It’s been a terribly quiet week blog-wise, but I did make that promise four weeks ago, and, seeing that I want to be a columnist when I grow up (hint hint employers of columnists) and those guys and girls simply HAVE to think up something interesting every single week, I too am going to do my best to add sweetness to the shortness that you see before you.
Speaking of shortness, I did get some off-blog (yes, face-to-face!) feedback on the previous edition of the WHV. Said (highly appreciated) feedback concerned the length of these posts, more specifically, that there was too much of it. It’s important to remember that I in fact do write these things with the chronically time-challenged in mind. One of the measures I take is to bold the most important themes in each paragraph, so that one can easily skip on to the next paragraph if the mentioned theme does not take one’s fancy. This week, I’m going even further by employing section headings! As always, please feel free to skip paragraphs and sections.
Before jumping in, I give you the traditional WHV photo, this time of my little Weber doing its thing (thanks to some crucial material supplied by my friendly neighbour) on the most brilliant of all South African celebrations: National Braai day!
My humble little Weber on NBD 2009.
Geeky Google Docs love affair
Google Docs is Google’s fantastic attempt (well, it was initially developed by Writely, which was soon assimilated by and has since been happily functioning inside of The Google Supermind) at an office suite. The whole thing, including Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations, runs in your web browser. This means that you always have access to your stuff from anywhere, and you never have to install any extra software. With the offline functionality, you can continue working even without an internet connection.
This was already pretty neat, but then they had to go and make it even neater. In my line of business, one of the coolest features is the fact that you can concurrently edit the same document with any number of collaborators. I’ve written research proposals together with colleagues before, where at a number of occasions we were actually editing the same paragraph of text from two different cities, and Docs didn’t break a sweat merging our edits in real-time. This functionality also eliminates the very irritating “Could you send me the latest version of the proposal” emails, the subsequent waiting and then the infuriating expired time window when the latest version finally arrives in the email.
A recent feature which is admittedly less impressive to the public at large, but made my geek heart miss several beats, was the built-in equation editor. Imagine my surprise when I tried this out for the first time and realised that it is in fact a real-time LaTeX math typesetter: You type your incredibly complex formula in standard LaTeX, and Google Docs shows the typeset math updated in real-time. This is even useful if you’re NOT using Google Docs but just want to fine-tune the formulas in your LaTeX article. Check the screenshot below:
Screenshot of Google Docs equation editor.
90% of MS Office users probably don’t use more than 10% of its functionality. Google Docs covers this 10% more than adequately, but without the complexity, the platform lock-in and the cost. Next time you’re considering emailing someone a Word document or Powerpoint, have a look at Google Docs first!
Netbook Bad Karma
On an extra partition, my netbook (Asus 1005HA-H, the computer I’m currently in love with) has the absolute latest development version of the Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10 – will be released at the end of October) Netbook Remix. Linux distributions, and especially Ubuntu, have been making great progress recently on state of the art hardware. On this netbook, suspend to ram for example works out of the box, which is quite an achievement for Linux-kind. However, whereas battery life under the bundled Windows with the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (don’t laugh, to me it sounds like some knid of giant fighting robot power source) is an astounding 9+ hours, under Linux it’s a quite disappointing 4 or 5 hours. One very obvious factor is the CPU running at 1GHz at idle under Linux and 850MHz at idle under Windows.
Even installing and configuring the latest eeepc acpi utilities, including kernel module, from the testing repository at StatUX http://www.statux.org/content?page=repo, although enabling bunches of hotkeys, didn’t solve the battery problem. The CPU was still running at 1GHz.
I’m curious to see what the case will be at Karmic release, preferably with the stock Ubuntu Netbook Remix and not too much user fiddling. I’m considering writing a short review at that time, hopefully less critical than my previous attempt with Ubuntu Feisty beta (7.04) on my HP laptop.
Brand new Visual Data Analysis lecture block
For the past 4 years, I have been taking care of the Medical Visualisation parts (2 lecture blocks) of the TU Delft master-level Data Visualisation course (IN4086). Since the beginning of this year, I also give my very own dedicated 5 ECTS Medical Visualisation course (IN4307), which I have designed with the sole purpose of producing MedVis NINJAS. I take great joy in corrupting promising young minds with my special brand of evil science. :)
In a very recent development, it seems that I will now also be taking care of the Visual Data Analysis block of the general Data Visualisation course. I somehow blurted this out during a recent meeting, and now have the privilege of designing this one from scratch too.
This is quite interesting, because visual data analysis, or visual analytics as it’s sometimes called (urgh), is primarily associated with Information Visualisation, and being a MedVis fanatic I’m supposed to be a Scientific Visualisation guy. To cut a long story short, InfoVis and SciVis are two sub-fields in the broader field of Visualisation, but the communities behind them might as well come from different planets, in spite of the best efforts of some of my colleagues to unify everything. In any case, it turns out that we (when I say “we” I mean Jorik) have been secretly publishing suspiciously infovis-friendly articles the past few years. Look:
- J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, E. Grundy, M.W. Jones, R.S. Laramee, and F.H. Post, Smooth graphs for visual exploration of higher order state transitions, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 15, 2009.
- J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, and F.H. Post, Extensions of Parallel Coordinates for Interactive Exploration of Large Multi-Timepoint Data Sets, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 14, 2008, pp. 1436-1451.
- J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, and F.H. Post, Interactive visualization of multi-field medical data using linked physical and feature-space views, Proc. Eurographics / IEEE-VGTC EuroVis, K. Museth, A. Ynnerman, and T. Möller, 2007, pp. 123-130.
I find this a very interesting and gratifying development. An increasing number of my research collaborations in the medical research field are also benefiting from visual data analysis techniques. Keeping in mind the clichéd but no less real data explosion, we, as visualisation people, can greatly increase our value to the client. The forthcoming Visual Data Analysis lecture block I’m designing is just one step in the evolution of our science.
The End, my friend, also of your common cold misconceptions.
Pressing Ctrl-Shift-C in this Google Doc draft (how’s that for subtle product placement?), I can see that I’ve once again passed the 1000 word mark (1200 to be more precise).
Whoops.
I had even more planned, but instead I’ll conclude with a hopefully useful snippet of information, especially in the light of the coming winter. Many people I run into still somehow believe that there’s a causal relationship between being cold, as in going outside in cold weather, and getting a cold, as in sneezing and having a running nose. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s an age-old myth. A myth I say! See this quote from the Wikipedia article on the common cold (emphasis mine):
An ancient belief still common today claims that a cold can be “caught” by prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions, which is where the disease got its name.[9] Although common colds are seasonal, with more occurring during winter, experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection, implying that the seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others.[6][10][11][12][13]
Just to ram that point home: Going outside in the cold, or being exposed to cold weather or direct chilling, very probably does not increase your chances of catching the common cold! Similar to this is the work on influenza. It turns out that there’s a link between the flu and absolute humidity: The lower the humidity, the higher the chance of getting the flu. It’s quite probable that you catch the flu virus not from going outside in winter, but from staying inside your heated and hence slightly drier home. Chalk one up for all the kids getting told, unfairly and without scientific basis, to dress up before going out or risk getting ill.
On that rebellious note, have a super duper week! (… and please do your thing in the comments below …)
You must vaccinate
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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Posted in Commentary, education, life, meta, science
Tagged denialists, evidence-based, health, medicine, science, vaccination