Anti-vaxxers are just one aspect of the fight

Penn and Teller take on vaccines
[Via Bad Astronomy]

I have long beaten the drum against the antivaxxers: people who falsely claim that vaccines cause autism, or are loaded with toxins. These groups are loud, in many cases vicious, and all have one thing in common: they are wrong, wrong, wrong. The evidence is overwhelming that vaccines don’t cause autism, for example. We know they don’t.

Despite that, it’s clear that the emotional arguments of antivax groups have some traction among people, especially new parents who are understandably concerned and nervous about their children’s health. We here on the reality side of things can talk facts, statistics, and evidence all we want, but to penetrate through to reason we sometimes have to make our arguments more visceral. More demonstrative.

And that’s why I loved the recent episode of Penn & Teller’s show about vaccines. They used facts and figures, but they also use humor and emotion, and it’s really effective. In a brilliant move, they opened their show with a fantastic demonstration of just why we need to vaccinate our kids [very NSFW language]:

I love it! That is precisely right: even if vaccines caused the woes antivaxxers claim — and as Penn says clearly, they don’t — by sheer numbers it’s clear that vaccinations are still critical.

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It is pretty difficult to convince people that have retreated into their own Cargo Cult World to change their minds and re-enter the real world. But there are lots of people that can be reached and we must do that.

Because we are not just fighting this battle against one group. We can not solve the difficult problems facing us by retreating into Cargo Cult Worlds. All of us that believe in understanding the world around us are fighting a wide range of Cargo Cult Worlds, from anti-vaxxers to creationists to climate skeptics to truthers to birthers and many others.

Cargo Cult Worlds allow people to hide from the real world. But they also provide a place for people to launch attacks against our attempts to solve difficult problems, such as human health, energy usage, ecological damage, or economical failures.

We need to realize that these groups are actually just different aspects of the same foe – ignorance And we need to unite to battle them all.

Because they will not be any help as we act to solve our problems and will do their best to prevent us from achieving success.

Complex technology that does not serve mankind

by Elsie esq.

When IT Fails
[Via I, Cringely]

A friend of mine has been in an epic struggle with his mortgage processor and his experience tells us a lot about the state of IT. It started in October of last year when my friend met with his loan processor (Bank of America) to inquire about a loan modification. The loan is actually owned by Freddie Mac. He turned-in all the required paperwork and followed up with an income statement when requested two weeks later. The meeting took many hours mainly because all of the original documents were imaged and put into his electronic file. In late December he was told that his modification was completed, given a new mortgage payment and told to wait on the paperwork.

Nothing happened.

Fast forward to September and guess what? He has had to restart the process three times now. Exactly why the process broke no one can determine. So three times he sent in his tax returns, bank information, income information and forms totaling over 100 pages only to have them disappear, again and again. Each time the process was a little different but the end result was the same — nothing. Process improvement at work yet no change in outcome.

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PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD
[Via Balloon Juice]

I just want to say that PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD, AND I WILL KEEP SAYING THAT UNTIL THIS REGISTERS ON GOOGLE AND THEY CONTACT ME.

Some backstory:

I’ve had this paypal account for ten years. I also had a debit card associated with it. I lost my wallet in July, and being the responsible party that I am, I contacted everyone to let them know this. My bank and other accounts had no problem with this, but not fucking paypal. Upon trying to get a new card, I learned my account had been limited. Why? Who fucking knows? So now, for the past two and a half months, I have been trying to verify I am who I am. This just makes me full of joy:

I’m verified, but limited!

I’ve spent the last two months trying to verify that I am the person they did business with for ten years, each time to be told that “Yes, you have provided the information we asked for, but we can not verify who you are.”

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Both of these describe similar problems – the systems are now so complex that no one can fix some of them, even if they wanted to. Here we have companies performing disservice for their customers. The companies continue to attempt to fix the problem but have no real understanding of why it is broken or how to fix it. Months go by with no resolution, with lost revenue and lost time.

The corporations really have no solution to this problem. They can not fix it because they do not seem to have any real handle on what is actually happening with the IT.

They really are like the people of the South Pacific and cargo cults. ‘If they just push the right buttons on their terminals, then the technology would work’. All while having no understanding of the principles underlying the technology.

The organizations have no fundamental comprehension of the concepts behind their IT. So, if they keep entering data, in just the right way, the system will somehow work. Even as the data keeps disappearing.

Their only worthwhile recommendation is to start up a new account or start the process over again. Like a country of auto drivers but with no mechanics, the only real solution to bad battery is to tell you to buy a new car.

Would a wooden computer with blinking lights be almost as useful?

Some key Apple numbers put in context

by Abhijit Tembhekar

Is Apple stock cheap at the moment?
[Via Edible Apple]

With Apple’s stock price currently hovering under $245, Chad Brand of Seeking Alpha lays forth the argument that the stock is actually undervalued at the moment.

Despite my roots as a value manager, in recent weeks I have been a fairly aggressive buyer of Apple shares. Such an investment may not seem appropriate for a value investor but as the stock has steadily fallen, dropping below $250 per share, it has actually become quite undervalued. And not just relative to its growth rate, but the broad market as well.

Flush with $45 billion in cash and investments ($50 per share) and no debt, Apple sports an enterprise value of about $190 per share. Compare that to $15 of earnings this year and enough catalysts to make next year’s estimate of $18 seem easily attainable, and you have a stock that actually trades at a discount to the S&P 500. And therein lies the core explanation for my heightened interest recently.

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Fifty dollars of every share is actually cash that apple has. So the real value the market is placing on Apple in $190. So its Price to Earnings ratio is 13 for this year and 11 for next.

So, one of the largest corporations in America has a P/E ratio almost over 1/3 lower than the current market which is at 19.25. If Apple was valued at the market’s current average, its price should be about $340 based on this years earnings and $396 based on next year’s.

Now if iTunes would let us pick which 60 seconds to hear

Apple expected to boost iTunes song samples to 60 seconds
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple this week is expected to double the length of free song samples within the iTunes Store, from 30 seconds to 60 seconds, according to a new report.

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Having 60 seconds of a sample to listen to will be better. But so often, the sample does not really provide a good idea of the song. It will be something like part of the long lead in, without any vocals. Or a part of the chorus without the bridge. For a lot of my favorite music, the sample often provides little real value in deciding about buying the song. 30 random seconds out of an 8 minute song is not going to be helpful.

I often end up using the reviews to get a better idea of each song than the sample itself.

Wouldn’t it be great if Apple would let us select which 60 seconds of a song we could listen to?

Clarence Darrow told us what happens when ignorance takes hold in a country

by Dominic’s pics

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
[Via Daring Fireball]

Timothy Egan:

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. I’m not so sure, though, that all the conservatives professing to believe that Obama is a Muslim, or wasn’t born a U.S. citizen, or any of these other fabrications, truly believe them. I think they know they’re spreading lies. See, for example, this story of a confrontation in an Oklahoma Starbucks.

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Basing decisions on incorrect and misleading data is a sure course for ruin. Reality will eventually win, no matter how loud you shriek “LA-LA-La” with your fingers stuck in your ears. Just as many liberals believed that TARP was passed under Obama’s administration as did conservatives. Ignorance is not purely a matter of where you fall along the political spectrum.

Ignorance can make people feel comfortable, that perhaps scary reality can safely be held at bay if they simply believe hard enough in the lies.

But ignorance will only serve the short-term needs of those with a vested interest in maintaining ignorance, usually those with money or power. It will not solve the problems we have to face.

As the post states, this sort of managed ignorance, where many of the people spreading lies are not stupid and surely must know they are lying, does not happen by accident.

Clarence Darrow spoke about this appeal to ignorance in the Scopes Trial. HIs words from 1925 could just as easily be applied to the matters of today:

I will tell you what is going to happen, and I do not pretend to be a prophet, but I do not need to be a prophet to know. Your Honor knows that the fires that have been lighted in America to kindle religious bigotry and hate. You can take ,judicial notice of them if you cannot of anything else. You know that there is no suspicion which possesses the minds of men like bigotry and ignorance and hatred.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Catholic and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

We see this whether the the topic is evolution, vaccination, climate change or politics. It raises some wonderful questions: Who are the powers that benefit by the “setting of man against man and creed against creed?” What do they gain by feeding ignorance and fanaticism?

Our Republic only works well with a base of educated citizens. They have to be smart enough to take really complex reality and find useful solutions. Unfortunately, an ignorant populace uses simplifying heuristics or rules of thumb that are wrong and easily manipulated. Thus the dual approach here of keeping people ignorant so they can be manipulated by fear-inducing lies and heuristics.

Perhaps if more people actually created views of the world based on verifiable facts and rational thought, rather than on lies and fear, we might be able move forward. Actually, unless we can get a large core of Americans who want to work with reality rather than against it, we will move backwards.

These are the forces that are using managed ignorance to maintain power. We must work against them with all of our strength because they will be happy to destroy us all in order to maintain themselves.

Who really thinks this is a good thing?

by K. Kendall

DoJ focusing on Comcast/NBC’s effect on Internet video market
[Via Ars Technica]

Online video may be wildly popular among the Internet savvy, but it is a minor part of the TV-viewing habits of the mainstream crowd. Because online video offerings are still catching on among the masses, the US Department of Justice is considering whether the proposed Comcast/NBC merger is really meant to lock up the market and keep the competition at bay, according to insiders speaking to the Wall Street Journal. If so, the companies could find themselves subject to certain guidelines from the DoJ or an antitrust suit, though the final ruling is still a ways away.

Comcast and NBC announced their plan to join forces late last year, sparking a DoJ investigation at the beginning of 2010. Since then, there has been plenty of debate over whether such a deal would hurt the online video industry—after all, Comcast is one of the biggest content distributors in the US, and NBC is one of the biggest content producers.

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Let’s have one of the largest distributors of content own one of the largest producers. Then let’s throw in a loss of net neutrality and you can easily see that Comcast would have good business reasons to make sure that NBC content was delivered over the Internet as rapidly as possible while content from competitors was slowed down.

I watched the Little League World series on ESPN and ABC, both owned by Disney. I heard the normal in-game spots for shows from ABC or ESPN (“Be sure to watch …”) but I also heard all sorts of in game spots for Disney shows that were disguised as normal content, not ads. They has songs and music videos for the teams during the games that, what a surprise, come from an upcoming DIsney show. Not ABC or ESPN but Disney’s cable channels. There were in-game cartoons from Disney shows that had no connection at all with the game.

Here we have content creators advertising and shilling for other members of the conglomerate that owns them. What happens when not only does the conglomerate own a lot of different content creators but also distributes that content?

I am not hopeful it will helpful for the customer at all.

Life lessons from a game

by luis de bethencourt

Rationality Lessons in the Game of Go
[Via lesswrong: What's new]

Submitted by GreenRoot 120 comments

There are many reasons I enjoy playing go: complex gameplay arises out of simple rules, single mistakes rarely decide games, games between between people of different skill can be handicapped without changing the dynamics of the game too much, there are no draws, and I just like the way it looks. The purpose of this article is to illustrate something else I like about playing go: the ways that it provides practice in basic habits of rationality, that is, the ways in which playing go helps me be less wrong.

I’ve tried to write this so that you don’t need to know the game to follow it, but reading a quick introduction would probably help. (ETA: A commenter below has helpfully pointed to more go info online.) The main aspect to understand for this article is that go is a game of territory. The two sides vie to occupy space and surround one another. If a group of stones is surrounded without sufficient internal space to support itself, it is killed and removed from the board.

Lesson 1: Having accurate beliefs matters.

Here are three examples of a group of white stones being surrounded by black stones. The important distinction between them is whether the white stones will eventually be captured, i.e. whether they are “dead” or “alive”.

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Each of these lessons is important for developing a resilient approach to the changing world around us. Go is a complex game that can teach simple lessons.

• Having accurate beliefs matters.
• Don’t be too confident or too humble
  
• Update on new evidence
  
• Be willing to change your mind
  
• New evidence is the arbiter of conflicting beliefs
  
• The road is long
• Shut up and count

Some of the comments add a few others:

• You need to lose in order to win
• Small differences matter
• Acknowledge mistakes and move to more successful battle
• The present often overshadows the past
• When you are behind is never a time to be conservative
• Sometimes your best move is your opponent’s best move
• Recognizing when intuition is not sufficient and careful analysis is needed
• The tactical and the strategic must be understood simultaneously
• Action without understanding will eventually produce failure

Not a bad set of things to learn from a game.

Flash should just disappear

by BlatantNews.com

Adobe Flash hobbles Android use of BBC iPlayer versus iPhone
[Via MacDailyNews]

“A Freedom of Information request to the BBC completed just Thursday has revealed that Android use of iPlayer may have been hurt, rather than helped, by the use of Flash,” Electronista reports. “As the Android version of iPlayer requires the still-rare Flash plugin to work, British viewers streamed just 6,400 episodes in July. In comparison, 5,272,464 shows streamed to iPad, iPhone and iPod touch owners.”

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Flash is such a pile of crap. My browser hangs all the time because of Flash. I get the spinning beach ball because of Flash. The Flash plug-in crashes. If I turn off the plug-in, no more crashes.

We should not stand for such a bug-ridden bit of software. We will only see it fixed or gone because of Apple’s stand.

The thing to remember is that most of Adobe’s technology and software are built on innovations it bought from others and simply screwed up, rather than developing its own technology. Just like Microsoft.

They simply do not seem to be able to fix this for mobile devices.

Memories of explosions

by KOMUnews

How Much is the PI To Blame?
[Via In the Pipeline]

Chemjobber has a post up on the responsibility of the professor in the Texas Tech explosion case. I have to agree with him: if you’re going to get grant money to have your group work on energetic materials, you have…

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I did my postdoc in a chemistry lab developing the chemistry for synthesizing DNA. My war story deals with a graduate student being shown how to distill something noxious – probably did by hydrazine involved. Anyway, the postdoc was showing him proper procedure, contrary to how the postdic usually did it. This involved using a blast shield between the distillation apparatus in the hood and the closed hood sash.

After getting the heating mantle up to the right temperature, the postdoc explained how they could not let the flask go to dryness. Then the two them went to lunch.

You can guess what happened. Luckily I was in another room but a graduate student was not so lucky when the flask did go to dryness. The explosion shot the blast shield into the sash, pushing both well into the room. The poor graduate who was not even involved in that project had hearing loss for several days.

One reason I am glad I did not work in a chem lab as a career. The other reason was the discovery of a 2 kilogram bottle of picric acid on a lab shelf – which no longer had a protective layer of water on top. A shelf that was about 10 feet from my workspace. I carefully walked out of the room – I still get chills that I moved the bottle out of the way while I was looking for something else before I noticed what it was – and notified the proper people.

I did not go back until the bottle had been removed.

Killing innocent men?

More Police Lab Corruption
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Balko has a disturbing article about a crime lab in North Carolina where corruption may have sent innocent men to their death.

Greg Taylor served 16 years in prison after he was falsely convicted of murdering a prostitute in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was released in February by a special three-judge panel after it was discovered the blood police claimed to have found in his SUV wasn’t blood at all. In the wake of that debacle, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered two retired FBI agents to conduct an investigation on the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) crime lab. The report came out last week, and it is damning.

The report found that SBI agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. There was widespread lying, corruption, and pressure from prosecutors and other law enforcement officials on crime lab analysts to produce results that would help secure convictions. And the pressure worked.

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I hope the estates of those guys who were executed have some outlet to find justice. The prosecutors were writing reviews of the lab analysts. The labs duty was apparently to get the DAs whatever they needed to convict. About 15 cases a year. This should send a chill down anyone’s spine:

In another case, an attorney for a woman accused of killing her mother was shocked to learn that the lab’s DNA tests on blood found at the crime scene matched his client. He called the lab and asked them to retest. They refused. He was finally able to obtain a court order for a new test. It was negative. It turned out that a lab technician had swapped the sample provided by his client with blood taken from the crime scene.

Horribly bad science done to convict people.

Perhaps the estates can sue the prosecutors involved or the state. But immunity for corruption should not be be allowed to occur without real consequence.

Wonderful but how do they actually do it

by U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-)

Brazilian Model Could Feed World
[Via Daily Ideafeed | Big Think]

Risking a slow-motion food crisis, the world should copy Brazil, which reacted to its farm crisis with boldness, expanding production through science, not subsidies, says “The Economist”. In four decades it has become “the first tropical agricultural giant and the first to challenge the dominance of the ‘big five’ food exporters (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union).” Sustainability is often associated with small farms and organic practices, but Brazil’s progress links combines huge farms and GM crops. “Brazil represents a clear alternative to the growing belief that, in farming, small and organic are beautiful.”

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The article os a nice read but very low on data. It states that the Brazilian way is sustainable but provides little in the way of facts to support that assertion. To me, simply having abundant land and water s not really sustainable. That describes most of the US until recently. Sustainable is not just grabbing larger reservoirs of resources. It the ability to balance the input with the output.

I’d like to learn more about Brazil’s practices. The article may very well be highlighting an important issue. But I have many more questions after reading the article.

It proposes something interesting like the preamble to an important debate. Now I want some more meat. It would have been nice for the article to have provided some more meat or at least some links to where the meat is.

Tracking hurricanes is so cool today

A wave out of Africa: birth of a hurricane
[Via CEJournal]

Danielle now a Category 1 hurricane. Watch its birth below

Update 8/23: I replaced the original global image with this close up of the North Atlantic. It depicts the formation of Danielle more clearly, and also doesn’t take as long to load! Second update, morning of 8/24: According to the National Hurricane Center, the second wave of low pressure flowing out of Africa — in the wake of Hurricane Danielle — stands a 90 percent chance of itself becoming hurricane.

Third update, evening of 8/24: The hurricane center has downgraded Danielle to a tropical storm. Literally in its wake, the second wave of low pressure is still estimated to have a 90 percent chance of becoming a hurricane. On the subject of hurricanes, I interviewed Judith Curry of Georgia Tech today for a future radio spot. “Everybody was predicing a very active hurricane season, but so far we haven’t seen very much at all,” she said. This has partially been the result of the blocking pattern thought principally responsible for the heat wave in Russia. According to Curry, it has also made the atmosphere dry in the tropical North Atlantic region. “But now that blocking pattern has broken, so we may see hurricane activity resume, and in fact we have already seen it with Hurricane Daniellle.”

Fourth update, 10:30 a.m. 8/25: Danielle is now a hurricane again, and now a third wave of low pressure is flowing out of Africa. See Jeff Masters’ Wunderground.com blog for more details. Note: This will be the last update on this post. For updated information, continue going to the National Hurricane Center and Jeff’s excellent blog.

The original post begins here:

The animation above shows the evolution of “total precipitable water” in the North Atlantic over the course of 72 hours, ending this evening (August 23) Boulder time. I offer it here simply because I think it is impossibly cool — and beautiful.

And for one other reason: It shows the development of the second Atlantic hurricane of the season, Hurricane Danielle. More about that in a minute. But first, what are we looking at here, and what’s “total precipitable water”?

According to NOAA:

The atmosphere contains an enormous amount of moisture that circulates around the globe. However, not all of it actually condenses into rain, sleet, or snow since the right balance of pressure and temperature are needed to create precipitation. Total precipitable water (TPW) in the atmosphere is the amount of water that can be obtained from the surface to the “top” of the atmosphere if all of the water and water vapor were condensed to a liquid phase.

The animation was produced by the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin. It is based on data from microwave sensors on a number of polar orbiting satellites. What I find most intriguing is the river of atmospheric moisture flowing out of Africa into the Atlantic.

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When I was growing up along the Gulf Coast, all we had were some weather maps to log latitude-longitude as reported on the news. Now we can follow the storm from off the African coast.

One fun fact to remember is that the same conditions that made Russia so hot and probably made Pakistan so wet have been keeping hurricanes from forming in the Atlantic. Now that that barrier has dissipated, we could be in for a wild ride the next month.

I predict that half a billion dollars will not get them close to iPhone and Android

Microsoft to spend over $500m to catch up to iPhone, Android
[Via AppleInsider]

Marketing costs for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 launch will add up to more than half a billion dollars as it re-enters the smartphone market, a new report claims.

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Spending large amounts of money does not automatically make something popular, at least outside politics. An expensive but stupid ad for the Superbowl is still a stupid ad. MS has rarely had an ad series tat created the emotional response that Apple’s have.

It actually looks like a large fraction of the money they will spend will go to grease the palms of the handset makers. Those approaches may have worked with the OS wars because the only competition was Apple. But there is already a free OS choice for handset makers, so MS will really have to pay them off – err, subsidize the ‘non-hardware engineering’ costs.

$500 million is just about what Apple spends the entire year and is about a third of MS entire advertising budget.

Nice for writing books

by Valeriana Solaris

Creating ePub files with Pages
[Via Apple Support]

ePub is an open ebook standard produced by the International Digital Publishing Forum. Pages ’09 lets you export your documents in ePub format for reading with iBooks on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. iBooks supports both ePub and PDF file formats, and you can export both from Pages.

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ePub is the most widely used standard for reading digital books and being able to directly export to ePub is a very nice plus/ Word does not do this and, while it is possible to construct an ePub document from a word one, the workaround is not too obvious.

And if you have to read your book on a Kindle there are converters for that but being able to read directly in iBooks will probably help the iPad. There is also a nice sample document to help you format the document so it looks best in ePub.

Can the project remain secret if everyone knows about it?

CDMA inventor Qualcomm seeks ‘iPhone developer guru’
[Via AppleInsider]

Qualcomm, which has long been rumored to supply a CDMA chipset to Apple for a Verizon-compatible iPhone, is looking to hire an “iPhone Developer Guru” for a “secret” project.

[More]

All sorts of interesting rumors from people who watch job ads.