At issue is that the "improvements" Heartland and Discovery want to make are watering down the science and muddying the water to promote their particular religious, cultural, and economic interests. They have no interest in objective science education (and in fact strongly oppose what they refer to as "materialism" —…

I do not think you understand what science is.

Indeed, scientific ignorance has worked so well for our nation thus far, so why stop now? I propose we drop reading and mathematics standards, too. How dare the state tell little Johnny how to spell 'liberry' or indoctrinate him into the post-modernism of negative integers?

Have != exposed. Otherwise, I suspect that is the rationale.

That's not how medical recommendations work. Studies are done, and if the demonstrated benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks by a reasonable margin, then a recommendation is made. Doctors should not recommend a drug or procedure if there is insufficient evidence that it will work.

My guess, and it's just that, is that by 27 most sexually active men have already been exposed to HPV.

The CDC only recommends it for people aged between 13 and 26. Over age 26 the best protection against cervical cancer is cervical exams — clinical studies showed no benefit from the vaccine for people over 26.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfac…

If you're trying to figure out why bacon gets brown when fried, that's science. If you're just trying to fry a tasty strip of bacon, that's fine art.

I don't even know why I'm replying to this... I'm obviously inviting abuse. Whatever.

Not everything under the banner of psychology, like social psychology, is science (in my opinion), but quite a lot of psychology *is*. Cognitive psychology, the study of perception, memory, and reasoning, is definitely science. It…

My experience, being a physicist, was that I knew a lot more probability, but formal statistical methods (like hypothesis testing and experimental design) got short shrift.

There is science in cooking, but that doesn't mean it's science. There is science in perspective drawing, too, but I think most people would classify portrait painting as a fine art. Not everything that employs measurement and renders recipes is science. Quantification and formalism are a necessary but not…

Cooking is to basic chemistry as portrait drawing is to basic optics.

I'm sure the authorization is in the ToS, somewhere. :-)

My point is that the measure is meaningless without the knowing the distribution and how that distribution relates the variable for which it is an instrument. If you believe that it is really easy to collect and compute all this data with the tools your (or I) have available, then go right ahead. I really would be…

It's not at all obvious that people are only highlighting the introduction. What this evidence supports is that a lot of people like what they read in the introduction. Imagine that a book has 10 chapters and three people read it. All three highlight one passage in the introduction. The first person also…

Sure. However, from the handful of popular science texts I've read, like "A Brief History of Time", much of the philosophy of the book was front-loaded. The conclusions are not any stronger than the introduction. They don't have a plot dynamic like one sees in fiction.

I would expect that academic and popular science texts would by their nature have a lot of the most popular and and succinct selections near the beginning where the introduction is. This is where the author sets out their thesis and tone.

EDIT to add: There is no reason to think that the distribution of popular…

Well, I think we're all a lot safer, now, until some genius decides that "vaccination causes atheism".

Maybe to avoid the shitstorm, one can just agree that pregnancy may be a desirable condition to many, but it is not risk free. A doctor should not intentionally put a patient at risk without her informed consent.

What does this have to do with ``theoretical physics work of Stephen Wolfram?''