Austin Skeptical Society

Last night’s Daily Show had Jon Stewart talking to Michael Specter about his new book, Denialism, and the two had a great conversation about vaccines.

The link below will take you to the clip on Hulu (available until January):

http://www.hulu.com/watch/112769/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-thu-dec-3-2009?c=817:1273

A quick blurb from the Austin American-Statesman had this little piece of prophecy regarding Texas’ students (the last blurb on the page):

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Early word: New tests are tough

As hundreds of Texas school districts get a jump on the end-of-course tests that will debut statewide in two years, preliminary results indicate a large number of students will have trouble passing the exams, the Dallas Morning News reported.

High school students will be required to pass the battery of 12 end-of-course tests beginning with freshmen entering high school in the 2011-12 school year. But many districts are already giving versions of the tests to their students, and some are even using them as final exams.

The Algebra I test was administered to nearly 79,000 students this year; 57 percent of them passed. Results were similar on the tests measuring knowledge and skills in biology, chemistry, geometry and U.S. history.

I’m not sure where these tests come from; the article doesn’t say. But if they’re anything like the tests implemented when I was going through public school in Michigan, they’re designed to test basic knowledge of the various scholastic disciplines. An inability to pass the test is meant to reflect that you simply didn’t learn — or weren’t exposed to — the materials everyone is expected to know before they graduate from high school.

Given that Texas also has draconian measures in place requiring public universities to admit the top 10% of students from each high school, we ought to expect a continued decline in the caliber of students enrolled in the state’s many universities. Add on budget cuts, inept governing bodies, and falling standards, and we can expect another generation to go through the Texas educational system and come out the other side as failures.

The least we can do as skeptics is promote strong education initiatives, but it’s hard to see where to begin our push.

One place: the Texas State Board of Education. Elections are coming up, and a handful of the members are facing strong opposition. Check out http://www.teachthemscience.org/ for a rundown of the various SBOE members, their positions, and their opponents.

I didn’t cover this Mansfield, Texas woman’s DIY botox insanity in length when it first became news (though it it did find its way into one of my link-dumps), but there’s some great news: she’s been shut down.

WIRED magazine covered both stories, and did a good job of explaining why self-injecting a toxin is a very bad idea.

These sites are brazenly circumventing regulations that protect consumers from bad or fake drugs and ensure that the chemicals are used correctly. The laws were designed precisely to prevent Americans with little to no medical training from doing things like buying a form of toxin, mixing it with saline and injecting it into their faces.

The web site’s proprieter had a host of made-up credentials, of course, something we’ve come to expect from woo-pushers of all sorts.

The domain’s registration details are private, but medspacanada.com, which refers back to discountmedspa.com, is registered to Cristie Stone, with the same phone number and e-mail address listed on discountmedspa’s website. The physical address listed for medspacanada.com is the home of the Manitoba Society of Pharmacists, which has no record of Stone.

“Not only is Christie [sic] Stone not a member or the Society, I can honestly say that I have never heard her name before,” wrote Jill Ell, executive director of the society, in an e-mail to Wired.com.

…

“Laurie belongs to the Texas Medical Council and is licensed to sell these products to the women that want to use them and understand that it is their responsibility to use them safely,” she wrote.

Wired Science could not find an organization called the Texas Medical Council. It does not maintain a website and has not been mentioned in the press. A representative for the Texas Department of State Health Services had never heard of it.

In any case, after WIRED managed to order and acquire a case of the toxin without even a hint of the word “prescription,” the Texas Attorney General’s office got wind of her and took the necessary steps to shut her down.

D’Alleva faces civil penalties of $25,000 per violation per day for each time she broke the rules for selling prescription drugs under the Texas Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In a post to the website, she claimed to have more than 2,000 customers.

In any case, this was some good work by WIRED, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the Texas Attorney General’s office. I’m glad to see one fewer pseudo-doctor practicing in Texas, and hope to see the trend continue.

Hi Everyone!

This is just a quick (and late!) announcement of the Austin Singers concert being held at 4pm today, Sunday November 22nd, at the University Presbyterian Church on San Antonio St (behind the Scientology building on the Drag). The concert program has an advertisement for the Austin Skeptical Society, so with any luck we’ll see a few new members as a result!

For those of you wondering, yes, Elizabeth is in the choir. I got to see their performance last night, and it was excellent!

More information about the concert can be found here: http://www.austinsingers.org/

Thanks!

One of the most basic arguments against evolution is that “something “this” complicated (as humans)” couldn’t just happen randomly.  While genetic mutation in and of itself is random, what is constantly ignored is the fact that animals (and humans) that experience counterproductive mutations tend to not survive long enough to reproduce!  Indeed, the computer science and electrical engineering disciplines have explicitly copied nature’s approach with evolutionary and genetic algorithms.  In fact this very approach was used to design a digital filter on a product I worked on at National Instruments, as it proved a superior way to design the filter than using explicit, “designed”, approaches to designing the filter.

But if you still aren’t convinced consider this.  Although performing evolutionary experiments is difficult due to the large timescales involved, it is possible if a fast growing organism is used.  Professor Richard E. Lenski at Michigan State University has performed just such an experiment.  He raised over 30,000 generations of E. coli. and provided them an environment short on glucose, on which they subsist, but high in citrate, which normal E. coli. cannot metabolize.  One (although none of the other) of the colonies evolved the necessary mutations to utilize the citrate!  Furthermore, this required not one, but multiple mutations to be effective, proving that even such complex mutations are possible (albiet not as common/likely as single step mutations, as one would naturally expect).  Given this complication, it is not surprising that only colony developed the necessary mutations.

In lieu of something insightful and lengthy, here are a handful of links to feed the skeptic in you:

Feral Camels Plague Australia — (autoplay video, via National Geographic)

Calculating Justice: The Failure of Statistics in the Courtroom — (via New Scientist)

DIY Botox — (via Wired)

Laundry, Tires, and Climate Change — (via New Scientist)

The Virulence of Anti-Vaxxers — (via Cosmic Variance)

Educate Women, Save the Planet — (via Scientific American)

Today, upon logging into facebook, I was utterly and completely horrified to see this in my sidebar:

WTF?

Now, facebook isn’t known for having the best ads, but for some reason this one just ticked me off. Maybe it’s the fact that there is no option for “No, alien abductions are full of crap.” Maybe it’s the fact that they’re pushing another woo-stupid movie for the holiday season. Or, maybe it’s the fact that the poll numbers looked like this:

Oh come ON!

69,000+ people had voted. On an advertisement for a movie. And almost half responded “yes.”

There is some poignant commentary to be made here about what people will believe. Something like: “If people believe in alien abductions, as absurd as the entire concept is, what else will they believe?” Or maybe: “Given that people are willing to accept anecdotal evidence and quack science as proof of the existence of aliens, what hope do we have of convincing them the value of real science and real evidence?”

Now, I know that it’s hardly a scientific poll. But even so, the Humanist in me would really, really love to believe that fewer people have their heads so full of woo that they’ll buy into anything.

Seen any other woo ads or polls? Let us know in the comments or in the forums!

Edit: It just doesn’t end! A refresh brought up this nonsense, from the same culprits:

...do aliens care about daylight savings?

A few rapid-fire links, pictures, and things of interest for Austin Skeptics:

• Health authorities troubled by number of healthy people dying from H1N1 virus – via Austin American-Statesman
• Prophecy fail – via Fail Blog
• Mistaking Beauty For Truth – via an older Cosmic Variance post
• Autotuned Sagan (as if you haven’t seen this yet) – via Cosmic Variance
• More Autotuned Science – via Pharyngula

Apologies if anyone showed after 7, but after I was at the pub alone for an hour I made the executive decision (as the only member present) to cancel the meeting.

Others can and will explain, better than I, why you ought to get vaccinated. Doctors, scientists, and senior skeptics will forever be able to describe why homeopathic alternatives are bupkis, and why herd immunity can tolerate a small percentage who go unvaccinated.

Unfortunately, in an article posted today over at New Scientist, pollsters from the University of Michigan have found that up to 40% of parents aren’t going to have their children vaccinated against H1N1:

In the US summer outbreak, the age group most hospitalised was children under 4. Yet 40 per cent of US parents say they won’t vaccinate their kids, according to a poll by the University of Michigan.

Many parents and health workers argue that swine flu is not dangerous enough to justify the potential side effects of a vaccine, but this week there were fresh warnings that the virus can cause serious illness. In Canada and Mexico respectively, 17 per cent and 41 per cent of people admitted to intensive care with the virus have died. In Mexico, half had no underlying health problems; in Canada 70 per cent had no major illness beforehand.

That’s a major, major problem. Kids–being kids–are unhygienic, virus-spreading creatures. If 40% go unvaccinated, outbreaks among them are inevitable: herd immunity only protects the freeloaders when 90% or more are vaccinated. Children under 4 are in the highest-risk group for hospitalization, and the numbers suggest that if you get it bad enough to be hospitalized, it’s bad enough to kill you.

One thing I’ve noticed–in the comment sections in many blogs, on tv, in homeopath rants and antivax rhetoric–is how fear is affecting the decision to vaccinate. Homeopaths don’t fear H1N1 because they believe that water will save them. Antivaxers may be afraid of swine flu, but they’re even more afraid of the shots that save lives and eradicate diseases. On top of that, chances are that you’re average Joe doesn’t fear H1N1; the outbreaks haven’t been severe enough, haven’t hit close enough to home to affect them.

I suspect that’ll change this coming winter, of course. Call me a pessimist, but with idiocy as rampant as it seems to be over health issues, the US population is bound to suffer a handful of major outbreaks and many more casualties. A peek at the news shows that the deaths have already started in and around Austin.

Of course, every year thousands of people die from regular influenza. What makes H1N1 different is that it appears to have a high kill percentage, and that’s nothing to sneeze about.

I’m getting vaccinated later this week… How about you?