“I consider it an irony that you have one of the most contagious viruses known to man juxtaposed against one of the most effective vaccines they have,” he said.”Yet we don’t do and have not done what could be done – namely eliminate, eradicate the virus.”
Source: Measles record means US could lose eradication status – BBC News
Still, the experience did not change the position of the boy’s parents.When the time came for his second round of DTaP, doctors talked with the family about the need for vaccinations. Surviving tetanus, unlike some other diseases, does not offer immunity in the future.But despite an “extensive review” of the risks, and the benefits of vaccination, the article said, the family declined the second vaccination — or any other recommended immunization.
In some places, complacency over vaccinations has been accompanied by outright rejection of the scientific evidence on measles vaccines that has saved over 21 million lives since 2000, according to the WHO. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories on supposedly negative side effects of vaccinations, either against measles or in a broader context, have gained momentum in some communities, in the United States and other countries.
Just like we need to be vaccinated against contagious diseases, we also need to be vaccinated against fake news and irrational mambo-jumbo. We do have a vaccine for that – it is called the Scientific Method:
The Scientific Method is not something you achieve in one day. And it is not something you achieve permanently – you need to work on it and work for it all your life. (Even celebrated scientists have fallen prey to non-scientific thinking.)
Our public schools are the place where this lifelong skill should be taught. This is the investment that we need to make if we are serious about our children’s future!
This is definitely alarming and should give every one who believes in the scientific method a sense of foreboding. After all, how can an evidence based approach work if the evidence can be fabricated?
However, I think there is also an opportunity here to use technology to fight problems created by technology. The idea of adversarial machine learning is not new – we already rely on it in fraud protection, for example in detecting fake or synthetic identities involved in payment fraud. If deep learning can create made up facts and entities, deep learning can also be used to detect such made up entities. It is definitely an arms race, but just because it is an arms race does not mean the good side is doomed to failure. We need to arm our selves with the right tools and technologies to fight the “fake” pandemic. It can be done if we give this the proper attention and investment of effort and resources.
In general, and especially in the world of business, I think the time may have come that we need to have a different mindset going forward. “Presume bad, and then strive to prove good.” That means that assume that every putative customer trying to sign up to your service or trying to buy your product is likely malicious and then use data to prove innocence and enable a good experience for the “provably” good customers. Many online business are already seeing fraud attacks out number good customers. (Facebook closed 1.3 Billion fake accounts in 6 months!)
I know this sounds Orwellian, but we are talking of an existential threat to democracies and to scientific thinking!
We like to think that the progress of knowledge and scientific thinking is unrelenting. That once you learn something as a fact you will never unlearn it. That we are moving slowly but surely from darkness to light.
Alas none of this is a truism beyond doubt. It is quite possible that society may turn its back entirely on the scientific method and slither back into the age of ignorance. Popular opinion can be misguided and misled so grotesquely by the ever amplifying tools of social media that people will do the unthinkable and put their children’s live’s in danger!
And if you have the delusion that this can happen only in far away poor third world countries, you have been living on the wrong planet for the last few years. Willful ignorance is a pathology that blights across the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the educated and the unlettered.
This is not the time for despair or apathy. That option is simply too horrible to contemplate. People who believe in and practice the scientific method, rise and make your voices heard! Educate and engage those around you, rally public opinion, do everything you can to bring sanity back into public discourse. Come down from your ivory towers and join the fray. What is at stake is nothing less than the kind of world our children will live in!
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
….
The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
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Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.
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In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
There are so many disturbing things about this story that it should be setting off alarm bells in the mind of every person with a social conscience.
WHO warns of soaring rates of measles in Europe
Every new person affected by measles in Europe reminds us that unvaccinated children and adults, regardless of where they live, remain at risk of catching the disease and spreading it to others who may not be able to get vaccinated.
Getting properly vaccinated is not simply a personal choice, it is also a social and moral choice. By not getting vaccinated we not only increase our own chance of infection but also the chance of infection for many others who cannot get vaccinated for various medical, economic or logistical reasons. Herd immunity develops only when a sufficiently large fraction of the population is vaccinated. Below that threshold every one is dramatically more at risk.
Finally, there is also the morality of making the choice of not vaccinating children who cannot decide for themselves. What a shame to put a child at risk of death by measles or paralysis by polio, both entirely avoidable diseases today, just because the adult in charge does not have the scientific understanding of the risks vs benefits of vaccination.
Personal choice is important and critical in a free society, but so is education about how every choice has consequences. And understanding that not doing something is as much a choice as is doing something!
Vaccination, gun control, climate change … the statistics are screaming at us unambiguously. The human toll piles up. Our humanity implores us to act!
The redesigned SAT contains longer and harder reading passages and more words in math problems, experts say. How well would you do? Try these questions, taken from a College Board practice test.
Source: How Would You Do on the New SAT? – The New York Times
This type of interpretation of math equations as word problems, and conversely the encoding of word problems into math statements is extremely critical in an engineering or scientific workplace setting, and I suspect that it is important even in other types of jobs like marketing or sales. So I really happy to see SAT problems addressing this need.
Writing is thinking! the ability to write and read precisely in really important. And word math problems are good practice to hone this skill.
Capabilities such as creativity and sensing emotions are core to the human experience and also difficult to automate.
Source: Four fundamentals of workplace automation | McKinsey & Company
This is a really good read, and I strongly agree with the sentiments expressed here. For example, as the article points out, automation is not just going to impact low wage job, but may equally impact very high paying jobs too. A lot of stuff that skilled professionals like doctors, financial planners and executives do is actually quite repetitive, predictable, and tedious, and can be automated. Conversely there are certain low wage jobs that cannot be automated at all with today’s technology, such as landscaping and yard cleanup! So the notion that machine intelligence and automation are going to put only blue collar workers’ job in peril is actually quite wrong. Rather AI and automation are going to put all repetitive, tedious and mind numbing jobs at risk.
And what is so bad about that? Won’t that free us up for more creative work? It will give us the ability to do what humans do best – adapt to novel situations, think originally, show social and emotional understanding, and build great things by networking and using empathy. For this reason, one can be optimistic that machine intelligence will not make us redundant, rather it will make us more human. For the same reason a strong education in liberal arts – having a refined taste in literature, art, music and culture – will be a key attribute of successful professionals in the future.
While it is perfectly virtuous to emphasize a good grounding in STEM (science technology engineering and maths), that does not mean that we should raise our children to be boorish loners who are savants with technology but incapable of holding a decent conversation or sensing the emotional needs of an audience and modulating their message accordingly. Liberal arts hone our social and emotional intelligence. So in the rush to achieve high grades in STEM subjects let us not forget the importance of music and arts and creativity and collaboration. Paradoxically, the STEM skills of a few will enable large scale machine intelligence and automation, which in turn will liberate the rest of the population from drudgery and allow them to flourish in creative and artistic endeavors. So STEM and Liberal Arts education can indeed live side by side with synergy and feed into one another and flourish.
Yes, by all means encourage your kid to do the hour of code. But also make sure you encourage them to do the hour of music!
The study involved only a few fingerprints, however, and a larger sample is required to ensure the results are statistically significant, Dr. Halamek said.
Source: New Technique Can Identify Gender From a Fingerprint – The New York Times
Which begs the question: why this is being reported at all? If they don’t have statistical significance they don’t have anything. (And even statistical significance is not enough since the world is full of spurious correlations. 5% significance can randomly occur 1/20 times.)
Disappointed that the NY Times would do such poor science journalism. No control, no numbers, no figures, no peer review – just a random statement that something can be used to identify something else. I am getting pretty tired of these types of pseudo-scientific statements that our mainstream media seems to be making with abandon! 😦
Anand's musings 