Drug company cluelessness

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Chris

I’m reading Mukherjee’s “Emperor of all Maladies, a biography of cancer” and am impressed yet again by the clueless nature of drug companies. So often the drug companies resist developing a drug that turns out to be a blockbuster, and only move ahead because academic scientists push so hard. That was the case with Gleevec. A scientist at Oregon Health Sciences University, Duker, tried constantly to convince Ciba Geigy/Novartis that this was something they wanted to develop. They resisted. The really funny thing is that they resisted, as drug companies often do, because they didn’t want to spend $100 million on clinical trials for a drug that would only be used by a few thousand people. However, this was the dream drug, from a business standpoint. Gleevec doesn’t cure chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). It merely keeps the disease at bay. So patients have to take it for the rest of their lives. And current, living patients (who before would have died) are joined by new CML patients. One person estimates that there will be over 250,000 people living with CML in the next ten years. Multiply that by $40,000 a year, for ten or twenty years until the patent runs out, and you have a huge moneymaker.

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How to run faster than you can run

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Chris

The world racing authorities have decided that women’s running records have to be set in women-only races. That is to keep them from being paced by generally faster men. What difference should that make? Another recent study cited in the NYT gives the answer.

Bicyclists were told to go as fast as they could on a stationary bike. Then they were paired against a artificial-reality rival who appeared to race just ahead of them, and they were able to see an image of themselves riding their personal record pace. But the researchers tricked the cyclists. Although the image was supposed to be that of themselves going as fast as they could possibly go, in fact it was rigged to go a little faster. And the cyclists kept pace with this faster time, even though they couldn’t before.

There is a huge psychological component to running. That is why people find reserves they didn’t think they had when they near the finish line. That is why, when a new world record is set, the person who comes in second also often bests the old world record. And why women won’t be allowed to have pace setters in male runners. Another example of the power of faking it ’til you make it.

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“Debriefing” after trauma actually increases PTSD

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Chris

An interesting article in Scientific American about the change in how people are helped in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. It used to be the standard practice (and still is, unfortunately, for some psychologists) to engage in a “psychological debriefing” after a traumatic event, in which they described what happened to them and how they felt. The theory was that talking about their experience helped them to “process” their emotions and deal with them better. Unfortunately, studies have show that those who go through this process actually have higher risk of PTSD than those who don’t. What seems to happen is that, by reliving the experience, they are actually imprinting it more strongly in their minds. Some studies have shown that people who can interfere with the solidification of traumatic memories in the immediate aftermath of the event actually have less long-term trauma (although talking it out is good therapy once PTSD actually sets in).

The best immediate therapy? Simply supporting someone, making them feel comfortable and safe.

Posted in Brain Hacking, Neuroscience and Psychology, Science and Medicine | Leave a comment

Solving the question of free will

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Chris

Interesting article in the New York Times magazine about decision fatigue. The research suggests that any decisions you make take something out of you, which is why people can be wiped out after a day of shopping or making a lot of decisions at work. But the research really suggests that any consciously directed activity has a cost, and that we have a limit to how much of such activity we can handle. This suggests a solution to the question of whether we have free will or not. The answer seems to be that while willpower and self direction is not totally free, we do have a “will budget” that we can spend as we choose. But it is not limitless, and eventually we fall back on automatic behavior and automatic responses.

 

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Musings on the physics of baseball

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Chris

I was just reading that Jose Bautista, the current MBL home run leader has popped 31 home runs, well behind the 50 or so that Mark McGuire was hitting by this time of year during the height of the Steroid Era. It got me thinking about the physics of the swing. A lot of people think that steroids help batters hit home runs because they can swing the bat faster and muscle the ball harder. But it seems to me that what muscle strength gets you is time. The key is that you can accelerate the bat faster, which means that you have a few more microseconds to watch the trajectory of the ball before you have to make a decision about hitting it. You get more data about if, when and where the ball will pass over the plate.

I think that was one of Barry Bonds greatest strengths. He seemed to be able to wait longer than anyone else. And then when he swung it was very quick, almost a pivot of his body and a flick of the bat (but then he always ended up jamming all that momentum onto his straightened right leg, which is where his knee problems came from).

Some have wondered if Bautista has been getting some chemical help because he has improved so quickly from last year, but he says that he is merely starting his swing earlier in the pitch. This makes sense–if you already have the bat moving you don’t have to accelerate so fast, and don’t need steroid-strength to get better home runs. Which made me wonder why more batters don’t do this. I think it might have to do with data. It’s easier to get reliable data about the flight of the ball if your head is still, so you want to wait. Of course if you could do the same body motion as you begin the swing, you could  learn to get good data about the ball even while moving and beginning to accelerate the bat. I wonder if that is part of what Bautista is doing.

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Where reading is going

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Chris

Reader’s digest was a powerhouse of its time. It brought together the best of a certain type of published material, so that people could sample a world of articles (often in condensed form, one of the reasons the magazine was derided in certain circles). It was really a blog before blogs, with actual articles instead of links.
Now we have people stepping in to bring that back. In a sense orgs like the Atavist are scouring the published world and offering some fine work for a low price. Here is a columnist who sings the praises of Atavist and another site called Longreads.

Of course these forms of publishing change the economics for writers. It may or may not make sense to write just for Longreads, but if you are writing for someone else you may earn some extra money if you have an agreement to share the proceeds.

Just as readers digest did, the web will probably lead to people reading more. As I have long believed, the web and epublishing will destroy writing in order to save it.

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The big sports competition: live versus fake

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Chris

It’s been a nice habit recently to get up early and watch Wimbledon tennis before work. So it was frustrating this morning to find that the Sharapova-Lisicki match was nowhere to be found. I finally figured out why. NBC is saving this match to show it at noon in each time zone.

This is part of a horrible habit on the part of broadcast networks, to delay sports until they have a bigger audience. It represents a view that sports is like any other drama, whereas I find that part of the drama of sports is that it is happening as you watch, and that the intensity of the experience is heightened by the realization that you and everyone else in the world has no idea what will happen next. I can’t help but think of tape delayed sports as somewhat fake, in the same category as scripted dramas. Sure I enjoy watching McEnroe-Borg final from the 70s, but I would rather watch Andy Roddick live on court 4 anytime.

The networks have decided that women don’t care if sports are live or not, which is why they delayed the Sharapova match, and why the Olympics are delayed and scripted for women. The delays were most ridiculous during the Vancouver winter olympics, when the evening events could have been broadcast live on the West Coast, where they were happening, but instead they delayed them for the East Coast and instead we saw the events 24 hours late.

Which is why I was happy to see that NBC has announced they will broadcast the 2014 Olympics live. Finally, the Olympics will be real sports again.

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A new advance for an old technology: steel

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Chris

I’ve long been fascinated by the process of making steel and the huge role it played in the economic history of the world, when inventions like the Bessemer process made it economical to produce steel on a large scale. A lot or research has been done on the internal structure that makes steel both strong and flexible, and the experts thought they had a pretty good handle on steel’s properties.

So this story was particularly interesting. Here’s a guy in Detroit who has his own small company and is not a big researcher by any means, who has found a way to make steel that is 7 percent stronger and retains its strength in thinner sheets.

Here is what a researcher at Ohio State University said:

“Steel is what we would call a ‘mature technology.’ We’d like to think we know most everything about it. If someone invented a way to strengthen the strongest steels even a few percent, that would be a big deal. But 7 percent? That’s huge.”

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Slash and crash

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Chris

Beautiful big boats shredding SF Bay and nearly pitchpoling. Yeah!

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Climate change is now

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Chris

Summer is here, and in many places people are feeling the heat. But a Stanford study says it will get worse. The study says that in the near future, in many places, the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past. They have created an interesting video of a computer simulation showing where those superhot areas are. Also, two interesting little articles this week highlight how global warming is not something that is happening in the future–it’s happening right now in measurable ways. One study shows that Mount Ranier has lost one-seventh of it’s ice and snow since 1970. Another study shows that the density of forests worldwide is increasing, sopping up at least some of the extra CO2 we are pumping into the atmostphere. What the release doesn’t say, but what I imagine might be happening, is that the density is increasing because of what could be thought of as the positive effects of climate change: more plant growth because there is more CO2 in the atmosphere.

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