Wanted to broadcast this out to any newly-minted PhDs out there: Women Evolving Biological Sciences Women Evolving Biological Sciences, or WEBS, is three-day symposium on the retention of female biologists and the transition of women from early career stages to tenure track positions and leadership roles in academic and research settings. …WEBS targets early career women in ecology and evolutionary biology, particularly women who have earned their doctoral degrees within the past two to eight years and who do not have tenure, to address the critical transition from graduate studies and postdoctoral positions to permanent research and teaching positions. The symposium provides a forum for professional development, including awareness and improvement of academic leadership skills, opportunities to establish mentoring relationships, and resources for developing professional networks….Applications are due April 15, 2010. Participants will be selected via an application process. Women from underrepresented groups will be actively sought and encouraged to apply…WEBS aims to include women from a range of institutions, personal diversity (race, ethnicity, disability, age), geographic locations and disciplinary interests. Preference will be given to minority applicants, to those interested in pursuing academic leadership positions, and to those whose career trajectory makes them prime candidates for future academic leadership positions. Also, given WEBS’s focus on addressing the critical transition period from graduate studies and post-doctoral positions to permanent research and teaching positions, priority will be given to women who have earned their doctoral degrees within the past two to eight years and who do not have tenure.
Filed under: Diversity, Science Tagged: evolution, leadership, women

In which the Isis and Zuska Tag Team takes down Laden (temporarily) and a free for all breaks out on the blogosphere. Is this another intrablogule iron cage death match? No, it's the real thing! In cartoon form....
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Because there are some conversations you have to have with your kids even if you wish you didn't have to have them: Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to talk to you about a situation that has come up for a friend of mine and is a little worrisome. So, you know I went down to UCLA the other week, right? Younger offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what I was there for? Elder offspring: A conference? Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, gynandromorph, bilateral gynandromorph bird, half-sider, mixed-sex chimaera, sex determination, molecular biology, genetics, developmental biology, endocrinology, birds, chicken, Gallus gallus, ornithology, bpr3.org/?p=52,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Half-sider. Almost exactly one year ago, hundreds of American birders
were thrilled by sightings and photographs of this remarkable
Northern Cardinal, or Redbird, Cardinalis cardinalis,
photographed in Warrenton, VA.
Image: DW Maiden, 2 March 2009.
I'll never forget the first time I saw a bilateral gynandromorph. I was a bird-crazy teenager reading my way through a stack of avicultural publications when I spied the strangest bird I'd ever seen on the cover of one magazine: an eclectus parrot that was very precisely divided down the middle: one side was rich scarlet and the other was brilliant emerald. Because eclectus parrots are sexually dimorphic -- females are red and males are green -- this remarkable bird was easily identifiable as being composed of both sexes, one on each side. Even though this was the first time I'd ever seen a gynandromorph, these mysterious birds do pop up from time to time. For example, bird watchers occasionally run across them in the wild (see above photograph) and poultry farmers sometimes find them in their flocks: it is estimated that roughly one in 10,000 domestic chickens -- another sexually dimorphic species -- is a gynandromorph.
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When it comes to aliens, Hollywood really does not have much imagination. Most extraterrestrials that have appeared on the big screen look very much like us, or are at least some kind of four-to-six-limbed vertebrate, and this says more about out own vanity than anything else. It would be far more interesting, I think, to take the weird and wonderful organisms of the Cambrian as inspiration for alien life forms, and two new critters have just been added to the odd Cambrian menagerie. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

A few weeks ago I was given a vintage camera that turned out to have a film hidden inside. On developing, I found the entire roll was dedicated to pictures of an old gravesite. Who was Edward Langan? Why had he been added to a grave with a man called James Ryan? And why (as the film dates from 1973) is the grave covered in flowers when the pictures were taken several years afer their deaths? All these questions, and more, answered after the fold. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years: More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance. That's according to records kept by the Department of Children and Families, which administers the program. DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007. Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also, I think, a compelling measure of the economic situation. But it is more than that - food stampls, as I've been arguing for many years, are important because as they become more universal (we're already at 1-in-9 Americans using food stamps, next year's numbers will probably be 1-in-8, and many states are at 1-in-6 - and American children are at 1-in-4) food stamps become more important. They shift from a safety net program to a basic food subsidy that serves a larger and larger percentage of Americans who can't afford food. And that should look very strange to all of us. The case for industrial agriculture has rested heavily on cheap food over the years - the idea that it was worth all the subsidies, the land degradation, the health costs because we all had plenty was a fundamental premise of the move to industrial farming. But if industrial agriculture can't provide affordable food even with its massive subsidies (at this point a large portion of industrially produced food is being subsidized twice - first at the agricultural subsidy level and then at the food stamp level) what is the compelling case for large scale industrial conventional production? Perhaps the focus should move. Michael Pollan has proposed, for example, that food stamps should pay double when used at farmer's markets. Right now only about 40% of all farmer's markets in the US are set up to take food stamps - making food stamp and WIC acceptance universal, and doubling pay outs when used to buy healthy food would do a lot both for local agriculture and for those who are struggling to eat and eat well. The case for bringing agricultural subsidies to small family farmers is more complex, and among others, Gene Logsdon has argued that subsidizing organic agriculture (which is beginning to occur) may not be the answer: This is supposed to be good news. Our dear government has finally recognized that organic farmers are at least as deserving of bribery as all those sinful chemical farmers. After all, industrial agriculture gets $17.2 billion dollars in direct payments every year so surely a little bit of money ought also to go to holy, humble, horse and hoe husbandmen who also help keep the world from starvation. In fact, organic farmers now have their very own farm subsidy program under the Environmental Quality Incentive Program to the tune of $50 million bucks. Ain't that wonderful? I will go as far out on the end of my bucket loader as I can and bet even money that this is the beginning of the end of organic farming. Government learned a long time ago that farmers, like everyone else, can be persuaded to do what the government wants done by handing out money. The result? Since government subsidy programs got serious about 70 years ago, the number of commercial farmers has plummeted from over 12 million to something less that one million. That's how helpful the payments have been. Then along came small organic farmers who although unsubsidized for the most part, began doubling and tripling in number with each passing year. Whoa. Can't have that, for heaven's sake. That might mean that government subsidies don't really help farmers. Maybe, perish the thought, government doesn't know how to help farmers. Or, perish two thoughts, maybe government doesn't really want to help farmers but just wants cheap food so the people can afford to buy more SUVs. Any trend toward farmers becoming successful without government subsidies has to be stopped. Uncle knows how to do that. Offer them money. If you think I am only joking, examine the rules of this new game. The fifty million dollar "Organic Initiative" subsidy is to help organic farmers, and I quote, "implement conservation practices on the farm." Hmmm. Isn't every real organic farmer already doing that? Isn't that part of any proper definition of organic farming? Rule number two: "Conservation practices that farmers have already adopted are not eligible for payment." Amazing grace. If you have already been doing what every responsible farmer should be doing, you don't get any money, sucker. Logsdon goes on to observe that with the inclusion of "transitional" farmers and the emphasis on giving money to those previously making the biggest negative environmental impact, the subsidies will go disproportionately to industrial organic producers. But at a bare minimum we could ask ourselves about whether agricultural subsidy payments should exist at all? Most organic and small scale producers would be happy just to have the playing field levelled a bit. At a minimum, we need to ask ourselves this -if the food we get industrially is unaffordable in an environmental sense and unaffordable in a practical "how do we get dinner" sense, what's the case for conventional corporate ag again? Sharon Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the one that established me as one of the go-to bloggers when it came to vaccines. Of course, it may also have been the gloriously Orac-ian verbiage I employed. As longtime readers may (or may not) recall, at the time, I referred to RFK's article as the "biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd I've ever seen it [Salon.com] publish, an article so mindnumbingly one-sided and uncritical that in my eyes it utterly destroys nearly all credibility Salon.com has had as a source of reliable news and comment." Nothing in the five years since then has changed my assessment of RFK, Jr.'s investigative prowess. Indeed, if anything, he's gotten worse, such as the time he tried to out-crank CBS News' resident antivaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson (who has been in bed with someone at Age of Autism to coordinate counterattacks on its enemies) or the time he teamed up with David Kirby and Generation Rescue to cube the stupidity. That was over a year ago, and since then RFK, Jr. has been fairly quiet, at least on the vaccine front. Maybe it had something to do with his being ignored by the then-new Obama administration when his supporters lobbied very hard to get him appointed to head the EPA. Or maybe it was embarrassment at having so successfully cubed the stupid. Who knows? Whatever the reason for his year-long disappearance from the anti-vaccine fray, it would appear that he's been pulled out of storage, dusted off, and sent once again to tilt at mercury windmills. It feels like 2005 all over again. That's because RFK, Jr. has laid yet another one of his steamy, drippy, corn-textured turds on the blogosphere as only he can in the one place where such a stench of bad arguments and pseudoscience can go completely unnoticed among all the other turds that routinely drip from it. That's right, RFK, Jr. has reappeared on that bastion of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, and the title of his latest turd is Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M. In what appears to be an obviously coordinated attack, Generation Rescue's anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is promoting RFK, Jr.'s article and adding a few of its own with titles such as Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume by the not-so-dynamic duo of fact-challenged anti-vaccine propagandists Mark "Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist" Blaxill and Dan "Why can't I find those autistic Amish?" Olmsted and NBC 11 Atlanta Reports: Vaccine Researcher Flees with $2M, featuring this news report: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June. That was when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the one that established me as one of the go-to bloggers when it came to vaccines. Of course, it may also have been the gloriously Orac-ian verbiage I employed. As longtime readers may (or may not) recall, at the time, I referred to RFK's article as the "biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd I've ever seen it [Salon.com] publish, an article so mindnumbingly one-sided and uncritical that in my eyes it utterly destroys nearly all credibility Salon.com has had as a source of reliable news and comment." Nothing in the five years since then has changed my assessment of RFK, Jr.'s investigative prowess. Indeed, if anything, he's gotten worse, such as the time he tried to out-crank CBS News' resident antivaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson (who has been in bed with someone at Age of Autism to coordinate counterattacks on its enemies) or the time he teamed up with David Kirby and Generation Rescue to cube the stupidity. That was over a year ago, and since then RFK, Jr. has been fairly quiet, at least on the vaccine front. Maybe it had something to do with his being ignored by the then-new Obama administration when his supporters lobbied very hard to get him appointed to head the EPA. Or maybe it was embarrassment at having so successfully cubed the stupid. Who knows? Whatever the reason for his year-long disappearance from the anti-vaccine fray, it would appear that he's been pulled out of storage, dusted off, and sent once again to tilt at mercury windmills. It feels like 2005 all over again. That's because RFK, Jr. has laid yet another one of his steamy, drippy, corn-textured turds on the blogosphere as only he can in the one place where such a stench of bad arguments and pseudoscience can go completely unnoticed, given all the other turds that routinely drip from it. That's right, RFK, Jr. has reappeared on that bastion of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, and the title of his latest turd is Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M. In what appears to be an obviously coordinated attack, Generation Rescue's anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is promoting RFK, Jr.'s article and adding a few of its own with titles such as Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume by the not-so-dynamic duo of fact-challenged anti-vaccine propagandists Mark "Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist" Blaxill and Dan "Why can't I find those autistic Amish?" Olmsted and NBC 11 Atlanta Reports: Vaccine Researcher Flees with $2M, featuring this news report: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Eric Holder, on the briefs in Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U.S. 426 (2004), arguing for a detainee’s right to at least hear the case against him, by means of a writ of habeas corpus, before being thrown in to a legal black hole: [We] recognize that these limitations might impede the investigation of a terrorist offense in some circumstances. It is conceivable that, in some hypothetical situation, despite the array of powers described above, the government might be unable to detain a dangerous terrorist or to interrogate him or her effectively. But this is an inherent consequence of the limitation of Executive power. No doubt many other steps could be taken that would increase our security, and could enable us to prevent terrorist attacks that might otherwise occur. But our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens. Per Politico, and ABC, we learn that this statement is apparently controversial. Why? We attribute to Benjamin Franklin a near infinite number of variations on the same theme: “those who would give up a little liberty, to gain a little security, deserve neither, and will lose both.” While security and liberty need not always be in perfect tension, or a zero-sum relationship, expansion of liberty does usually attend the loss of some security, or at least the loss certainty. Whether that’s a bargain we want to strike is not a question we’re empowered to resolve: it was decided for us, in the affirmative, long ago. And, remember, in the 2001-2008 debate over habeas corpus, Holder’s side won. Have we really fallen so far that we’re willing to not only mortgage the writ of habeas corpus, but question why we ever thought we’d do otherwise?

I am remiss in my duties. The last episode of the endless thread has expanded to excessive size while I was off frolicking in the antipodes. In my defense, I have been distracted by the remarkable habits of Australians: every time my hands were empty, they would put a beer in it. I once made the mistake of having both hands briefly unoccupied, and received two beers for my trouble. The Pharyngufest with Chloe here in Melbourne has been captured on video, right here. Unfortunately, I don't remember my performance at all—infinite beers, remember. Read the comments on this post...

Enteroctopus dofleini Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman. Read the comments on this post...

Waterfowl (or wildfowl, or anseriforms, or ducks, geese, swans and kin) are awesome. Last year saw the publication of a particularly freakish, recently extinct member of the group that's been known to some of us for a while: the surreal Hawaiian duck Talpanas lippa Olson & James, 2009 from Kauai*. I'll admit that I missed the memo (didn't know about publication until Glyn Young sent me a pdf), even though Chris Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms wrote about Talpanas on its publication. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

This is a repost of my reflections on my father who passed away 13 years today. It took me 12 years to write the following eulogy and remembrance. While quite personal, I posted it here last year because I felt that my experiences were quite universal, shared by the families of the ten or twenty million alcoholics in the US and the hundreds of millions worldwide. Moreover, I wanted to provide a face for my colleagues who work in the area of substance abuse and a reminder for my clinical colleagues of the people behind those they may dismiss as drunks and junkies. In becoming one my most most highly-read and highly-commented posts, I thought I would share it again this year, especially for the new readers who've come on board in the last twelve months.
Today marks 12 years since you died. Well, it might have been today, possibly yesterday, I hope not too many days ago. You see, you died alone in your apartment you rented from your sister downstairs. Yet no one checked on you as your mail accumulated Monday and Tuesday. One of your drinking buddies from the Disabled American Veterans post told me proudly at your funeral that he probably had with you your last beer that Saturday night. So, maybe it was the 8th or 9th? When I think back, though, I believe you died some eight years earlier, just after your 50th birthday party. For your wife, my Mom, it was even long before that - she is a saint for staying with you as long as she did - no offense, Dad - and I know she still loves you no matter what. Our family runs rich with depression and alcoholism but you died exceptionally early; my Dad - the young, fit, handsome fella you were in those pictures with little me at the Jersey shore, at home, or with me in that horrible Easter outfit - had died back then and was replaced for the last eight, ten, fourteen years by someone else. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

There is an educational approach to becoming a doctor.  It involves learning massive amounts of basic science, followed by massive amounts of pathophysiology,  which barely prepares you for the clinical  years of the last two years of medical school and the subsequent residency and the massive knowledge dump you have to absorb.  Much of the information is given by experts in the field, usually MD’s or PhD’s (or both),  who lecture formally and informally.  Being considered expert in ID, I now spend hours a day yammering on about infections to anyone who will listen, students in all the medical fields who rotate through our hospitals.  I value the facts I have learned in my field and respect those who have worked to provide me with the information.  I greatly value facts and the the people who provide them. Most of the information I get in medicine is from those in the field.  It is rare to get people to write about aspects of medicine that I will take seriously.  Yes, there are a lot of people who write on the web about medicine, but given what it takes to achieve even a solid knowledge in medicine, much less develop expertise, I usually can’t take them too seriously.  Call me arrogant, but if you want to be a legitimate source of information, there are dues that have to be paid. The world of anti-vaccination discourse is small. There are few physicians who take an interest in the topic. Most doctors are too busy to care and is like worrying about defending fresh water and clean air.  I would wager that to most physicians outside the world of pediatrics, the benefit of vaccines is a given. The anti-vaccinationists are an equally small group of people, at last the ones that bother to write on the topic. Sometimes they seem inordinately loud, but that is only because they end up on Oprah. I often feel that the two sides inhabit different worlds with different approaches to reality.  I live in a world dominated by facts derived from the sciences.  The facts always change, or a better words may be evolving or refined, with time.  But facts matter to me.  There is a world of facts derived from observation of the natural world and in the end my opinion on a topic medicine does not matter.  It is what the facts say that should determine my opinions, not the other way around.  Facts can be tricky things, especially in medicine, with much nuance and subtlety that makes the facts less clear cut than one would like, especially compared to a hard science like physics or chemistry. Facts often do not seem to matter to anti-vaccine proponents and other CAM practitioners to the same amount that they do to me.  For example, given the preponderance of information about the worthlessness of homeopathy I cannot see how anyone would ‘practice’ homeopathy. Or acupuncture. Or chiropractic. Or virtually any CAM discussed on this blog. I have spent half of my life accumulating facts to understand the best way to practice medicine and, as best I can tell facts, mine or others, do not matter to the CAM practitioners. And I don’t get it.  Why do the CAM practitioners and anti-vaccine proponents not pay attention to the facts.  It is, as I have said, like we live in two separate cultures.  I have spent some time in other countries whose customs are different from mine: Japan, France, Minnesota.  Before visiting those foreign lands I would read texts by anthropologists and historians on what to expect and how their culture differed from mine.  I would never have survived my three years in Minneapolis if not for “Lake Woebegon.”  But who better to understand a foreign culture than an anthropologist.  What I need is anthropologist to help understand why the facts do not matter. Ask and you will receive.  I serendipitously came across the article “A Post modern Pandora’s box: Anti-vaccination misinformation on the internet” by Anna Kata, an anthropologist from Canada.  There are other studies on the beliefs of the anti-vaccinationists, but they are from the perspective of doctors and hvae underlying belief that if you get the right information to people they will make the right decision.  Doctors believe, in the end, in rational discourse. Instead, read the abstract: “The Internet plays a large role in disseminating anti-vaccination information. This paper builds upon previous research by analyzing the arguments proffered on anti-vaccination websites, determining the extent of misinformation present, and examining discourses used to support vaccine objections. Arguments around the themes of safety and effectiveness, alternative medicine, civil liberties, conspiracy theories, and morality were found on the majority of websites analyzed; misinformation was also prevalent. The most commonly proposed method of combating this misinformation is through better education, although this has proven ineffective. Education does not consider the discourses supporting vaccine rejection, such as those involving alternative explanatory models of health, interpretation strikes me that this argument is for a freedom without responsibility for the consequences of parental responsibility, and distrust of expertise. Anti-vaccination protestors make post-modern arguments that reject biomedical and scientific “facts” in favour of their own interpretations. Pro-vaccination advocates who focus on correcting misinformation reduce the controversy to merely an “educational” problem; rather, these post-modern discourses must be acknowledged in order to begin a dialogue.” Note she put facts in quotes. What the author did was Google for websites that opposed childhood vaccinations for any reason and she ended up with  9 sites, including the whale, vran.org, vaclib.org, and vaccinationnews.com.  Why so few?  Evidently those seeking health information on the net rarely look past the first 10 search results, so she tried to mirror the results of the average internet user searching for information.  She then analyzed the sites for content relating to Safety and Effectiveness, Alternative Medicine, Civil Liberties and Conspiracy Theories/Search for Truth as well as design attributes of the web sites, emotive appeals and content.  Interestingly, the search using the terms “immunization OR immunization” failed to find any anti-vaccine sites; anti-vaccinationists do not use the term as “they tend not to believe that vaccine confer immunity.” The findings will be no surprise to those who frequent anti-vaccine sites, or alt med sites in general. What 100% of the sites had in common was the assertion that vaccines are dangerous because they contain poisons or cause a variety of illnesses. It was noted that on the sites “pertinent information was not elaborated upon” and gave examples of the amount of toxin being too small to cause disease and that the ether is chemical not the anesthetic are not mentioned. Also common were statements concerning the lack of vaccine immunogenicity, the lack of vaccine efficacy in decreasing childhood diseases (credited to diet, hygiene, etc) and a trivialization of vaccine preventable diseases, failing to mention the past and present morbidity and mortality of the diseases. What these site show is a disregard for facts, which at one time were considered the final arbitrator of reality. If facts do not matter, and can be ignored arbitrarily, then the conversation between the reality based approach to medicine and the alt med practitioners is impossible. She notes that most sites endorsed the use of alternative medicines and often argued against germ theory. “Anti-vaccination website tended to reject scientific, clinical and epidemiologic studies demonstrating the safety and efficacy  of vaccines.  Pro-vaccinations studies were criticized as unreliable, conducted by those with vested interests in vaccination.” Again. Facts ignored. Three quarters of the sites cited the infringement of civil liberties by requiring vaccination. It strikes me that this argument is for a freedom without responsibility for the consequences,  but for which I have some sympathy, but only as long as those who wish for exercise their freedom not be vaccinated are always at least 30 miles away for me and mine or agree to take all the financial responsibilities for the medical care of anyone they inadvertently infect.  My problem with this approach comes from having to see for free and my hospital treat for free people in the trauma ICU who preferred the freedom of not wearing seat belts and helmets in defiance of the man and ended up with multiple, very expensive,  traumas.  But we are all biased by our experience. “The conspiracy theory theme was present on every website analyzed”  be it cover up of the TRUTH THEY don’t want us to know (but somehow commonly available) to vaccination production and promotion being motivated by profit. Those who speak out against vaccination were considered martyrs to the cause, such as Dr Andrew Wakefield.  I cannot wrap my head around the fact that after all the information that has been released about the conduct in his Lancet paper that people would resort to insisting that the man is out to get him rather than the fact that his study was unethical and the data falsified.  I hate to risk invoking Godwins law, but I am reading the Fall of Berlin at the moment, and one of the many striking aspects of the madness of the Eastern front is how, as the Soviet’s were shelling Berlin and the Soviet troops were entering the city, there were still those who still thought and acted like a German victory was possible.  I have also seen patients who deny remarkable pathology and present with advanced cancer or AIDS. The ability for people to deny even the most compelling evidence is beyond my feeble intellect to comprehend.  I can only shake my head in wonder. Religious ideology was the least represented reason against vaccination on the sites, although the morality of growing vaccines in aborted fetus or experimenting on children was mentioned, it was only in about a third of sites. Not unsurprisingly, misinformation and falsehoods were found on every site.  ”88% made claims unsupported by evidence” and personal testimonials of the harm alleged to caused by vaccines were also common. Only the Wikipedia was free of taint. “The open nature (of the Wikipedia) appears to have acted as form of peer-review, keeping the page current, unbiased and properly referenced. There appears to be no self-criticism within the anti-vaccination community; this was demonstrated by most of the analyzed website.”  Free and open debate is least practiced by those who rage against the oppression of the man.  That should have been an Alanis lyric; she would have had less criticism for a lack of understanding of ironic. Again the pattern: a disinterest in facts as changing and understanding is refined or altered as well as no interest in having factual errors corrected.  The attitude evidently being if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you. Interestingly, while 25% identified themselves are non-partisan, non-profit and a public education group, all linked to other anti-vaccination sites while only half linked to pro-vaccination sites. If you spend time in the anti-vaccination world, none of the above will come as any surprise.  To my mind what was an interesting conclusion of the author. “A proponent of vaccination would likely wish to counter with “correct” information; indeed, the most commonly proposed intervention to combat vaccine misinformation is education…With acknowledging falsehoods is important, the assumptions behind educational methods must be examined.  Assuming additional information will influence vaccination decisions reduces the issue to one in which the two sides are separated only by a gap in information.” She further points out that educational attempts only anger those who are corrected (AoA?) and that historically education has not altered the opinion of those who have been against vaccination, whose essential messages have changed little since the 18th century, despite the massive increase in biomedical information to correct vaccine misinformation. It is not the facts that inform the rejection of vaccines (or, more broadly, modern medicine) but “belief in alternative models of health, promotion of parental authority and responsibility and  suspicions of expertise.” It is not the facts that guide opinion, but opinion that determines the facts.  She uses the relationship opinion = evidence + values, and as the former approaches zero, the latter predominates. She also points out how the trend in medicine to patient autonomy and informed choice has had the inadvertent effect of medical consumers extending that autonomy to public health issues and rejecting the premise of vaccines for the overall societal good, noting that “parents may reject epidemiological and population-level risk arguments for vaccinations, for such statistics do not take into account specific experiences, ideologies, and health histories.” It is both the triumph of medicine that so much benefit can be gained by ignoring specific experiences, ideologies, and health histories, and is its current bane.  I know that the data suggests the more we treat all patients the same, the better the outcomes, but no one wants to be another cog in the medical industrial complex. I am motivated by the facts, and basically have a trust in the long term validity of the results of medical research.  Ideas wax and wane, but most people in the field are doing good work and are not trying to be dishonest.  Dr. Wakefield is an aberration.   However, to the anti-vaccination crowd, not only is Dr. Wakefield a source of truth, the rest of the biomedical research results are suspect.  It is the post-modern questioning of the legitimacy of authority and science, both of which I am inclined to value.  Medical and scientific authority is neither valued nor trusted. So where does that leave science based medicine?  I am not certain.  I value facts, medical and scientific authority, always with the understanding of their somewhat fluid nature.  The ‘other side’ does not value facts or the weight of expert opinion, especially when it contradicts opinion.   Those who promote anti-vaccination or homeopathy or the numerous non-reality based therapies live in a different world that I, and we do not share a common common view. I suppose the best I can do is plant a seed of doubt here or serve as a source of information for someone who is not committed to the ideas of scams. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. -Mark Twain There is an educational approach to becoming a doctor.  It involves learning massive amounts of basic science, followed by massive amounts of pathophysiology,  which barely prepares you for the clinical  years of the last half of medical school and   subsequent residency with the massive knowledge dump you have to absorb.  Much of the information is given by experts in the field, usually MD’s or PhD’s (or both),  who lecture formally and informally.  Being considered expert in ID at a teaching hospital, I now spend hours a day yammering on about infections to anyone who will listen, students in all the medical fields who rotate through our hospitals.  I value the facts I have learned in my field and respect those who have worked to provide me with the information.  I greatly value facts and the people who provide them. Most of the information I get in medicine is from those in the field.  It is rare for people to write about aspects of medicine that I will take seriously.  Yes, there are a lot of people who write on the web about medicine, but given what it takes to achieve even a solid knowledge in medicine, much less develop expertise, I usually can’t take them too seriously.  Call me arrogant, but if you want to be a legitimate source of information there are dues that have to be paid. The world of anti-vaccination discourse is small. There are few physicians who take an interest in the topic. Most doctors are too busy to care and it is like worrying about defending fresh water and clean air.  I would wager that to most physicians outside the world of pediatrics, the benefit of vaccines is rarely given a thought. The anti-vaccinationists are an equally small group of people, at last the ones that bother to write on the topic. Sometimes they seem inordinately loud, but that is only because they end up on Oprah. I often feel that the two sides inhabit different worlds with different approaches to reality.  I live in a world dominated by facts derived from the sciences.  The facts always change, or  better words may be evolve or refined, with time.  But facts matter to me.  There is a world of facts derived from observation of the natural world and in the end my opinion on a topic medicine does not matter.  It is what the facts indicate that should determine my opinions, not the other way around.  Facts can be tricky things, especially in medicine, with nuance and subtlety that makes the facts less clear cut than one would like, especially compared to a hard science like physics or chemistry. Facts often do not seem to matter to anti-vaccine proponents and other CAM practitioners to the same degree that they do to me.  For example, given the preponderance of information about the worthlessness of homeopathy I cannot see how anyone would ‘practice’ homeopathy. Or acupuncture. Or chiropractic. Or virtually any CAM discussed on this blog. I have spent half of my life accumulating facts to understand the best way to practice medicine and, as best I can tell these facts, do not matter much to the CAM practitioners or anti-vaccinationists. And I don’t get it.  Why do the CAM practitioners and anti-vaccine proponents not pay attention to the facts.  It is, as I have said, like we live in two separate cultures.  I have spent some time in other countries whose customs are different from mine: Japan, France, Minnesota.  Before visiting those foreign lands I would read texts by anthropologists and historians on what to expect and how their culture differed from mine.  I would never have survived my three years in Minneapolis if not for “Lake Woebegon.”  But who better to understand a foreign culture than an anthropologist.  What I need is anthropologist to help understand why the facts do not matter. Ask and you will receive.  I serendipitously came across two articles.  The first is by Leonard Pitts in my local paper.   The other is  ”A Post-modern Pandora’s box: Anti-vaccination misinformation on the internet” by Anna Kata, an anthropologist from Canada.  There are other studies on the beliefs of the anti-vaccinationists, but they are from the perspective of doctors and have underlying belief that if you get the right information to people they will make the right decision.  Doctors believe, in the end, in rational discourse. Others do not. “The Internet plays a large role in disseminating anti-vaccination information. This paper builds upon previous research by analyzing the arguments proffered on anti-vaccination websites, determining the extent of misinformation present, and examining discourses used to support vaccine objections. Arguments around the themes of safety and effectiveness, alternative medicine, civil liberties, conspiracy theories, and morality were found on the majority of websites analyzed; misinformation was also prevalent. The most commonly proposed method of combating this misinformation is through better education, although this has proven ineffective. Education does not consider the discourses supporting vaccine rejection, such as those involving alternative explanatory models of health, interpretation strikes me that this argument is for a freedom without responsibility for the consequences of parental responsibility, and distrust of expertise. Anti-vaccination protestors make post-modern arguments that reject biomedical and scientific “facts” in favour of their own interpretations. Pro-vaccination advocates who focus on correcting misinformation reduce the controversy to merely an “educational” problem; rather, these post-modern discourses must be acknowledged in order to begin a dialogue.” Note she puts facts in quotes. What the author did was Google for websites that opposed childhood vaccinations for any reason and she ended up with  9 sites, including the whale, vran.org, vaclib.org, and vaccinationnews.com.  Why so few?  Evidently those seeking health information on the net rarely look past the first 10 search results, so she tried to mirror the results of the average internet user searching for information.  She then analyzed the sites for content relating to Safety and Effectiveness, Alternative Medicine, Civil Liberties and Conspiracy Theories/Search for Truth as well as design attributes of the web sites, emotive appeals and content.  Interestingly,  a search using the terms “immunization OR immunization” failed to find any anti-vaccine sites; anti-vaccinationists do not use the term as “they tend not to believe that vaccine confer immunity.” The findings will be no surprise to those who frequent anti-vaccine sites, or alt med sites in general. What 100% of the sites had in common was the assertion that vaccines are dangerous because they contain poisons or cause a variety of illnesses. It was noted that on the sites “pertinent information was not elaborated upon” and gave examples of the amount of ‘toxins’ being too small to cause disease and that the ether in vaccine is the chemical not the anesthetic  not being mentioned on the anti-vaccination sites. Also common were statements concerning the lack of vaccine immunogenicity, the lack of vaccine efficacy in decreasing childhood diseases (credited to diet, hygiene, etc) and a trivialization of vaccine preventable diseases, failing to mention the past and present morbidity and mortality of the diseases. What these sites demonstrate is a disregard for facts, which at one time were considered the final arbitrator of reality. If facts do not matter, and can be ignored arbitrarily, then the conversation between the reality based approach to medicine and the alt med practitioners is impossible. She notes that most sites endorsed the use of alternative medicines and often argued against germ theory. “Anti-vaccination website tended to reject scientific, clinical and epidemiologic studies demonstrating the safety and efficacy  of vaccines.  Pro-vaccinations studies were criticized as unreliable, conducted by those with vested interests in vaccination.” Again. Facts ignored or dismissed. Three quarters of the sites cited the infringement of civil liberties by requiring vaccination. It strikes me that this argument is for a freedom without responsibility for the consequences. It  is an argument for which I have some sympathy, but only as long as those who wish to exercise their freedom not be vaccinated are always at least 30 miles away for me and mine or agree to take all the financial responsibilities for the medical care of anyone they inadvertently infect.  My problem with the civil liberty approach comes from having to take care of for free and my hospital treat for free people in the trauma ICU who preferred the freedom of not wearing seat belts and helmets in defiance of the man and ended up with multiple, very expensive,  traumas.  But we are all biased by our experience. “The conspiracy theory theme was present on every website analyzed”.  Someone, usually doctors or big pharma,  is covering up of the TRUTH they don’t want us to know (but is somehow widely available) about the sordid truth that vaccination production and promotion is being motivated by solely profit. Those who speak out against vaccination were considered martyrs to the cause, such as Dr Andrew Wakefield.  I cannot wrap my head around the fact that after all the information that has been released about the conduct in his Lancet paper that people would resort to insisting that the man is out to get him rather than the fact that his study was unethical and the data falsified.  I hate to risk invoking Godwins law, but I am reading the Fall of Berlin at the moment, and one of the many striking aspects of the madness of the Eastern front is how, as the Soviet’s were shelling Berlin and the Soviet troops were entering the city, there were still those who still thought and acted like a German victory was possible.  I have also seen patients who deny remarkable pathology and present with advanced cancer or AIDS. The ability for people to deny even the most compelling evidence is beyond my feeble intellect to comprehend.  I can only shake my head in wonder. Religious ideology was the least represented reason against vaccination on the sites, although the morality of growing vaccines in aborted fetus or experimenting on children was mentioned, it was only mentioned in about a third of sites. Not unsurprisingly, misinformation and falsehoods were found on every site.  ”88% made claims unsupported by evidence” and personal testimonials of the harm alleged to caused by vaccines were also common. Only the Wikipedia was free of taint. “The open nature (of the Wikipedia) appears to have acted as form of peer-review, keeping the page current, unbiased and properly referenced. There appears to be no self-criticism within the anti-vaccination community; this was demonstrated by most of the analyzed website.” Free and open debate is least practiced by those who rage against the oppression of the man.  That should have been an Alanis lyric; she would have had less criticism for a lack of understanding of ironic.  Again the pattern: a disinterest in facts as well as no interest in having factual errors corrected.  The attitude evidently being ‘if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.’ Interestingly,  25% identified themselves as non-partisan, non-profit or a public education group, giving the impression impartiality, but  all linked to other anti-vaccination sites while only half linked to pro-vaccination sites. If you spend time in the anti-vaccination world, or alt-med world, none of the above will come as any surprise.  To my mind what was an interesting conclusion of the author. “A proponent of vaccination would likely wish to counter with “correct” information; indeed, the most commonly proposed intervention to combat vaccine misinformation is education…With acknowledging falsehoods is important, the assumptions behind educational methods must be examined.  Assuming additional information will influence vaccination decisions reduces the issue to one in which the two sides are separated only by a gap in information.” She further points out that educational attempts only anger those who are corrected (AoA anyone?) and that historically education has not altered the opinion of those who have been against vaccination, whose essential messages have changed little since the 18th century, despite the massive increase in biomedical information to correct vaccine misinformation. It is not the facts that inform the rejection of vaccines (or, more broadly, modern medicine) but “belief in alternative models of health, promotion of parental authority and responsibility and  suspicions of expertise.” It is not the facts that guide opinion, but opinion that determines the facts.  She uses the relationship opinion = evidence + values, and as the former approaches zero, the latter predominates. She also points out how the trend in medicine to patient autonomy and informed choice has had the inadvertent effect of medical consumers extending that autonomy to public health issues and rejecting the premise of vaccines for the overall societal good, noting that “parents may reject epidemiological and population-level risk arguments for vaccinations, for such statistics do not take into account specific experiences, ideologies, and health histories.” It is both the triumph of medicine that so much benefit can be gained by ignoring specific experiences, ideologies, and health histories, and is medicines current bane.  I know that the data suggests the more we treat all patients the same, the better the outcomes, but no one wants to be another cog in the medical industrial complex. I am motivated by the facts, and have a trust in the long term validity of the results of medical research.  Ideas wax and wane, but most people in the field are doing good work and are not  dishonest.  They are good people trying to do good work.  Dr. Wakefield is an aberration.   However, to the anti-vaccination crowd, not only is Dr. Wakefield a source of truth, the rest of the results of biomedical research are suspect.  It is the post-modern questioning of the legitimacy of authority and science,   and neither is valued nor trusted. In my world, both are valued and trusted. So where does that leave science based medicine?  I am not certain.  I value facts, medical and scientific authority, always with the understanding of its somewhat fluid nature.  The ‘other side’ does not value facts or the weight of expert opinion, especially when it contradicts their opinion.   Those who promote anti-vaccination or homeopathy or the numerous non-reality based therapies live in a different world than I, and we do not share a common common view. What is the proper dialog or is such a dialog even possible?  I suppose the best I can do is plant a seed of doubt here or serve as a source of information for someone who is not committed to the ideas of scams. Maybe Fordor’s needs to have a new guide.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs5WGmYnDgw See you around the convention! Thanks to the Freethought University Alliance for letting me introduce PZ to the crowd, especially Jason Ball of the Young Australian Skeptics. ShareThis

Well well well. Here we are. It's Friday. And we've been talking about SPERM ALL WEEK. What to do...what to do... Nel-Themaat et al. "Quality and freezing qualities of ?rst and second ejaculates collected from endangered Gulf Coast Native rams" Animal Reproduction Science, 2006. Heh. So it turns out that the people who wrote the study Sci covered the other week wrote ANOTHER one. Also, it turns out the eland is not endangered, but the other species they were working with, the Gulf Coast Native Sheep, IS endangered. Though it's a rather odd beastie, in that it originally was from a population of European sheep brought over to the US, which escaped, went feral, and is now considered its own variety. This is an important sheep to look at in particular because the Gulf Coast Sheep has become adapted to living in a moist environment (as some of you may be aware, the southeast of the US is very moist, in some areas is it entirely IMPOSSIBLE to get all the mildew out of your house EVER), being less sensitive to parasites and less sensitive to fungal problems like foot rot. This means that if you wanted to, say, work with sheep in humid environments (sheep are often introduced domestically for very poor areas, and the southeastern US is apparently trying to reintroduce them. It is Sci's hope that they might eat the dang kudzu), you might want to take a look at these Gulf Coast sheep, and maybe steal of their useful genes for your benefit. And of course if you are going to steal some genes and breed some of these Gulf Coast sheep into your stock you need...some sperm. Multiple ejaculates. Because once is never enough. Oh and also: For those who don't know about kudzu. It SUCKS. A lot. There's a house under there, under the lump in the middle. Really. It was introduced (I think from Japan) as something for cows and sheep and stuff to forage on. Also, it was apparently ornamental (*snort*). There was only one problem with the plant. Cows WON'T EAT IT. I mean, they'll eat it if they're STARVING, but they don't enjoy it. Goats don't either. NO ONE DOES. And kuzdu can grow like...kudzu. In the southeast, it takes over EVERYTHING. Every spring and summer becomes a war on the kudzu. A sheep that would eat this crap would get a grateful hug from Sci every day of it's little life. It would also get VERY fat. Anyway. Back to semen. I know what you guys REALLY want to hear about.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

So... these credit default swap thingies,
they pay out if some credit instrument goes bad, like a bond issue,
and, famously, financial companies buy them as side bets hedges against financial "events", including betting against instruments they are promoting to clients, and deals they have no involvement in at all and they are not regulated Soooooo........ Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

In what seems to be a bit of a continuation on his earlier post (which I talked about yesterday), Larry Moran has another post up on the whole "is science ever compatible with religion" thing. At the end of the post, he asks a very good question - one that gets right at something that's very important: So, what exactly are the limitations of science that we are supposed to adhere to? Earlier I criticized the concept of methodological naturalism because it seemed to rule out investigations of the paranormal as well as investigations of miracles. Robert Pennock, another philosopher, was asked about that during his testimony and he had a ready answer. See if you are convinced. Q. Isn't it true that as we sit here today scientists are investigating what some people call psychic powers?
A. I know that there are a few scientists who did that I believe. Mack is one name, someone who's done this. So there are a few scientists who have done that, that's right, and what they do in that case is really the same thing. It's often misunderstood to think, to call something paranormal means that it is supernatural. Essentially what's going on in those scientific investigations is to say no, that's not so. We will again treat this purported phenomenon, ESP or telekinesis for example, as though this is a natural, still yet unknown, but ordinary causal process, treating it essentially in the same way we treat other things under the constraints of methodological naturalism, reconceptualizing it as a natural thing rather than a supernatural. Cool. You can investigate the paranormal because it's not supernatural and you can treat it as a potential natural phenomenon. Presumably you will reach the conclusion that is is not a paranormal event.

But for some reason you can't do that for miracles and the role of God in theistic evolution. That's forbidden science.

Excuse me if I'm confused. Actually, there are cases - quite a few of them, in fact - where theological statements can be investigated scientifically, and where they can, and have, been shown to be false. The circumstances that surround these cases are very similar to cases where ESP, ghosts, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night have been investigated by science. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsHG3P8hBE8 Was BOUND to happen. Spot my fellow bloggers? See you at the con. ShareThis