Read this excellent review of Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets. It sounds like a rightfully strong book.
Also, I’ve now lost a lot of respect for Jim Carrey.
Read this excellent review of Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets. It sounds like a rightfully strong book.
Also, I’ve now lost a lot of respect for Jim Carrey.
So now that I’ve got that whole college thing out of the way, I can finally start cleaning, sorting, and packing for the big road trip to the new home ahead, and doing more reading. Lord of the Flies (which I had never read) is first on the list. And a whole bunch of stuff from the New York Times. Like this one:
Over the following months, Dr. Gregorius learned many things, including how to deliver babies while saying “push!” in Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and several languages he had never heard of. He learned that Chinese people brought babies into the pediatric E.R. between 11 p.m. and midnight, apparently after restaurants closed, that Pakistani babies showed up between 3 and 5 a.m., when cabdrivers changed shifts, and Hasidic babies seemed to arrive at 10 p.m., for reasons no one could explain. He knew it seemed like stereotyping, but that’s when a sudden rush of sick babies would arrive each night.
The World Health Organization has announced that polio has been eradicated from Somalia. This was an incredibly difficult task, given Somalia’s endemic violence and instability. And it took a huge effort:
More than 10,000 Somali volunteers and health workers vaccinated more than 1.8 million children under the age of five by visiting every household in every settlement multiple times.
However, this has happened before. Polio was eradicated from Somalia back in 2002, only to be reintroduced from Nigeria. The fact that polio was reintroduced from a country on the other side of the continent calls attention to the interrelatedness of disease control efforts in different countries (diseases know no borders) and the tragedies that occur when vaccination efforts clash with local cultures or religions.
But despite its tenuous progress in terms of total eradication, the WHO’s $4 billion polio campaign has made great steps forward:
When WHO and partners began their anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually. The disease’s incidence has since been slashed by more than 99 percent and remains endemic in four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan. Polio cases were also detected last year in Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger and Sudan.
So that’s the good (albeit cautiously so) news. The bad news for Somalia:
Somalia’s Government Teeters on Collapse
If you read that and asked “wait, Somalia has a government?” you’re not alone. But it does have a government of sorts:
By its own admission, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is on life support. When it took power here in the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war and suffering.
But now its leaders say that unless they get more help — international peacekeepers, weapons, training and money to pay their soldiers, among other things — this transitional government will fall just like the 13 governments that came before it.
Less than a third of the promised African Union soldiers have arrived, the United Nations has shied away from sending peacekeepers and even the Ethiopians are taking a back seat, often leaving the government’s defense to teenage Somalis with clackety guns who are overwhelmed.
Have you ever sat down and wondered, “Am I a scientific quack?” Well, probably not. But I’ve met enough True Believers in pseudoscience to give myself pause. What I really am the person to come up with a scientific breakthrough? How will anyone ever believe me? Doesn’t science trudge along, a la Thomas Kuhn, in the dominant paradigm until the evidence suggesting otherwise is just too overwhelming to ignore? What if I’m part of the new paradigm that will supplant the old, and I want to get the word out?
After all, weren’t many breakthroughs originally derided? Who believed the Earth actually revolved around the Sun? Who knew that Helicobacter pylori bacteria played a role in ulcers? Who knew that RNA interference played such a large role in cell function? Or that cells were programmed to self-destruct as a natural part of development? Or that a thing as wacky as prions actually existed? (After heliocentricity, these ideas won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 2005, 2006, 2002, and 1997, respectively).
Luckily for all of us, Cosmic Variance has compiled an Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist. Excerpts follow:
Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective… Perhaps you have been able to construct a machine that produces more energy than it consumes, using only common household implements; or maybe you’ve discovered a hidden pattern within the Fibonacci sequence that accurately predicts the weight that a top quark would experience on Ganymede, expressed in femtonewtons; or it might be that you’ve elaborated upon an alternative explanation for the evolution of life on Earth that augments natural selection by unspecified interventions from a vaguely-defined higher power. Whatever the specifics, the point is that certain kinds of breakthroughs just aren’t going to come from a hide-bound scholastic establishment; they require the fresh perspective and beginner’s mind that only an outsider genius (such as yourself) can bring to the table.
No sarcasm there. Rule 1:
Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.
But! But! Seems a bit demanding, doesn’t it?
Now, you may object that steering clear of such pre-existing knowledge has played a crucial role in your unique brand of breakthrough research, and you would never have been able to make those dazzling conceptual leaps had you been weighed down by all of that established art. Let me break it down for you: no.
Rule 2:
Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.
Continuing:
Scientific claims — whether theoretical insights or experimental breakthroughs — don’t exist all by their lonesome. They are situated within a framework of pre-existing knowledge and expectations. If the claim you are making seems manifestly inconsistent with that framework, it’s your job to explain why anyone should nevertheless take you seriously…. If you claim that the position of Venus within the Zodiac affects your love life, you’re not only positing some spooky correlation between celestial bodies and human affairs; your theory also requires some sort of long-range force that acts between you and Venus, and there aren’t any such forces strong enough to be relevant.
And finally, Rule 3:
Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.
Not likely. But in case someone still needs convincing, have them submit their theory to the Crackpot Index.
CNN has a piece on the re-burial of victims of the massacre in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995, worth reading. If you haven’t already, you should check out Sheri Fink’s War Hospital, an excellent account of the siege from the perspective of national and international medical doctors trapped in the Muslim enclave.