For those artistic evilutionists out there, Burning Man, the yearly festival celebrating freedom, expression, and self-reliance, is sponsoring art based on this year’s theme of Evolution. The details for getting a grant to support your artwork are here.
So, come up with some ideas for interactive, creative expressions of what evolution means, where humans have come from or where are we going, and submit them for entry into the festival!
I’m very pleased with today’s decision from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on recently-strengthened privacy protections for phone records. The short history goes something like this: the FCC created strong opt-in (affirmative consent) provisions for the sharing of phone records (who calls whom, for how long, etc). In 1996, the 10th Circuit held that the restrictions violated the First Amendment rights of companies that wanted to sell this data to marketers. Thus, the FCC relaxed the standard to opt-out, meaning that you had to take affirmative action to stop your phone records from being sold.
Did you know that the burden was upon you? Probably not! That’s why in 2005, I petitioned the FCC to reestablish stronger privacy protections, because all sorts of investigation companies were pretexting and obtaining phone records for perverts, stalkers, etc. The FCC opened a rulemaking and reestablished opt-in protections for phone records again. The industry sued, arguing that the First Amendment barred opt-in protections. Today the DC Circuit rejected the industry’s argument, holding that the FCC had sufficient justification for the heightened protections.
But what’s more important is that the DC Circuit’s opinion “gets” privacy. Many courts conceive of privacy as a way to shield oneself from embarrassment. The DC Circuit disagreed, writing, “There is a good deal more to privacy than that. It is widely accepted that privacy deals with determining for oneself when, how and to whom personal information will be disclosed to others. See Daniel J. Solove, Conceptualizing Privacy, 90 CAL. L. REV. 1087, 1109-10 (2002).”
Further, “…the carrier’s sharing of customer information with a joint venturer or an independent contractor without the customer’s consent is itself an invasion of the customer’s privacy – the very harm the regulation targets. In addition, common sense supports the Commission’s determination that the risk of unauthorized disclosure of customer information increases with the number of entities possessing it. The Commission therefore reasonably concluded that an opt-in consent requirement directly and materially advanced the interests in protecting customer privacy and in ensuring customer control over the information.”
Wow! In privacy law, courts are often wedded to waiting for some type of harm to arise, such as unwanted telemarketing calls. They rarely get the idea that it is the data sharing itself that is the problem, and that privacy is about how personal data is controlled. Good job, Judge Randolph. Now the burden won’t be upon you to shield your phone records from sale to marketers!
I have to admit I’m somewhat surprised (even if Orac isn’t). We all knew that Andrew Wakefield’s research was bogus and the link between vaccines and autism was engineered by ideologues who fear vaccines irrationally. But fabrication of data? Sloppy research is one thing, but the need for cranks to be correct, no matter what reality reflects, has resulted in yet another example of egregious dishonesty.
This is in line, however, with what we know about cranks. Mark Crislip recently wrote an interesting piece on mathematics crankery which bears upon just this phenomenon. Mathematics is a wonderful area to study crankery because as Crislip points out, mathematics is a field in which it is possible to distinguish between the possible and the impossible.
In mathematics there are things that are impossible. Absolutely impossible. No ifs, ands, or buts. Impossible. Can’t be done no how no way. In the world of mathematics, things are not only impossible, they are proven truly impossible within the boundaries of the mathematical discipline.
An example of mathematical impossibility is the quadrature of the circle, also called squaring the circle.
It is impossible, using only a straight edge ruler and a compass, to construct a square with the same area as a given circle. It was proved to be impossible in 1882 by Lindeman. Not improbable or unlikely or very, very, very difficult. With in mathematical reality, it is impossible.
But in his review of Mathematical Cranks
Here is Crislip’s description of the mathematical crank:
1) They are convinced that their opinion is superior to the accumulated opinion of 2000 years of mathematics and mathematicians. That hundreds of mathematicians have worked for hundreds of years on these problems and found no errors in the proof that it is impossible to square a circle is of no consequence. Despite the accumulated mathematical knowledge of uncounted mathematicians, they are convinced that their solution is the right solution. Everyone else for all of history has been wrong. There is a tinge of megalomania in all the correspondence, and some appear to me to be clinically insane.
2) To accommodate their solutions, they are willing to alter reality to fit their proofs. There are solutions to squaring the circle, but they require a value of pi that is different that 3.14159265… Pi, for those that have forgotten, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and is a constant of the universe. For some circle squarers, Pi has a different value and all the mathematics that has confirmed the current value of pi is wrong. Others deny that pi exists or that the definition is meaningless, since they can construct a squared circle with pencil and paper, and send in the (flawed) construction.
3) When errors of math or logic are pointed out, they respond not with understanding, but a redoubling of efforts to prove that their erroneous solution to the problem is actually correct. They are incapable of recognizing flaws in logic, or mathematics, or flaws that are in opposition to mathematical consistency. A crank cannot recognize their error because they cannot recognize that their reality differs from mathematical reality.
4) Cranks are impervious to arguments based on mathematical reality. They do not recognize or understand that their solutions are in error because the solution contradicts known mathematical reality. They do not base their solutions on known mathematics, but on their own flawed understanding of mathematics.
5) Cranks evidently send their ‘solutions’ to multiple mathematical departments and rarely receive a reply. This silence from academia is interpreted not that their solution is worthless, but that there is a conspiracy of Professors of Mathematics to keep their solution secret, to the detriment of human kind. Big Math, out to suppress the truth THEY don’t not want you to know.
It is obvious to me that no matter what the field, the problem is crankery – the defective thought processes that allow people to believe in nonsense, no matter what obstacles reality throws in their path. Every description of every crank in every field ultimately boils down to these same factors. Cranks believe in something contrary to observable reality. They will do anything to prove it. When reality gets in their way, they ignore, subvert, lie, cheat, or obfuscate to create confusion. And when it’s proven beyond all doubt they’re wrong? That’s when the conspiracies come out. The comments on the Huffington Post coverage of the most recent Wakefield dishonesty are an excellent example of this. Wakefield is a victim of Big Pharma, being persecuted by Brian Deer, it’s all a conspiracy against children by doctors and pharmaceutical companies etc.
The more time passes the more I’m convinced that our original thesis on cranks and denialism in general has been confirmed again and again. No matter what the foolish belief the problem the reality-based community is fighting is a defective pattern of thought, an incompetence in evaluating the quality of evidence that afflicts millions of individuals and ultimately is why so many people believe in such stupid things. Wakefield, ultimately, is just another in a long line of cranks. And while biology is never as concrete as mathematics, it is clear that accepting reality was never a part of the the anti-vaccine movement’s ideology. And what do cranks do when reality opposes your world view? They do what Wakefield did. Reject reality, and substitute their own.
Even after all this time I was surprised they would find outright fabrication in Wakefield’s work, but I shouldn’t have been.
What do this cartoon and the latest edition of PLoS One have in common? Well, reading Bora’s blog this week I saw an article entitled, Risks for Central Nervous System Diseases among Mobile Phone Subscribers: A Danish Retrospective Cohort Study and my ears perked up. We have been mocking the idea that cell phones cause everything from brain cancer to colony collapse disorder and it’s always fun to see what cell phones are being blamed for based on weak associations and correlations.
In this article the authors identified more than four hundred thousand cell phone subscribers and linked their cell phone use to their medical records in the Danish Hospital Discharge Registry which has collected records of hospitalizations since 1977. They then tried to identify an association between cell phone use and various CNS disorders over the last few decades. These disorders include epilepsy, ALS, vertigo, migraines, MS, Parkinsons and dementia, a broad spectrum of diseases with a variety of pathologies and causes. Basically, they’re fishing. Well, what did they find?
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Obama has delayed am important political risk: he’s pushed back the DTV transition. If the televisions stopped working on February 17th, we would probably have an impeachment trial (as soon as the televisions were back on again).
The process of choosing a medical specialty, and applying for residency programs is nearly complete as I have returned from my tour of the West Coast and am nearly done with interview season. This is when medical students travel the country at great (and unreimbursed) expense to find their future training program. When all is said and done, all your research into programs and time spent interviewing boils down to a simple question. Do you want to work with these people for the next 3-7 years of your life?
It’s also nice to see the cities where you may live and get a feel for the type of lifestyle you may enjoy. You also get to take pictures from helipads! Like this one from UNC:
And then there is the famous medical art like the Gross Clinic at Penn which also graces a common surgery text:
Or Ether Day (in the Ether Dome at MGH):
More pictures and some fun interview questions below the fold…
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The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Elephant Pharmacy, a “holistic” drug store has closed and will file for bankruptcy. Why should you care? Elephant was an upscale store based in the Bay Area, the epicenter for wooishness. If this type of business fails here, how well will woo do elsewhere?
There’s something to be said for the idea that perhaps people know that woo doesn’t work, and maybe they cut back when the economy goes bad. Could the popularity of alternative medicine be a reflection of economic exuberance? Will individuals act more rationally when they have less money to spend?
The comments on the Chronicle site are fun to read. Gives you an idea of the atmosphere here on alternative medicines.
I’ll be on Minnesota Public Radio this morning with LA Times consumer reporter David Lazarus, talking about identity theft. Here’s the preview and I’ll post the stream later. I’m going to be talking about my recent articles on identity theft: Identity Theft: Making the Known Unknowns Known and Towards a Market for Bank Safety.
The toy companies that moved their production to China in order to save money apparently didn’t calculate the full costs of offshoring. Testing their products for lead is just too expensive, they argue. They have successfully lobbied to delay lead testing rules for children’s toys. Joseph Pereira and Melanie Trottman of the Journal report:
Under pressure from manufacturers, federal regulators have postponed for one year certain testing requirements for lead and other toxic substances in toys and other children’s products.
But unless Congress acts, retailers and manufacturers still won’t be allowed to sell products that don’t comply with tougher lead standards that are set to take effect on Feb. 10. “Congress will need to address that issue — the CPSC cannot,” Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in a statement.
The stay allows manufacturers, which have been hit hard by the recession, to put off costly product testing for levels of lead, used to stabilize the plastic in products, and phthalates, which are chemicals used to soften plastic. The testing rules were supposed to have taken effect on Feb. 10 as well.
So, let’s just hope that there’s no lead in the toys you buy your kids in the next year. Oops, wait a minute. There is lead in them. All you have to do is test to find it:
Friday, the Center for Environmental Health, an advocacy group in Oakland, Calif., said it found several Valentine’s Day stuffed-animal toys sold by Rite Aid Corp. and Longs Drugs, a unit of CVS Caremark Corp., with lead exceeding the new national standards that take effect on Feb. 10. The lead levels found in one of the stuffed-animal toys were more than 15 times the new federal limit, the Center for Environmental Health said. “There should be something to back up a claim that the products are safe, but without testing and certification there’s no assurance,” said Charles Margulis, a spokesman for the group.