Vaccines and the...what epidemic, now?

Although people all over the spectrum—layman bloggers like me or medical experts like those at the American CDC—all agree that the link between MMR and other vaccines on the one hand and autism on the other are spurious, many people still ask: If not this, then how shall we explain the autism epidemic?

Well, the best answer I have seen is in this, one of Orac’s most succinct articles. I do not, myself, have much to add, so I shall merely provide that link and provide a summary for the most impatient among you (though if you are that impatient, why read someone so wordy as me?).

The one piece of irony I wish to add is that I have seen pre-emptive protests by those who do buy into this stuff that claiming that diagnostics have improved radically in the past few decades won’t cut it—irony, because I have never seen anyone claim that we are better now than previously at diagnosing autism. Instead—and here I go into brief summary mode for that article—what has happened is that the diagnostic criteria have changed. In a very real sense, the definition of autism has changed.

What seems to have happened is this: Various sources of statistics, like those for students with any kind of significant learning disabilities, classify those students by their primary diagnosis. A couple of decades ago, autism wasn’t even a category. By sixteen years ago, people were diagnosed as autistic if they met a specific set of criteria. More recently, the criteria have expanded, autism has been expanded into autism spectrum disorder (and many who are diagnosed on that spectrum are defined as high-functioning: They may have ‘peculiarities’, but are not ‘disabled’ in any serious sense)…and of course the number of people diagnosed as autistic have gone up.

Well, of course they have! Thirty years ago they’d have been diagnosed as something else entirely. And this is not because doctors have become better at making the diagnoses: No one is claiming that. Instead, the medical community has changed the definition of what it means to be autistic. (This may very well be for good reason: Unifying similar conditions, etc.) Thirty years ago, perhaps, you were diagnosed with autism if you showed symptoms X, Y, or Z; now you may be diagnosed on the autism spectrum if you show two or more out of the symptoms X, Y, Z, U, V, or W.

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There is one additional twist to the story: Because the diagnostic criteria have changed (and because diagnosing disorders like autism is a lot trickier than, say, bacterial diseases where a pathogen is or is not present in a pretty concrete way), it may be impossible to figure out if the prevalence of autism really has changed at all. This is unfortunate because it makes it that much harder to study the condition and figure out what the causes really are; and while some high-functioning people with autistic spectrum disorders are fine just the way they are, low-functioning autism can be a pretty awful thing. It’s bad enough that researchers are sidetracked and distracted by claims to study these spurious vaccine danger claims (certainly a worthwhile topic to study! —but it’s been done again, and again, and again…).

Excerpt from a paper

Virtually all commercially produced pharmaceuticals have their source and/or intellectual roots in active compounds isolated from plants. It is ironic that ‘herbal’ sources themselves are often considered ‘safe’, but that commercially produced derivatives – the compounds that are forced to undergo toxicity testing – are not. The finding that 1/5 Ayurvedic medicines purchased on the Internet have detectable and often toxic levels of lead, mercury and arsenic (Saper et al., 2008) should give those who think CAM interventions can do no harm serious pause.

Homeopathy and the curse of the scientific method
Karen L. Overall, Arthur E. Dunham

Indeed.

Shamelessly angry rant: Apple

Caveat lector: This is a rant with a lot of intentional hyperbole.

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During my attempts at figuring out what phone to get next, I spent some time on manufacturers’ websites. This is always a frustrating experience, because phone manufacturers tend not to publish very detailed information (at least not on any pages I came across), and because my questions tend to be a bit arcane (Will this phone allow me to subscribe to an LDAP directory as an address book?).

None, however, managed to enrage me as much as Apple’s website, which appears to be made of fluff and chromed trimmings. The technical content amounted roughly to We make a phone, with pages of filler largely consisting of We are awesome and we make awesome stuff. I don’t want fluff. I don’t want marketing-speak.

Marketing speak doesn’t work on me, because holy shit, I’m not that stupid. Surely I can’t be very unusual in picking up on this? If somebody tries to sell me something based on their assertions that it’s awesome and cool people use it, I will tell them to fuck off. If you want to sell it to me, tell me about the features it has and hand me a spec sheet. I don’t mean eighteen different pages that bury various technical details in fluff, and one annoyingly laid-out page with some tech specs; I mean a single, clean page where the features are enumerated and I can actually get a solid sense of what the damned thing does. The lack of this sort of thing—which is standard issue in the PC world where I am used to buying hardware—seems to express contempt for my demographic, i.e. People who want convenient access to information on what, exactly, it is that they are buying, before they buy it.

I feel like they are being condescending in that, insofar as the advertising is directed at me, they are saying either We believe that you are stupid enough to buy our product based on the shit we’re telling you, or We believe that you’re too stupid to grasp any of the real information, so we‘ll give you the information equivalent of crome-plated turds instead. (It’s that or We don’t have a good product, and they don’t seem to believe it.) Of course, the reality is that their marketing isn’t aimed at people like me, but that message isn’t terribly helpful either: We don’t give a shit about you or your kind, and if we come off as condescending or offensive, who cares? You’re just a nerd, nobody gives a damn.

Admittedly, it’s possible that they just don’t support anything I care about—good IMAP support, Google Calendar sync, LDAP, etc., and so just don’t have any information to share.

It also annoys me that the website contains misinformation. For instance, they claim that the iPhone has a standby time of up to 300 hours, which is literally true, but only in the sense that up to doesn’t actually specify a lower limit. People I know who use the things seem to opine that they need to be recharged on a nightly basis. Two days, 48 hours, is too long, so less than 15% of the advertised standby time seems truly realistic even for users who do very little actual calling. Of course you can’t trust manufacturer stats, but at least in the world of laptops I can usually trust them to get their numbers within the right order of magnitude.

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The phone itself has more problems—the ludicrous lack of copy/paste, the fact that you can’t even run software updates without running iTunes (you not only have to have a PC, you also have to run an OS Apple bothers porting iTunes to)—but that’s not the point of this rant…

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The truly aggravating factor is that, through no fault of Apple’s marketing department (whom I consider roughly equivalent to that of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation), I can’t discount the product. Their marketers and web people may all be assholes, but too many people whose judgements I trust and whose opinions I care about claim that they make good devices, that the iPhone itself is actually a good product. And it may well be…and so I can’t just dismiss it…and so I have to seek out information about it, regardless of what the search may do to my blood pressure. One thing is for sure, though: If I ever buy an Apple product, it will be in spite of their marketing, and very grudgingly. I might also have to scrape off the logo to live with the shame.

Training progress

Good week for jiu-jitsu.

I am sometimes amused, sometimes troubled by my astonishing lack of talent for jiu-jitsu. I am clumsy and un-coordinated, I have a terrible memory for body movements and techniques, and my habitual tendency to play an overly defensive game applies to jiu-jitsu as it does to anything from video games to chess. I am miles behind people who started around the same time as I did, and while some of that is due to time I missed practice due to sickness or travel, most of it is just that I’m not talented, and am profoundly unathletic.

Most of the time, though, that doesn’t particularly bother me: I try, and I do improve (however slowly), and I’m just doing this for fun, after all.

This was a good week, too; I had some good rolls during which I felt I more or less held my own against people I should be able to hang with. Today I executed a transition of exactly the kind that I ought to be capable of: Having achieved side control, I moved to a knee-on-belly position; I maintained it; as my sparring partner tried to push me off, he exposed his neck, and I went for a choke; when he successfully defended the choke, he exposed his arm, and I went for the armbar (he tapped out).

This isn’t spectacular stuff; this isn’t rocket science; and the guy in question has probably trained less than I have and wins more rolls than not (though they are usually close enough to be intense). But being able to move through the sequence is something I’d not have done a few months ago, and it’s precisely the sort of thing one ought to do: Establish a dominant position, look for a weakness; go for a submission, ideally without sacrificing position; if that attack fails, use it to look for another… This particular sequence, of course, was particularly nice in that (1) knee-on-belly is a very, very good, dominant position, where one’s weight on the opponent’s torso is painful, slightly impedes breathing, and tends to motivate people to go for risky things just to get out of it; and (2) he had to use his arms to defend the choke, so he had no real choice but to expose himself to at least an armbar attempt.

A person with average talent and athletic ability would have reached this stage months or a year ago. I am reaching it now. But so what? I’m reaching it, and I’m not stopping here.