vaccine schedule at the urging of her chiropractor. The boy nearly died, and the only person who was able to diagnose the condition was an aging doctor who had seen the disease in decades past, before there was a vaccine. There’s also Dana McCaffery, whose daughter contracted pertussis (whooping cough) as an infant, before she was even eligible for the vaccine. More stories abound, and they’re effective in Vaccine Epidemic…if that’s the only kind of book you read. And I suspect vaccine refusers only read these kinds of books.

It’s My Choice

If there’s an example of the lack of community mindedness that pundits lament pervading secular America, it’s the notion of “privilege” or “choice” observable in the vaccine choice movement. Consider the flu vaccine: a parent may wish to forgo the vaccine for their child due to suspicions about mercury in the suspension (even though non-thimerosol preparations are available)1, and rightfully conclude that even if their otherwise healthy child were to contract influenza, the likelihood of death due to the flu is small. But it’s not your child specifically that vaccine schedules are designed to protect, at least not exclusively. By participating, your child is reducing the prevalence of influenza in the community, and to those areas to which she might travel. By participating, your child is helping more vulnerable populations (those with compromised immune systems and the elderly) avoid contraction.

Another example: Rubella. It is true that in most people, Rubella or (German measles) is not an especially frightening disease. So if you’ve already borne healthy children, you may take comfort in the fact that they are not likely to experience severe illness or death from Rubella (not least of all because those of us who are more convention and community minded about this kind of thing have innoculated our children). The impact of Rubella, however, on newborn children who contract it from their mothers is devastating. And in a community with an outbreak of Rubella, children in the first three months of life are at severe risk. Rubella in your fourth grader? Just a rash and a fever, maybe. In your newborn? Maybe heart defects and nervous system damage. Maybe death.

Jumping the Shark

Vaccine Epidemic revealed to me the surprising notion that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, and the vaccine-autism chestnut, is alive and well among the anti-vaccine crowd. If you were to only read Vaccine Epidemic you would think that Wakefield simply lost his medical license for supporting vaccination choice (specifically, that the MMR vaccine should be administered separately in three distinct doses). The truth, of course, is far more damning:

  • Wakefield’s conclusions were based on a very small sample;
  • Wakefield’s conclusion — a link between MMR vaccine and autism — could not be replicated by his peers, a standard in any kind of research;
  • Evidence emerged that, two years prior to Wakefield’s findings being published in The Lancet, Wakefield had been hired by a lawyer to investigate a link between vaccines and autism;
  • Wakefield performed invasive medical tests on children that were not approved by the Royal Free Hospital’s ethics committee;
  • Wakefield was developing his own vaccine in preparation for the MMR vaccine’s discrediting due to his published results.

Huckster Bob Haley

Wakefield was, of course, the medical celebrity in the anti-vaccine movement. I had never heard of Bob Haley before I picked up Vaccine Epidemic, but he’s something of a star himself. About Haley:

  • He is a proponent of chelation therapy
  • He attempted to market OSR#1, an unregulated industrial chemical called n,N’-bis(2-mercaptoethyl)isophthalamide, for the treatment of autism, and attempted to sidestep FDA approval of the substance by marketing it as a dietary supplement.

The most curious thing about Haley’s inclusion in the book (if the reader takes the time to research Haley and his company, CTI Science) is that the parents of children with autism, desperate for a cure, lauded and goaded the usage of OSR#1 irrespective of FDA approval. For a group of people who are suspicious of substances being introduced into their children’s bodies by vaccines, they are curiously eager to offer their children up for experimentation, or to attempt all kinds of “natural” or “homeopathic” cures into them, without anything close to the oversight and study exacted on vaccines.

And another huckster: Dr. Sears.

National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and VAERS

A favorite whipping boy of the anti-vaccine movement that is brought up in Vaccine Epidemic is the VICP (the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program). Both the VICP and VAERS are invoked as a means of proof that vaccines are harmful. VAERS is popular because it is democratic: you and I and anyone else can go in and look at the numbers. You can sort the data as you like, but access is not expertise.

Consider this article from Natural News, which references a study that purports to show how VICP payouts to parents proves the autism/vaccine link. Linking to a >press release, Neev M. Arnell summarizes:

The study looked at 1300 cases of children with brain injury resulting from vaccines where the court’s records referenced autism, symptoms of autism or disorders commonly associated with autism — twenty-one cases outright stated “autism or autism-like symptoms” in the court records. The researchers then identified and contacted 150 of the families that were compensated to find out whether the children had autism. 62 of the families they contacted (greater than 40 percent of their sample) reported children with autism, for a total of 83 cases of autism.

The study is somewhat (in)famous, depending upon if you get your news from Natural News or, say, Wired.

There are a few problems with the conclusions of the “study,” not the least of which is its provenance: lawyers and their clients.

How the Pace Legal Group operationalized “autism” is novel, to say the least:

One must note that the DSM-IV definition of “autistic disorder” is similar on its face to the VICP’s definitions of “encephalopathy, seizures, and sequela.” … The DSM-IV “autistic disorder” does not contradict the VICP description of encephalopathy, seizures, and sequela.

There are diagnostic criteria for Pervasive Developmental Disorder. Some symptoms that occur in autism may be observed in children or adults with other disorders. How do you determine whether someone is autistic or not? Differential diagnoses. Do you know whose job that is? Not a law student’s. In fact, as Paul Offit has pointed out, it is not physicians but lawyers who often make VAERS reports connecting a vaccine to autism.

So the study did not differentiate between bona fide autism and autistic-like symptoms. And fewer than 10 of the 83 cases provided “third party medical, educational, or court records confirming autistic disorder on file with the authors.”

There is also the method that bears scrutiny. The Pace group assisted the parents in combing the database to find the 60-odd cases that either explicitly or indirectly reference autism (and that is a big indirectly). They were then contacted by telephone, and a small number (22 parents) were asked to complete a screening tool, “The Social Communication Questionnaire.” (Screeners, in psychometrics, are brief instruments usually not sufficient to establish anything beyond the need for additional testing). The authors continue to refer to “vaccine-induced encephelopathy,” conflating the symptoms of this purported reaction with a bona fide autism diagnosis.

First, and most obviously, 83 cases out of 1300 is about six percent, not 40; the study attempted to extrapolate a larger conclusion from a sample size of 150, which is pretty small in this realm of endeavor, and the reason for choosing 150 is unclear (it should be a random sample). They then contacted families and asked them if their children had autism in the absence of other data. They attempted to use questionnaires, and while the percentage of the injurees whose respondents rated their children in the significant range (beyond the cutoff score) was high, the number of completed surveys is very low. And this is from a small sample to begin with.

This is problematic because parents don’t diagnose autism, so a phone survey isn’t really thorough enough to determine rates of diagnoses, and a brief questionnaire, while better than a phone interview, is still insufficient. (Furthermore, the qualifications for administering the psychometric instrument were likely not met, based on who authored the study.) Of the 83 reports, “the families report that their children have autism and symptoms of autism.” I suspect that’s not additive (“I have a common cold and symptoms of the common cold”); rather, either someone diagnosed their child with autism, or the family reported that the child had symptoms of autism. What symptoms? How many of the families surveyed actually had a child diagnosed autistic? Half? Three? Or did the families answer some questions over the phone and the “researchers” determined whether they had some “symptoms” of autism?

It’s kind of terrifying to thing that people are making decisions to not vaccinate their children based on work like this, which gets linked to from suspect sources like Natural News. And, in effect, their decision could affect my children. If you bookmark Natural News and rely on it to provide you with information about whether or not to vaccinate your child, you’re going to be influenced by studies like the Pace group’s piece. And as you’ll see below, even larger organizations will report on such studies in a way that is misleading, because the headlines are likely to generate pageviews.

One final point: I can’t think of a complement in the homeopathic world that does what VAERS does.

The Press

As with politics, how the press (the “liberal media!”) reports these studies makes a difference in how people perceive the data. Consider my example above, where Beth Parker quoted David Nelson from the Department of Pediatrics at Georgetown University:

“The government has not compensated any case based on a determination that autism, in the absence of acute neurologic illness, was actually caused by vaccines. Furthermore, there is no reliable scientific evidence that vaccines cause autism even in cases where an acute encephalopathy following vaccination has occurred.”

And then she concludes:

For some families, it is not enough.

But the title of her article? “New Study Suggests Link Between Vaccines and Autism.” The headline, however, is contrary to the conclusion of the article.

And as Julia “GeekMom” Sherred observed regarding the Pace study I mentioned above:

The way in which SafeMinds.org has presented this study is very misleading. Not a single thing about this paper, or the involvement of Pace Law School, has been represented accurately. How many parents are going to take the time to read the 66-page paper, or are they just going to listen to the press and believe the presentation? How many parents understand solid experimental design?

In another example of headline-grabbing hyperbole, Alex Jones’ Prison Planet recently posted:

The truth has once again shaken the foundation of the ‘American Tower of Babel’ that is mainstream science, with a new study out of Harvard University showing that pasteurized milk product from factory farms is linked to causing hormone-dependent cancers.

The Harvard Gazette’s own write up of the “study” was less emphatic, speaking in the measured tones expected of scientists:

Long-term studies are needed to see if any of this is important for children’s health. “We don’t know what the larger implications are,” said Ganmaa [Davaasambuu, a researcher]. (The National Institutes of Health is now reviewing Ganmaa and her team’s application to fund a two-year study.)

Davaasambuu was actually discussing the state of research in the field, and ongoing investigations that she and some colleagues will be conducting. If you read the headline, though, from Prison Planet, you would think something conclusive had been discovered. Guess where I read it? Facebook. A friend posted the link to Prison Planet, but not to the Harvard article.

What To Do?

It seems that the stakes are high: proponents of vaccine choice not only risk the health of their children, but the health of the young, infirm, and elderly in their communities.

By way of Paul Krugman, Chris Mooney points out the “smart idiot” phenomenon, where people who have attained higher levels of education are more likely to ignore scientific evidence than less educated people. And indeed, that is where the pockets of vaccine choice are coming from. Krugman concludes:

What Chris Mooney is telling us is that this is a vain hope. Highly educated political conservatives — and this includes conservative economists — are going to be less persuadable by empirical evidence than the man or woman in the street. The more holes you poke in doctrines like expansionary austerity or supply-side economics, the more committed they will get to those doctrines.

This debate isn’t going to be won by rational argument.

Replace “conservatie economosists” with “vaccine choice advocates” and “expansionary austerity or supply-side economics” with “the autism-vaccine link.” It seems evident that, quite to the contrary of the call for “more research” and “dialog” by anti-vaxers, the debate will not be won by rational argument.

As Seth Mnookin quotes Leon Festinger in Panic Virus:

Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

Vaccine choice advocates don’t really want dialog or more studies. The movement is cynical at its heart.


1It’s also beating a dead horse. Thimerosol is no longer an ingredient in vaccines (with the exception of some influenza vaccines), yet the incidence of autism continues to rise. Paul Offit also points to a well-designed study that no significant neurological, psychological, or developmental differences were found for those who received greater or lesser quantities of mercury.

May 7, 2012
Wake Up. Be Bold.

BlackBerry’s “Wake Up, Be Bold” campaign:

> You don’t just think different. You do different.

I don’t see how these kinds of statements are going to sell phones. I don’t use things because they’re a statement of who I think I should be. I use things I like using.

Or, in the case of some BlackBerry users, because I have to for work.

Link

May 5, 2012
Poor Robber Baron

AT&T’s Randall Stephenson:

You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.

How much sleep does he lose worrying about charging $1500 per megabyte for a service that costs them almost nothing to provide?

May 5, 2012
I just can’t believe it!

Paul Krugman on the “Incredulity Problem”

In such situations [households and businesses] spending less is a sure-fire way to reduce debt, cutting your price or your wage demand is a sure-fire way to sell more. But in the economy as a whole, your spending is my income and vice versa; my wage matters only in comparison to your wage; and so on. This changes everything, which is why we have paradoxes of thrift and flexibility.

NYT

May 5, 2012
The Joker

Noel Rogers of It’s the Crew on Batman’s enemies:

The Joker is everything that Batman is not. Thematically. The Joker is colorful where Batman is dark. The Joker is grinning where Batman is grim. I thought this was very well shown in Batman: Arkham Asylum. You could play as The Joker on certain challenge maps, and his fighting style is completely different. Where Batman is smooth, the Joker is jerky and erratic. But it’s not just in physicality or color scheme. Batman uses the tools of crime — violence and intimidation — to fight crime. The Joker uses the methods of order — careful and meticulous planning — to sow chaos.

I don’t know when DC writers started making the Joker awesome…he was very clownish to me until I read The Killing Joke sometime around 1989. He became a twisted and scary villain in that title. Health Ledger, in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, was based in no small part on Killing Joke’s conception of the Joker.

May 5, 2012
"Yauch’s is one of the voices that can signify hip-hop within three syllables—rough, low, and strained. He got a lot done with that voice."

Postscript: Adam Yauch : The New Yorker via The Loop

May 4, 2012
Getting Ready for the Inevitable

Chris Christie, Governor of the (Olive) Garden State, speaking to the American Federation for Children:

Christie recalled a conversation he had when he was U.S. Attorney in Newark. A woman whose son had gained entry to a high-performing charter school through a lottery told him it likely meant the difference between her son going to college or going to jail.

“The tragic part of the story is, we know she is right,” he said. “What mother in New Jersey, what mother in America, should have to sit and wait for a bouncing ball or ticket with numbers on it to find out whether her son is going to go to college or go to jail?”

I detect both the anecdotal fallacy and the black-or-white fallacy at play here. Is it really really possible that the only choice for people is jail or college? There are no points in between? And should school districts be required to send children (that is, provide bussing and pay tuition to another school district) because of an anecdote?

The outcome of school choice, taken to its logical extreme, would be that any kid with an attentive parent would send their kids to another public school and gobble up well more in dollar resources than a student staying in district (due to transportation costs). What would be left would be a kind of student ghetto full of “bad” kids.

Consider the name of the initiative: “school choice.” What’s being chosen? The school. By whom? The student and his parents.

But is that all?

Turns out, the receiving school would have to accept the student. What are the criteria for accepting a student? I can tell you that if you’re one step out of jail, that kind of information is going to be shared when school records are reviewed.

School receiving students in a choice program are not going to take tough cases if they know what they’re doing. Choice programs will drain the brighter, more charismatic, more upstanding students from their home schools.

So why not just do it now? Go in to failing schools (schools where a percentage of kids can’t pass a threshold on a standardized assessment) and pluck out all of the kids who can pass the tests, who don’t have disciplinary histories, and whose parents actually do show up for events and meetings, and put them in a nice school next door, or down the street, or in the next town over. Put bars over the windows in the old school, where the dumb, bad, poor kids are left.

Just get them ready for the inevitable.

May 2, 2012
Gov. Christie: Dump the HSPA

Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, wants to get rid of the High School Proficiency Assessment, or HSPA. Bully for that; I’m all in agreement for dumping the test. But it’s not because he sees standardized assessments as being an inappropriate graduation criteria:

>Christie said Monday that moving away from the High School Proficiency Assessment, or HSPA, would produce graduates more prepared for college or careers.

Standardized tests are, I think, useful gauges of a student’s level of achievement, provided that the student was well-rested and felt invested in the test. There are a lot of kids who don’t really care about the tests, and the way to make them care (doesn’t that sound coercive?) is to make passing it a graduation requirement.

But they are not the whole story, and I think that it’s wrong-headed to use them as graduation requirements. Give the tests. Look at the scores. Use the scores to determine areas of instruction that need improvement or wholesale change. Professionals appreciate data when it’s not a gotcha.

At least the new tests would be phased in over time, though:

>Students now in high school would still have to pass the test