No, the first step is making sure that you're not comparing apples to oranges. Looking for any potential causes comes after that. Because if you're comparing apples to oranges, there are no potential causes to look for.

As a rule of thumb, vaccination is safe if the last time you had fever was more than 2 weeks ago and you don't have any other individual risk factors. If you want better explanation, go talk to an immunologist.

Of course there is. First, you make lots of observations of whatever you want to study. Then you generalize your observations into a hypothesis using inductive reasoning. Then you make predictions from the hypothesis using deductive reasoning. The more ridiculous prediction, the better. And then you do an experiment to verify whether or not the prediction is correct. If the prediction turns out to be wrong and the experiment was done properly, throw the hypothesis out and start over from the beginning. If the experiment confirms the prediction, go back to making even more ridiculous predictions and test them again. If your hypothesis survives enough attempts to disprove it, congratulations, you have a theory. That's the scientific method in a nutshell.

The problem of deductive reasoning is that it only works on clearly formulated claims. And the physical world has no clearly formulated claims to offer. Inductive reasoning alone is nothing more than a glorified ass-pull. Deductive reasoning alone has nothing to work with in the first place. They only work when you put both of them together so your pedantic insisting on separating them makes absolutely no sense.

What's the difference? Both Google and Wikipedia came up with nothing relevant about "expanding vacuum theory".

I'm the above AC. Humor me. How do you figure out a law of nature without using inductive reasoning?

Because you just agreed with coolsnowmen that the statistical increase of autism might be bogus because of methodological errors. When you rule out that possibility, you might also want to check influences that happen during pregnancy, rather than jumping straight to vaccination. For the simple reason that vaccination happens a little too late to cause so much brain damage in such a short time.

Wrong. O(n log n)>O(n). We care because you can't erase the difference by adding a constant or multiplying by a constant.

I mean that log time is most definitely polynomial time. The fact that the log function itself is not a polynom doesn't matter. Polynomial complexity means that there exist constants C, D and E such that C*N^D+E is upper bound of complexity for every N. Complexity is non-polynomial only when it grows over the polynom for every finite C, D and E.

You have a really weird definition of "polynomial time".

Looking at you Brits from continental Europe, I don't see much of a difference ;-P

Here are the combined results of two largest parties in lower house elections in Czech republic for the past 20 years:
1996: 56%
1998: 60%
2002: 55%
2006: 68%
2010: 42%
2013: 39%

In all elections since 1996 up to 2010, the two largest parties were Social democrats (scandinavian-style liberal left) and Civic democrats (conservative right). In 2013, Civic democrats fell to 7.7% (5th place out of 7 parties that got into lower house), which is about 1/3 of their previous result. The second place was taken by a completely new party (populist party led and funded by a local billionaire), but I don't expect them to survive the next lower house elections, just like the previous two newcomer parties didn't.

This problem isn't caused by proportionate election system. The cause is that the winner doesn't have the balls to form a minority cabinet and play the democracy game all the way through. Running a minority cabinet is hard but the results are difinitely worth it.

There's a slight problem with your idea: Every single supplier on the market has only one goal: destroy the market by becoming a de-facto monopoly. And while it may take decades, some companies do succeed even without government regulation. Huge corporations and weak government result in corporations becoming the new government.

Czech republic requires any endorsement of political parties or candidates by a corporation to be declared as non-monetary donation to the political party. We don't have any contribution limits but the law requires that political parties have to make all donation records public at the end of the year, including names, addresses and birthdates/corporation ID numbers. If the political party doesn't have all that information, it has to either return the donation in question or give it to the state. Giving money directly to individual candidates or elected officials is prosecuted as bribery.

You should call it "ghetto culture." Black people are a much more diverse group than your post implies. Ghetto culture is also very common among Czech and Slovak gypsies, with very similar crime, education and economic statistics and widespread prejudices among the majority population.

I think you're exaggerating their limited participation. But I don't blame you, the parents themselves probably believe that they play much less active role than they really do, simply because they don't keep track of everything they do to help their kids learn. And just to be clear, I'm not talking specifically about reading. I'm talking about their entire education (including mathematics, science, history, etc.). The younger the kids are, the more guidance they need, whether direct or indirect.

If we focus exclusively on reading, creating environment that encourages kids to try is more than enough. When there's plenty to read around the house and kids see their parents reading often for themselves (not just reading to the kids), the "monkey see, monkey do" principle will drive them crazy about reading. I know because I was like that as a 5-year-old.

But let's go back to education in general. I started teaching myself programming when I was 10 years old. Now I have a degree in Computer Science. So I can see in hindsight how much time I wasted learning useless crap simply because I didn't know better. I also felt for a long time that I was missing something important - it turned out to be the whole theory of algorithms, complexity and proving correctness that I've later learned at university. If I had a mentor early on who would point me in the right direction every once in a while, I could have learned much faster and avoided some bad habits that I still struggle with today.

I also have another personal experience with learning on my own: English is my second language. I had to take 11 years of compulsory English classes (since 5th grade all the way up to second year at university). I got my first computer after the first year of English. Another year or so later, the classes became complete waste of my time because I was learning much more from computer games. I've also learned some key insights that I'm successfully using to learn a third language at the moment.

I've never said that parents have to do everything right. They just need enough insight to realize that what their kid is doing doesn't work and that they have to step in and give some advice. If that advice doesn't work either, they need to step in again and try yet another way, over and over again. This is especially important for pre-teen kids who may not be able to try a different approach on their own yet or they might waste a lot of time exploring dead ends.

Also, it's not enough that there's text around. The kids need to explore it at their own slow pace. That pretty much rules out TV. And while you can learn to mechanically read from a McDonald's menu, you won't develop any functional literacy from it. (Functional literacy is the ability to understand the meaning of written text. Functionally illiterate people can read text out loud but they'll have no idea what it means unless somebody repeats it back to them.)