Hypography Science Forums: TheFaithfulStone - Viewing Profile - Hypography Science Forums

So, I've always considered the "Vaccines Cause Autism" crowd to be more than a little bit crazy. But lately I've been seeing some kind of disturbing trends that make me think that even if they're barking up the wrong tree with the thimerosal thing, that they might actually be on to something.

Anyway, it turns out that my wife is likely suffering from lupus, which although a serious disorder is not (usually) life threatening. While researching lupus, we found out that Live vaccines are contraindicated for people with SLE. Whether this is because SLE sufferers are susceptible to infection from live vaccines or because the treatments for SLE leave them susceptible is an open question.

Furthermore, there's some evidence that certain types of autism are linked to autoimmune disease in family members.
Autism is an autoimmune disease
Troubling case study
Outspoken neurobiologist who things autism is autoimmune related.

And then today, on Slashdot I saw this
Immuno suppressant drug restores function in autistic mice.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that my infant son, with a family history of autoimmune disorders on both sides of the family may be at greater risk receiving live virus vaccines like MMR than not.

Measles, mumps, rubella are all bad, yes, but not really THAT frequently encountered. Autism strikes me as much, much worse.

Somebody with a medical background point me to appropriate journal articles. I posted this in another location and was frankly appalled by the response that I got - telling me that I was no better than a child abuser for even considering such a thing as skipping the MMR.

The information that I'm operating on is not from a bunch of hippies with crystals - these are all peer reviewed articles in respectable medical journals by real scientists and doctors. (Of course Halton Arp is a real scientist, and ALSO a anti-big-bang maniac.)

If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong here - but I need some hard facts, not just strident repetition of the conventional wisdom.

TFS

What's the equation for graphing a "gravity well" in three dimensions?

Assume that I can make the constants whatever I want.

I'm wanting to arrive at something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_well

Help. I've forgotten basic algebra. 1/r^2 just makes an unlimited parabola.

tfs

Okay, so I'm helping the wife with a project and I need a little help.

We have a Data Set consisting of approximately 500 items which may (or may not) have some number of traits.

I don't want to give away too much of the specifics, because she'd be pissed off at me if I disclosed too much of the research specifics, as part of the data is... not classified, perse ... but private.

So, I'm using people as an example - even though that's not really the data set.

We have

Bob: Who has blue eyes, brown hair, a large nose, and light skin, freckled skin.
Sue: Blue eyes, blonde hair, small nose and light skin, unfreckled skin.
Greg: Green eyes, red hair, large nose and light, unfreckled skin.
Dave: Brown eyes, brown hair, large nose and dark, unfreckled skin.

Now, the best way to show the relationship between all of these people since there is no dependent variable is to use a Venn / Euler diagram. Although, in this abbreviated data set you wouldn't find it for instance, that's how you find out that people with blond hair rarely have freckles, and that dark skinned folks have brown eyes and brown hair, since the overlap is small.

And this works great with smaller data sets of less than about 100 or so. However, when you get up into those larger areas it becomes increasing difficult to represent all of the relationships with a Venn/Euler diagram. Of course, if we had 200 items, we can easily drop all sets with a membership of less than two individuals as being less significant than more numerous ones, but we still wind up with having difficulty representing all significant overlaps. By way of example, try drawing the nose size or freckles on that diagram using only circles!

Currently, we are using a program called "VennMaster" which is for doing this kind of analysis on genetic data, (I belive it called "synteny" in this sense) and it's working pretty well. However, the well-formedness rules for Venn diagrams specify that each proportional shape must be perfectly round, which is why it's difficult to represent the data accurately. VennMaster doesn't do Venns/Eulers with relaxed well-formedness rules. Does anybody know of a program that does?

Now, we realize that this is ideally suited for Bayesian networking / decision tree analysis work, but the statistical methods employed in the field that she works in make it ... problematic to get too in depth with those kinds of statistics and machine learning problems. She's going to address it, and talk briefly about using those kinds of methods in the future, but even looking at her data set in this way is a big step. The Venn Diagrams are a huge improvement, and it's already going to be an uphill battle to get them adopted as a valid way of looking at things.

In the example above for instance, the CW on this would be to say "Bob's Dutch, Sue's Swedish, and Greg is Irish, and Dave is Zulu" and leave it at that. It doesn't tell you much about the similarities of Bob, Sue, or Greg, or how those difference might have arisen, or what the relationship between Dutch, Swedish, Irish, and Zulu is. It doesn't tell you that all of those people live in the same neighborhood.

So anyway, the questions are:

1) Anybody know of a Euler / Venn program with relaxed well formedness rules that could help draw this out?

2) Anybody know of a good BASIC introduction to Set Theory / Bayesian networking stuff.

3) Any tips on touching on decision tree anaylsis and influence diagrams here? They seem like they could be well applied to this problem. (For instance, skin color is more strongly correlated with eye and hair color.)

TFS

[aside: It seems that the idea of a directed acyclic graph and Venn Diagrams are largely the same, but that they show the relationship in a different way - with the dag showing a predictive model, while the Venn is primarily descriptive? see here.]

So today on NPR, I was listening to NASA administrator Michael Griffin hand Gregg Easterburg his head (which was satisfying) and then whammo he drops this one.

Michael Griffin said:

Damn it man! That's fantastic - you were doing such good job of making Gregg Easterburg look like a concern troll, and then you pop that one off. Now, admittedly, you were saying that combating global warming isn't one of NASA's tasks (and it shouldn't be) but the little bit about 'what's right in climate' is either -

A) Far to scientific and parsed a statement for most people to comprehend. That is - if he actually meant it. (Well, maybe we just got lucky until now, and the climate is only metastable, and we need to be thinking about how we're going to adapt to a different one.) But then, why not just say that?

or

Weak scientific justification for a political position.

Anyway, as much as I hate the anti-NASA crowd - whose main reason for not building a 'motel 6 on the moon' - is that they want that little bit of money spent on their own pet projects - Griffin's comment makes him sound like a political hack. Despite the fact that's he probably done more for NASA in the last two years than O'Keefe did in four, it's still frustrating.

Now we'll have all the environmentally concerned-but-not-crazy looking askance at NASA.

Grrr....

TFS

What is with the high number of cranks around here of late?

An (incomplete) thread list from the side.


Tribal morality, Lack of...

A long rant by someone about why they're so abused.


Massless Energy & Nothing.

Anti-relativity time-cube junk as far as I can decipher.

Reverse Racism

Has somehow descended into beating back holocaust deniers.


TIME EXPLAINED (v2.1)

WHY WON'T THIS THREAD DIE?!

Steady State Universe

Haven't read it but the vibe isn't good from the get go...

Was Einstein Right when he...

Yes. Unless he thought he was wrong. Then he turned out to be right.

Flags on the Moon

Moon landings are real. Thank you.

Global Warming a fake?

No.



Maybe I just haven't been here long enough, but it seems like the ratio of "Crazy Timecube Relativity Deniers" vs "Actual Interesting Science" has gone up around here.

Or maybe I just come at the wrong times, when all the interesting threads are inactive. Don't get me wrong, I've made my share of stinkers in the past - but it seems we've got a high number of people who come in, make semi-coherent posts about how "Einstein SuX0rz!" and then are never heard from again.

(Debatably better than having them stick around...)

TFS