 Hi, guys. So I just wanted to record a little, I don't know, retort, reply, comment on the Lab 1 reports that I graded today. And one of the biggest reasons why I want to record this little response is because I'm concerned about some of the lab reports that came in, because it makes me feel like maybe you missed the point or some of you missed the point of the lab activity. So we looked at the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And the goal of the process was for you to have a conversation with your group mates around the evidence that is present for whether or not the MMR vaccine is related to or is a part of the cause of autism. And part of, you know, I don't, this is something that I definitely do in my face-to-face classes, and I do this lab activity in the very beginning of the semester because I think it addresses some really important, like take-homes for the whole semester and for your whole life, I hope. And that's the importance of being a critical consumer of information and being a scientifically literate human, like being able to look at someone's science and do a legitimate analysis of whether or not you think it's legit. I want to make sure that everybody knows that all the research out there points to no link between autism and vaccines. And I know this. I've seen the research. I've looked at the evidence. I'm fully aware of this. And 12 years ago, when I was giving vaccinations or making the decision about whether or not to vaccinate my children, it was a horrible, like heart rate, and I know this. I know the evidence. I know the science, and it was still an incredibly challenging choice to make. I remember sitting there with my tiny, screaming, sad human who was about to get poked with needles and thinking, am I going to regret? Like I was very aware of that moment and the hype of my choice to vaccinate in spite of people, a large population of people, very vocal people saying there was an increased risk of my child ending up with autism if I did proceed with the vaccination. I decided to vaccinate my kid anyway. I knew the science, but it was still scary. And my point in sharing that is it's really important that we are super conscious about our emotions and what can come up with our emotions and how our emotions can sometimes take us out of a logical space. And I think, I mean, now more than ever, we need to be critical consumers of information. We have to be asking hard questions about where did that information come from and how do you know that? And I think it, I mean, this weekend of, I mean, there's lots of stuff in the media right now that is pointing to this kind of hyped up what is legit, what's a real fact and what's an alternative fact or like what's a, I think we need to talk about that too in this class. I think we need to talk about the fact that there are facts that are supported by evidence. There are perceptions and perceptions are variable and I want to bring up like dude, I'm sorry to do this tall y'all, but anybody who has been in social media over the last couple of years, you've probably seen this, right? Like you've seen the dress and whether or not it's blue or black, blue and black or white and gold. And I mean, I remember seeing that in Facebook and being like, are you kidding me? Like why would I even care until I found out that the dress was actually black and blue but I was totally seeing white and gold. So then my brain is like, dude, what? Seriously? That dress is blue black and I know you probably won't believe me but I absolutely, like I still see total white and gold right there. I've tried to see it as blue and black. This article is actually kind of nice because it actually shows you the real color of the dress. Like there's no question that that dress, that one right there totally is blue and black. That's the real color of the dress. I know enough anatomy and physiology to know that my brain sees this sort of backlit scene right here and like fills in the blanks. Like my brain says, oh, it's a backlit image which means that my brain sort of adjusts the colors. I know that that's a perception issue. Perceptions, we can have different perceptions of the exact same thing. It's one of the reasons why eyewitnesses are really crappy evidence for something because eyewitnesses are relying on perception. Science tries really hard not to rely on perception. That's part of the inference versus conclusion conversation that was a little bit tricky for you guys in the lecture this week. Something that is a fact is supported by evidence and always, especially with this vaccine situation, the concept of vaccines causing autism was based on a paper where there was fraud. Like this piece of research, number one, it wasn't science that was intending to study whether or not autism was caused by the MMR vaccine and it was based on parents' memories and saying, oh my God, yeah. It might be a vaccine. Yeah, my kid had the vaccine. Like a week before they turned autistic and I mean, if I have an autistic kid and it happened all of a sudden, like I would totally link it to vaccines that were given, I mean, that makes sense or if somebody came up to me and said, you know, there's a disease at the zoo that is, you know, it's causing autism and did you go to the zoo and I'd be like, oh my God, I totally took my kids to the zoo. That is how I got autism. That's how my kids got autism. The point is that it's easy for us to make leaps like that, especially when we're emotional about things and in the process of science you need to be really, really, really critical. I think you also have to be compassionate and open-minded and listen to each other and that's one of the things. That's one of the reasons why I want you to have group conversations around your lab activities. The future labs that we have going on in here, we won't have a controversial subject like this. This really is the only case study that we deal with. All the rest of the labs have really prescriptive tasks, activities that we're going to do. But the conversations that you have, like take advantage of your lab group and really use them to make sure that you're understanding the material. In grading the lab reports, some of you guys didn't get full credit and part of that is because of the, yeah, I didn't want, dude, this lab was cool. It was fun. Or, yeah, I'm not going to get my kid vaccinated because it could cause autism. I wanted an analysis of how the process of science was related to this and that's your task to get in there and really think deeply about this stuff and then communicate it to me. It doesn't have to be long and I definitely, like if you can get to the meat of the matter in fewer words, by all means fewer words is good. So give me a holler if you guys have questions about the upcoming lab but I just wanted to make sure everybody was good on this. Now, I'm posting this in an announcement which means that you can actually comment below if I get a discussion post. I would love to know if you want to chime in. I would love to know if the video announcement is better or if you would prefer to me to just write up this, my thoughts and my analysis. Okay.