Bieber Fever

Newspapers had a hay-day last year following the publication of a paper out of the University of Ottawa that discussed Bieber Fever. Some articles included:

• Science Confirms: Bieber Fever Is More Contagious Than the Measles (The Atlantic)
• Bieber fever is worse than measles, according to actual science (National Post)
• Bieber fever more contagious than measles, claim scientists (The Week)
• 'Bieber Fever' more infectious than measles (CBC)

Of all of these, I'm most disappointed in the CBC - I often pay attention to the CBC, and it's discouraging to know that they might be equally as wrong about other things as they are about this.

What's going on here? A professor from the University of Ottawa published a paper where a new model was developed to look at Bieber Fever, and the paper does indeed include the quote "It follows that Bieber Fever is extremely infectious, even more than measles, which is currently one of the most infectious diseases. Bieber Fever may therefore be the most infectious disease of our time." Oh my god, those newspapers must be right! Science has confirmed our worst fears! This must be backed by hard facts and empirical evidence!

Well, no. The paper appears to be a chapter in a book that examines diseases through various mathematical models. Each of the papers in the book (four of which are written by the Bieber Fever author) takes on a different disease and models it, then examines mathematically the effects of different approaches to the disease, like pulse vaccination or changes in infection or relapse rate. I can't comment on the quality of the other chapters in the book, but they seem to be well-developed and certainly based on real diseases. 

The Bieber Fever paper is a little bit different though. First of all, it is clearly written in a tongue-in-cheek manner that I think flew over the heads of most major newspapers. The humor and sarcasm actually make it quite an entertaining read, and if the piece was written as a humorous look into a creative way of adapting a disease model (which is my suspicion), then it could certainly be a fun case study for biology or math students. It is definitely not something worth raising alarms over in newspapers, though, as the model's predictions aren't validated against any actual statistics and its math is misleading, allowing them to draw this ridiculous comparison to measles that grabbed newspaper attention.

Mathematical disease modelling is a pretty cool field. The most basic model that can be developed is an SIR model - a population is divided up into three groups (Susceptible, Infected, and Removed), and people move through the groups depending on disease parameters and the size of the groups at a given time. For instance, if a lot of people are Infected, the chance of a healthy Susceptible person getting infected is quite high (perhaps due to lots of people sneezing on them), but as more people are Removed (happily by recovery and immunity, or sadly by death), it may become harder for the disease to propagate. 

In this model, βIS represents the rate that healthy people become sick - effectively, it is the chance that in a given time a Susceptible person will encounter an Infected person, multiplied by the chance that that encounter will transmit the disease. On the other end, γI represents the rate at which sick people become healthy, effectively the number of Infected people divided by how long it takes them to get healthy (or die, I suppose).

As long as the rate of people becoming sick (βIS) is larger than the rate people are recovering (γI), then the disease will reach an epidemic of some type - otherwise it will quickly die out. For simple models, the ratio of these rates is known as the Basic Reproduction Number (R₀) of a disease, and correlates to the number of new diseases a sick person will cause. This is pretty easy to visualize - if the ratio R₀ is bigger than 1, then by the time someone recovers from their illness they’ll have spread it to at least one more person, and the disease will grow. If you're unlikely to make someone else sick when you fall ill, the disease’s R₀ will be less than 1, and the disease will go away without much of an outbreak. 

For reference, the flu typically has an R₀ of 2-3, HIV is around 2-5, Smallpox is 5-7, and Measles is 12-18. For every person who got Measles, the disease was so infectious and you had it for long enough that you were expected to transmit it to between twelve and eighteen people before you either recover or die.

Frightening stuff. Fortunately, analyses of diseases with these mathematical models shows that as long as a certain proportion of a population is immunized by vaccine, epidemics can be avoided. That proportion needed is (1-1/R₀) - so a typical flu needs 60% immunization to prevent outbreak, and measles needs over 90%. If you're still unsure about getting a flu shot, just remember that if a population doesn't hit ~60% immunity, it is very much worse off for those who don't have the vaccine or who are otherwise susceptible.

The Bieber paper develops a more complicated mathematical disease model. It looks something like this:

The author, Robert Smith? (not a typo), proposed a model where media effects have a large impact on the disease. Positive media (P in the picture) can increase the rate at which healthy people become Bieber-infected, and can also make recovered individuals susceptible to re-infection, and Negative media can heal the sick or immunize the susceptible (how miraculous).

Using the numbers that Smith? has in his paper, the spread of Bieber Fever in a typical school of 1,500 students would look something like this:

After about 2 months, the system reaches an equilibrium with about 85% of people being Bieber Fanatics. The paper makes a couple of assumptions: first of all, people are assumed to "grow out" of Bieber Fever after a period of two years. People are also expected to interact with everyone else in the population at least once a month, and have a transmission rate of 1/1500. This means that the average infected person will infect 1 person a month for 24 months, giving Bieber Fever an R₀ of 24.

SWEET MOTHER OF GOD IT'S WORSE THAN MEASLES!?!?

Not even a little bit! The transmission rate is absolutely just assumed out of nowhere - no stats, evidence, or explanation given. Similarly, the length of the disease is made up, with the explanation "But let’s be honest, we all know which one it really is, don’t we?" (Smith?, p. 7). Essentially, the authors were given a calculation where they had to assume three numbers and multiply them together, and newspapers are surprised that the answer to the multiplication was high. Even the mechanics of the positive and negative media effects are questionable, though the model they developed could help provide insight into other diseases with relapse mechanisms.

The paper is cute, clever, and provides a mathematical analysis of a convoluted set of differential equations - for all of these things it serves a nice purpose as a tongue-in-cheek entry into a textbook examining mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. But newspapers taking essentially the result of an unfounded set of assumptions out of proportion and reporting them as "Science Confirms!" will always annoy me to no end.

One last thing. This is what a graph would look like if the same school was hit with measles:

Now that's an epidemic - three people sick can infect up to 1,200 in less than a week. Remember this when deciding whether or not to immunize your baby.

In Defense of Fluoride

Recently, the #yegvote twitter feed has been occupied with a lot of discussion about water fluoridation, particularly from and against mayoral candidate Curtis Penner (including him tweeting a bibliography of 70 consecutive journal articles early Thursday morning). As has been pointed out, a lot of the twitter debate has devolved into personal attacks on both sides, but the question of water fluoridation is important and worth discussing on its merits alone.

First of all, some fun fluoridation facts!

• low concentrations of fluoride in your mouth reduces the rate at which your enamel breaks down,
• fluoride is often naturally present in water all over the world in different concentrations,
• about 5% of the world's population has fluoride added to the water supply at low concentrations (including Edmonton), and
• different studies have shown that the presence of fluoride in water can reduce cavities by between 27 and 40% relative to regular brushing

The ideal concentration for fluoride in water appears to be somewhere between 0.5-1.0 milligrams per liter. This is lower than the natural levels found in lots of communities, and in many parts of the world fluoride concentrations are reduced or even eliminated before being pumped into municipal water supplies.
 

Mr. Penner's platform for mayor includes a lengthy paragraph against water fluoridation, with the first argument referencing the Material Safety Data Sheet for the chemical that's being used in Edmonton, hydrofluosilicic acid. His claim appears to be that since this chemical is listed as corrosive and dangerously reactive, we shouldn't have anything to do with it. This is at best a red herring, and not an argument at all - at the high concentrations that the chemical is stored, very nearly anything is poisonous. We add chlorine to our water supply explicitly to kill living organisms, and its MSDS warnings are even more severe than fluoride. This isn't to say that the concentrated version of the chemical is ok to drink, but the final product in our taps is millions of times less concentrated than the solution the data sheet refers to.
 

 Dropping evil-sounding chemical names and referring to alarming MSDS data sheets can't form an argument in and ofitself. People regularly consume citric acid and acetic acid, whose MSDS data sheets name them as flammable and corrosive and include pages of toxicity warnings, but we enjoy them as orange juice and vinegar. The fact of the matter is that data sheets have to cover all possibilities and naturally make anything sound evil - even the data sheet for plain old boring water has lethal dosage information.
 

Mr. Penner then goes on to reference this Harvard meta-analysis on the effects of fluoride on children. His claim is that the study indicates that "children who do not drink fluoride have a 20% better chance of having high intelligence, whereas those who do drink fluoride have a 9% better chance of developing mental retardation." Oddly enough, the words "mental retardation" and the term "20%" don't show up in the journal article at all. In fact, they write instead that their "results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children's neurodevelopment." Their major finding, actually, is that children who had "high exposure" to fluoride had an IQ that was0.45 points lower than reference children.
 

What constituted "high exposure"? Turns out it ranged from about 3-12 mg/L for most studies. Their reference points - the points the study considered not exposed to fluoride - were between 0.34-2.35 mg/L. In fact, some of the reference healthy populations were drinking water that was two to three timesmore fluoridated than what would ever be allowed in Edmonton's water. An overwhelming majority of the over 70 studies tweeted by Mr. Penner that supposedly support his position deal with high concentrations of naturally-occurring fluoride in India or China, not low concentrations carefully monitored in Canada. So while it most likely is true that high concentrations of fluoride can cause adverse effects, it is far more likely that increasing your intake of any substance by a factor of 5 to 10 over what scientists recommend would be similarly poisonous.
 

It has also been pointed out that Calgary stopped water fluoridation in 2011. This is true - and already has dentists raising alarms about increases in cavities (and don't forget, dentists get less work if people have fewer cavities. They must be really concerned...).
 

With studies showing the positive effects of low concentrations of fluoride, and other studies showing adverse effects only at levels significantly higher than Edmonton's, the scientific argument for those opposing the current fluoride program doesn't seem that strong. The remaining argument is one of policy - is it morally acceptable to add a substance to the water with the goal of treating an entire population?
 

While this is mostly a matter of personal opinion, it is interesting to consider the city’s role and responsibilities in providing water to the public. There is a very defined cost vs. benefit analysis to be made when treating water. No treatment and you'll kill people, add some filters and you'll kill a bunch less - but after a certain point there are massively diminishing returns with regards to how expensive it will be to make water just a little bit safer to drink, with the extreme end being an economically devastating plan to provide everyone with pure distilled water (which, actually, maybe isn't all that ideal after all).
 

If the factors behind water treatment were only economical in nature, then the benefits of saving families hundreds of dollars a year for dental work far outweigh the cost of fluoride at less thana dollar per person. Fluoridation provides a blanket benefit to everyone who drinks tap water, providing unique aid to those who cannot afford regular dental work or perhaps even other sources of fluoride like toothpaste.
 

Water fluoridation has been included with vaccinations and family planning as among the ten greatest public health achievements by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is supported by major health and dental organizations. As mentioned before, the up to 40% decrease in cavities from fluoridated water is in addition to any benefit already achieved from brushing your teeth. Any policy that so easily and effectively provides this much assistance against such a preventable condition as cavities is surely worth keeping around.
 

As long as the fluoride program that Edmonton currently uses continues to be beneficial, and the low concentrations that are used continue to not be dangerous, the program should not be stopped.

Homeopathy: Worse than "Just Water"

In 1796, German physician Samuel Hahnemann first proposed the idea of homeopathy. Based on the concept that "like cures like", homeopathic remedies attempt to cure symptoms suffered by patients by using highly diluted concentrations of a substance that would normally cause the same symptoms. However, these remedies are ineffective, wasteful, and can be damaging if they stop people from seeking real medical attention.

At first glance, the principle behind homeopathy may not seem that far-fetched. For instance, some vaccines are basically just preparations made from a non-life-threatening version of a disease in order to prepare your body to fight off that disease, and vaccines are great. Homeopathy takes this concept – fighting an effect with its own cause - way too far though, well past the point of ridicule.

An actual example from the Canadian Society of Homeopaths is the use of onion juice as a remedy for hay fever. Onions cause runny noses and itchy eyes, and hay fever causes runny noses and itchy eyes. Homeopathy claims that since both of these cause the same symptoms, onion juice can also cure the symptoms of hay fever.

Let me reiterate: homeopathy claims that using more of something that causes your problems will end up curing your problems. They literally claim that two wrongs make a right. Similarly, they claim that oysters can cure indigestion, arsenic stops diarrhea, and mercury can cure chronic pain.

If homeopathy doesn't already seem ridiculous, it's about to. It's quite obviously not a good idea to ingest arsenic and mercury, and homeopathic remedies certainly wouldn't sell if they immediately killed the people who bought them. This is where the second major claim of homeopathy comes into play: the more a remedy is diluted, the more potent its healing powers will be.

While having the obvious advantage of avoiding killing people by directly poisoning them, the dilutions used in most homeopathic remedies don't help the plausibility of homeopathy as a practice. Homeopathic remedies are commonly prepared by performing a series of dilutions by a factor of 100, where the number of dilutions is referred to as the C number of the remedy. For example, they could take one millilitre of an ingredient, add it to 99 millilitres of water and shake it, then take one millilitre of that and add it to a new 99 millilitres of water, and get a 2C solution.  The original number of dilutions proposed by Hahnemann was 30C - a series of thirty 1% dilutions. This is an equivalent ratio of one part active ingredient in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  (1 novemdicillion) parts water.

For reference, a 6C homeopathic solution of salt water is supposed to help with irritability, but that's 40 billion times less concentrated than the salt in the ocean. The amount of liquid that's passed through an average 80 year old by the time they die dissolved in the combined water of all the world's lakes, oceans, and rivers is around 8C. What's intriguing is that if you started with a solution containing on mole of original material, at a dilution of 12C there's only a 60% chance of finding a single molecule of the active ingredient, and at a dilution of 13C, you're looking at pure water. A common over-the-counter homeopathic remedy at 30C isn't just essentially water - it is water.

The most popular homeopathic remedy sold is Ocsilloccinum, a 200C dilution of duck liver that is supposed to help with the flu. There are approximately 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe, so in order to have enough water to get one molecule of duck liver extract in a solution at this dilution, one would need 10³²⁰ universes worth of water. Somehow this is still considered a very potent concentration. Oscillococcinum is labelled as consisting of 0.85 g sucrose and 0.15 g lactose – these are 100% sugar pills.

Homeopathic practitioners can't easily argue with math, and most will readily admit that there is no active ingredient present in the remedies that they sell to patients. Instead, they claim that water has a "memory" and that the dilution and shaking process involved in preparing a homeopathic solution leaves an imprint on the water, thus changing its properties.

There is absolutely no evidence for this. Logically, it also doesn't hold up. As has been pointed out by countless comedians and scientists, it doesn't make any sense that water could remember the tiny amounts of poison once dissolved in it, but forget all the sewage it's come in contact with. Both the ability for water to retain an imprint of a chemical, and its ability to selectively forget other chemicals, would violate basic fundamental laws of physics.

So homeopathy is based on a principle that doesn't make sense, at concentrations that are nonexistent. Yet it is still around. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Homeopathic Hospital has the Queen as their official patron, and homeopathic remedies like Oscillococcinum in France are one of the most common treatments for the flu. Why?

One leading theory is that any perceived benefits of homeopathic water are likely due to a mix of confirmation bias and the placebo effect. Studies have shown that just the act of going to a clean hospital-like environment, listening to a compassionate doctor (or someone perceived to be a doctor), and taking something that you believe to be a medicine can often help with certain conditions. Placebos can have a measurable effect on improving health in certain circumstances, and are well-enough studied that we know a fake needle is more effective than a fake capsule, which is in turn more effective than a fake pill.

Confirmation bias likely also plays an important role in people's opinions on homeopathy. As an example, homeopaths describe a process known as 'homeopathic aggravation' - a temporary worsening of symptoms following a dose of a homeopathic remedy. When a patient takes the dose and then starts to feel worse, the homeopath can claim that's all part of the plan, reassuring the patient and convincing them that the remedy is working. Of course, an alternative explanation for homeopathic aggravation is self-evident - a patient notices they have a runny nose, takes some non-medicine, and then the rest of the flu hits and they claim that's the 'aggravation'. Well, no - that's just how diseases work when they aren't subject to actual medicine.

After hearing these arguments, a homeopath may ask to agree to disagree and claim that since the remedies are so dilute they can't possibly have side effects, but they bring comfort and maybe benefits to the people who buy them, surely there’s no harm in offering it as an alternative medicine.

The harm comes when people spend money on homeopathic remedies, mistaking them for real medicine, instead of going to real doctors. The placebo effect can have noticeable effects on health, but isn't generally capable of curing cancer. Patients with serious medical conditions who forego proven treatments from real doctors put themselves at severe risks they otherwise wouldn't need to experience, much like those who choose to avoid vaccines or sunscreen.

Homeopathy sold alongside real medicine, courtesy of your local Safeway.

Homeopathic remedies do not need to pass the same testing requirements as real medicine to be sold in Canada, but they can still be sold deceivingly on a shelf in a grocery store beside real medicine as though they are equally valid options. Someone desperate for symptom relief who doesn't know any better could easily mistakenly be buying sugar pills and pure water, costing them money and delaying real treatment. This is where the real harm of homeopathy comes from.

Drug regulations require strict testing for a reason, and if homeopathy cannot provide evidence that it works or at least a plausible working mechanism then it should not be portrayed and sold commercially as an equally viable form of treatment.

Light Rail Transit

If I’m on a train going the speed of light and walk from the back to the front, what happens?

I recently got a fun question that highlights a seeming contradiction in what we’ve been taught in physics lessons. On the one hand we’ve been told that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but on the other hand we’ve been told that speeds in the same direction can be added up. So what’s really going on here?

Normally if you’re riding a train going 100 km/h and you walk forward at 5 km/h along the train, those speeds can be added up, depending on the reference point you’re using. Someone sitting on the train would see you walking 5 km/h forward and the outside moving 100 km/h backwards, but someone sitting outside would see you as moving forward at 105 km/h relative to the ground. Similarly, a jet taking off from a moving aircraft carrier gets a helpful speed boost, and firing a gun from that jet massively increases the speed of the bullet.

The problem is that the speed of light is strange. In 1905 Albert Einstein suggested that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the light source and of the observer. That’s insane! No matter how quickly you’re moving towards or away from light, its speed will never change (but its colour will).
This also suggests that simply adding up speeds no longer works when we’re close to the speed of light. Fortunately a fun formula exists that relates speeds at relativity, and it looks something like this:




What’s fancy is that this equation gives the results we'd expect for speeds that are substantially slower than the speed of light, but that no matter how high the speeds are, the result of the equation is still less than light (as long as neither individually is faster than light).

Sadly, the question that’s been asked can’t be solved straight-up because nothing with mass can go faster than the speed of light (trust me, science has tried). But we can still try with something close enough.

The fastest speeds humans have achieved are at the Large Hadron Collider when a proton was accelerated to 99.9999991% the speed of light. That’s only about 10 km/h slower than the supposed universal speed limit. The fastest a human has ever run was Usain Bolt at 37 km/h. Using the equation from before, instead of topping out 27 km/h above the speed of light, Usain Bolt actually only ends up speeding up to 99.9999991000001% of the speed of light. Not really a lot of progress.

As a bonus answer, even though the speed of light isn’t exceeded in this example, other cool things happen to the train. A passenger on the train sees Bolt travelling at 37 km/h, but an observer watching outside would only see him moving one millimeter per hour faster than the speed the train is already moving. A messed-up consequence of this is that the train would appear to flatten to one ten-thousandth of its original length due to Lorentz Contraction. And if that doesn’t boggle your mind, nothing will.

I ain't afraid of no ghosts

What do the Loch Ness monster, crop circles, and spiritualism have in common? Apart from being more or less considered fringe beliefs that have been known to spark intense facebook battles, they were all actually started off as known hoaxes, but continue to thrive to this day.

The most famous Surgeon's Photo picture of the Loch Ness monster, for instance, was produced in 1934 as supposed conclusive proof of the monster, but was revealed by the photographer to be a toy submarine sixty years later. Crop circles were started by two British men in 1978 using only simple tools, who were only revealed in 1991 after their wives got suspicious as to why they were spending so much time together at night and driving so far. Fortunately, apart from a small amount of ruined crops, neither of these hoaxes has caused any real damage - in fact I'm sure the tourism industry of Northern Scotland doesn't mind the Nessie myth at all.

Like the other two examples, the entire practice of spiritualism was also popularized by a massive hoax. Sadly, it has caused real damage.

Spiritualism largely began in the 1840s when the three Fox sisters began touring the United States claiming to be able to communicate with ghosts through mysterious 'rapping' noises. They performed séances for hundreds of people at a time and started the entire practice of communicating with lost loved ones (for a fee, of course). By the time they came clean in 1888 with signed confessions explaining how they achieved their effects, it was too late - the spiritualism movement had taken off and imitators were performing across the world.

Nowadays we live in a world where a third of Americans believe in ghosts, and more than 20% of Americans believe that mediums can talk to them. And if that wasn't bad enough, the worst aspect of this is the massive industry that has sprung up based entirely around exploiting people who've lost loved ones.

Though it is perhaps impossible to ever prove that what a medium does is fake, wouldn't a good place to start be to show that anything they can do could also be done by someone who claims no such powers? You bet it is. Fortunately, that's already been done.

Two of the most common principles put forward as explanations are known as hot reading and cold reading. Hot reading is essentially straight-up cheating - the medium would know something about a deceased individual from beforehand, tells the bereaved about it, and moves on. This is often accomplished through interactions beforehand with the individuals, planting repeat customers in large audiences, or, in one famous faith-healing example, having individuals fill out information cards beforehand and having them read out to the presenter using an ear piece.

Cold reading is much more subtle, and often involves a bit of psychology and manipulation. Commonly an on-stage medium will start with exceptionally vague statements such as "I'm getting a George. Who's George?" and will toss it out to an audience. Chances are that in an audience of a couple hundred people, either someone there will be named George, or will know a dead person named George, and if they have already paid to be there and want to contact their relative, they'd think this 'spirit' is for them. If that member of the audience were to stand up and say "My dad was named George!" they have begun to supply the medium with information and have stepped into a trap.

Once the medium has a target, there are a great number of ways they can convince the victim that they're talking to a dead person. Based on simply looking at people and reading their body language, a medium could make a series of educated guesses - if someone's in their forties to sixties they've likely recently lost a parent and most certainly don't have living a grandparent, for instance. Guesses are often stated vaguely enough that they can be recovered from if they turn out to be wrong - in this video, for instance, a medium states that a man's recently-deceased mother comes across as nervous. When she gets no response from him, she recovers by saying "... which is very unusual for her" and continues on about how extroverted she was. There's no way the medium could lose that battle.

Often mediums will make statements that could apply to almost anyone but seem less general than they are - for instance "this individual had an accident involving water" or "this person often wouldn't get stuff done because they are frustrated by the idea of mediocrity and wearied by the idea of starting over." If neither of those could potentially apply to you or someone you know then you're in a very slim minority. Statements like this are known as Barnum Statements - they are often general statements true about most people, but in a certain context can seem very personal.

A willing participant in a medium reading will take a mix of hits and misses from both cold and hot reading and will often end up dropping the misses and exaggerating the hits. When they later tell their friends about the experience, the medium will come across as having amazing powers. A general statement at the beginning of "Who's George?" gets transformed into the medium knowing that your dad was named George, even if you were the one who supplied that information. This is part of a common feature of our brains known as the confirmation bias where we tend to forget evidence that counters our preconceived notions and only remember what supports the conclusions we've already formed.

How about televised showings of live readings? Witness testimony of these suggests that often hours of material will get edited down to a half-hour show in order to boost the apparent success rate of the medium. Cheating? Definitely.

A combination of confirmation bias and Barnum statements is behind lots of other creepy phenomena like psychics, horoscopes, palm-reading, and Tarot cards. Nobody minds being told that they're creative and enthusiastic, but also patient and reliable, even though those are from different Zodiac signs (so you couldn't possibly actually be both!). 

Another favorite method of talking to the dead is the use of Ouija boards. Like crop circles, they were also started one way and have taken off to ridiculous levels of popularity. In the case of Ouija boards, they were started off and patented as a toy in 1890. That doesn't stop modern day mediums from using them to contact the dead, though. Ostensibly the spirits take over people's hands and use them to spell out enigmatic messages 'from beyond'.

Sound spooky? Good thing science can explain it. The leading explanation is known as the ideomotor effect, which is a fancy term for 'subconscious movement'. A great example of this is if you were to close your eyes and really vividly imagine tying your shoes. For a large proportion of the population, your fingers will start to twitch (ask a friend to watch - your eyes are supposed to be closed here). In the case of Ouija boards, people tend to move the cursor on the board to the letters they expect to be revealed, but can be completely unaware of the fact that they were actively moving it.

So though it can't be necessarily disproved, there truly are completely rational explanations for the effects that mediums use to convince people they can talk with the dead. So for this Hallowe'en, things turn out to not be so spooky after all.

Higher Learning

Pick a professional career. Almost any will do. Now really take a moment to visualize how their job is done today - their tools, their projects, all sorts of the stuff that's required by their fields.

Now think about that same profession 300 years ago. Any chance it's changed?

Doctors have progressed from prescribing urine baths and bloodletting to minimally-invasive laparoscopic surgery. Engineers have moved from catapults to Mars rovers, and law enforcement has gone from corrupt court systems to advanced forensics (in most countries, at least). These and other similar advances have been undeniably amazing, and are largely responsible for our currently quality of life.

Sadly, though, one particularly glaring profession has been dragging its heels against this rapid change. Despite the enormous advances over the last hundreds of years, university education has been largely unchanged. For some reason, an overwhelming majority of university classes are still taught by packing vast numbers of students in a theater and being talked to for an hour. Tweed jackets have come and gone, and the use of powerpoint may have sped things up, but by and large the methods used to teach are virtually unchanged.

Courses are still taught largely by talking at students, assigning readings and homework, and then giving grades based on exams. Exams themselves are still mostly just forcing students to cram material for a couple days beforehand, then stuffing students in a room for two hours and making them answer random questions about the previous forty hours of lecture.

Why is this still the standard? How likely is it that, of all professions, how we teach people more or less peaked three hundred years ago? Why is it that the most common way of judging how well someone has learned is to cram them into a room and force them to recite things, and why on earth should the grading that results from that two hour test be worth up to 70% of their grade? The case has been made before that universities should get students focusing on learning how to learn, instead of what often seems to be the focus of getting students learning how to write exams, and I totally agree.

There have been some pretty exciting developments in expanding education options recently, though. For example, the Khan Academy has more than 3,300 video lessons and interactvie exercises covering math all the way from preschool arithmetic to first-year calculus, which are free for anyone to take. The Academy also covers basic sciences, humanities, and finance.

If that isn't what you're looking for, why not learn a language? The BBC offers free courses on all the major European languages, and essential phrases for 40 languages. If you're interested in something less structured, free lecture videos on hundreds of topics can be found anywhere online to anyone who's really interested.

What's particularly cool, though, are the opportunities that are becoming available for a more formalized education. Recently, three of the biggest names in education (MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard) joined together to offer advanced university courses for topics ranging from solid state chemistry to artificial intelligence. These even offer 'certificates of completion' - certainly worth putting on a resumé, even if they don't have quite the same weight as an official transcript. Registration for the courses is open right now, and I strongly suggest you take a look at what's being offered.

The advantage of this new-found variety in fairly high-level education options is that it may (hopefully) end up pushing the envelope for education options in universities. Many post-secondary programs are starting to allow more open-ended education, such as the option to learn by correspondence or online, and with so much knowledge so freely available we may yet see a change in the 'classical' approach to lectures.

And for those of you who truly are here to learn how to learn, I strongly suggest taking a look at some of the links - I can guarantee there's something out there you'll find fascinating.

Scientific Illiteracy

In 1998 British physician Andrew Wakefield was offered £400,000 to publish an article claiming the vaccine against Measles, Mumps, and Rubella could lead to autism. The article was funded by lawyers preparing for an anti-vaccine lawsuit, and despite the fact that his results could not be reproduced and were dismissed by an overwhelming majority of researchers, a massive and ultimately deadly panic swept across the world. Vaccination rates dropped across Europe opening the doors to completely preventable outbreaks, children were killed or permanently disabled, and an estimated $25 million in avoidable hospital bills were accumulated due to completely avoidable MMR outbreaks.

It ultimately took a long and unnecessary campaign by researchers and health professionals to re-prove the safety of the MMR vaccine, but the scientific agreement hasn't quite been translated to the public - in fact today about 48% of Americans either don't trust or are unsure about the safety of vaccines, largely based on that one fraudulent article.

Vaccines are a dramatic example of the consequences of a public that doesn't trust or doesn't understand science, but they are absolutely crucial to public safety. Not getting vaccinated is not only a hazard to yourself but also to everyone around you. Sadly modern outbreaks of completely preventable diseases, such as the recent Whooping Cough outbreak, are reminders of the impact of ignoring science.

Studies have shown, though, that in general the public has a very poor understanding of some fairly basic concepts. Take for example these survey results on scientific literacy:

• 6% of Americans don't believe smoking can cause lung cancer
• 13% don't know that plants produce the oxygen we breathe
• 20% aren't aware the center of the earth is very hot (and are presumably very confused by volcanoes)
• 25% still think the sun goes around the earth
• 46% don't know it takes the earth a year to orbit the sun (but were probably still stumped by the previous question), and
• 52% fell hard for the Flintstones and believe dinosaurs and humans coexisted

Admittedly none of these specific misconceptions of science are likely to be dangerous to an individual, apart from perhaps lung cancer and smoking. What's instead frightening is that these are all concepts that are taught during or before high school, and suggest a public that is largely ignorant or apathetic to some of the most fundamental concepts we rely on. Even more horrifying is that these percentages have tended to only get worse between 2001 and 2010.

Regardless, though, of whether the misunderstanding of science is harmful on an individual basis or not, this attitude towards science of either apathy or automatic distrust is very dangerous for society. Distortion of science for personal or political benefit is very common, and has even been used explicitly to cause harm.

Two particular government exploitations or distortions of scientific understanding come to mind. The eugenics movement in the early 20th century claimed that human breeding needed to be controlled in order to advance our evolution, and was pushed ferociously by political groups and individuals around the world. Even countries like Canada and the United States got caught up in the movement, with individuals like Tommy Douglas and Alexander Graham Bell advocating for restrictions on who could marry and have children, and certain provinces and states forcibly sterilized individuals who were considered unfit to breed. The movement ultimately led to the rationalization of murders in the name of cleansing in Nazi Germany. It ultimately took the combination of the end of World War II and the further understanding of genetics to bring about the end of the vast majority of eugenic based programs, but not after massive personal and societal loss.

On the other hand, Soviet Russia took control of science and dismissed genetics entirely as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", instead adopting the practices of Lysenkoism for agricultural development. This explicit adoption of absolutely useless techniques held back Russian understanding of genetics for decades, and resulted in the firing, imprisonment, and execution of legitimate Russian scientists.

But misunderstanding of science still harms us daily. Despite court findings of fraud, millions of dollars a year of "ion bracelets" are still being sold by pretending to be scientific. Fictionalized versions of polygraph tests have led to the belief that they're foolproof - and private polygraph examiners have likely been responsible for propagating actual lies - even though psychologists have determined that they really aren't any better than guessing. Some people will often reach out to homeopathy at the expense of medically-proven treatments even though it's been consistently debunked by doctors.

Fortunately it's not all bad. The public acknowledgement of Canadian science journalists like Jay Ingram and Bob McDonald with the Order of Canada recently was an important step for supporting the field, which is undeniably important for keeping people informed, and televised outreach through the Discovery Channel and shows like Mythbusters has done a lot for increasing interest in science topics and critical thinking. Hopefully as science continues to advance we will see fewer opportunities for people to take advantage of people's misunderstanding of it, and more opportunities to get people interested and engaged. We definitely need it.

This was also posted on TheWandererOnline with graphics by Michelle Weremczuk. Check it out!