> Same folks that historically develop most drugs and health advances, academic and national research labs.
As far as drugs are concerned, this is simply not true, not even close. I believe the actual fraction of new drug approvals developed by academic research (including national labs) is more like 20%.
It's not the meta-analysis part that's the biggest red flag, it's "a total of 113 subjects". That's the size of a Phase I trial, and the road to Phase III and clinical approval has a crazy high attrition rate.
"Data from 7 crossover studies involving a total of 113 subjects were reanalyzed and then pooled for meta-analysis"
This is a huge red flag - I've read too many of Derek Lowe's blog posts to take that kind of study very seriously as medical advice. Much more promising leads than this have utterly bombed in clinical trials, it happens all the time.
Nearly all of recorded human history has been rule by gangsters - the liberal democracies of the rich world are an aberration, not the norm. I think about this almost daily and it terrifies me.
I think you may be misunderstanding how the Bayh-Dole act works. The Stanford-Roche case looks like it hinged on a very particular set of circumstances involving a signle researcher working in both academia and industry, and the dispute was basically over who owned his work. The CRISPR case is different because the competing labs claim to have made the invention independently, with zero crossover. Even if Broad Institute were a for-profit corporation and not siphoning up vast amounts of NIH grants, the underlying dispute has nothing to do with Bayh-Dole or university IP policies, it's just a classic case of "who was first".
I obviously need to read "Worlds", but one thing I've wondered for a long time is whether LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" was also partially written in response to "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
As a software developer, I think of bassoon fingerings as a classic example of "technical debt", and also the kind of design that if someone thought it up de novo, the only appropriate response would be "you're fired."
All of the descriptions I've seen were "viable" in the sense of "we could hypothetically accomplish this in a few decades a for around $100 trillion". At least that was the estimate for Project Daedalus, which designed a nuclear pulse propulsion probe to do a 50-year flyby of Barnard's Star. Fun to think about but it's going to be a while before even the largest governments can afford to fund a project that most of its creators will never see completed.
The regulatory overhead to getting a drug approved by the FDA is enormous and this places a huge burden on small companies. I have no magic ideas for fixing this but it's a classic problem of regulatory capture, in many other fields besides pharmaceuticals. I suspect there are ways that the government (and/or private funders) could effectively centralize just the testing and data collection, while keeping the R&D independent and flexible, but it would require a different mindset than we usually apply to public policy.
The ANL maintains a large research facility called the Advanced Photon Source, a giant X-ray machine that the government rents out to academics (for free) and pharma companies (for $$$). The APS is very important and has been involved in many major pharma discoveries as well as a few Nobel prizes, and they pay very smart people to run their facilities, but the relationship is much more contractual than your comment implies. I don't know what beamtime at APS costs but if it's anything like other such facilities, Pfizer paid thousands of dollars an hour for the privilege of keeping their data collections private from staff and other users. (And to give credit where it's due, pharma execs have testified before Congress about the importance of these facilities.)
Patents are enforced by governments that have massive amounts of guns and can shut down any company that violates them. I promise you nobody in the tech industry respects patents because of any "social contract".
A better headline would be "MO Governor makes a fool of himself repeatedly". I would feel safe betting money on the reporter's continued freedom - the more important question is how much the paper will need to spend on legal defense before it gets thrown out. Which I suspect is actually the point, unless Parson really is that dumb.
For most people in my program and others like it (molecular biology, US) the decision point tended to be at the end of the second year, after the qualifying exam(s). This is because the first year tends to be full of lab rotations and some classes, and you don't really start doing research until nine months in.
I agree with most of the GP's points and I don't think of them as defeatist, but rather a call for realism when dealing with people (versus data, which have no ego to bruise). It's very hard to devise a system that rewards individual achievement without ever falling prey to classic human flaws. The good news is that science over time tends to be self-correcting, and all that requires is a commitment to shared principles and methods, combined with enough anarchy that no one individual can screw up an entire field (Trofim Lysenko being the most extreme example, but any bureaucracy can accomplish this).
Isn't approximately half of the Facebook workforce doing manual content moderation already? I was under the impression that it's an enormous time suck and morale killer that lets a ton of awful stuff through, hence the desire for automated solutions.
I cannot recall any misinformation campaign as spectacularly successful as the one that has convinced many Americans that the GP post's publisher/platform distinction is actually the law. And they don't seem to have had any special trick to it, they just repeat the lie enough times that people believe it.
So you're telling me NFTs are exactly like an industry that exists almost entirely to service the ultra-wealthy looking for new ways to hide their assets and/or show off with conspicuous consumption? That's pretty much all I need to hear to decide it's a bunch of BS. Find a use for NFTs that affects those of us without massive disposable income, and maybe I'll be impressed.
I like trains too (and short-haul aircraft frighten me), but it's much easier to find an unobstructed path for a small aircraft than a high-speed train. There's also more latitude for experimentation with these piecemeal private sector experiments. I would expect a high-speed rail line between San Jose and San Francisco, for example, to cost far more than Lilium's current market cap. I'm not even sure where you'd put the track, without killing an existing train line.
This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.
Not really - it's just consistently better than everyone else, and obviously the best solution that anyone is likely to come up with for a while. But there were already plenty of examples of near-perfect de novo structure predictions from other groups, going back more than a decade.
I still think "The Mule", AKA the second half of "Foundation and Empire", could make an excellent standalone - still one of the best sci-fi thrillers IMHO, and much more interesting characters than most of Asimov. But otherwise, there are so many better choices for translating to screen...
Read more history! (Especially read what the Wilson administration did to the Socialists - the origin of the phrase "yelling fire in a crowded theater." Many of us would riot if this happened today.) Stories like this have been happening since long before I was born, and will continue to happen long after I die, because voters will continue to elect stupid people some fraction of the time. The correct response isn't nihilism, but constant vigilance, and constant shaming of elected officials who abuse their powers.
I've listened to (and occasionally played) a lot of really mediocre classical music, and this sounded exactly to me like "lesser composer tried to mimic Beethoven" and/or "sketches completed by his student". Or, alternately, "great composer phoned it in", of which Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" is a relevant example. The AI totally nailed the sound of Beethoven, the rhythms, harmonies, and orchestration... but my reaction is the same as yours. Fine for listening to in the background while I code, I guess.
On the other hand, I'm now very curious what similar experiments with other composers would sound like: Vivaldi, Brahms, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, John Williams.... the potential for AI orchestration is probably infinite.
I too was reading the article and wondering "why..." until I saw the mention of addiction. This is an excellent reason to write a complete operating system from scratch, congratulations to the author.
It's a real problem, and I've been struggling with it for two decades, but even so I am legitimately impressed (and not in a good way) if they have 170,000 lines of Matlab code in their production software. That takes a really special combination of productivity and cluelessness, even for academic specialists. Regardless of the facts of this particular case, it should be absolutely horrifying that anyone's freedom is left up to a gigantic pile of unaudited Matlab code. (That said I am almost certain he added some zeros to the number, I have a hard time imagining what they're doing that could be that complex.)
I think what bugs me the most is the common assumption that we just need better modeling tools to make a lot of the messy lab work go away. Everyone who raises this idea seems to think it's original and revolutionary and a no-brainer, but there's at least 40 years of bitter experience in biotech and pharma development saying otherwise. Even genuinely impressive feats like AlphaFold get inflated wildly in importance (and used to retroactively bash experimentalists for all the time they wasted by not listening to software people). Actually speeding up the entire process of biomedical research requires improvements across the board in many different fields, and it's not something that is magically going to be solved by computer science wizardry alone.