Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
StumbleUpon Bigger than Facebook in US? This can't be right...
must be a faulty data source here I suspect?
Second Life Users File Class Action Lawsuit Over Virtual Land
via mashable.com
Virtual Worlds still yield real lawsuits...at first I was skeptical but sounds like they may have a point here...
Posterous Starts Automatically Inserting Affiliate Links Into Sites, Forgets To Tell Users
We’ve been tracking super-simple publishing service Posterous for quite a while now, and for the most part they’ve turned us into big fans. Unfortunately, they’ve just committed a fairly serious blunder. In a post earlier today, one Posterous user stumbled across the fact that his site was automatically converting all of his links to affiliate links using VigLink. There isn’t anything sinister about VigLink — the service helps publishers generate revenue without having to manually insert affiliate links themselves, and has received funding from Google Ventures, First Round Capital, and some prominent angel investors. But Posterous neglected to inform its users that it was starting to monetize all of their links, which is a breach of user trust.
Co-founder Sachin Agarwal agrees — in a phone interview he conceded that Posterous should definitely have informed users about the change (they’re currently drafting a statement about the incident). Agarwal says that Posterous has actually been testing the VigLink integration for months, which means the links have gone unnoticed for quite a while. But he says it’s just an experiment, and that Posterous hasn’t decided if it’s going to be keeping them in the long-term (though he agrees they should have informed users regardless).
Agarwal also says that if Posterous does wind up permanently integrating VigLink, users won’t have to take part in the program. And there’s an upside: once they’ve built the infrastructure to support it, Posterous has plans to allow its users to generate revenue from links on their own blogs, which could actually drive more people to start using the publishing platform.
It’s worth pointing out that while VigLink will convert any normal links to affiliate links whenever possible, it will ignore any links that are already connected to affiliate programs (in other words, it doesn’t overwrite existing affiliate links).
Website: posterous.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: May, 2008 Funding: $5.14M Posterous is a Y Combinator startup that was founded in mid 2008. It’s a simple web publishing platform via email. Text and files can be uploaded to the site via email.
Users are not required to create an account… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
via techcrunch.com
Good Idea. bad execution...
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Hope for Targeted Lung-Cancer Treatment
By RON WINSLOW
WASHINGTON—An unusual clinical trial involving four different drugs offered promise that guiding treatment based on the molecular traits of a tumor can improve survival from lung cancer.
Researchers said the study amounted to "proof of concept" for a new approach to clinical trials that could improve the efficiency of cancer-drug development and eventually shorten the time it takes to get new treatments to market.
The study, called Battle, involved 255 patients with advanced lung cancer, an especially lethal disease in which until recently average survival on chemotherapy was about eight months. New drugs, including so-called targeted medicines such as Tarceva, co-marketed by OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc., and Roche Holding AG, have achieved some improvement in survival, but typically in only a fraction of patients.
Doctors don't know which patients are likely to respond to which treatments, resulting in hit-or-miss use of high-cost medicines.
Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center mounted the Battle trial to see whether matching tumor characteristics called biomarkers with specific drugs would lead to better results. Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer, accounting for 28% of all cancer deaths in the U.S.
The study is too small to call for immediate new treatment strategies. But researchers believe it sets a path for bringing personalized medicine into the care of lung-cancer patients, just as it is already playing a critical role in breast, colon and other tumors.
"This is a first step to find biomarkers that may help supplant existing toxic therapies and to find the right population for a particular drug," said Edward S. Kim, a cancer researcher at M.D. Anderson and principal investigator of the Battle study. He presented results Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research.
Key to the study, Dr. Kim said, was the ability to obtain new tumor biopsies from all patients. The samples were analyzed to find molecular traits driving the patients' cancers. Then patients were randomly assigned to one of four drugs: Tarceva; the kidney and liver cancer drug Nexavar from Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Bayer AG; Zactima, being studied by AstraZeneca PLC for lung cancer; and a combination of Tarceva and Targretin, a drug for lymphoma-related skin problems from Eisai Inc.
Eight weeks after the start of therapy, doctors used imaging to assess whether disease in each patient was under control. Researchers said absence of progression at eight weeks is considered a reliable predictor of overall survival benefit.
After about 40% of the patients were enrolled, researchers looked at the first imaging results to see which combinations of drug and biomarkers were more likely to result in disease control. Then, in a strategy called adaptive trial design, the randomization of the remaining patients was weighted to steer patients toward therapies they were likely to benefit from based on their biomarkers.
The adaptive design is gaining interest among researchers and drug companies because it could help identify drugs that don't work sooner, and identify biomarkers that would be used to enroll patients in late-stage studies required for market approval.
Currently large clinical trials typically take all comers without evaluating their biomarker status. "The problem is that when you take a drug that has a specific target, but you treat everybody, you dilute the effect" of the drug, said Dr. Kim.
Researchers say that is why many targeted cancer drugs fail in late-stage or Phase III studies.
"This is the future," Tyler Jacks, a cancer researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the AACR, said of the Battle trial. "This is how drugs will be developed and clinical trials organized." Just this month, a study called I-Spy-2, led by Laura Esserman, a cancer doctor at University of California, San Francisco, began enrolling patients in a big breast-cancer trial using adaptive design.
In the Battle study, 46% of patients achieved disease control at eight weeks. The improvement was only slightly higher among patients enrolled by the adaptive technique, but researchers said that likely reflected shortcomings in how biomarkers were defined, among other issues.
"We need better biomarkers and better drugs to improve care," said Roy Herbst, an M.D. Anderson researcher and a leader of the Battle study.
Among other findings: Patients whose biomarker status matched up well with the treatment they got had an average survival of 11.3 months compared with just over 7% among those that didn't match well.
Dr. Kim also said Nexavar showed promise in patients whose tumors had a mutation in a gene called KRAS, a particularly troublesome population to treat.
Nexavar also achieved favorable results in patients without a KRAS mutation. Still, said Anil Potti, a lung cancer expert at Duke University Medical Center who wasn't involved with the study, finding an unexpected potential benefit for Nexavar reflects the potential of an adaptive trial to find new drug candidates that might be missed in more conventional trials. Nexavar previously failed to show a benefit in advanced lung cancer in a large trial in which it was combined with chemotherapy.
Dr. Potti and other researchers said the finding suggested the drug might be reconsidered for a lung-cancer study that included KRAS mutations—but that excluded patients with a mutation in a gene governing what is called the epithelial growth factor receptor. Tarceva, confirming other research, worked well in such patients in Battle, but Nexavar didn't.
Among the medicines, only Tarceva is approved for lung cancer in the U.S. The study was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense with support from the National Cancer Institute and some pharmaceutical companies.
Write to Ron Winslow at ron.winslow@wsj.com
via online.wsj.com
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
ArmRev: Hollywood Games The Web For Social Good
Imagine if the tens of millions who give time and money to tending their Farmville game were instead working for social change. A team of Hollywood's elite talent has been working with an army of advisors for six years to create a game building infrastructure that will make it so.
Armchair Revolutionary is a social gaming and strategic crowdsourcing concept that's based on real life social needs. The games are designed to connect the real-time Web to real-time social change.
via readwriteweb.com
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Mr. Oizo x Pharrell Williams x Flat Eric: WHERE’S THE MONEY GEORGE? | Hypebeast
via hypebeast.com
So weird. I was just searching to find who this muppet was from years ago... and now he popped up right in front of me.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Power Corrupts - and makes you a better liar
Lying is costly, extracting physiological and cognitive tolls from most people. The body of research on lying consistently shows that people become stressed when they do not tell the truth. The speed with which they process information slows down, possibly because lying requires keeping track of the lie and the truth while simultaneously trying to suppress nervous habits or other signs that might give the liar away. (So-called lie-detector tests, or polygraphs, can’t actually determine if people are lying, but they can identify signs of physiological stress that are consistent with lying.)
Professor Dana R. Carney, who studies social judgment and decision making, noticed that in a different area of scientific study, psychologists have observed that power — defined as control over others’ social or monetary outcomes and always accompanied by feelings of power — enhances cognitive functions and makes people feel good. The effects of feeling powerful are precisely the inverse of those that most people experience when they lie.
“The overlap is remarkable. When you feel powerful, you feel good, you’re a little smarter in that you process information more quickly and are better at multitasking, and some evidence suggests you may be more physiologically resilient,” Carney says. “When you lie, you feel bad, your cognitive systems are overworked, and you are physiologically taxed. What if you put lying and power together? It’s a match made in heaven or a match made in hell.”
Carney worked with Andy Yap, Brian Lucas and Pranjal Mehta of Columbia University to see what they could learn about the differences in the physiological and cognitive responses of both high- and low-power liars.
Previous research has shown that the mere act of assigning subjects leadership roles and subordinate roles is sufficient to produce feelings of power and subordination. Several parts of the researchers’ experiments here were designed to intensify those feelings. Subjects first completed a survey intended to make them believe they would be assigned a role as a leader or subordinate based on their answers. In fact, subjects were randomly assigned their roles. Each leader was shown to an expansive, comfortable office, while each subordinate was relegated to a small, windowless space.
Next, each pair met face-to-face in the leader’s office, and was asked to review a set of résumés and decide how to allocate a small pool of bonus funds. They also had to divide a small amount of bonus money between themselves. The conditions of the experiment gave the leader control in three significant areas: social control of the interaction, control over the final outcome of the assigned task and control over how the monetary incentive was divided between the leader and the subordinate.
Once the first phase of the study was complete, the subjects were separated and asked to wait, alone, in another room, where they were led through an exercise that asked certain leaders and subordinates to steal money (hidden in the room) and lie to the researchers about having done so.
Subjects had saliva samples and other measures of physiological stress taken at key points during the experiment — for example, before beginning the survey and after being asked to lie. All participants also completed a reaction-time test at the end of the experiment designed to measure their cognitive capacity.
The researchers found that subjects assigned leadership roles were buffered from the negative effects of lying. Across all measures, the high-power liars — the leaders —resembled truthtellers, showing no evidence of cortisol reactivity (which signals stress), cognitive impairment or feeling bad. In contrast, low-power liars — the subordinates — showed the usual signs of stress and slower reaction times. “Having power essentially buffered the powerful liars from feeling the bad effects of lying, from responding in any negative way or giving nonverbal cues that low-power liars tended to reveal,” Carney explains.
It’s an unsettling finding that prompts a number of questions, the first of which is, if powerful people can lie without suffering consequences, are they prone to lie more? “Even a very ethical person who suddenly finds herself in a position of power is probably going to notice on a conscious or unconscious level that lying no longer feels bad,” Carney says. “We can’t say empirically that power makes a person lie more, but the evidence does suggest that power would make you lie more easily and therefore more often.”
Carney emphasizes that these results don’t mean that all people in high positions find lying easier: people need only feel powerful, regardless of the real power they have or their position in a hierarchy. “There are plenty of CEOs who act like low-power people and there are plenty of people at every level in organizations who feel very high power,” Carney says. “It can cross rank, every strata of society, any job.”
Dana R. Carney is assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School.
One gene lost = one limb regained?
via sciencedaily.com
Amazing - one gene deletion can allow mice to regain some regenerative ability. This is more evidence to me that evolution works in part by preserving a "scrap heap" of old material that may prove of use in the future. Of course I would be surprised if turning this capability back on did not result in some serious negative effects. Surprising that no increase in cancer rate was observed - that would have been my first guess.
Health Reform, Point by Point - Bills Compared
Compare the health-care bill that won approval on Capitol Hill late Sunday with the bills that passed in the Senate Dec. 24, 2009, and the House on Nov. 7, and with President Barack Obama's pitch to Congress in September.
• Senators added extra $10 billion for community health centers
• After adding up a variety of new costs in the bill, including increased prescription drug coverage for seniors under Medicare, the cost is around $1.2 trillion
• Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, net savings estimated to be $438 billion over ten years, starting in 2013
• $54 billion over 10 years from a Medicare payroll taxes hike on couples with income of more than $250,000 a year. For those families, the levy would be raised to 1.95%, up from 1.45%
• Customers of indoor tanning salons would pay a 10% tax (Replaces a proposed tax on cosmetic surgery)
• $102.3 billion over ten years from fees on insurance companies and medical device manufacturers, including $23 billion over ten years on fees on drug makers
• A tax on individuals without qualifying coverage, maximum penalty set at 2.0% of income
• More than $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid
• A new $20 billion fee on medical device makers
• $13 billion from limiting contributions to flexible spending accounts
• Fines paid by individuals and employers who don't obtain coverage and a mix of other corporate taxes and fees
• Said most of the cost would be paid for by cuts to Medicare
• Dedicated $630 billion over 10 years toward a Health Reform Reserve Fund in budget outline released in February
• An increase in Medicare payroll taxes on couples with income of more than $250,000 a year.
• Customers of indoor tanning salons would pay a 10% tax
• Fees on insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, including $33 billion over ten years on fees on drug makers
• A tax on individuals without qualifying coverage, maximum penalty set at 2.5% of income
• Individuals without qualifying coverage could face a penalty up to 2.0% of income
• The maximum amount workers would be required to spend on premiums would be capped at 9.8% of income
• Exemptions for economic hardship, religious objections, American Indians, those without coverage for less than three months, undocumented immigrants, incarcerated individuals
• People who fail to purchase coverage would face a tax penalty of 2.5% of income
• Exceptions for financial hardship and religious objections
• Individuals without qualifying coverage could face a penalty up to 2.5% of income
• Exemptions for economic hardship, religious objections, American Indians, those without coverage for less than three months, undocumented immigrants, incarcerated individuals
• Companies with more than 200 employees are required to automatically enroll employees in plans
• Companies with payrolls under $250,000 annually are exempt and the penalty is phased in for companies with payrolls between $500,000 and $750,000
• Tax credits to buy health coverage available to small employers with up to 25 workers and average wage of $50,000 or less
• Ensure that federal premium or cost-sharing subsidies are not used to purchase coverage for abortion if coverage extends beyond saving the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest
• Tax credits to buy health coverage available to small employers with 10 or fewer workers
• Prohibit federal premium subsidies from being used to purchase a health plan in the Exchange that includes coverage for abortions except to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest
• Tax credits to buy health coverage available to small employers with up to 25 workers and average wage of $40,000 or less
• After a last-minute deal with a critical group of anti-abortion lawmakers, Mr. Obama signed an executive order affirming current law and provisions in the legislation that ban federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.
• Prohibit abortion coverage from being required as part of the essential health benefits package
• Starting in 2010, insurers would be barred from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. That provision would apply to adults starting in 2014.
• Prohibit abortion coverage from being required as part of the essential health benefits package
• Out-of-pocket costs would be capped
• The new benefits package would be the basic benefits package offered in the exchange.
• Wants to prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions; limit premium variation based on age; and stop insurers from dropping people when they get sick
• Prohibit abortion coverage from being required as part of the essential health-benefits package
• In place of that, the senators embraced a more limited proposal that would empower the government's Office of Personnel Management to put in place a new low-cost national health plan
• The new national plan would be run by nonprofit entities set up by the private sector, and would be available to the public on the new insurance exchanges that would be created under the bill
• Democrats originally designed the plan to pay Medicare rates plus 5% to doctors. But the final version would let the HHS secretary negotiate rates with providers
• Employees would be generally allowed to keep their work-provided coverage
• It could be expanded to large employers over time
• States could opt to operate their own exchanges in place of the national exchange if they follow federal rules
• Small businesses and people without access to affordable insurance through their employer or elsewhere would have access to a new exchange starting in 2013
• Illegal immigrants would not be able to shop in the exchange
• Employees would be generally allowed to keep their work-provided coverage
• Income eligibility levels likely to be standardized to 133% of poverty ($29,327 a year for a family of four)
• States could negotiate with insurers to arrange coverage for people with incomes slightly higher than the cutoff for Medicaid
• The federal government would pick up the full cost of the expansion for 2014 through 2016; thereafter financing will be shared through an increase in the federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP)
• The federal government would pick up the full cost of the expansion in 2013 and 2014; thereafter the federal government would pay 90% and states would pay 10%
• The House added a provision to include enough money to close a gap in the Medicare prescription drug coverage over the next decade, starting with an election-season rebate of $250 later this year for seniors facing high costs.
• It also included sweeping changes in the student loan program, an administration priority that has been stalled in the Senate for months.
• Require health plans to report the proportion of premium dollars spent on clinical services, quality, and trends on premium increases
• Adopt standards for financial and administrative transactions
• Provide dependent coverage for children up to age 26
• Prohibit individual and group health plans from placing aggregate dollar lifetime limits on coverage. Prohibit insurers from rescinding coverage except in cases of fraud
• Develop standards for insurers to use in providing information on benefits and coverage
• Limit deductibles for health plans in the small group market to $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families
• Prohibit individual and group health plans from placing aggregate dollar lifetime limits on coverage. Prohibit insurers from rescinding coverage except in cases of fraud
• Adopt standards for financial and administrative transactions to promote administrative simplification
• Require review of increases in health insurance premiums prior to implementation of the increases
• Provide dependent coverage for children up to age 27
• Improve consumer protections by establishing uniform marketing standards, requiring fair grievance and appeals mechanisms and accurate and timely disclosure of plan information
• Create the Health Choices Administration to establish the qualifying health benefits standards, establish the Exchange, administer the affordability credits, and enforce the requirements for qualified health benefit plan offering entities, including those participating in the Exchange or outside the Exchange
• Require health plans to report the proportion of premium dollars spent on clinical services, quality, and other costs and provide rebates to consumers
• Adopt standards for financial and administrative transactions to promote administrative simplification
• Develop standards for insurers to use in providing information on benefits and coverage
• Limit deductibles for health plans in the small group market to $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families
• Create a new federal body that would have power to block insurers from raising rates
• Limit any waiting periods for coverage to 90 days.
• Grandfather existing individual and group plans with respect to new benefit standards, but require these plans to extend dependent coverage to age 26 and prohibit rescissions of coverage. Require grandfathered plans to eliminate lifetime limits on coverage and annual limits on coverage. Require grandfathered plans to eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions.
Sources: Associated Press research, Kaiser Family Foundation.
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via online.wsj.com
Monday, March 8, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Implanted Neurons Let the Brain Rewire Itself Again
Wow. Maybe some day stem cells induced in the brain will allow us to learn better, or even rejuvenate old brains.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Twitter Nears Facebook’s Daily Status Update Volume
This afternoon Twitter announced that the company now receives over 50 million status updates per day. Compare that with Facebook who states they currently receive over 60 million updates per day. Despite Twitter being a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company now owns a massive percentage of the total status updates posted each day on the web. The latest statistics should revive discussion over the ongoing Facebook versus Twitter war.
While Twitter is not releasing statistics about the percentage of users tweeting on a daily basis, a report published last week suggests that the percentage of Twitter users posting updates each month remains relatively low (somewhere around 16 percent). So what information can we derive from the latest statistics?Twitter Rapidly Approaching Facebook%u2019s Status Update Volume
Despite being a fraction of the size of Facebook, Twitter has a large enough sampling of information on the web since they appear to have the most active users on the web. While we don%u2019t know the exact volume of tweets per user, the top users continue to remain active. The behavior of a Twitter user also differs significantly over Facebook users who arguably don%u2019t post updates as frequently.
Twitter%u2019s Grip On The Real-Time Web Is Significant
Ultimately it doesn%u2019t matter how many users a company has as long as they have the most connected and most active users. Even Google knows that a fraction of the content on the web isn%u2019t updated regularly and much of it is irrelevant. As long as Twitter can capture the most important segment of the social media market, the company has a shot at competing in the real-time web wars.
One important factor that would determine Twitter%u2019s grip on the real-time web is the percentage of tweets being sent directly to Facebook.
Twitter Has A Ways To Go When Including Facebook%u2019s Shared Content
Despite Twitter%u2019s dominance in the %u201Cstatus update%u201D world, one needs to include the fact that more than 700 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared on Facebook each day. That%u2019s in addition to the 60 million status updates. In theory the volume of links and news stories should be included in the comparison to Twitter. Unfortunately Facebook doesn%u2019t break out the volume of links posted each day, but we could make a wild guess and say that at least 100 million links are posted each day in addition to the status updates.
Conclusion
Facebook should be concerned about the latest statistics from Twitter. While it%u2019s difficult to say how close Twitter is to competing with the volume of relevant content being posted on Facebook each day, the growth continues to be impressive. At this rate, Twitter could eventually be a direct competitor to Facebook in terms of status updates and links shared if the growth continues.
Is Twitter going to be competing on the level of Facebook anytime soon? Probably not since their user base is still a fraction of Facebook, however it%u2019s pretty clear that Twitter has some of the most active internet users on the web.
via allfacebook.com
Interesting comparison of Twitter and Facebook volumes of status updates and link shares.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Science Podcast, 12 February 2010 -- Food Security Special
Great podcast from Science Mag. on the risks of our food supply - the first speaker highlights how regulation has hindered our ability to improve technology that is needed to help us feed the World.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Smarter You Are, The Less You Click
via readwriteweb.com
Sad but probably true. I salute all of you people who make my ad supported businesses possible.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph
via readwriteweb.com
Interesting twist - recommendation engines for people. This is the way I primarily find value in LinkeIn.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
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