I can't say as the Republican ideas for reforming class action lawsuits are very useful;
here's my list:
1. Strict limit on fees: the class gets a minimum of 65% of the reward. All costs(distribution, printing, whatever) not earmarked by the judge come out of the lawyers 35%.
2. Strict parity in payments, in both kind and time.
Kind: The only way the lawyers get paid in cash is if the class is paid in cash. If the class gets $650,000 in coupons, the lawyers are paid $350,000 in identical coupons. They're welcome to sell the coupons on ebay.
Time: As in the time value of money. At no point during the payout are the lawyers paid their fees in advance of the class being paid their settlement. If a trust is established to pay out claims over a period of years (typical for medical lawsuits), the lawyers get paid incrementally as the claims are paid. If the lawyers wish to be paid up front they can securitize their revenue stream from the trust and sell it. They may get 60 cents on the dollar for it.
You missed the point of the article. We are selling it now, but the market is ridiculously primitive. It is all take-it-or-leave-it, no options for negotiation and basically no transparency. For all intents and purposes we've replaced cash with personal information as the currency of online services
What I don't get is how outfits like Personal.com that claim to provide a way to control and sell your information have any more control of your data than you do. Google still has your data. Facebook still has your data. Your ISP, Amazon, Yahoo, and every other site you visit and the third parties they contract with still have your data, and they still sell, use, and package it however they want.
And if it's bad local news, someone else is willing to pay for you to see it. The San Diego Union Tribune was recently bought by a real estate developer. Mostly because it was so cheap he could turn a profit just by selling the land the paper owned, but he also said pretty bluntly that he did it so he could use the paper as a megaphone to promote his own local real estate development plans and political views.
News is paid for by advertising. Your local newspaper doesn't need your subscription fee.
But their advertising rates in large part are determined by their subscriber numbers. The latest way to pump up those numbers: subscription drives where they offer to donate your subscription fee to charity. Win win, I guess, but if abused (and it will be) advertisers will start demanding even lower rates.
Researchers / institutions can coordinate to bring together a couple dozen reviewers, and then some random subset can review a particular paper; if the paper passes review, that subset applies a group signature for the group of reviewers and concatenates it to the paper, which is then published, or else sends anonymous feedback to the authors of the paper (which is what happens in the current system).
Bear in mind that in many journals you'd have to go through that whole process for each individual paper , and a random subset could quite well include people who have no qualms with actively screwing over an author they hate/compete with.
Not quite, but there is a movement among universities to reserve copyright on their faculties' publications. Elsevier can publish it, but the professore wouldn't be able to give them an exclusive copyright to the submitted paper.
How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Most readers aren't in a vacuum. The average reader (been active in the field for 5-40 years) of the average journal article probably already has a relationship with the principal author: they've known each other for years, hired each other's undergrads and grad students as grad students and postdocs, spoken to each other at conferences and seen each others' presentations. At the very least they've probably already read several articles by the author and maybe reviewed one of them. Journal articles and conference proceedings are the permanent record of academic science, but it's only a small part of the communication.
it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
What I think would work well is the law school journal model, which is essentially student run but still high quality due to the extreme reputation enhancement you get from being part of the process. Have groups of graduate students and postdocs (all in the same field, but not necessarily all in the same school) be responsible for most of the editing functions; they get paid in reputation (what you need most while training) and maybe travel costs for journal-specific meetings. Students would also end up with a lot of valuable insight into how the academic game is actually played and the political skills they will need. Riding herd you would still have big name professors on the masthead to add clout and cajole procrastinators, and you could farm out the IT and paper publishing to the university press.
I think the way PLoS does it is better then the current peer-review model: Everything that is technically sound gets accepted, and then the readers can comment and rate the article publicly.
One place where traditional peer review can excel above PLoS is that it is an editing process. Peers have the chance to suggest additional experiments and explanations, catch errors, improve clarity, and genuinely improve the paper before the rest of the world sees it. Of course that benefit is balanced by peers who just say "you need to cite (my totally irrelevant) article before you publish", etc.
It's a start. But peer review is rarely completely anonymous. First off, there may be only 10 or fewer people its logical to ask to review a highly specialized paper. In the consortia model, if "University of California" (10,000 professors?) signs a review, there's a good chance someone knowledgeable in their field could narrow it down to 2 or 3 professors before reading it, and know exactly who wrote it after reading it. Also, authors are often asked to suggest some of the reviewers, and are allowed to preclude personal enemies/competitors.
Because of the low
failure rates and short time periods involved, we assume that all consoles sold are in active use. F
we assume that 30 % of users leave their console idle when not in use, with the remainder putting their console into standby mode. Given the importance of this assumption, we perform a thorough sensitivity analysis, discussed at length in “Results: estimated console energy consumption”.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 have both added an “auto power down” capability through firmware updates, but this feature is not enabled by default and is difficult to find in system menus. We believe that this feature is not frequently utilized by consumers, and we neglect its effects on overall power consumption.
Can't blame all of this on grants-whores. There are a lot of reasons for published results to "revert to the mean": honest mistakes like cell lines that drift from their normal phenotype, lack of budget necessary to run additional or larger experiments, and publication bias at the journals. One of the biggest problems is brought up in TFA: the observed effect was only seen under extremely specific conditions. Often that means that the company had to adapt the experiment to a model (say a different animal or cell line) that was relevant to their own work, and they couldn't reproduce the result in that model. In which case the result is still true, but much less likely to be useful for identifying a drug target.
On the other hand, this isn't really news, or limited to oncology. Bayer published a report last year covering its analysis of targets in CV, womens health, and onco and overall could only verify ~25% of targets in house.
My point about "the number or the needle position" still stands: a (usually) two digit number is a lot faster to register than text.
Your altimeter says "5.8", not "five point eight".
As to your other point: you could slow down to the point where you can keep your eyes on the road...
Not necessarily, or at least, I wouldn't hold my breath... They can gloss against Prometheus by saying that isolated DNA doesn't exist in nature and therefore is not a "law of nature" itself, same as the Supreme Court found vulcanized rubber to be patentable in Diehr, even though rubber itself existed.
But if "isolated DNA" is the anchor they're holding onto, they're also screwed. There are plenty of ways of running the test without creating Myriad's version of isolated DNA, some of them have the benefit of being useful for running hundreds of DNA tests at once. Even worse, the price of sequencing your genome is expected to drop to 1/3 of the cost of Myriad's test. Once you have that data, there is already free software out there that will score the test for you (or your doctor).
Cheap sequencing is basically the ball game when it comes to charging for individual DNA diagnostics. They can't charge the sequencing company a licensing fee if all they do is give you your genome. They can go after someone who distributes software that does the analysis...
but not in the EU (if the software is free), and probably not after the Prometheus decision.
Basically, after ~2014 you will be able to pay $1K for your genome and after that every DNA test you ever want or need is free*..
But why should the gene be patented? The patent seeker in question didn't invent the gene, nor did he invent the way it expresses into proteins, nor did he invented the proteins synthesized. Someone discovered what role the gene plays in the metabolism, but that's a discovery, not an invention.
That's not what the patents cover.
They usually cover:
1. Adding or removing genes from an organism to give the organism a useful new phenotype (corn that makes bt toxin).
2. A process for manufacturing a protein that includes taking it out of the original organism and expressing it in a different one so that you get a higher yield.
3. A diagnostic based on the presence of a particular version of a gene or protein (what this case was about)
4. A new version of a protein that is more useful than the natural one.
What's the difference between a screen displaying operational data (like navigation) or any of the various gauges that you use to operate the vehicle?
For instance, I find myself very distracted by constantly looking down to my speedometer when going through some of the areas around my home where the local police will nail you for 35 in a 25.
The difference is in the time it takes you to read it. You can (or at least should) register the number or needle position in a few milliseconds. Compare that with the time it takes to read and interpret moving text on a screen. Old dashboards where all of the needle gauges are all pointing in the same direction when everything is normal? There's a reason they did that.
Also: if you can't avoid unconsciously accelerating while driving through residential neighborhoods, I'd worry about more than speeding tickets. Try learning to drive manual; you end up being much more aware of what your car is doing.
It is not important that these are secondary effects, there is nothing wrong with the secondary use of data. It is perfectly legitimate to use a heart attack study and look for secondary effects like cancer, weight gain, etc.. as long as the events are captured and controlled for. Why wouldn't it be?
obligatory XKCD:
You can certainly use data on secondary effects, but it's a lot more dicey to draw conclusions from it.
There was no significant difference in all cause mortality. So overall, the people who were assigned aspirin are living as long as the people who weren't.
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies. Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research
Cite? A cite with actual numbers and specific drugs, not just an opinion, that is?
Typically about one new drug a year comes out of academic research. Biotechs and pharma companies often get grants from NIH or NCI, but the bulk of the money is still private.
They were only selling ~49 prescriptions of Nexavar per year in all of India, so I don't think the price drop affects the profitability of the drug very much.
Are you unaware that half of drug R&D is publically funded?/p>
If you mean the R&D tax credit and other tax credits, that's true of all R & D in the US, not just pharma.
If you mean academic research, cite some numbers. And not just the Warburton ones that conveniently ditch all of the expensive parts (failed drugs, trials on NMEs) as "outliers" and then guesstimate NIH's contribution.
Samples are a good way for a doctor to see if a particular medicine is right for a particular patient. The alternative is for the doctor to write a prescription, the patient buys the drug, then finds out a few days/weeks later that the very expensive drug is not right, and he gets to buy ANOTHER drug.
One improvement that we'll be seeing more and more of: drugs approvals conditioned on an accompanying diagnostic test, one that substantially predicts who will be a good responder to the drug. Not that Pharmas really like the idea, but it's the only way some drugs can make it through the FDA's increasingly stringent efficacy and safety requirements.
There was a study done years ago that found that DTC drug marketing's biggest impact wasn't on generating new prescriptions by getting people to nag their doctors, it was in reminding people to refill their prescriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Strict limit on fees: the class gets a minimum of 65% of the reward. All costs(distribution, printing, whatever) not earmarked by the judge come out of the lawyers 35%.
2. Strict parity in payments, in both kind and time.
Kind: The only way the lawyers get paid in cash is if the class is paid in cash. If the class gets $650,000 in coupons, the lawyers are paid $350,000 in identical coupons. They're welcome to sell the coupons on ebay.
Time: As in the time value of money. At no point during the payout are the lawyers paid their fees in advance of the class being paid their settlement. If a trust is established to pay out claims over a period of years (typical for medical lawsuits), the lawyers get paid incrementally as the claims are paid. If the lawyers wish to be paid up front they can securitize their revenue stream from the trust and sell it. They may get 60 cents on the dollar for it.
You missed the point of the article. We are selling it now, but the market is ridiculously primitive. It is all take-it-or-leave-it, no options for negotiation and basically no transparency. For all intents and purposes we've replaced cash with personal information as the currency of online services
What I don't get is how outfits like Personal.com that claim to provide a way to control and sell your information have any more control of your data than you do. Google still has your data. Facebook still has your data. Your ISP, Amazon, Yahoo, and every other site you visit and the third parties they contract with still have your data, and they still sell, use, and package it however they want.
And if it's bad local news, someone else is willing to pay for you to see it. The San Diego Union Tribune was recently bought by a real estate developer. Mostly because it was so cheap he could turn a profit just by selling the land the paper owned, but he also said pretty bluntly that he did it so he could use the paper as a megaphone to promote his own local real estate development plans and political views.
News is paid for by advertising. Your local newspaper doesn't need your subscription fee.
But their advertising rates in large part are determined by their subscriber numbers. The latest way to pump up those numbers: subscription drives where they offer to donate your subscription fee to charity. Win win, I guess, but if abused (and it will be) advertisers will start demanding even lower rates.
Researchers / institutions can coordinate to bring together a couple dozen reviewers, and then some random subset can review a particular paper; if the paper passes review, that subset applies a group signature for the group of reviewers and concatenates it to the paper, which is then published, or else sends anonymous feedback to the authors of the paper (which is what happens in the current system).
Bear in mind that in many journals you'd have to go through that whole process for each individual paper , and a random subset could quite well include people who have no qualms with actively screwing over an author they hate/compete with.
Not quite, but there is a movement among universities to reserve copyright on their faculties' publications. Elsevier can publish it, but the professore wouldn't be able to give them an exclusive copyright to the submitted paper.
How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Most readers aren't in a vacuum. The average reader (been active in the field for 5-40 years) of the average journal article probably already has a relationship with the principal author: they've known each other for years, hired each other's undergrads and grad students as grad students and postdocs, spoken to each other at conferences and seen each others' presentations. At the very least they've probably already read several articles by the author and maybe reviewed one of them. Journal articles and conference proceedings are the permanent record of academic science, but it's only a small part of the communication.
NO!!!! the whole point of peer review is to judge a paper BEFORE it is published.
Very true. As you pointed out, most of the value added by peer review happens before publication.
it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
What I think would work well is the law school journal model, which is essentially student run but still high quality due to the extreme reputation enhancement you get from being part of the process. Have groups of graduate students and postdocs (all in the same field, but not necessarily all in the same school) be responsible for most of the editing functions; they get paid in reputation (what you need most while training) and maybe travel costs for journal-specific meetings. Students would also end up with a lot of valuable insight into how the academic game is actually played and the political skills they will need. Riding herd you would still have big name professors on the masthead to add clout and cajole procrastinators, and you could farm out the IT and paper publishing to the university press.
I think the way PLoS does it is better then the current peer-review model: Everything that is technically sound gets accepted, and then the readers can comment and rate the article publicly.
One place where traditional peer review can excel above PLoS is that it is an editing process. Peers have the chance to suggest additional experiments and explanations, catch errors, improve clarity, and genuinely improve the paper before the rest of the world sees it. Of course that benefit is balanced by peers who just say "you need to cite (my totally irrelevant) article before you publish", etc.
It's a start. But peer review is rarely completely anonymous. First off, there may be only 10 or fewer people its logical to ask to review a highly specialized paper. In the consortia model, if "University of California" (10,000 professors?) signs a review, there's a good chance someone knowledgeable in their field could narrow it down to 2 or 3 professors before reading it, and know exactly who wrote it after reading it. Also, authors are often asked to suggest some of the reviewers, and are allowed to preclude personal enemies/competitors.
Because of the low failure rates and short time periods involved, we assume that all consoles sold are in active use. F
we assume that 30 % of users leave their console idle when not in use, with the remainder putting their console into standby mode. Given the importance of this assumption, we perform a thorough sensitivity analysis, discussed at length in “Results: estimated console energy consumption”. The PS3 and Xbox 360 have both added an “auto power down” capability through firmware updates, but this feature is not enabled by default and is difficult to find in system menus. We believe that this feature is not frequently utilized by consumers, and we neglect its effects on overall power consumption.
hmmmm ....
On the other hand, this isn't really news, or limited to oncology. Bayer published a report last year covering its analysis of targets in CV, womens health, and onco and overall could only verify ~25% of targets in house.
My point about "the number or the needle position" still stands: a (usually) two digit number is a lot faster to register than text. Your altimeter says "5.8", not "five point eight". As to your other point: you could slow down to the point where you can keep your eyes on the road ...
Not necessarily, or at least, I wouldn't hold my breath... They can gloss against Prometheus by saying that isolated DNA doesn't exist in nature and therefore is not a "law of nature" itself, same as the Supreme Court found vulcanized rubber to be patentable in Diehr, even though rubber itself existed.
But if "isolated DNA" is the anchor they're holding onto, they're also screwed. There are plenty of ways of running the test without creating Myriad's version of isolated DNA, some of them have the benefit of being useful for running hundreds of DNA tests at once. Even worse, the price of sequencing your genome is expected to drop to 1/3 of the cost of Myriad's test. Once you have that data, there is already free software out there that will score the test for you (or your doctor).
Cheap sequencing is basically the ball game when it comes to charging for individual DNA diagnostics. They can't charge the sequencing company a licensing fee if all they do is give you your genome. They can go after someone who distributes software that does the analysis ...
but not in the EU (if the software is free), and probably not after the Prometheus decision.
Basically, after ~2014 you will be able to pay $1K for your genome and after that every DNA test you ever want or need is free*..
*So long as your doctor accepts them.
But why should the gene be patented? The patent seeker in question didn't invent the gene, nor did he invent the way it expresses into proteins, nor did he invented the proteins synthesized. Someone discovered what role the gene plays in the metabolism, but that's a discovery, not an invention.
That's not what the patents cover.
They usually cover:
1. Adding or removing genes from an organism to give the organism a useful new phenotype (corn that makes bt toxin).
2. A process for manufacturing a protein that includes taking it out of the original organism and expressing it in a different one so that you get a higher yield.
3. A diagnostic based on the presence of a particular version of a gene or protein (what this case was about)
4. A new version of a protein that is more useful than the natural one.
Some are still pretty obnoxious though.
What's the difference between a screen displaying operational data (like navigation) or any of the various gauges that you use to operate the vehicle?
For instance, I find myself very distracted by constantly looking down to my speedometer when going through some of the areas around my home where the local police will nail you for 35 in a 25.
The difference is in the time it takes you to read it. You can (or at least should) register the number or needle position in a few milliseconds. Compare that with the time it takes to read and interpret moving text on a screen. Old dashboards where all of the needle gauges are all pointing in the same direction when everything is normal? There's a reason they did that.
Also: if you can't avoid unconsciously accelerating while driving through residential neighborhoods, I'd worry about more than speeding tickets. Try learning to drive manual; you end up being much more aware of what your car is doing.
It is not important that these are secondary effects, there is nothing wrong with the secondary use of data. It is perfectly legitimate to use a heart attack study and look for secondary effects like cancer, weight gain, etc.. as long as the events are captured and controlled for. Why wouldn't it be?
obligatory XKCD: You can certainly use data on secondary effects, but it's a lot more dicey to draw conclusions from it.
There was no significant difference in all cause mortality. So overall, the people who were assigned aspirin are living as long as the people who weren't.
check the computer that has your prescription history and a drug interaction database.
Somewhat wrong. Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies. Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research
Cite? A cite with actual numbers and specific drugs, not just an opinion, that is? Typically about one new drug a year comes out of academic research. Biotechs and pharma companies often get grants from NIH or NCI, but the bulk of the money is still private.
They were only selling ~49 prescriptions of Nexavar per year in all of India, so I don't think the price drop affects the profitability of the drug very much.
Are you unaware that half of drug R&D is publically funded? /p>
If you mean the R&D tax credit and other tax credits, that's true of all R & D in the US, not just pharma. If you mean academic research, cite some numbers. And not just the Warburton ones that conveniently ditch all of the expensive parts (failed drugs, trials on NMEs) as "outliers" and then guesstimate NIH's contribution.
Samples are a good way for a doctor to see if a particular medicine is right for a particular patient. The alternative is for the doctor to write a prescription, the patient buys the drug, then finds out a few days/weeks later that the very expensive drug is not right, and he gets to buy ANOTHER drug.
One improvement that we'll be seeing more and more of: drugs approvals conditioned on an accompanying diagnostic test, one that substantially predicts who will be a good responder to the drug. Not that Pharmas really like the idea, but it's the only way some drugs can make it through the FDA's increasingly stringent efficacy and safety requirements.
There was a study done years ago that found that DTC drug marketing's biggest impact wasn't on generating new prescriptions by getting people to nag their doctors, it was in reminding people to refill their prescriptions.