Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Pharmacogenomics and drug safety

New drugs go through clinical trials before they can be marketed. Phase I trials are for safety. Phase II/III trials are for efficacy. If a drug fails these trials, it can’t be sold. One challenge to drug testing is trial enrollment. Ideally, the subjects should be demographically representative. The problem is that there can be […]

You can’t fool Mother Nature

Back when we lived in Chapel Hill NC, we made a few trips to the Outer Banks where my wife had an uncle who built fishing boats in Buxton NC. Back then, nobody was talking about sea levels rising because of global warming and yet it was obvious back then (early 1980s) that these sandy […]

Pig-to-human kidney transplant

There will never be enough human kidneys available to transplant all the patients in renal failure who are on dialysis. While there has been considerable interest in xenotransplantation (sourced, in this case, from pigs), the barriers to sustainable transplant have so far proved insurmountable: these include immune rejection and activation of cryptic viruses. Now, thanks […]

Intertoobs: good or bad?

Let’s just start with the acknowlegement that most of the internet is porn. Make of that what you will. I ignore it. For the residual, well, there’s Facebook. I haven’t been sent to FB jail recently, so I am favorably disposed towards it. I get all my news online these days, so I like it […]

AI and lung cancer prognosis

To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study […]

Will AI take all the jobs?

Noah Smith has a blog post arguing that AI won’t take away all the jobs from humans. It’s a clever and well-written post that deserves your attention. Here are some money grafs: “So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will […]

Death of the 6% commission

Apparently, the National Association of Realtors has agreed to eliminate rules on commissions. “The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prohibits agents’ compensation from being included on listings placed on local centralized listing portals known as multiple listing services, which critics […]

Fixing Social Security

If nothing is done, the Social Security Trust Fund is currently projected to run out in about 2033. At that point, projected benefits will fall by about 20%. The Boston Globe has an opinion piece about the coming Social Security crisis/crunch. It talks about how Canada deals with the problem. I have a subscription and […]

High school financial literacy?

I thought this might make a fun follow-up on my post on 8th grade algebra. Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum discusses a proposal to make a semester of financial literacy a high school graduation requirement. He feels that this would fill a much-needed gap: “There are no long-term tests of financial literacy that I can […]