Nerd Industries: Stuart Robinson's blog

I was just reading an article from Reuters about the congressional grilling of oil executives. One of them produced a pretty laughable quote:

"Imposing punitive taxes on American energy companies ... will discourage the sustained investments needed to continue safeguarding U.S. energy security," Exxon senior vice president Stephen Simon said in testimony."

Oil companies don't safeguard U.S. energy security. They produce and sell oil, at a profit. Expecting oil companies to safeguard anything but their own profits is ridiculous. What's needed for American energy security is reduced dependence on foreign oil, and expecting the oil companies to help with that is on par with expecting drug dealers to run rehab clinics.

This morning I heard about the protestors who unfurled pro-Tibet flags on the Golden Gate Bridge. I found an article about the event in the San Jose Mercury News. Amazingly, at the bottom of the article, there was an ad for Chinese weight loss secrets! Oops. Fail.

This month's issue Computational Linguistics has a great article by Mark Steedman entitled "On Becoming a Discipline". In it, he talks about the success and prestige of physics compared to computational linguistics and provides an interesting analogy between the following propositions (the first being a quote from a physicist):

1. "Everything is made of particles, so physics is very important."
2. Human knowledge is expressed in language. So computational linguistics is very important.

Since I work as a computational linguist, I'm very sympathetic to the analogy. But I have to admit that it contains a few leaps of logic. Let's spell out the logic a bit more explicitly:

3. Everything is made of particles. Physics is the study of particles, so physics is very important.
4. Human knowledge is expressed in language. Computational linguistics is the study of language, so computational linguistics is very important.

When stated in this way, it's clear that there is a defect in (4). Computational linguistics is the study of language but only to the extent that linguistics is the study of language and computational linguistics is a subfield of linguistics. Therefore, the proposition is more correctly stated as follows:

5. Human knowledge is expressed in language. Linguistics is the study of language, so linguistics is very important.

In order to justify the proposition that computational linguistics per se is very important, we would need to identify computational linguistics with linguistics or justify the importance of computational linguistics over other subfields of linguistics. That, I think, would be subject to controversy.

The idea that autism is caused by vaccinations has been floating around in the media recently. The first episode of the television series Eli Stone revolved around the issue (NY Times) and recently I saw an episode of Larry King Live in which Jenny McCarthy very aggressively asserted a strong link between vaccinations and various health problems, including autism.

Let me say up front that I support additional research on autism, and I don't reject out of hand a possible link between the two. However, I got the impression from McCarthy's behavior on Larry King that the case is already closed in her mind. That's troubling, because the issue has wide-reaching public policy implication. And the science is by no means clearcut, as shown by a recent article in The Economist.

The article provides some evidence that the increase in autism diagnosis rates are not just because autism is on the rise. It's also because there is an increased awareness of the disease and therefore fewer misdiagnoses of autism as something else (e.g., a specific language impairment, for example). In other words, it isn't necessarily the case that autism is skyrocketting. Maybe doctors are just getting better at recognizing it. (It's an open question.)

But the bigger problem is that, if it can be established definitely that vaccinations cause autism in some cases, and there is no way of changing the vaccinations to reduce this risk (say, by eliminating some harmful ingredient), there is still a cost-benefits trade-off between the potential harm caused by vaccinating children and the potential harm caused by not vaccinating them, as Jenny McCarthy herself acknowledged (albeit in a somewhat simple-minded fashion) when she said, "An increase in the measles, I'll take that way over autism any day." But it's not just measles. It's hepatitis, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, smallpox, and polio (among others). Is the potential threat of autism so great that we're willing to put up with more children contracting these diseases instead? I guess that's the $64,000 question.