Thursday, July 1, 2010

Knowledge Acquisition Through Comic Books (Homeopathy and Vaccination edition)

This is cool. This guy writes explanations of scientific issues. Lots of people do that. But this guy does it with comics.

First up, Homeopathy. It's really good. After that, try Vaccination and Autism.

The vaccination one was especially interesting to me, since we had a lot of questions about vaccination with our kids. Here's a couple extra links:
  • Alison Singer, executive vice president of Autism Speaks, stepped down to form a new autism research group. Her reason for leaving? Despite study after study that showed no link between autism and vaccination (some of those studies by her own organization), Autism Speaks insisted on continuing to look for a link. Every dollar that goes towards this non-link is a dollar that won't go towards actually finding a cure.

  • Here's a study showing autism numbers aren't actually going up. Instead, what used to be diagnosed as "mental retardation" is now being more accurately diagnosed as autism. Actually, combined rates of retardation and autism have decreased in recent years, possibly due to better prenatal care.

More information on Wakefield here if you want it.

1 comment:

Dan said...

good reads man, interesting stuff