Courtesy of an invitation by Prof. Bernhard Preim and the CARS (Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery) organization to give the Visualization and Virtual Reality in Medicine tutorial together with the good professor, I got to go to CARS 2009 in (you guessed it) Berlin. It was an honour and a pleasure to present this tutorial together with the author of The Book currently defining my research field.
What was completely unexpected though, was being completely blown away by Bill Buxton’s keynote.
I have to admit that I was not aware of this distinguished gentleman or his credentials (amongst other things, xerox parc in its absolute heyday, later chief scientist of alias wavefront and of SGI, now principal scientist at Microsoft, and much more) before yesterday. This dude shows up on stage, and in a totally relaxed and understated way, manages to blow my mind a number of times.
He started by casually telling us that he’d already been playing around with multi-touch displays (now all the rage in the UI world) in 1985, using it to design digital percussion instruments. Then he demonstrated, with a number of examples, a significant number of which he had personally been involved with (the multi-touch just mentioned among others), his “20 year long nose” observation. Innovations that eventually make it, take on average 20 years to get from the lab to main-stream, where main-stream is defined as being a billion dollar industry. The mouse took even longer: 30 years.
Before getting to the next important and extremely provocative point, he showed us this video (I’ve made you a nice crappy mobile phone cam version):
(Peter Krekel managed to find the original Microsoft demo-reel on youtube and shared:)
His provocative statement was that screen real estate will essentially be free in 5 years, based on the rapid evolution of manufacturing technology, customer demand, and the trends in analogous examples, such as bandwidth. If somebody had told you 10 years ago that internet bandwidth today, in 2009, would be essentially free and available in copious amounts, you would have spat out your morning coffee. I know I would have… in ‘99 we were still dealing with dial-up. Coming from Bill Buxton, and also based on all his examples, this made me sit up straight and think. We’re going to have really big screens. Think metres by metres at a resolution of at least 100 DPI. Think walls covered with screens, because it’s cheaper than putting up a whiteboard. We have to rethink everything that we know about interfacing with the digital world…
Another tantalising prediction (and I’ve heard this from more people than Buxton) is that soon mobile phones will have as standard equipment a micro laser projector. This will allow us to project on arbitrary curved surfaces (it’s coherent light, so always in focus!) when we want to show something to anyone else and, even cooler, it will allow us to perform 3D colour scans of anything we see. At this stage I had the distinct feeling of my hair being blown back. I’m going to be living inside Star Trek!
There was much more (including personal devices that are more aware of their context: think cell phone automatically speaking to television and computer as you enter a room), but I’d like to conclude this post with one of his more profound lessons: Innovation is hardly ever about coming up with something completely new. That sometimes does happen, but is a fluke. Real innovation is about taking one of the dimensions defining an existing technology (size, speed, price, resolution, simplicity, intelligence, and many more subtle dimensions) and expanding that dimension by at least an order of magnitude. Doing this in fact yields a completely new technology. The really clever people have learned how to identify the more subtle dimensions and expand them.
I’m going to think about that for a while. 
You must vaccinate
May 21st, 2009 · Commentary, education, life, meta, science
Image courtesy of dbtechno.com.
I was mistakenly under the impression that, at least in my social circles, the whole vaccination issue had been put completely to rest, but based on the number of serious questions that I’ve been asked recently, this unfortunately does not seem to be the case.
For those of you who don’t have time, I’ll cut to the chase immediately:
Yes, you simply must vaccinate your children. This is the best and safest choice, for both your child and your fellow humans.
No, there is no link between vaccination and autism. No, spreading out the (MMR) vaccinations is not safer, it is in fact more dangerous. Also, the “vaccine overload” hypothesis is flawed.
For those of you with a bit more time or those of you who are not willing to take me on my word, I’ll go into some more detail on each of the points mentioned above. Most of what I write here is based on articles in the Wikipedia. I’ve deliberately done this, because these articles are accessible and readable to everyone, and they do link to the original scientific articles that they are based on. Feel free to jump to any section. Also, each section ends with a short summary of its contents to make it easier for you to skip.
Recent history
This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the MMR vaccine controversy.
In 1998, Andre Wakefield and co-authors published a paper in the Lancet where, based on 12 case reports, they speculated on a possible link between the MMR vaccination and autism, and also speculated that it might be better to space out the vaccinations. Of course the press and media picked this up and went completely wild, causing a health scare in the UK. It is important to note that both of these claims were highly speculative.
It later turned out that Wakefield had received 55000 (fifty-five thousand) UK pounds from Legal Aid Board solicitors who were gathering evidence to use in a case against vaccine manufacturers, and that a number of parents of the children taking part in Wakefield’s study were directly involved in the law-suit. Wakefield did not mention any of this at the time of publication. Ten of his 12 co-authors have since completely retracted their interpretation of the paper.
In short, the author of the paper that started most of the modern vaccination-autism scare was completely corrupt, and his corruption directly affected this specific research.
He did manage to cause such a scare in the UK, that measles (one of the diseases that MMR vaccinates against) is for the first time in decades at almost epidemic levels. Since then, there have been cases of measles killing children, something which would most probably not have happened had the vaccination compliance not been at an all-time low. Isn’t that absolutely crazy when one considers that measles was all but eradicated?
In the years between 1998 and the present, there have been numerous extremely well-designed and large studies, none of which have been able to find any kind of link between vaccination and autism.
To summarise this section: The research that the vaccination scare is based on, was deeply flawed and based on corruption, not science.
Spreading out of vaccines
This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the general Vaccine Controversy.
In some cases, parents opt for spreading out the vaccinations, because they mistakenly think that this is safer than not doing so. The flawed idea that administering all these vaccines together could be dangerous is called the “vaccine overload hypothesis”. It is flawed for the reasons:
Importantly, if you spread out vaccines, you increase the time during which your child is susceptible to the diseases that are being vaccinated again, thus greatly increasing the health risk to your child and all other children it comes into contact with. You are a bad parent if you do this.
To summarise this section: Administering the vaccinations together does not damage your child’s immune system. Spreading out vaccines is dangerous for both your child and all children it comes into contact with.
Celebrities campaigning against vaccination
Recently, a number of celebrities, most prominent of which Jenny McCarthy and her partner Jim Carrey, supported by Oprah, have been campaigning against vaccination. You have to remember that these are actors and entertainers, with almost ZERO medical or scientific background or training. McCarthy dropped out of nursing school to become a Playboy Bunny: There’s nothing wrong with that, but you really cannot base important medical decisions, concerning the health and survival of your child (!!), on the opinions of an erstwhile nude model!
To summarise: Think carefully about the scientific and medical backgrounds of actors telling you how to care for the health and well-being of your child, even more so when it concerns life and death issues such as vaccination.
The logical conclusion
To the best of our scientific knowledge, vaccinations as they are administered today are safe and do not cause autism. In spite of this, research continues day and night to make sure of this observation.
On the other hand, if you don’t vaccinate, the risk of your child getting ill and dying is significantly higher. If a large enough number of you don’t vaccinate, we lose our herd immunity and then there is a very real risk that many more of our children will get ill and die due to your inaction. Do you seriously want to take this very real risk with your and my children’s lives?
Post scriptum
I hope that this has helped. If there are any issues that are not clear, or missing, or you are not convinced, please let me know so that we can discuss and so that I can improve this article.
Extra resources
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