It's the media. They take a single study and purport it to be some kind of fact.
It also seems to be the case that the less applicable your study, the more coverage you get. It's running joke now in epidemiology that you get more impact and coverage by showing a potential mechanism in 10 rabbits than you do by demostrating a genuine preventive effect in a population study of 100000 people.
When I worked in biotech (this was in the UK in 2000-2003) our lab books, countersigned regularly by a senior academic and archived in the institute library were considered a good enough defense against subsequent US patent applications. I don't know if this was ever tested.
I agree there should be repositories for articles that are not necessarily of enough immediacy, impact or quality for publication, but still contain potentially valuable IP. I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing already exists. Nature magazine have a new 'Nature Precedeings' website to share pre-publication research, and I'm sure other subject areas are doing similar things.
Now Spirit is out there, how much does it cost to run on a day-by-day basis? Surely there are enough scientific groups around the world with the money and the projects to buy time with Spirit to keep it running. There's no way we should be even contemplating new missions to Mars if nobody can find a use for the perfectly good and proven rover that is already there.
I work in neuropathology and we always need more brains to work on. I'm guessing you're in the UK, so you could look up the 'brain bank' at the IOP in London and find out how to donate. Some people prefer to donate their brain rather than their body because then relatives still get to bury you within a reasonable time.
I agree entirely. My post was badly worded, I only meant to say that equating pragmatism with capitalism was silly. I count myself as a pragmatist, and I'm suspicious of idealists of any political flavour.
But apparently you're willing to use this advanced technology even though it is the product of something that goes against your principles. How pragmatic of you. How... dare I say it... capitalist? After all, your actions seem to imply that you value your short term personal gain over your principles, and that furthermore you can absolve your conscience with a disclaimer that says the opposite. If that behavior isn't typical of the large Western corporations you claim to despise, I don't know what is...
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Just because somebody doesn't approve of a political or economic system, it doesn't make them a hypocrite for using something that was created under (although not necessarily as a consequence of) that system. I might disagree with the current patent system, but that shouldn't stop me using something that was developed using it.
Regarding the second part of your comment, I don't think capitalists have the monopoly on being selfish, shortsighted or even pragmatic.
We can't do fusion in a reliable, safe, controllable, or useful manner. That's why it's an engineering challenge not a scientific one. The commercial challenge will come after the engineering challenge is solved.
I think the biggest missing option from the list is accessibility: making all benefits from these whizzy scientific and technical ideas available and accessible to everybody around the world.
I'm skeptical about these statistics: 500 tumour patients and 1300 control subjects can't really support a probability of 0.003% and 0.0045% for each outcome, can they? I reckon that these numbers are less likely than the false-positive error for their data set.
These figures comes from two different studies. The \emph{relative risk} increase of 1.5 comes from one case-control study. This is then applied to a survey of the total number of cases in the population, leading to an estimate of the \emph{absolute risk} increase of 0.0015%. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The result isn't worth getting too excited about, but it's interesting none the less.
The bigger problem I would have, (although I don't think it's a fatal problem for the study) is that overall they found no effect of being a regular phone user. They had to do a subgroup analysis of very heavy users in rural areas to find a significant increase. I'd also be worried this being a freak result given the number of negative findings.
it was done with printed playbills. That's why so many cities had to pass playbill laws to keep every huckster from posting flyers on every surface (you can still see the fading "Post no bills" paint on many old city walls).
I foresee a silly objection, so I'll say that this entire question obviously wouldn't apply in the case of people who cannot be expected to follow instructions (say, an Alzheimer's patient) and other arrangements would have to be made.
Although I broadly agree with you, there are an awful lot of people who find it difficult to comply properly with their meds, not just Alzheimer's patients. Particularly older people, who are taking maybe ten or so different meds, all from identical looking bottles with badly printed labels, with pills that can also look very much alike. So you've got the weekly pill that if taken daily will kill you next to the five times per day pill, and you have to be some kind of pharmacist to tell them apart. Combine that with a mild memory problem (which is very common), bad eyesight, or questionable literacy, and you have a recipe for disaster that is at present causing a lot of harm.
Usually not, and in any case it can be a long time before anybody realises what the problem actually is, by which time damage may have been done. Also over medicating, or taking pills at the wrong frequency is also a major problem that this thing is trying to address.
Having said that, I don't think a hi-tech solution like this is a necessary answer for most people. We'd go a long way towards preventing these problems simply by printing readable labels on med boxes that are easily distinguishable for people with visual impairments or slight memory problems.
It's actually closer to the way the British House of Commons appoints party leaders. The Labour party's leadership is decided by a bizarre combination of Labour members of parliament (think congressmen), trade unions, and party members, except for this time when Gordon Brown succeded without any contest at all. The Tory party I think only poll their own members of parliament, but sometimes ask the party membership for their opinion in some kind of unofficial non-binding way.
The Lords are directly appointed by the government. The Queen was appointed by God (or by her ancestors hacking other people to death, which is kind of the same thing).
One can only hope that the treatments can be made available at a decent price, so that the folks who are most likely to pass it on--poor people who don't know how to use contraception and the like--will be able to be treated.
It seems to me that once you have HIV then rich or poor this doesn't help you much, it's more of a help your community. So the incentives for treatment are a bit unusual. If there was ever a case for government funding of a drug, it's here, ie in the absence of any real personal benefit for the individual who would otherwise be asked to pay.
Also, if this works it doesn't really matter if it doesn't get absolutely everywhere; if you only reduce the transmisability of a disease in a population you can stop an epidemic.
Unfortunately, the older a human mind gets, the less able it is to reject old value systems and embrace new perspectives.
As far as I understand, a judges job is not to make the rules, but to interpret them in the face of ever changing technology. We don't want judges to embrace new value systems. We want the same vale system that has been in place for the last few hundreds or thousands of years to be diligently applied to the modern world. An old, objective and experienced judge really is the best person to do this.
From reading the summary, what the judge seems to have said is that maybe it is possible to be inventive purely in software, and that we should treat such claims on a case-by-case basis. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I agree that most software patents granted in the US are not good. But I don't agree that a software patent by definition is bad. That would be a pretty much indefensible and, if I can turn your accusation against you, an inflexible position.
On the other hand, it strikes me that parking has long been this way; in many places, on weekdays you must feed the meter, but at night and on weekends it's free.
Everything has long been this way. The summary suggests that IBM are trying to patent the demand curve. If on the other hand they'd found a cool new algorithm to set the prices, maybe that would be worth something (haven't read the article, btw).
Your opinions are based on an expertly demonstrated misunderstanding (or possibly outdated understanding) of the system as it current stands. I cannot sufficiently communicate how distressed I am that the public perception of the academic system is the way it is. My comments on here have generally been replied to by people with only a peripheral understanding of how academic publication works, and with a lot of hostility, possibly fuelled by a single unfortunate encounter with a journal editor at some point in the past. I don't know where the suspicion for academics comes from. We're not in it for the money, I could earn three times as much as I do working for a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Most of us never get any public recognition. Most of us do what we do because it's interesting, and we like finding out stuff, and sharing our findings with the world. The ultimate reward in my group is some kind of public dissemination of our findings, or a positive policy change that comes out of something we do.
The very fact that my comments, coming from a position of actual knowledge and experience can be refuted with, and I chose the word carefully, lies, and those lies be highly rated by people who want to believe them and don't know any better, confirms my view that a more rigorous system of arbitration needs to be in place in this world where anybody can post anything and the layman in his ignorance is expected to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I include myself as an ignorant layman when it comes to any area outside of my expertise. I want to be able to find information that has been vetted by people who know what's what, not stuff that's highly ranked because it's good emotive rhetoric (see the parent post - paedophile priests, good analogy), or is confirming somebody else's prejudices.
For example, despite all our efforts, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who write that MMR causes autism, or that smoking prevents AD (recently modded 5 informative on Slashdot no less). Neither of these things is true. But of course nobody listens to us, because we're boring, and are cautious not sensationalist.
Peer review has far more to do with the arbitration of career advancement than quality control over factual content. Much like the Vatican, which can't even toss out a pedophile from among the shepherdship, at least not until their coffers were crucified by rattus legalis.
Not when I do it, it isn't. I'm personally offended by that statement. I review a lot of things, and 90% of the time I don't know and cannot guess who has written them. I judge articles for quality and for relevance. Badly executed research I send back, badly written or badly interpreted research I try to help with.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
Your right, the system is crumbling - and we'll be much poorer for it. For example the vast amounts of unsupported gibberish being published by political groups in the UK and the US is leading to policy shifts in favour of screening for many diseases, despite a medical consensus that it is not needed and is potentially harmful. None of this crap has gone through peer review by epidemiologists or research clinicians, but the press love it, and the politicians see votes, and the mob demand it on radio phone in shows, so it is done. Research clinicians can only look on and weep as the carefully collected and controlled evidence is tossed aside in favour of some fervent blogger who dem
I wouldn't trust those academic indexes too much. For instance, in my part of mathematics there's a concept called "correspondences", which is (according to my supervisor) only really treated in two sets of never-published notes. These notes are, for good measure referenced in quite a few papers, so it's not as if they are secret. However, they are both hard to get and not in the indexes (MathSciNet at least).
I've found a couple of similar things in maths and comp sci. Fortunately for me my work doesn't take me into those fields very much. Coming from biomedical science I can't understand how something important and frequently cited (presumably as personal communication or similar) never gets published, but I accept that it happens.
Having said that, I suppose that mathematics is not a subject where you need to do a lot of evidence synthesis. You still need a systematic, repeatable and justifiable search strategy though, which was really my original point. I'm really surprised that it generated such a negative response.
Why is it that every time the term "peer review" comes up, it comes up in a sentence justifying silliness? First of all, peer review is like the patent system: at any given time, all the breaking discoveries are tied up in a secretive review process. By the time this information is actually published, it's awfully late to the party in any fast moving discipline.
Yes, that's true, but the delays are necessary for the integrity of the system. Also work is often presented in preliminary forms at conferences, and pre-published articles are frequently circulated among the community for discussion. Where an author feels that their work is of immediate importance, a rapid review is usually possible.
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
Medline and Embase together cover everything bio-medical, World of Knowledge indexes almost every journal that exists. Other similarly comprehensive indexes exist in most fields, and if you feel it is necessary you must include those as well . You must also be able to justify leaving them out if you chose to do so.
Keyword, title and abstract searches within each index will find almost everything. It's not a problem if you accidentally miss something with an irrelevant title, abstract and the wrong keywords. It is a problem if you systematically miss out huge sections of the literature because of a lazy search. Also, if somebody is trying to hide a cognitive psych paper in The Journal of Monkey Mating Calls or some such, rather than going for a cognitive psych journal, then you should probably worry (although you probably will find it).
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
There's nothing to stop anybody sending anything into a peer-reviewed journal. If something from the 'barbarian sphere' (I like that, I will use it again) is good enough, then the author can always write it up properly, and submit it to the rigour of examination by people who know what they are talking about. Of course that would mean being able defend your arguments and demonstrate a working knowledge of the relevant subject. You make a good point about unusual subjects being difficult to locate, and this is why you must read all the titles in your search and not just the top ten.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
I would love to answer that point but I don't understand it. Sounds good though.
Slashdot Mirror
It also seems to be the case that the less applicable your study, the more coverage you get. It's running joke now in epidemiology that you get more impact and coverage by showing a potential mechanism in 10 rabbits than you do by demostrating a genuine preventive effect in a population study of 100000 people.
When I worked in biotech (this was in the UK in 2000-2003) our lab books, countersigned regularly by a senior academic and archived in the institute library were considered a good enough defense against subsequent US patent applications. I don't know if this was ever tested.
I agree there should be repositories for articles that are not necessarily of enough immediacy, impact or quality for publication, but still contain potentially valuable IP. I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing already exists. Nature magazine have a new 'Nature Precedeings' website to share pre-publication research, and I'm sure other subject areas are doing similar things.
Now Spirit is out there, how much does it cost to run on a day-by-day basis? Surely there are enough scientific groups around the world with the money and the projects to buy time with Spirit to keep it running. There's no way we should be even contemplating new missions to Mars if nobody can find a use for the perfectly good and proven rover that is already there.
I work in neuropathology and we always need more brains to work on. I'm guessing you're in the UK, so you could look up the 'brain bank' at the IOP in London and find out how to donate. Some people prefer to donate their brain rather than their body because then relatives still get to bury you within a reasonable time.
Until 2003 London was also home to the Mail Rail which is more or less what the article is proposing.
I agree entirely. My post was badly worded, I only meant to say that equating pragmatism with capitalism was silly. I count myself as a pragmatist, and I'm suspicious of idealists of any political flavour.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Just because somebody doesn't approve of a political or economic system, it doesn't make them a hypocrite for using something that was created under (although not necessarily as a consequence of) that system. I might disagree with the current patent system, but that shouldn't stop me using something that was developed using it.
Regarding the second part of your comment, I don't think capitalists have the monopoly on being selfish, shortsighted or even pragmatic.
We can't do fusion in a reliable, safe, controllable, or useful manner. That's why it's an engineering challenge not a scientific one. The commercial challenge will come after the engineering challenge is solved.
I think the biggest missing option from the list is accessibility: making all benefits from these whizzy scientific and technical ideas available and accessible to everybody around the world.
oops I've been writing in \LaTeX{} all day. That's what you get for not using preview.
These figures comes from two different studies. The \emph{relative risk} increase of 1.5 comes from one case-control study. This is then applied to a survey of the total number of cases in the population, leading to an estimate of the \emph{absolute risk} increase of 0.0015%. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The result isn't worth getting too excited about, but it's interesting none the less.
The bigger problem I would have, (although I don't think it's a fatal problem for the study) is that overall they found no effect of being a regular phone user. They had to do a subgroup analysis of very heavy users in rural areas to find a significant increase. I'd also be worried this being a freak result given the number of negative findings.
In the UK the wording was slightly different, leading to fear and uncertainty for a few unfortunately named individuals
Although I broadly agree with you, there are an awful lot of people who find it difficult to comply properly with their meds, not just Alzheimer's patients. Particularly older people, who are taking maybe ten or so different meds, all from identical looking bottles with badly printed labels, with pills that can also look very much alike. So you've got the weekly pill that if taken daily will kill you next to the five times per day pill, and you have to be some kind of pharmacist to tell them apart. Combine that with a mild memory problem (which is very common), bad eyesight, or questionable literacy, and you have a recipe for disaster that is at present causing a lot of harm.
Usually not, and in any case it can be a long time before anybody realises what the problem actually is, by which time damage may have been done. Also over medicating, or taking pills at the wrong frequency is also a major problem that this thing is trying to address.
Having said that, I don't think a hi-tech solution like this is a necessary answer for most people. We'd go a long way towards preventing these problems simply by printing readable labels on med boxes that are easily distinguishable for people with visual impairments or slight memory problems.
It's actually closer to the way the British House of Commons appoints party leaders. The Labour party's leadership is decided by a bizarre combination of Labour members of parliament (think congressmen), trade unions, and party members, except for this time when Gordon Brown succeded without any contest at all. The Tory party I think only poll their own members of parliament, but sometimes ask the party membership for their opinion in some kind of unofficial non-binding way.
The Lords are directly appointed by the government. The Queen was appointed by God (or by her ancestors hacking other people to death, which is kind of the same thing).
It seems to me that once you have HIV then rich or poor this doesn't help you much, it's more of a help your community. So the incentives for treatment are a bit unusual. If there was ever a case for government funding of a drug, it's here, ie in the absence of any real personal benefit for the individual who would otherwise be asked to pay.
Also, if this works it doesn't really matter if it doesn't get absolutely everywhere; if you only reduce the transmisability of a disease in a population you can stop an epidemic.
how about 'Mooning'
As far as I understand, a judges job is not to make the rules, but to interpret them in the face of ever changing technology. We don't want judges to embrace new value systems. We want the same vale system that has been in place for the last few hundreds or thousands of years to be diligently applied to the modern world. An old, objective and experienced judge really is the best person to do this.
From reading the summary, what the judge seems to have said is that maybe it is possible to be inventive purely in software, and that we should treat such claims on a case-by-case basis. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I agree that most software patents granted in the US are not good. But I don't agree that a software patent by definition is bad. That would be a pretty much indefensible and, if I can turn your accusation against you, an inflexible position.
huh?
Here's some advice for all pilots. When you're about to fly into a UAV, try not to fly into a UAV.
Everything has long been this way. The summary suggests that IBM are trying to patent the demand curve. If on the other hand they'd found a cool new algorithm to set the prices, maybe that would be worth something (haven't read the article, btw).
But will they run Hurd?
Oh no! Systematic reviews aren't possible! Quick, somebody tell the Cochrane Collaboration!
Your opinions are based on an expertly demonstrated misunderstanding (or possibly outdated understanding) of the system as it current stands. I cannot sufficiently communicate how distressed I am that the public perception of the academic system is the way it is. My comments on here have generally been replied to by people with only a peripheral understanding of how academic publication works, and with a lot of hostility, possibly fuelled by a single unfortunate encounter with a journal editor at some point in the past. I don't know where the suspicion for academics comes from. We're not in it for the money, I could earn three times as much as I do working for a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Most of us never get any public recognition. Most of us do what we do because it's interesting, and we like finding out stuff, and sharing our findings with the world. The ultimate reward in my group is some kind of public dissemination of our findings, or a positive policy change that comes out of something we do.
The very fact that my comments, coming from a position of actual knowledge and experience can be refuted with, and I chose the word carefully, lies, and those lies be highly rated by people who want to believe them and don't know any better, confirms my view that a more rigorous system of arbitration needs to be in place in this world where anybody can post anything and the layman in his ignorance is expected to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I include myself as an ignorant layman when it comes to any area outside of my expertise. I want to be able to find information that has been vetted by people who know what's what, not stuff that's highly ranked because it's good emotive rhetoric (see the parent post - paedophile priests, good analogy), or is confirming somebody else's prejudices.
For example, despite all our efforts, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who write that MMR causes autism, or that smoking prevents AD (recently modded 5 informative on Slashdot no less). Neither of these things is true. But of course nobody listens to us, because we're boring, and are cautious not sensationalist.
Peer review has far more to do with the arbitration of career advancement than quality control over factual content. Much like the Vatican, which can't even toss out a pedophile from among the shepherdship, at least not until their coffers were crucified by rattus legalis.
Not when I do it, it isn't. I'm personally offended by that statement. I review a lot of things, and 90% of the time I don't know and cannot guess who has written them. I judge articles for quality and for relevance. Badly executed research I send back, badly written or badly interpreted research I try to help with.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
Your right, the system is crumbling - and we'll be much poorer for it. For example the vast amounts of unsupported gibberish being published by political groups in the UK and the US is leading to policy shifts in favour of screening for many diseases, despite a medical consensus that it is not needed and is potentially harmful. None of this crap has gone through peer review by epidemiologists or research clinicians, but the press love it, and the politicians see votes, and the mob demand it on radio phone in shows, so it is done. Research clinicians can only look on and weep as the carefully collected and controlled evidence is tossed aside in favour of some fervent blogger who dem
I've found a couple of similar things in maths and comp sci. Fortunately for me my work doesn't take me into those fields very much. Coming from biomedical science I can't understand how something important and frequently cited (presumably as personal communication or similar) never gets published, but I accept that it happens.
Having said that, I suppose that mathematics is not a subject where you need to do a lot of evidence synthesis. You still need a systematic, repeatable and justifiable search strategy though, which was really my original point. I'm really surprised that it generated such a negative response.
Yes, that's true, but the delays are necessary for the integrity of the system. Also work is often presented in preliminary forms at conferences, and pre-published articles are frequently circulated among the community for discussion. Where an author feels that their work is of immediate importance, a rapid review is usually possible.
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?Medline and Embase together cover everything bio-medical, World of Knowledge indexes almost every journal that exists. Other similarly comprehensive indexes exist in most fields, and if you feel it is necessary you must include those as well . You must also be able to justify leaving them out if you chose to do so.
Keyword, title and abstract searches within each index will find almost everything. It's not a problem if you accidentally miss something with an irrelevant title, abstract and the wrong keywords. It is a problem if you systematically miss out huge sections of the literature because of a lazy search. Also, if somebody is trying to hide a cognitive psych paper in The Journal of Monkey Mating Calls or some such, rather than going for a cognitive psych journal, then you should probably worry (although you probably will find it).
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.There's nothing to stop anybody sending anything into a peer-reviewed journal. If something from the 'barbarian sphere' (I like that, I will use it again) is good enough, then the author can always write it up properly, and submit it to the rigour of examination by people who know what they are talking about. Of course that would mean being able defend your arguments and demonstrate a working knowledge of the relevant subject. You make a good point about unusual subjects being difficult to locate, and this is why you must read all the titles in your search and not just the top ten.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.I would love to answer that point but I don't understand it. Sounds good though.