Apple already made the same changes to their InApp Purchases requirements with the same 30% cut to Apple if purchased via the InApp Purchase, and that they have to offer the same price via their own website and through the Apple Store. The new Subscription Model is a continuation of the policy they've already put in place
Really? Then why is it that book purchases that I make through the Amazon app go into my shopping cart at Amazon, the same one as when I make a purchase via their web site? And if I purchase a book via the Kindle iPhone app, why does it still send me to Amazon's web site?
Because Apple forces (or attempts to force) all its customers through their store.
Except that they don't. The only thing that is forced to go through the store is apps. I read books purchased through Amazon and a number of other publishers on my iPhone. I listen to music bought from independent retailers or Amazon on my iPhone. I could buy that stuff through their store if I wanted; I just don't.
And there's hardly a disadvantage to me, as a consumer, to buying my apps through Apple. The apps are cheap, the selection is the widest of any platform, and I appreciate having some degree of quality control to reduce the risk of malicious or otherwise problematic apps
I'm not sure how big a deal this will be for Amazon. It doesn't apply to books sales, since they aren't subscriptions. I know that Amazon offers magazine and newspaper subscriptions, but the Kindle isn't really all that great for mags and newspapers. The slow display and the lack of touch interface are fine for books, but not so good for media where you are jumping from story to story. So the iPad could bring in Amazon subscription purchases that they wouldn't otherwise get at all, in which case the 30% tax isn't such a terrible deal. And some of those people will likely order through Amazon's web site, anyway, in which case Apple gets nothing?
Still, enforcement is likely to get complicated. For example, is Amazon allowed to offer a great big button on their app's front page to link to their web site, and bury in-app purchases 3 menus down?
Hey, Amazon, want to offer customers the ability to purchase ebooks(downloaded from your server, linked to their amazon accounts, through the kindle application)? 30% of that is ours, and you aren't allowed to charge a higher price in-app to make up for that.
Except that Amazon is not a subscription service, so it hardly even seems to apply. Even if it did, is Amazon really going to get new customers through Apple, even if the Amazon app offered the ability to sign up via the Amazon app?
Sure, if a shop wants to ban books and newspapers, and thinks that the increased turnover will make up for the customers who choose to patronize a more reading-friendly venue, that is perfectly reasonable. But banning some kinds of reading media and not others comes across as sheer technophobia (perhaps the proprietor's dad works for a printer).
3D sounds like a substantial improvement to me. I already have a pre-order in, as I expect them to sell out quickly. All of the reviews to date have said that the 3D effect works well. I'm not worried about having to watch from a fixed position, because that's how I hold a hand-held device anyway.
Prediction: Apple is not going to try to grab a cut of Amazon or Barnes&Noble book sales. Apple will not reject Amazon's Kindle app for allowing users to use access books purchased through Amazon's web site. Apple's users wouldn't stand for it, and Apple knows this.
Direct purchases from an app, as opposed to forwarding users to Safari, will have to go through Apple's system, and Apple will take a cut. This allows Apple to maintain the curated character of the app store. A kid won't be able to bypass parental restrictions on the iPhone buy buying an app that downloads porn outside of Apple's controls.
Apple may insist that subscriptions (i.e. e-magazines as opposed to e-books) go through Apple's store
Apple will ultimately revise their guidelines to make these points more clear.
I think that it is likely that Apple would be vulnerable to liability, and would probably trigger an antitrust investigation, if they appeared to be selectively applying their rules to disadvantage competitors. This has been an issue in the past.
Looks to me like Amazon could fulfill the requirement by removing the "buy" option from the app entirely, and just having the app access already-bought books. Users could still buy though the web page, they just couldn't get to it directly from the app.
Amazon does not include a "buy" option in the app itself--it just forwards the user to Amazon's web site in Safari. This is perhaps not elegant, but it is not a problem. But one reading of Apple's requirements is that any app that offers "outside the app" purchases must also offer "in app" purchases, presumably giving a 30% cut to Apple. Assuming that Apple did not permit Amazon to just tack on 30% to the in-app price (which would basically cause users to do what they do now--use Safari), this would almost certainly be a problem for Amazon.
It's possible that Apple might keep the restriction in place by provide case-by-case exemptions for booksellers (perhaps excluding subscriptions). Losing access to e-booksellers like Amazon and B&N would certainly weaken Apple's competitive position vs. droid.
Right now, for example, I can buy a book from Baen Books WebScriptions, and load it into the Stanza app on my iPhone. So is that OK because Stanza is separate from Baen (in fact, Stanza has been acquired by Amazon)? If so, Amazon could simply license the ability to download and display Kindle books to a 3rd party app maker (maybe even Stanza, spun back off) and circumvent the limitation. The only way to avoid such a workaround would be to prohibit apps (and indirectly, users) from loading and displaying 3rd party files. But a lot of apps do this, so this would be taking away from users a capability that is currently fairly widely used. That would not go over well with users. Indeed, while I prefer iPhone, this would give me a reason to consider a droid.
Of course, Apple could let Amazon simply tack on the 30% levy to the regular Kindle price. In that case, nobody would buy in-app, since they could just go to Amazon via Safari and save the 30%. This would just make Apple look foolish.
"Linked" is a very vague term. It does not imply causality. Of course, "aggressive" does not equal "criminal." So basically it is a warning that "Use of this product may be associated with behavior that is legal, but that some people don't approve of."
"The opposite" has not been shown in the kind of behavioral tests that this refers to. Of course, it is incontrovertible that as video games sales have increased, and as video game violence has become more realistic, the incidence of real-world violent crime has declined substantially. That does not prove that video game reduce violence, but it does prove that any "criminal violence promoting" effect of video games is so small that it is swamped by other social/cultural/demographic/economic factors that affect the incidence of violent crime.
This looks like something that Nintendo's lawyers told them they had to do, kind of like that warning in every videogame manual that everybody ignores, which cautions that games have the potential to trigger seizures. It makes it harder for somebody to sue, claiming "Your system is the reason my kid needs glasses!"
In fact, the notion that the 3ds could harm a normal child's eyes does not make a lot of sense. There's no evidence to support it, and some evidence against
Then why haven't the DS and DSi had TV out? (Where's the consumer version of IS Nitro Capture in the way that Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player were the consumer versions of Wide Boy?) Why can't the 3DS have TV out even in 2D mode?
Most likely because keeping cost low is a major objective of a handheld device. The 3ds is being introduced at about the highest price that consumers are likely to pay for a handheld game. And running a wire to your TV from a handheld device is so awkward and inconvenient that few people would use the feature, so it would add cost without increasing its value to the average buyer.
And before that, we probably threw rocks. Play in most species rehearses the behaviors that are critical for survival. As a species, human beings have three uncommon capabilities which were likely important in our survival as a species: We can throw objects with great accuracy, we can run for extended periods of time, and we have sophisticated communication that enables us to coordinate complex activities within a group. I think that it is not a coincidence that most of our games involve running, throwing/shooting, or teamwork, and often all of them at once.
It is quite correct that physics-based games that involve targeting of parabolic trajectories are very old, dating back almost to the earliest days of computer gaming. Yet over all this time, such games have been at best mildly popular. So how is it that Angry Birds is a mega-hit when nearly everybody has played a game that is sort of like it?
I attribute its success to these factors:
1. Excellent puzzle design and progression. Key to a puzzle game is that the player must always feel challenged, but never frustrated enough to give up. In Angry Birds, it is possible to pass a level without a perfect score, reducing frustration, while still returning it to try to improve performance, maintaining replay value.
2. Excellent user interface. Touch control makes a big difference for games of this sort is a big asset to games of this sort. The use of a slingshot, as opposed to a cannon or catapult also makes the game more intuitive, as most everybody understands the dynamics, and the rubber band provides a visual cue to the trajectory. A dotted line shows you last trajectory for comparison. (For comparison, I took a look at Scorched Earth, a game identified by others--correctly--as similar, and after 5 minutes I still hadn't figured out how to control my trebuchet.
3. Engaging graphics. Puzzle games go well with bright, cartoony characters. The simple, cute characters and backgrounds amuse the player without distracting too much from the puzzles.
So basically, what we have is a triumph of execution--a classic concept finally done well.
The inability to use voice and data simultaneously is a major handicap. Sounds like I'll be sticking with AT&T unless the Verizon unlimited data plan turns out to be substantially cheaper than my grandfathered AT&T unlimited data plan.
And in fact, it is not particularly uncommon in lab work to observe an increasing effect over time. When that happens, you mostly just congratulate yourself for improving your technique and the sensitivity of your methods.
Then why hasn't anyone done anything about transsexualism? We know there are measurable differences in male and female brains. We know how to prevent a girl with the misfortune of male genitals from undergoing male puberty (and thus having no chance at ever being a woman again).
It is this sort of poor understanding of science and medicine that feeds these paranoid notions that physicians and pharmaceutical companies are withholding cures out of pecuniary or malicious motivation.
Yes, it is true that brain scans of a relatively small numbers of transexual individuals have found significant differences. But this is a very far cry from something that can be used for diagnosis. Statistically significant just means that one is able to say with high probability that one group is different from another. It does not mean that the difference is large enough to detect reliably whether a single individual belongs to one group or another. Men and women on the average score significantly differently on math tests. But that does not mean that you can relaibly tell just from somebody's math SAT score whether they are male or female.
But it's worse than that, because the differences would have to be found in childhood, while the studies that have been done have been done in adults. What sort of study would have to be done? Scan a large number of children, then follow them up for a couple of decades and determine which of them turn out to be transexual. Such prospective studies require much, much larger numbers of people than studies of adults who are already known to be transexual, because only a tiny fraction of the children studied will turn out to be transexual. So we are talking about a huge, multi-decade study--something that would be enormously expensive. And that just for diagnosis.
So maybe in twenty years or so, if we start today, and if we are lucky and the results turn out as we hope, we can have a reliable diagnostic test. But that doesn't give you treatment. Now we're talking about a drug trial, giving drugs to children, probably for years. That diagnostic test better be absolutely free of false positives (as hardly any diagnostic test is) because it would almost certainly be a Very Bad Thing to treat somebody who didn't need it. And you'd want to know that the treatment does not itself have long-term consequences that might be as bad or worse than what they are intended to treat. So before any such treatment could be approved for large scale use, there would have to be a multi-decade drug trial to determine safety and efficacy in a small number of volunteers (well, actually they'd have to be volunteered by their parents--major ethical concerns there, which means great difficulty even getting the study approved). So now we are talking about a research and clinical trial program that would extend over maybe 50 years, at astronomical cost, well beyond that for a major industrial drug development project or federally funded research grant. And that's if everything goes right. But most of the time in real life there are problems--the diagnostic test turns out not to reliable in practice as is hoped, or the treatment does not work as well as expected, or causes some dangerous side effect, and you end up having to start over with little or nothing to show for all that investment. Probable cost: well into the billions of dollars.
Republicans have often been very good for scientific funding. Clinton would propose a low NIH budget, and the Republicans would increase it. That is probably the best scenario for science--a Democratic administration, with a strong Republican presence in Congress. The problem with the Republicans actually being in charge is that while they like science, but they love war, and they hate taxes. So they tend to end up getting into a war, and then they can't afford science
You can certainly run into a biased reviewer or editor, but there are a lot of journals. Solid work is pretty much always publishable whether or not it agrees with the conventional view, even if you are sometimes disappointed not to get into the prestigious journal that you had in mind.
The pharmaceutical industry is easily one of the most corrupt industries known to man. Perhaps some defense contractors are worse, but if so, then just barely. It's got just the right combination of billions of dollars at play, strong dependency on the part of many of its customers, a basis on intellectual property, financial leverage over most of the rest of the medical industry, and a strong disincentive against actually ever curing anything since it cannot make a profit from healthy people.
One tends to hear this sort of thing from people who don't know anything about the pharmaceutical industry, and of course this attitude is pushed very hard by people who are hawking quack cures of one sort or another, and who are thus competitors of the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm an academic pharmacologist, but I've met a lot of the people involved in industrial drug discovery, and trained more than a few of them. People tend to go into pharmacology because they are interested in curing disease and alleviating suffering. Many of them were motivated to enter the area by formative experiences with family members or other loved ones suffering from disease. They don't lose this motivation because they happen to become employed by a pharmaceutical company--indeed, many enter industry because it is there that they have the greatest opportunity to be directly involved in developing treatments that will actually cure people.
It is certainly true that pharmaceutical companies are businesses, and their decisions regarding how much to spend on treatments for different illnesses are strongly influenced by the potential profits. A potential treatment for a widespread chronic disease can certainly justify a larger investment than a one-time cure. But it can also be very profitable to be the only company with a cure for a serious disease. And it would be very bad to spend a lot of money developing a symptomatic treatment only to have somebody else find a cure. So a company passes up an opportunity for a cure at its peril. There is definitely a great deal of research going on in industry on potential cures.
The real reason why cures are rare is that curing disease is hard. Biology is complicated, and even where the cause is well understood, a cure can be hard to implement. For example, we understand in principle how many genetic diseases can be cured, but nobody in industry or academia knows how to reliably and safely edit the genes of a living person in practice. It is worth noting that the classic "folk" treatments for disease, including virtually all of the classic herbal treatments that have been found to actually be effective--aspirin, digitalis, ma huang, etc--are not cures; they are symptomatic treatments. Antibiotics were a major breakthrough in the curing of bacterial diseases, but they were not created from scratch, but by co-opting biological antibacterial weapons that were the product of millions of years of evolution. Unfortunately, for many diseases we are not lucky enough to find that evolution has already done the hardest part the research for us.
If you take 1000 scientists and give them all the same data, they will probably look at that data in several thousand ways. If you are dealing with 95% intervals, and the data is looked at in 2000 ways, then about 100 of those ways will present something 'significant' by simple random chance.
Not really. This would be only true if all of those 2000 ways were statistically independent from one another. It would take a much larger dataset than most scientists deal with for there to be 2000 different ways of analyzing it, and even then they would not be statistically independent.
So the problem is not as bad as you suggest, but it is real. If I compare 20 different statistically independent measurements, one is expected to meet the p 0.05 criterion by pure random chance. There are ways of correcting for this bias, by requiring a higher criterion of statistical significance (say p 0.0025), but that also reduces the power of my study to detect a real difference.
Which is appropriate really depends upon the nature of the experiment and the question being asked. If I do 20 measurements and half of them are statistically significant, I may not much care if one of them is by chance.
If I want to minimize the likelihood of reporting an incorrect result, while maximizing the power of my study, my best bet is to decide in advance on a very few measurements and statistical tests, and stick with them. That's good for me, but it doesn't really help the reader who is looking at a bunch of different studies, because each finding reported at p = 0.05 still has one chance in 20 of being wrong. Added to that is an unknown magnitude of publication bias, because studies with significant findings are more likely to be published than those that find nothing of statistical significance.
The unacknowledged problem is that the scientist is a part of his experiment. Scientists are humans with expectations, and cannot be impartial observers.
It's hardly unacknowledged--it is a well known problem that things like statistics, blinding, and placebos are designed to compensate for.
But the idea that "scientists tend to find what they expect" does not explain the phenomenon. The paradox is that scientists don't find what they expect: the magnitude of an effect is often found to be smaller than what they expect based upon early observations.
I think that people tend to underestimate the pervasive impact of regression toward the mean.
Even without "data snooping" (improperly reanalyzing your data post-hoc in multiple ways to find something that appears to be statistically significant), there is still going to be bias. If I do an experiment and I happen to "luck out" and get a large (i.e. larger than the "true" mean of an infinite number of observations) effect size just by chance, I am far more likely to do follow-up experiments than if I am unlucky and the effect size is small or the result is not statistically significant. If subsequent experiments asking the same question in different ways also give a statistically significant result, my belief in the phenomenon is reinforced even if the effect size is a bit smaller.
So I am far more likely to identify a real phenomenon if because of a statistical fluctuation I initially observe a larger effect size or a smaller standard error than the "true" value. And my figures from that initial study, showing a nice big effect and a small error bar are far more likely to pass peer review than if the effect size is smaller and the error bars are larger, even if the criterion for statistical significance is satisfied.
If I am unlucky, and I get a lot of variation and/or a small effect size (again, compared to the "true" value from an infinite number of experiments), there is a good chance that the experiment will go into a drawer. Perhaps I'll give up on the idea, or perhaps I'll try it again, but I'll improve the experimental design in a way that I hope will reduce the statistical variability or give me a larger effect size. Of course, if it "works," I'll pat myself on the back for solving the technical problem and go on to do follow-up studies, even though statistically speaking it may well be the case that the prettier result from the new design is itself just a statistical fluctuation.
Part of the problem is that by convention, we report a single value for effect size. Yes, some sort of estimate of standard deviation is appended, but what people remember is that single value. It simply is very hard for human beings to think in terms of statistical distributions. We tend to forget (even though we know it to be true in theory) that a statistically significant result does not show that our estimate of effect size is correct--all it tells us is that the effect size is unlikely to be zero.
Thus, we can predict, just on statistical grounds, that effect sizes will tend to decline ("regress" toward the "true" mean) over time with follow-up studies, based on the simple fact that those follow-up studies are far more likely to happen if the measured effect size was initially larger than the "true" value than if it was smaller. And as far as I know, nobody has been able to come up with any statistically rigorous way of estimating the magnitude of this unavoidable bias.
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False. The Kindle app was updated today.
Really? Then why is it that book purchases that I make through the Amazon app go into my shopping cart at Amazon, the same one as when I make a purchase via their web site? And if I purchase a book via the Kindle iPhone app, why does it still send me to Amazon's web site?
Except that they don't. The only thing that is forced to go through the store is apps. I read books purchased through Amazon and a number of other publishers on my iPhone. I listen to music bought from independent retailers or Amazon on my iPhone. I could buy that stuff through their store if I wanted; I just don't.
And there's hardly a disadvantage to me, as a consumer, to buying my apps through Apple. The apps are cheap, the selection is the widest of any platform, and I appreciate having some degree of quality control to reduce the risk of malicious or otherwise problematic apps
I'm not sure how big a deal this will be for Amazon. It doesn't apply to books sales, since they aren't subscriptions. I know that Amazon offers magazine and newspaper subscriptions, but the Kindle isn't really all that great for mags and newspapers. The slow display and the lack of touch interface are fine for books, but not so good for media where you are jumping from story to story. So the iPad could bring in Amazon subscription purchases that they wouldn't otherwise get at all, in which case the 30% tax isn't such a terrible deal. And some of those people will likely order through Amazon's web site, anyway, in which case Apple gets nothing?
Still, enforcement is likely to get complicated. For example, is Amazon allowed to offer a great big button on their app's front page to link to their web site, and bury in-app purchases 3 menus down?
Except that Amazon is not a subscription service, so it hardly even seems to apply.
Even if it did, is Amazon really going to get new customers through Apple, even if the Amazon app offered the ability to sign up via the Amazon app?
Sure, if a shop wants to ban books and newspapers, and thinks that the increased turnover will make up for the customers who choose to patronize a more reading-friendly venue, that is perfectly reasonable. But banning some kinds of reading media and not others comes across as sheer technophobia (perhaps the proprietor's dad works for a printer).
3D sounds like a substantial improvement to me. I already have a pre-order in, as I expect them to sell out quickly. All of the reviews to date have said that the 3D effect works well. I'm not worried about having to watch from a fixed position, because that's how I hold a hand-held device anyway.
Prediction:
Apple is not going to try to grab a cut of Amazon or Barnes&Noble book sales. Apple will not reject Amazon's Kindle app for allowing users to use access books purchased through Amazon's web site. Apple's users wouldn't stand for it, and Apple knows this.
Direct purchases from an app, as opposed to forwarding users to Safari, will have to go through Apple's system, and Apple will take a cut. This allows Apple to maintain the curated character of the app store. A kid won't be able to bypass parental restrictions on the iPhone buy buying an app that downloads porn outside of Apple's controls.
Apple may insist that subscriptions (i.e. e-magazines as opposed to e-books) go through Apple's store
Apple will ultimately revise their guidelines to make these points more clear.
I think that it is likely that Apple would be vulnerable to liability, and would probably trigger an antitrust investigation, if they appeared to be selectively applying their rules to disadvantage competitors. This has been an issue in the past.
Looks to me like Amazon could fulfill the requirement by removing the "buy" option from the app entirely, and just having the app access already-bought books. Users could still buy though the web page, they just couldn't get to it directly from the app.
Amazon does not include a "buy" option in the app itself--it just forwards the user to Amazon's web site in Safari. This is perhaps not elegant, but it is not a problem. But one reading of Apple's requirements is that any app that offers "outside the app" purchases must also offer "in app" purchases, presumably giving a 30% cut to Apple. Assuming that Apple did not permit Amazon to just tack on 30% to the in-app price (which would basically cause users to do what they do now--use Safari), this would almost certainly be a problem for Amazon.
It's possible that Apple might keep the restriction in place by provide case-by-case exemptions for booksellers (perhaps excluding subscriptions). Losing access to e-booksellers like Amazon and B&N would certainly weaken Apple's competitive position vs. droid.
This could be awkward for Apple.
Right now, for example, I can buy a book from Baen Books WebScriptions, and load it into the Stanza app on my iPhone.
So is that OK because Stanza is separate from Baen (in fact, Stanza has been acquired by Amazon)?
If so, Amazon could simply license the ability to download and display Kindle books to a 3rd party app maker (maybe even Stanza, spun back off) and circumvent the limitation.
The only way to avoid such a workaround would be to prohibit apps (and indirectly, users) from loading and displaying 3rd party files.
But a lot of apps do this, so this would be taking away from users a capability that is currently fairly widely used.
That would not go over well with users. Indeed, while I prefer iPhone, this would give me a reason to consider a droid.
Of course, Apple could let Amazon simply tack on the 30% levy to the regular Kindle price. In that case, nobody would buy in-app, since they could just go to Amazon via Safari and save the 30%. This would just make Apple look foolish.
"Linked" is a very vague term. It does not imply causality. Of course, "aggressive" does not equal "criminal." So basically it is a warning that "Use of this product may be associated with behavior that is legal, but that some people don't approve of."
"The opposite" has not been shown in the kind of behavioral tests that this refers to. Of course, it is incontrovertible that as video games sales have increased, and as video game violence has become more realistic, the incidence of real-world violent crime has declined substantially. That does not prove that video game reduce violence, but it does prove that any "criminal violence promoting" effect of video games is so small that it is swamped by other social/cultural/demographic/economic factors that affect the incidence of violent crime.
This looks like something that Nintendo's lawyers told them they had to do, kind of like that warning in every videogame manual that everybody ignores, which cautions that games have the potential to trigger seizures. It makes it harder for somebody to sue, claiming "Your system is the reason my kid needs glasses!"
In fact, the notion that the 3ds could harm a normal child's eyes does not make a lot of sense. There's no evidence to support it, and some evidence against
Most likely because keeping cost low is a major objective of a handheld device. The 3ds is being introduced at about the highest price that consumers are likely to pay for a handheld game. And running a wire to your TV from a handheld device is so awkward and inconvenient that few people would use the feature, so it would add cost without increasing its value to the average buyer.
And before that, we probably threw rocks. Play in most species rehearses the behaviors that are critical for survival. As a species, human beings have three uncommon capabilities which were likely important in our survival as a species: We can throw objects with great accuracy, we can run for extended periods of time, and we have sophisticated communication that enables us to coordinate complex activities within a group. I think that it is not a coincidence that most of our games involve running, throwing/shooting, or teamwork, and often all of them at once.
It is quite correct that physics-based games that involve targeting of parabolic trajectories are very old, dating back almost to the earliest days of computer gaming. Yet over all this time, such games have been at best mildly popular. So how is it that Angry Birds is a mega-hit when nearly everybody has played a game that is sort of like it?
I attribute its success to these factors:
1. Excellent puzzle design and progression. Key to a puzzle game is that the player must always feel challenged, but never frustrated enough to give up. In Angry Birds, it is possible to pass a level without a perfect score, reducing frustration, while still returning it to try to improve performance, maintaining replay value.
2. Excellent user interface. Touch control makes a big difference for games of this sort is a big asset to games of this sort. The use of a slingshot, as opposed to a cannon or catapult also makes the game more intuitive, as most everybody understands the dynamics, and the rubber band provides a visual cue to the trajectory. A dotted line shows you last trajectory for comparison. (For comparison, I took a look at Scorched Earth, a game identified by others--correctly--as similar, and after 5 minutes I still hadn't figured out how to control my trebuchet.
3. Engaging graphics. Puzzle games go well with bright, cartoony characters. The simple, cute characters and backgrounds amuse the player without distracting too much from the puzzles.
So basically, what we have is a triumph of execution--a classic concept finally done well.
The inability to use voice and data simultaneously is a major handicap. Sounds like I'll be sticking with AT&T unless the Verizon unlimited data plan turns out to be substantially cheaper than my grandfathered AT&T unlimited data plan.
And in fact, it is not particularly uncommon in lab work to observe an increasing effect over time. When that happens, you mostly just congratulate yourself for improving your technique and the sensitivity of your methods.
It is this sort of poor understanding of science and medicine that feeds these paranoid notions that physicians and pharmaceutical companies are withholding cures out of pecuniary or malicious motivation.
Yes, it is true that brain scans of a relatively small numbers of transexual individuals have found significant differences. But this is a very far cry from something that can be used for diagnosis. Statistically significant just means that one is able to say with high probability that one group is different from another. It does not mean that the difference is large enough to detect reliably whether a single individual belongs to one group or another. Men and women on the average score significantly differently on math tests. But that does not mean that you can relaibly tell just from somebody's math SAT score whether they are male or female.
But it's worse than that, because the differences would have to be found in childhood, while the studies that have been done have been done in adults. What sort of study would have to be done? Scan a large number of children, then follow them up for a couple of decades and determine which of them turn out to be transexual. Such prospective studies require much, much larger numbers of people than studies of adults who are already known to be transexual, because only a tiny fraction of the children studied will turn out to be transexual. So we are talking about a huge, multi-decade study--something that would be enormously expensive. And that just for diagnosis.
So maybe in twenty years or so, if we start today, and if we are lucky and the results turn out as we hope, we can have a reliable diagnostic test. But that doesn't give you treatment. Now we're talking about a drug trial, giving drugs to children, probably for years. That diagnostic test better be absolutely free of false positives (as hardly any diagnostic test is) because it would almost certainly be a Very Bad Thing to treat somebody who didn't need it. And you'd want to know that the treatment does not itself have long-term consequences that might be as bad or worse than what they are intended to treat. So before any such treatment could be approved for large scale use, there would have to be a multi-decade drug trial to determine safety and efficacy in a small number of volunteers (well, actually they'd have to be volunteered by their parents--major ethical concerns there, which means great difficulty even getting the study approved). So now we are talking about a research and clinical trial program that would extend over maybe 50 years, at astronomical cost, well beyond that for a major industrial drug development project or federally funded research grant. And that's if everything goes right. But most of the time in real life there are problems--the diagnostic test turns out not to reliable in practice as is hoped, or the treatment does not work as well as expected, or causes some dangerous side effect, and you end up having to start over with little or nothing to show for all that investment. Probable cost: well into the billions of dollars.
Republicans have often been very good for scientific funding. Clinton would propose a low NIH budget, and the Republicans would increase it. That is probably the best scenario for science--a Democratic administration, with a strong Republican presence in Congress. The problem with the Republicans actually being in charge is that while they like science, but they love war, and they hate taxes. So they tend to end up getting into a war, and then they can't afford science
You can certainly run into a biased reviewer or editor, but there are a lot of journals. Solid work is pretty much always publishable whether or not it agrees with the conventional view, even if you are sometimes disappointed not to get into the prestigious journal that you had in mind.
One tends to hear this sort of thing from people who don't know anything about the pharmaceutical industry, and of course this attitude is pushed very hard by people who are hawking quack cures of one sort or another, and who are thus competitors of the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm an academic pharmacologist, but I've met a lot of the people involved in industrial drug discovery, and trained more than a few of them. People tend to go into pharmacology because they are interested in curing disease and alleviating suffering. Many of them were motivated to enter the area by formative experiences with family members or other loved ones suffering from disease. They don't lose this motivation because they happen to become employed by a pharmaceutical company--indeed, many enter industry because it is there that they have the greatest opportunity to be directly involved in developing treatments that will actually cure people.
It is certainly true that pharmaceutical companies are businesses, and their decisions regarding how much to spend on treatments for different illnesses are strongly influenced by the potential profits. A potential treatment for a widespread chronic disease can certainly justify a larger investment than a one-time cure. But it can also be very profitable to be the only company with a cure for a serious disease. And it would be very bad to spend a lot of money developing a symptomatic treatment only to have somebody else find a cure. So a company passes up an opportunity for a cure at its peril. There is definitely a great deal of research going on in industry on potential cures.
The real reason why cures are rare is that curing disease is hard. Biology is complicated, and even where the cause is well understood, a cure can be hard to implement. For example, we understand in principle how many genetic diseases can be cured, but nobody in industry or academia knows how to reliably and safely edit the genes of a living person in practice. It is worth noting that the classic "folk" treatments for disease, including virtually all of the classic herbal treatments that have been found to actually be effective--aspirin, digitalis, ma huang, etc--are not cures; they are symptomatic treatments. Antibiotics were a major breakthrough in the curing of bacterial diseases, but they were not created from scratch, but by co-opting biological antibacterial weapons that were the product of millions of years of evolution. Unfortunately, for many diseases we are not lucky enough to find that evolution has already done the hardest part the research for us.
Not really. This would be only true if all of those 2000 ways were statistically independent from one another. It would take a much larger dataset than most scientists deal with for there to be 2000 different ways of analyzing it, and even then they would not be statistically independent.
So the problem is not as bad as you suggest, but it is real. If I compare 20 different statistically independent measurements, one is expected to meet the p 0.05 criterion by pure random chance. There are ways of correcting for this bias, by requiring a higher criterion of statistical significance (say p 0.0025), but that also reduces the power of my study to detect a real difference.
Which is appropriate really depends upon the nature of the experiment and the question being asked. If I do 20 measurements and half of them are statistically significant, I may not much care if one of them is by chance.
If I want to minimize the likelihood of reporting an incorrect result, while maximizing the power of my study, my best bet is to decide in advance on a very few measurements and statistical tests, and stick with them. That's good for me, but it doesn't really help the reader who is looking at a bunch of different studies, because each finding reported at p = 0.05 still has one chance in 20 of being wrong. Added to that is an unknown magnitude of publication bias, because studies with significant findings are more likely to be published than those that find nothing of statistical significance.
It's hardly unacknowledged--it is a well known problem that things like statistics, blinding, and placebos are designed to compensate for.
But the idea that "scientists tend to find what they expect" does not explain the phenomenon. The paradox is that scientists don't find what they expect: the magnitude of an effect is often found to be smaller than what they expect based upon early observations.
I think that people tend to underestimate the pervasive impact of regression toward the mean.
Even without "data snooping" (improperly reanalyzing your data post-hoc in multiple ways to find something that appears to be statistically significant), there is still going to be bias. If I do an experiment and I happen to "luck out" and get a large (i.e. larger than the "true" mean of an infinite number of observations) effect size just by chance, I am far more likely to do follow-up experiments than if I am unlucky and the effect size is small or the result is not statistically significant. If subsequent experiments asking the same question in different ways also give a statistically significant result, my belief in the phenomenon is reinforced even if the effect size is a bit smaller.
So I am far more likely to identify a real phenomenon if because of a statistical fluctuation I initially observe a larger effect size or a smaller standard error than the "true" value. And my figures from that initial study, showing a nice big effect and a small error bar are far more likely to pass peer review than if the effect size is smaller and the error bars are larger, even if the criterion for statistical significance is satisfied.
If I am unlucky, and I get a lot of variation and/or a small effect size (again, compared to the "true" value from an infinite number of experiments), there is a good chance that the experiment will go into a drawer. Perhaps I'll give up on the idea, or perhaps I'll try it again, but I'll improve the experimental design in a way that I hope will reduce the statistical variability or give me a larger effect size. Of course, if it "works," I'll pat myself on the back for solving the technical problem and go on to do follow-up studies, even though statistically speaking it may well be the case that the prettier result from the new design is itself just a statistical fluctuation.
Part of the problem is that by convention, we report a single value for effect size. Yes, some sort of estimate of standard deviation is appended, but what people remember is that single value. It simply is very hard for human beings to think in terms of statistical distributions. We tend to forget (even though we know it to be true in theory) that a statistically significant result does not show that our estimate of effect size is correct--all it tells us is that the effect size is unlikely to be zero.
Thus, we can predict, just on statistical grounds, that effect sizes will tend to decline ("regress" toward the "true" mean) over time with follow-up studies, based on the simple fact that those follow-up studies are far more likely to happen if the measured effect size was initially larger than the "true" value than if it was smaller. And as far as I know, nobody has been able to come up with any statistically rigorous way of estimating the magnitude of this unavoidable bias.