Arete

I just stumbled upon an open letter to anti vaxxers from a mother whose son has cancer, and subsequently is immunocompromised. He had to be shifted classes at school because there were children whose parents had "opted out" of vaccinations. It explains very eloquently why there is so much animosity towards people who opt out of vaccines for their children. The whole letter is worth reading but I'll quote the most relevant bit for you. "Choosing to not vaccinate impacts my family and my immunocompromised son. It impacts the teacher who is pregnant and teaching your non-vaccinated child. It impacts the man going through chemo who happened to be behind you in the grocery store when your unvaccinated child sneezed. It impacts the mom next to you at the pick up line at school who is on immunosuppressive drugs for her rheumatoid arthritis and who is bending down to hug her child just as your unvaccinated child coughs. Your "choice" has repercussions for your community. Part of the cost of living in a first world country is that you have to do things that support the community in which you live. You pay taxes to pay for the police that respond to your 911 calls, to pay for the teachers who teach your children, and to pay for roads to be plowed and paved ... Sometimes, to live in a place with the privileges we enjoy here in America, you suck it up and do things you don't want to do because it's for the communal good ...Your responsibility to your community is to vaccinate your child." http://imgur.com/gallery/p7WZs2u

Well, the odds of meeting several parents whose children have had severe reactions to vaccines is tens of millions to one. Either, your mother's group is profoundly and uniquely unlucky, or someone isn't being entirely honest. You tell us which sounds more plausible... I've met a woman in our hospital who claimed vehemently that her child's learning disabilities were caused by the MMR vaccine. Upon examination, the child had all the hallmarks of fetal alcohol syndrome. However the idea that she might bear some responsibility for her child's condition was too hard to fathom and the vaccine was an easy scapegoat. There's a multitude of alternative explanations for virtually all the conditions people blame on vaccines, and often no causal link between the vaccine and the condition - see your own example below. That doesn't stop distraught parents from looking for something or someone to blame. You're strawmanning as no one ever claimed that they didn't happen. The evidence clearly shows that they are exceedingly rare. Conversely, severe complications from many of the infectious diseases they prevent are several of orders of magnitude more likely - including measles, which we discussed earlier. For anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of probability, the least likely choice to result in harm to a child is clearly to vaccinate. From your own link, out of 5.4 million children who received a obsolete vaccine in the 80's, ten suffered some deafness afterwards, and zero cases could be directly linked to the vaccination. It's sad when a child loses the ability to hear, but to baselessly blame a vaccination is irrational. Febrile seizures are a known side effect of any attenuated virus vaccine (approx 1/3000 risk for MMR), as they can cause fever. It should be noted that any fever can cause a febrile seizure, and there's strong evidence that vaccines which prevent viral infections have significantly lowered the overall occurrence of febrile seizures. It is normal for a child not to breathe and turn blue during a febrile seizure, and they are not known to cause any long term effects. http://www.emsworld.com/article/10319626/febrile-seizures http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000980.htm Sorry, these two statements are contradictory, or at least irrational: your argument is essentially the same as saying that because seatbelts can cause certain injuries to occupants of a car during a crash, you've decided it's safer to not have them in your car - which I think we can all agree is irrational. Similarly, it is very clear that the benefits of vaccines overwhelmingly outweigh the risks yet you've irrationally decided it's somehow safer not to get your child vaccinated. If you are unable to see that it would appear that you have fallen victim to a conspiracy theory, unfortunately spurred into action by an unethical doctor who lied for monetary gain (see http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield), which is a very large shame for your son.

They aren't out of context as you made a sweeping statement and are now shifting the goalposts and yes, I have read them. And I think the facts totally disagree with your assessment that measles is a trivial disease: "In the decade before the measles vaccination program began, an estimated 3–4 million people in the United States were infected each year, of whom 400–500 died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and another 1,000 developed chronic disability from measles encephalitis. Widespread use of measles vaccine has led to a greater than 99% reduction in measles cases in the United States compared with the pre-vaccine era, and in 2012, only 55 cases of measles were reported in the United States." http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html You absolutely are. To counter your anecdote with one of my own, we just had a child in our pediatric clinic die, horribly, of measles caused encephalitis. The child was unvaccinated. Vaccination would have easily prevented the infection. Your perspective is ignorant, willfully so and puts others at risk of serious disease. The anti vaccination argument is based on misinterpretation of the facts and risks, and in a lot of cases plain fallacy. It's been heard and found to be baseless. If you maintain it, at the risk of your child and your community's health, then you should expect some blowback. I personally would not allow your child to interact with my own if I knew he wasn't vaccinated, and you probably wouldn't be welcome in my home. Have you read your own link? It refers to post elimination of the disease due to vaccination rates of infection. Pre-vaccination, approximately 3-4 million people contracted measles annually. See previous quote. I'm just going to straight up call bs on this one. The rate of serious complications due to vaccination are several million to one. To "personally know" several parents whose children experienced severe reactions to vaccines, one would have to meet tens of millions of people - or as is more likely seek out anti vaccination advocates who are making the claim that their child's ailments were caused by vaccines - often spuriously.

First off, I think a couple of definitions are required. 1. Biological evolution: At its most basic sense, evolution is the change in allele frequency, in a population, over time. This phenomenon has been directly observed countless times, in virtually (likely every, but I'll avoid absolute claims for now) population that has ever been looked at. Through scientific investigation we understand, to a large extent, that mutations in the DNA/RNA genome of organisms are heritable, and largely responsible for the physical changes observed in populations over time (i.e. mutation causes observed changes in allele frequency) . We also know that particular environmental conditions and circumstances favor the propagation of particular genotypes (i.e. selection influences observed changes in allele frequency) So the basic underpinnings of biological evolution - that mutations cause variation in a population, and that the environment causes shifts in the population over generations through time, are well documented through a multitude of independent lines of scientific investigation. Denying biological evolution is rather impossible - akin to claiming that the Earth is flat. 2. The theory of evolution: The theory of evolution postulates that all of the organismal diversity of Earth occurs due to biological evolution. While this obviously cannot be directly observed due to the time scale involved, like many other scientific theories which occur over long time scales (e.g. plate tectonics, the formation of fossil fuels, most of geology and astrophysics, etc.) we can make predictions about what present day organisms will be like, if organimsal diversification did arise through biological evolution. Examples of biological fields which make predictions in accordance with the theory of evolution include (but are not limited to): comparative genomics, phylogenetics, biogeography, morphology, molecular ecology, population genetics, experimental evolution, paleontology, and many others. The establishment and continual testing and refinement of the theory of evolution DOES follow the scientific method - any claim to the contrary is simply false. Additionally, any claim that the theory of evolution is based on unsupported speculation is, at best, supremely ignorant of the vast number of supporting observations which are in accordance with predictions made using the theory of evolution, and finally, if direct observation is required for a scientific theory to be somehow "valid" then vast swathes of science (geology, atomic science, astrophysics, etc) are also invalid - which doesn't make very much sense.

Very unfortunately, this is highly incorrect - at least in the case of measles. " In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year." http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/ " In populations with high levels of malnutrition and a lack of adequate healthcare, mortality can be as high as 10%. In cases with complications, the rate may rise to 20–30%." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles Measles can be a significant cause of mortality in an un-vaccinated population. Regardless of the fatality rate, vaccination trivially prevents infection, with minimal risk.

Precisely - often there has been decades of research invested in defining the "dimensions" of said box. In order to understand why the answer to a problem most likely is "in the box" and not outside of it, often one needs to correspondingly understand decades of prior research - which is difficult, time consuming, and extremely unlikely to lead to accolades and riches. Another thing I have noticed is that a lot of crackpot posters are very assured of their own intellect - they don't need to invest time and energy into learning what is already known about subject X - they are so clearly smarter than everyone else that learning the material would be boring and useless. Their gift to the world will be a fresh way of thinking, unburdened by the "dogma" of the current understanding of the subject. So they propose something radically different from the current understanding, leading to a "There! I solved it!" thesis and seemingly an expectation that praises and accolades will rain down upon them. When instead their new speculation is criticized and rejected due to (usually) obvious fatal flaws, resentment ensues. No one else is brilliant enough to understand their idea. Everyone is blindly going along with the status quo because they're dogmatic zealots... blah blah blah. Good scientists generally aren't people who are unwilling to be wrong - I am, at least, constantly proving my predictions wrong, then revising them or making new ones, then proving those wrong, etc. I think that a ready acceptance of being wrong, and that being wrong is no better or worse than being right is a key part of scientific thinking. Experiments that prove predictions are completely wrong are usually far more interesting than those that do exactly what you expected them to. I think physics attracts more crackpots than say, biology for 3 reasons: 1) Most cutting edge biological/chemistry research requires expensive equipment, a larger percentage of physics can be pursued through thought experiments 2) Physics is much cleaner and more elegant than biology. Biological systems are messy, noisy and often enormously complicated, which leads of complex and incomplete answers rather than the silver bullets crackpots are looking for. 3) Physics is often seen as a "higher" science and physics savants as the pinnacle of academic bigheadedness in popular culture.

I was going to say, the coffee in that case was abnormally hot and the woman suffered third degree burns requiring hospitalization. Contrary to popular media sensationalization, McDonald's, in that particular case was partially responsible for an accident which had significant repercussions for the plaintiff - it wasn't an "oops, I spilled my coffee and experienced mild discomfort - give me millions of dollars" type incident, although it inspired plenty of those.

Put simply, sequencing and assembling a genome from a living species is non-trivial in the amount of time and money which needs to be invested. Sequencing DNA from extinct species is exponentially more difficult, to the point of being impossible if all available tissue is degraded. Hence, complete genome sequences for Erectus, Hominid, Or Australopithecus do not yet exist, and potentially never will. The Neanderthal genome does exist, but is fraught with contamination issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project#Criticism ​Here's a list of available complete eukaryotic genome sequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_eukaryotic_genomes

Because the scientific method doesn't allow for forming an unsubstantiated conclusion and then subsequently abandoning logic and cherry picking observations to try and "support" an unfounded position.

1. Using you laptop to take notes, or even googling/wikipediaing on topic things is fine. 2. Facebooking in the lecture is pretty darn rude, but not enough of an issue that I'd actually do anything. 3. As once happened to me while I was teaching, watching porn during class is decidedly unacceptable. 4. Texting falls into the same category as facebook - rude, but not worth disrupting everyone else over. 5. Talking on the phone is a capital sin. My tactic is usually to take the phone from the student if I can, and talk to the person they called, informing them that the caller is in a lecture, which they are disrupting, and they will call back at the end of class when I give the phone back. Also, labs, tutorials and discussions are all different. A typical class will have both lectures, where you are expected to stfu and listen, and interactive sessions where I expect you to discuss and input into the class. Ultimately, if I'm giving a prepared talk, with slides, I expect students to behave as they would like others to behave when they have prepared a talk for class. If they decide not to, without distracting others, it's rude but not worth addressing, if you're distracting other people, you'll be asked to stop (If I'm giving the lecture) or in extreme cases (you are flicking rubber bands at other students - it's happened, never TA statistics 101) you'll be told in no uncertain terms to GTFO and don't come back until you've learned to behave like an adult. The bottom line is you were talking in a lecture, another student found it distracting, and you got told to shut up. A perfectly acceptable series of events.

I'll provide an example of how me and a colleague turned a speculation into what we're calling a "theory". We are interested in a particular virus (a bacteriophage) which infects and kills bacteria. We noticed that the virus could kill bacteria which tended to have a particular protein in their cell wall (lets call it protein A), bacteria which didn't have this protein tended to be resistant. This led to the speculation that protein A was the binding site for the virus. So our first step was to take a susceptible bacteria, and silenced the gene encoding protein A. We then infected bacteria identical in all respects, except for their expression of protein A with the virus. Ones expressing A died, ones with A silenced did not. This EVIDENCE allowed us to deduce that A was critical to viral infection, but it wasn't yet evidence that A was the binding site of the virus. So we crystallized the part of A which sticks through the cell wall of the bacteria, and attached it to an artificial surface, to create a "lawn" of the part of protein A that a virus would see when encountering a bacterium. We then exposed this lawn to a high titration of virus, and analyzed it for the level of viral binding to the lawn. A lot of viruses had bound to the protein lawn. At this point, we concluded that we had substantial EVIDENCE that protein A was indeed the binding site for the virus, and were happy to publish a paper suggesting the theory that our virus of interest bound to the membrane protein A - which was necessary to enable viral infection. So, that's how, in science, EVIDENCE can lead to a SPECULATION becoming a THEORY. It's not through repetition, believing really hard, thinking you are smarter than everyone else, or walls of text.

During a lecture is not an acceptable time to have a conversation. If your friend was having trouble with the course material and you were prepared to help, the time to do it is AFTER the class. The student having the issue could quite easily have written a quick note to remind them of the question they had. As a lecturer - it's somewhat disrespectful and rude to the person giving the class to hold a private conversation while I'm trying to teach. At the same time I'm there to teach the class biology, not manners, so I'll generally ignore it unless a) you're disrupting the class and preventing other students from concentrating or hearing - in which case I will ask you to be quiet or take the conversation outside; or b) you miss the lecture material and ask for special treatment, at which point you will be told to pay attention in class next time. Obviously, since you were asked to be quiet by another student, your conversation was disruptive, who was completely in the right to tell you to be quiet.

Just to clarify, when I worked on a panel, I was expected to read ~30, 15 page long applications - many outside my immediate field. I'd be the primary on ~10 of those. I was advised to recommend funding for a maximum of 3 grants of those 30. At the panel meeting, the primary reader is expected to give a short (~2 min) intro to what the grant is about and a recommendation. The secondary readers give a recommendation. If there is agreement, that's the end. If there's disagreement, more discussion takes place. You wind up with 3 columns on a whiteboard, "do not fund", "must fund", and "fund if possible." If you wind up with the panel's quota of grants in the must fund column, that's the end. If not, you discuss the fund if possibles. Maybe we can offer a reduced budget, move one over to the must column, etc. You can't read all 15 pages of every grant in depth - so I and most other grant reviewers use a very cursory read through of each grant to decide initially if a grant will be potentially considered in the top three. Ideally you want the pile of considered applications to be as small as possible, as you'll have to read them more carefully. I'd usually aim for between 20-30% (or 5-10 applications in the above example). As a grant writer, your first hurdle is getting past that first skim read where the reviewer is looking for a reason not to read your grant more carefully. Small fonts, poor grammar/spelling or layout, too much jargon, waffly text, etc will all do that. ONce you're over that hurdle, it become more about the criteria as CharonY mentioned and the minutia of the grant. Is it worth doing? Does the methodology seem sound? Is it within the scope of the agency, etc. All this stuff is somewhat dependent on what your competitors in the pile are doing as well. Ideally what you want is to be in more than one of the three reviewers top 3 "must fund" piles, but if you impress one of the three enough for them to go into bat for your proposal, you've got a good chance of getting up.

I've been on a couple of grant review panels, so a couple of tips from that end: 1) In reality, you've got about 2 minutes to grab my attention. Grant review panels are swamped in proposals, and often directed to accept a very small proportion (sometimes around 5%). I'm looking for a reason to put grants in the "no" pile. If it isn't clear in the opening paragraphs what an application is proposing to do, why it's important and how the authors will do it, I'll probably stop reading and put it in the no pile. If I have to re-read parts of the application to understand it due to poor writing, I may well do the same. So: A) Make the writing concise and absolutely crystal clear. B) Clearly state what you want to do, how you will do it and why it is important early on. C) Get as many people as you can to read particularly the introduction parts. In fact get people outside of your field to read it and see if they can quickly get what you're trying to say. 2) Agencies are looking to fund things that they see as high impact and important, but also low risk (contradictory, I know, but that's how it is). A lot of proposals get rejected not because the science is bad, the methodology isn't sound or the question isn't important, but because the first step in the study requires proof of concept - which if it turns out isn't supported, the rest of the study is moot: hypothetical e.g. "We are going to see if tree sap has antiviral properties, and if it does we will isolate and refine the antiviral compounds in it for pharmaceutical use." The problem being that if the answer to "Is tree sap antiviral?" is "No" the rest of the study can't be conducted. The workaround is of course, generating preliminary data. If you had conducted an assay showing that the sap of say, pines had antiviral properties, and were proposing to isolate the antiviral compounds, it would make for a much more likely to be funded proposal that the former - it also demonstrates that you are capable of carrying out the study. Ultimately, in the current funding climate, a lot of good proposals don't get funded and it's something of an art/stochastic process to getting your proposal into that 5 or 10% of "must fund" grants. Good luck.

This is why we call a single personal experience an anecdote. Most people's experience of a given treatment will fall within a distribution. In order to understand how well a particular therapy works, you need to conduct trials on many people to determine that distribution. Additionally, pulmonary irregularity is not usually a reported side effect of most commonly prescribed sedatives - indicating that if the medication truly did cause your palpitations it would indicate your experience is atypical. There are several scientific journals devoted entirely to sleep research: Sleep - http://www.journalsleep.org/ Journal of Sleep Research - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2869 Sleep Medicine - http://www.sleep-journal.com/ Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine - http://www.aasmnet.org/jcsm/ Sleep Disorders - http://www.hindawi.com/journals/sd/ Journal of Sleep Disorders - http://www.hoajonline.com/sleepdisorders Journal of Sleep Disorders and Therapy - http://omicsgroup.org/journals/sleep-disorders-therapy.php Sleep and Breathing - http://link.springer.com/journal/11325 Sleep Medicine Reviews - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/sleep-medicine-reviews etc.

The short answer is you're wrong and they have been extensively demonstrated to have statistically significant effectiveness: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2002-02802-010 http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=718734 http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12088162 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032704004392 etc. And there's little evidence of any severe long term side effects - which are largely weight gain and sexual dysfunction. http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10401230209147454 http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/14700451

I'm afraid these questions demonstrate a distinct lack of understanding of the work Charles Darwin actually conducted on the theory of evolution via natural selection. Darwin was a gentleman scholar and a natural historian. He largely described the natural world as he observed it. A good example of the type of work he did is given in The Voyage of the Beagle. As a result, the inception of the theory of evolution via natural selection was not via an explicit experiment, but through observation of the natural world, making many of your questions invalid. In answer: 1. Not applicable. 2. Since Origin was published evolutionary theory has accurately predicted the outcome of many thousands, if not millions of scientific studies. 3. Not applicable. 4. Darwin did not work in isolation. Here is a list of other scientists who influenced his work 5. Not applicable. Ultimately, the specific details of the studies that led Darwin to conceiving the theory of evolution are rather moot, as the experimental effort in validating the theory since its inception has been immense. The sample size and statistical significance of this collective body of experimental evidence is overwhelming - you're talking many thousands of experiments, each with large numbers of replicates, and large effect sizes. Some famous examples: 1. Endler's Guppy experiment 2. The Lederberg Experiment 3. The Lenski experiment 4. The Losos lab Anolis experiment

I don't know why you would expect this. The rate at which a mutation sweeps to fixation is proportional to the fitness benefit of the mutation. This means that large effect alleles will fix before smaller effect alleles. http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-5468/2008/04/P04014 The resultant expectation is rate of adaptation will begin rapidly and slow over time, as allele which confer a large effect fix first, and alleles which confer a smaller require more generations to reach fixation. This expectation has, as previously cited, been experimentally validated many times over.

This contradicts the bulk of experimental results in which the rate of fitness increase a population under selection slows, rather than escalates over time: "A common observation in microbial evolution experiments is that the rate of fitness increase tends to decelerate over time." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1193.short Most notably, it contradicts long term results from studies like the Lenski experiment: "Both morphology (cell size) and fitness (measured in competition with the ancestor) evolved rapidly for the first 2000 generations or so after the populations were introduced into the experimental environment, but both were nearly static for the last 5000 generations." http://www.pnas.org/content/91/15/6808 As such, I'd say the argument appears fundamentally flawed at the outset, and lacking a basis in sound evolutionary theory.

I've reviewed for both the peer review process and for publishers. While peer review is generally unpaid, when the purpose of the review is to profit the author/publisher, reviewers generally get paid. People like American Journal Experts and Bio Science Writers offer the type of service you're looking for.

I currently work in a virology lab in an evolutionary biology department. We don't work specifically on epi, but a lot of what we do has public health implications. I'm primarily a population geneticist/ bioinformaticist, and have worked on fish, reptiles, flies, parasites, bacteria and viruses. 1. Depends where you are. Give us an idea of where you would like to go to school. 2. Again, dependent on where you are, build your college entry portfolio (SAT scores, extracurricular activites, etc) and do some basic science at school. 3. It also really depends on where you want to end up; A research lab? Government Department? Clinician? Generally there would be 3 tracks - PhD, MD/PhD or MD. Ultimately, you're probably looking at a long road post high school, and a lot will change along that path. Focus on getting into a decent university program, and let the chips fall into place as you go.

It totally depends on your application. My current workhorse computer is a Dell Precision mobile workstation. It's pretty beefy for a laptop ~9lbs but has 32Gb of RAM, an I7 and dual solid state hard drives set as a RAID. At work, I hook it up to dual 24" monitors and an external mouse/keyboard, and it's pretty much a desktop. It's handy to have the grunt and be able to lug it around, but it is heavy, big and cumbersome for a laptop - it's also overkill for most of what I do, given an increasing amount of my heavy duty computational work is being shifted to the university cluster. More often I leave my workstation at work and use my tablet as a portable device. I can use VPN to log into the cluster and have loads of computer power on hand, even from that device. However, for writing documents, the desktop setup really can't be beaten.

That has to be one of the daftest strawmen I've ever seen. No one suggested we do nothing about climate change or the ozone layer - many posters simply stated your idea didn't sound like it would either work or be in any way feasible. In terms of getting back on topic, as I posted earlier - it looks like the ozone layer is a glimmer of good environmental news among a lot of bad news, in that it may repair itself in the next 60 years. One less sin of the baby boomer generation to be visited upon future generations.

Issue 1: $528 is only raw materials and does not include any land/foreshore purchasing or leasing, labor costs, insurance costs, infrastructure (boats, pontoons, etc), maintenance costs... Issue 2: Your example produces about 180kg of biomass per week: "In a 4-day week you can produce 180 kg of dried seaweed". That's not very much per acre at all. Issue 3: Your example requires daily maintenance: "To be a productive farmer, the seaweed farm should be well attended. This means that you constantly visit and check your farm". Rolled out a scale that would change global oxygen concentrations, you're talking about an extremely non-trivial level of daily maintenance. Issue 4: Without proof of concept and efficacy, working out costs is a moot point. It's like costing out items to build a homemade jetpack to get to Mars.