A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
In the worst states the poor pay 7% of their income in sales/excise taxes vs 4.6% for middle incomes and 0.9% for the wealthiest.
from ITEP:
States’ consumption tax structures are highly regressive with an average 7 percent rate for the poor, a 4.6
percent rate for middle incomes, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers. Because food is one
of the largest expenses for a low-income family, taxing food is a particularly regressive tax policy; five
of the ten most regressive states tax food at the state or local level. Excise taxes on things like gasoline,
cigarettes or beer take about 1.6 percent of the income of the poorest families, 0.8 percent from middle
income families and 0.1 percent of income from the most well-off.
well, not that kind of 3D. When they finally give me that 2000 x 2000 x 2000 holographic display I'll probably be in the market for a new graphics card.
I run complete atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of viruses that cause disease in humans (enterovirus simulations around the 3-4 million atom mark).
I can see a time in the not to distant future when I can model multiple instances of virus-drug interactions on-site here in the lab and get results overnight that I can compare with our "wet lab" results. I use NAMD for the simulations which works well with the CUDA cards.
Considering we can't even accurately model solvation of most drugs, let alone proteins, I think you're being a little optimistic. NAMD is really cool technology, but it will always be limited by the underlying forcefields. Given a group of lead compounds, can any virus model accurately predict binding modes, allostery, agonist/antagonist effects, kon, koff, binding inhibition, etc. for members of the group or even just rank them in the correct order? By predict I mean predict: no wetlab experiments introducing the lead compounds to viruses/viral components until after the modeling results are in, no forcing of binding sites or modes in the simulation.
Skip down to steps 13-15. imagine if 3 or 4 of those components were housed in plastic dominos as per the article. How many other components would have to be left out of the phone to fit them in?
On the other hand:
Step 12
Resting atop the motherboard is the SIM/microSDXC board.
On one hand, the modular design of this component makes it possible to replace if you happen to jam something into one of the two slots—although you will need to replace both at once.
That's what modular looks like if you don't waste space.
I do like the idea of an easily replaced display, at least until they stop being so brittle. Other accessories could be attached externally via a standardized dock.
I can see how a 12 month delay helps for protecting scientists from being scooped based on unpublished data they are required to disclose, but their competitors see everything that is published the day that it is published. The 12 month rule for journal articles and published supporting material only protects the publishers.
so everybody should be able to parse pubmed, download any new articles, archive and serve them for free ?
or would you get oritzed ?
NIH grants free access, not a complete copyright waiver, so most articles aren't available for bulk download. You can search by license type for the ones that are.
But you want to create a free mirror of a free public service? OK, but since the articles are already publicly available and searchable by date, author, words in title, abstract, or text, patent #, pharmacological action, chemical structure, molecular weight, # of hydrogen bond donors/acceptors, DNA/RNA sequence, amino acid sequence, and about a hundred other fields you will have your work cut out for you. You'll still have to wait 12 months after publication, until then you get only whatever the publisher wants you to see. I also don't see how this helps other people get more access for their own research/curiosity than they already have. Is PubMed lacking a feature that you need?
Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Already.Has.Happened.
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Over 13000 scientists joined a boycott of Elsevier last year. Also back in 2010 the University of California threatened a boycott of Nature journals over their subscription prices and managed to haggle them down.
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? CAS Scifinder and STN (subscription based services) will get me more granular results than Google Scholar, but I find plenty of paywalled results when I use Google Scholar or PubMed. What is being blocked?
By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless.
What???
The Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states:
SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
The Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The Policy requires that these final peer-reviewed manuscripts be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.
NIH/ NSF sponsored research published since 2008 is available on Pubmed for free 12 months after it is first published. Most of the rest you can rent from DeepDyve.com for about a buck an article.
I think they hold on to them for quite a while as "evidence" while they try to find out the identities of people who sent money to/through SilkRoad. Not that spending them would affect that investigation at all, but just for appearances sake when the court cases happen. My guess: four+ years from now they will auction them off.
Some new drugs (biologicals) are pretty expensive to manufacture. The cost of antibodies is finally coming down though; oddly enough because they are manufacturing them in smaller batches. Smaller batches are easier to keep sterile (higher success rate) and take less expensive infrastructure. Still looking at several thousand dollars to manufacture enough of a cancer drug for one series/one patient though.
Worst offenders: companies that manage to gain exclusive marketing rights for drugs already in the public domain and then jack up the price 1000% or more. Good discussion of the problem here:
Most of the rest: You're trying to persuade investors to throw money into a black hole for 5 or 10 years before there is even a hope for any revenue. Several billion dollars later IF you have succeeded you have 8-12 years to pay off not only the development costs of the drug but also the hundreds to thousands of failures you made along the way.
Like other businesses, perverse incentives abound. They're just so much more asinine when they involve peoples' health.
If there was a new drug for curing all sorts of cancer, would you want a name brand or generic version?
Depends on which company/country made the generic. Ranbaxy? No thank you.
oops:
"Post-grant review: The bill expands an important avenue to challenge a patent's validity at the Patent Office "
There's another part the deepest pockets might decide needs to be cut out of the bill.
There's always the chance that one house would nix it just to spite the other, but I'd think something like this would primarily move or stop based on the total lobbying $. The deepest pockets in tech sometimes use patent troll outfits as cutouts so they might fight the sections that cut into their privacy, but overall wouldn't Apple, Intel, Google, etc. benefit from this bill?
We'd need to take into account that not all tech sectors move at the speed of software or Intel's tick tock. The average development time for drugs is about 8 years, with many taking up to 12.
Patents on cancer drugs that unmask cancer cells hiding from the immune system, thus allowing T-cells to recognize the cancer cells and mount an immune response.
How much more is enough? I don't want them to stop trying, but somebody needs to ask where it reaches the point of diminishing returns.
Right after they hand me a 2k^3 resolution holographic (360 degree viewing angle) display and a GPU that can power it at 60 frames , er, cubes per second.
In my state/city Grid electrical usage is taxed @19%..
Thus generating more revenue per dollar than gasoline or diesel. I.E 19% of $3.00 retail gas would yield $0.57 per gallon in state taxes
Hold on,
19% of $3.00 retail gas yields $0.57 per gallon and lets call it 25 mpg, so 2.39 cents per mile.
19% of 12.6 cents per kWh (average US price) yields 2.39 cents per kWh and at ~3 miles per kWh (Tesla S) 0.798 cents per mile.
So the taxes are still almost 3x higher for gasoline, and the electrical usage taxes are already spoken for, so they don't fund transportation needs.
And Teslas are heavy (4600lb) cars.
How about: tax carbon fuels at the pump. Tax pure electric vehicles based on their miles in state. Tax plug in hybrids based on a model that takes both into account. Discounts for lighter cars.
Determining miles in state is not a problem for electric vehicles: If you have a Tesla you already agreed to let Tesla track your location and speed. They have access whenever the car is in range of a mobile phone network. They don't keep logs of mileage and location data, but it would be trivial for them to do so and send the miles driven in each state to each state's DMV or whatever.
That makes sense. For a while now coxsackievirus and rubella have both been suspected to trigger diabetes in those susceptible to type I, and it looks like cytomegalovirus can be involved in type II.
has discovered the virus that causes type 1 diabetes.
Already a problem right there, though it might be in translation. There are several viruses known to trigger the autoimmune response that generally causes type 1 diabetes.
1. No real differences were seen between groups of animals in the study. Contrary to Smith’s claims, expert pathologists stated that mild gastric erosions were seen at similar levels in both GM and non-GM fed rats (European Commission 2000, FDA 1994).
2. There is no evidence of animal deaths. The numbers and details given by Smith about rats fatalities appear to be factually incorrect, Smith may have confused the words necrosis and dead cells with animal deaths. Careful reading reveals that the regulatory record does not mention any animal deaths which surely would have been of concern had they occurred.*
Second of all: there's nothing about feeding pigs GM food in that paper.
Finally, the publisher of that article (Bentham Open) is on Beall's list of predatory publishers which charge authors to publish their papers without actually conducting any peer review to speak of. If you heard about the recent sting on predatory journals the other week*, the Open Neutraceutical Journal's sister publication, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal, was quite willing to publish an utterly bogus cancer article, one constructed to be obviously fake to anyone with experience in the field.
With sections titles that say "GENETICALLYY MODIFIED ANIMALS AND
HUMAN NUTRITION" I don't think they spend anything on copy editing either.
Although it overlaps with previous work more than you would guess from the original post, it does extend the control scientists have over gene expression both in research and in manufacturing settings. That's worth an article in Science.
If they could now find out that it's cheaper to find tumors early and have them removed rather than keeping the patient alive that year or two he still lives after it's discovered and determined to be terminal...
Part of the US's vaunted 5 year cancer survival rates vs European single payer systems isn't due to screenings leading to earlier treatment, its due to the disease running the same course over the same period of years and killing the same number of people but being detected earlier in the progression. Imagine a deadly cancer for which there are early screening tests but no treatments at all. The screening typically finds the cancer 4-8 years before death, otherwise the cancer is usually diagnosed via symptoms 1-4 years before death. One country uses the screening test, the other does not. Guess which one has a better 5-year survival rate?
That's an extreme analogy of course, and screening does save lives, but screening can also artificially inflate survival statistics. Cancer mortality rates are the way to go, and overall the US is more or less tied with the EU. For the most preventable common cancer (lung), the US is actually worse than the EU:
Slashdot Mirror
A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
In the worst states the poor pay 7% of their income in sales/excise taxes vs 4.6% for middle incomes and 0.9% for the wealthiest. from ITEP:
States’ consumption tax structures are highly regressive with an average 7 percent rate for the poor, a 4.6 percent rate for middle incomes, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers. Because food is one of the largest expenses for a low-income family, taxing food is a particularly regressive tax policy; five of the ten most regressive states tax food at the state or local level. Excise taxes on things like gasoline, cigarettes or beer take about 1.6 percent of the income of the poorest families, 0.8 percent from middle income families and 0.1 percent of income from the most well-off.
http://www.itep.org/pdf/whopayses.pdf
and 3D
Ew, no.
well, not that kind of 3D. When they finally give me that 2000 x 2000 x 2000 holographic display I'll probably be in the market for a new graphics card.
I run complete atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of viruses that cause disease in humans (enterovirus simulations around the 3-4 million atom mark).
I can see a time in the not to distant future when I can model multiple instances of virus-drug interactions on-site here in the lab and get results overnight that I can compare with our "wet lab" results. I use NAMD for the simulations which works well with the CUDA cards.
Considering we can't even accurately model solvation of most drugs, let alone proteins, I think you're being a little optimistic. NAMD is really cool technology, but it will always be limited by the underlying forcefields. Given a group of lead compounds, can any virus model accurately predict binding modes, allostery, agonist/antagonist effects, kon, koff, binding inhibition, etc. for members of the group or even just rank them in the correct order? By predict I mean predict: no wetlab experiments introducing the lead compounds to viruses/viral components until after the modeling results are in, no forcing of binding sites or modes in the simulation.
Applies even more to smartphones:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S4+Teardown/13947/
Skip down to steps 13-15. imagine if 3 or 4 of those components were housed in plastic dominos as per the article. How many other components would have to be left out of the phone to fit them in?
On the other hand:
Step 12 Resting atop the motherboard is the SIM/microSDXC board. On one hand, the modular design of this component makes it possible to replace if you happen to jam something into one of the two slots—although you will need to replace both at once.
That's what modular looks like if you don't waste space.
I do like the idea of an easily replaced display, at least until they stop being so brittle. Other accessories could be attached externally via a standardized dock.
I can see how a 12 month delay helps for protecting scientists from being scooped based on unpublished data they are required to disclose, but their competitors see everything that is published the day that it is published. The 12 month rule for journal articles and published supporting material only protects the publishers.
so everybody should be able to parse pubmed, download any new articles, archive and serve them for free ? or would you get oritzed ?
NIH grants free access, not a complete copyright waiver, so most articles aren't available for bulk download. You can search by license type for the ones that are.
But you want to create a free mirror of a free public service? OK, but since the articles are already publicly available and searchable by date, author, words in title, abstract, or text, patent #, pharmacological action, chemical structure, molecular weight, # of hydrogen bond donors/acceptors, DNA/RNA sequence, amino acid sequence, and about a hundred other fields you will have your work cut out for you. You'll still have to wait 12 months after publication, until then you get only whatever the publisher wants you to see. I also don't see how this helps other people get more access for their own research/curiosity than they already have. Is PubMed lacking a feature that you need?
Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Already.Has.Happened.
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Over 13000 scientists joined a boycott of Elsevier last year. Also back in 2010 the University of California threatened a boycott of Nature journals over their subscription prices and managed to haggle them down.
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? CAS Scifinder and STN (subscription based services) will get me more granular results than Google Scholar, but I find plenty of paywalled results when I use Google Scholar or PubMed. What is being blocked?
By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless.
What???
The Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states: SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. The Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The Policy requires that these final peer-reviewed manuscripts be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.
NIH/ NSF sponsored research published since 2008 is available on Pubmed for free 12 months after it is first published. Most of the rest you can rent from DeepDyve.com for about a buck an article.
I think they hold on to them for quite a while as "evidence" while they try to find out the identities of people who sent money to/through SilkRoad. Not that spending them would affect that investigation at all, but just for appearances sake when the court cases happen. My guess: four+ years from now they will auction them off.
Some new drugs (biologicals) are pretty expensive to manufacture. The cost of antibodies is finally coming down though; oddly enough because they are manufacturing them in smaller batches. Smaller batches are easier to keep sterile (higher success rate) and take less expensive infrastructure. Still looking at several thousand dollars to manufacture enough of a cancer drug for one series/one patient though.
Worst offenders: companies that manage to gain exclusive marketing rights for drugs already in the public domain and then jack up the price 1000% or more. Good discussion of the problem here:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/10/21/catalyst_pharmaceuticals_and_their_business_plan.php
Most of the rest: You're trying to persuade investors to throw money into a black hole for 5 or 10 years before there is even a hope for any revenue. Several billion dollars later IF you have succeeded you have 8-12 years to pay off not only the development costs of the drug but also the hundreds to thousands of failures you made along the way.
Like other businesses, perverse incentives abound. They're just so much more asinine when they involve peoples' health.
If there was a new drug for curing all sorts of cancer, would you want a name brand or generic version?
Depends on which company/country made the generic. Ranbaxy? No thank you.
oops: "Post-grant review: The bill expands an important avenue to challenge a patent's validity at the Patent Office " There's another part the deepest pockets might decide needs to be cut out of the bill.
or just not pass both houses of Congress.
There's always the chance that one house would nix it just to spite the other, but I'd think something like this would primarily move or stop based on the total lobbying $. The deepest pockets in tech sometimes use patent troll outfits as cutouts so they might fight the sections that cut into their privacy, but overall wouldn't Apple, Intel, Google, etc. benefit from this bill?
We'd need to take into account that not all tech sectors move at the speed of software or Intel's tick tock. The average development time for drugs is about 8 years, with many taking up to 12.
Patents on cancer drugs that unmask cancer cells hiding from the immune system, thus allowing T-cells to recognize the cancer cells and mount an immune response.
How much more is enough? I don't want them to stop trying, but somebody needs to ask where it reaches the point of diminishing returns.
Right after they hand me a 2k^3 resolution holographic (360 degree viewing angle) display and a GPU that can power it at 60 frames , er, cubes per second.
Then they can have the weekend off.
In my state/city Grid electrical usage is taxed @19%.. Thus generating more revenue per dollar than gasoline or diesel. I.E 19% of $3.00 retail gas would yield $0.57 per gallon in state taxes
Hold on,
19% of $3.00 retail gas yields $0.57 per gallon and lets call it 25 mpg, so 2.39 cents per mile.
19% of 12.6 cents per kWh (average US price) yields 2.39 cents per kWh and at ~3 miles per kWh (Tesla S) 0.798 cents per mile.
So the taxes are still almost 3x higher for gasoline, and the electrical usage taxes are already spoken for, so they don't fund transportation needs.
And Teslas are heavy (4600lb) cars.
How about: tax carbon fuels at the pump. Tax pure electric vehicles based on their miles in state. Tax plug in hybrids based on a model that takes both into account. Discounts for lighter cars.
Determining miles in state is not a problem for electric vehicles: If you have a Tesla you already agreed to let Tesla track your location and speed. They have access whenever the car is in range of a mobile phone network. They don't keep logs of mileage and location data, but it would be trivial for them to do so and send the miles driven in each state to each state's DMV or whatever.
That makes sense. For a while now coxsackievirus and rubella have both been suspected to trigger diabetes in those susceptible to type I, and it looks like cytomegalovirus can be involved in type II.
has discovered the virus that causes type 1 diabetes.
Already a problem right there, though it might be in translation. There are several viruses known to trigger the autoimmune response that generally causes type 1 diabetes.
Ok.
First of all: it's been debunked:
http://academicsreview.org/reviewed-content/genetic-roulette/section-1/1-2-gm-tomatoes-proven-safe/
1. No real differences were seen between groups of animals in the study. Contrary to Smith’s claims, expert pathologists stated that mild gastric erosions were seen at similar levels in both GM and non-GM fed rats (European Commission 2000, FDA 1994).
2. There is no evidence of animal deaths. The numbers and details given by Smith about rats fatalities appear to be factually incorrect, Smith may have confused the words necrosis and dead cells with animal deaths. Careful reading reveals that the regulatory record does not mention any animal deaths which surely would have been of concern had they occurred.*
Second of all: there's nothing about feeding pigs GM food in that paper.
Finally, the publisher of that article (Bentham Open) is on Beall's list of predatory publishers which charge authors to publish their papers without actually conducting any peer review to speak of. If you heard about the recent sting on predatory journals the other week*, the Open Neutraceutical Journal's sister publication, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal, was quite willing to publish an utterly bogus cancer article, one constructed to be obviously fake to anyone with experience in the field.
With sections titles that say "GENETICALLYY MODIFIED ANIMALS AND HUMAN NUTRITION" I don't think they spend anything on copy editing either.
*Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
Although it overlaps with previous work more than you would guess from the original post, it does extend the control scientists have over gene expression both in research and in manufacturing settings. That's worth an article in Science.
they have all but absolute conclusive proof that it *is* the gm food that is messing with their digestive systems and killing them.
Plenty of studies as well
I'll bite.
Cite?
Bad article: most of the aspects discussed were first done ~10 years ago by Peter Schultz: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299037/
If they could now find out that it's cheaper to find tumors early and have them removed rather than keeping the patient alive that year or two he still lives after it's discovered and determined to be terminal...
Part of the US's vaunted 5 year cancer survival rates vs European single payer systems isn't due to screenings leading to earlier treatment, its due to the disease running the same course over the same period of years and killing the same number of people but being detected earlier in the progression. Imagine a deadly cancer for which there are early screening tests but no treatments at all. The screening typically finds the cancer 4-8 years before death, otherwise the cancer is usually diagnosed via symptoms 1-4 years before death. One country uses the screening test, the other does not. Guess which one has a better 5-year survival rate?
That's an extreme analogy of course, and screening does save lives, but screening can also artificially inflate survival statistics. Cancer mortality rates are the way to go, and overall the US is more or less tied with the EU. For the most preventable common cancer (lung), the US is actually worse than the EU:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-do-we-rate-the-quality-of-the-us-health-care-system-disease-care/