Goodbye blog, welcome Facebook

I realised that I need no blog to share my ideas with all of you friends, now that facebook gives me the opportunity of expressing my mood, post links, videos and other objects. So I guess this is my last post here. I am sure you will not miss me. If you do, just come on and visit me: http://www.new.facebook.com/reqs.php#/profile.php?id=643947002&ref=profile

Any european...

...who believes that ANY American president (or presidential candidate) will give a crap about their idea of how america should be is in for a (nasty) surprise. Mark my words.

How much the (OECD) world invests in R&D

It's in this nice graph, from the latest edition of Nature. Sad to see Italy lagging behind, I did not expect the 4% that Sweden pulls but at least 2%, come on!!!

The latest analysis from the US National Science Board confirms that Israel leads the world in its economic devotion to research and development (R&D).
Its civilian R&D spending in 2005 accounted for 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Although US R&D investment was the world’s largest ( $340 billion ) and in 2004, it was more than that of the rest of the G7 nations combined, the report offers some evidence of a slight decline in its standing.
Its 2.57% share of GDP is comfortably above the OECD average of 2.25%, but both South Korea and Switzerland have leapfrogged ahead of the United States by this measure since the board’s previous report in 2006.
Germany could now be poised to do the same.
Most countries are investing more in R&D than they were, says Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, which published the report.
For example, although China ranks 23rd in GDP share ( just 1.34% ) it has pulled ahead to third in total R&D investment with an estimated $115 billion in 2005.

I am most surprised at the incredible figure for Israel expenditure: almost 5% of the GDP in R&D. and I thought they had to spend all of their GDP in weapons to keep their many enemies at bay...

Toyota Tundra - helping to make it the real thing

Toyota, which prides itself as the greenest car maker in the planet, launched its new HUGE Tundra pickup. Funny name, since thanks to the fact that Toyota, together with the Detroit block, is lobbying the US government not to impose too strict limits on car consumptions, the permafrost once common in the places the thing takes its name from will most likely melt away. Duh!!!



I guess they'll call the next model the Swamp... or something...

Finally, house prices start to fall...

The bane of every young couple, their ability to buy a house to live in without wasting money on the monthly rent, has been getting worse and worse for the past years everywhere in Europe. Luckily, things are starting to change, with a contraction of prices close to 2% in most European states. If it continues that way, may be in a couple of years' time I'll start considering buying one - by that time hopefully we (marie and me)should be more financially stable and able to take advantage of an eventual free fall of prices.

A hurdle on the road to personalised cancer treatment

The new Nature is out, (since a couple of days, in fact) with a nice piece on the difficulties facing the development and approval of biomarkers-based cancer diagnostic assays.

Quickly, they work by taking a broad look at the proteins (or RNA, or else) expressed in your body at the moment, and compare them with similar sample in healthy and sick people. if the fingerprints (protein prints, or RNA-prints, or else-prints) match, then there's a good chance that you may share the same medical condition.

Trouble is, these tests do not yet seem able to differentiate between different kind of cancer enough to be useful in suggesting a treatment. To do so, large, long, expensive clinical trials are necessary. And the companies that produce those diagnostics do not have that kind of money. Pharmaceutical companies do, and they also have some interest in this: with clear diagnoses and treatment indication,s their drugs could be given only to patients likely to responds. Of course, this means that they would sell more or less drugs than they currently do. It can go both ways.

However, there are good chances. If it is true that the UK government will soon require certainty of effect on drugs before re-imbursing them to the company, then such a test would act as a shield in those cases where the drug were not to work nonetheless. I guess a middle ground will have to be found, with the government accepting a certain rate of failure in the prediction of the treatment and therefore shouldering the price of ineffective drugs rather than unloading it onto an already unstable pharmaceutical complex. Whether you like them (us) or not, the world needs new medicine and that's the most efficient way to create them.

Neglected Diseases

The new Nature is out. I've stolen the time to my paper-writing to read the brief news, if not the real papers, but really can't discuss them right now. Too damn busy...

Draft is due tomorrow and I am still adding data to the discussion and introductory session!!! Bad bad practice.

Anyway, nature you have to pay for, but you can get the Neglected Disease report for free. So, go and check it out.

Hold off on the purchase...

...of that new digital camera, boy, and wait for one with integrated GPS.

I had the same idea some days ago: "wouldn't it be nice to have a GPS integrated in my camera, so that every time I take a picture and upload it on picasa or flicker, I can get an exact location of where it was taken from? and viceversa, looking for pictures taken at a certain longitude/latitude spot?"

Wouldn't that be cool? well, of course it would be, and it indeed is. It turns out that some cameras do already include the thing: the Nikon D2X is a 5000 $ camera, so it's a little bit off-the market for me. But the Ricoh 500SE, at 1000$, isn't too far off. I'm sure next year this will be the craze - after all, many new ones already have wireless download to the PC/Printer, so it will be standard feature next year. And the megapixel run is over (thank God).

In brief, what are the good thing of this? For a start, other people will be able to look up your picture in the case they want to get there. conversely, they will know where exactly (with an approximation of some meters) that spot is. And once the mass of pictures in it reach a critical mass, other things may become possible, just think of a police officer looking for data on a person, or an event: knowing the location and time you (may) find the right picture and Bam!!! Case solved.

Organising such a vaste amount of data will be challenging, I bet. But once we pull it off we'll have an incredibly powerful tool at everybody's disposal.

Want to get back to an hotel who promised marvels and turned out to be dreadful? there you go, snap a picture of the bedroom, tag it with the hotel's name, geo-localised with GPS data and they're doomed.

As it happens, I'm way behind... Panoramio already offers this with Google maps, and Google has announced the intention to buy it.

Panoramio Announces Planned Acquisition by Google

Today, we are pleased to announce the planned acquisition of Panoramio by Google. This acquisition is a great opportunity for Panoramio uploaders to leverage Google's reach, increasing the exposure of their photographs to photophiles around the world and for viewers to choose from a larger universe of photographs as Panoramio becomes more widely known. We hope to close the acquisition in mid to late June of 2007. Got questions? Go to Q&A to learn more.

(Update: registered to panoramio as gufodotto, and uploaded three pictures. Check them out)

Welcome to the transparent society.

And I'd believe it too!

I mean, I would believe it if the guy in black were to specify that the Space God was nothing less than the "Flying Spaghetti Monster"



Of course, the two turtles were hurled down, slammed together, their feet jammed, and voila`, here's planet Earth! Spherical as observed experimentally.

if (prenatal_diagnose == down) then abort()

as described on the NY Times, almost 90% of unborn children diagnosed as having down syndrome are subsequently aborted by the parents. This seemingly puts at risk the remaining down, as their dwindling numbers will mean decreased visibility, therefore less money spent on support programs and such. May be, though, we'll have more money for those few children who are born with the condition? which one is the right choice, in your view?

I am internally fighting over this. Quite frankly, I don't think I have the balls to raise such a child. We discussed this over a couple of times with my GF and I'd rather abort. She would rather not - on the other side, she said she would not force me to be parent this way. So, my personale choice is quite clear. I'd rather have a healthy children, than a down one. However, I see the point in the agenda of the already born down's parents. Less down children will mean less visibility, therefore less money going toward research programs. Support program will continue to exist, yes, but research is a different thing. A drug needs a minimum investment to be made, and if the market is lower, the rice will be higher. same can be said for new techniques and such. therefore, a decrease of 90% in the newborn downs strongly puts to risk the improvement of thos who already are there, who will get no more new treatment as their numbers do not justify the expense any longer. I am surprised by the high percentage too. 350000 in the whole of US means almost one every thousand people is down. That's a lot more down I use to see. May be in Italy they are kept away from the view?

Anyway, lots of food for my mind. and yours.

Featured in the (bad) press

Uh Oh, The NY Times has a very nasty piece on the American branch of J&J and AM GEN who've apparently been paying (a lot) doctors to prescribe their anti-anemia treatments (EPO, a.k for its role in cycling doping).

Here's how the trick works.

Doctors buy from the company 9M US$ worth of drug. They prescribe it to the patients. Insurance or Medicare pays (let's say) 10M US$, to cover the drug's and all other costs. The company who sold the drug, though, send the doctors a rebates worth 2.7 M US$. Profit!!!

Frankly, I am disgusted of these practices, especially knowing that the company I work for (one of the two) prizes itself so much over his own credo. Now, I know this kind of practices are legal in the US, still this does not make them morally acceptable. Bleagh.

It's hot up there...

It's been two, no three weeks without rain, a very unusual thing for spring, here in belgium. It's so dry, that I need to water my rucola, and it's so sunny that it's growing large, and bitter like hell. So, I have been sitting in my GF's garden, basking in the sun and eating a nice mediterranean salad.
Yet, something feel wrong, with this weather. A friend told me that the Azorres' anticyclon, tha high pressure area which usually hovers over the mediterranean, has moved up north, while the souht of europe is blessed by sub-tropical rains. I don't know if this is true, but it certainly is worrying, and I believe I am not the only one worried. not that I see many people tearing apart their clothes and stopping using their cars, yet. Well, tearing apart their clothes yes, but only to sun-bake themselves to death. The average belgian has now a color which makes them look a bit more of an arab, and a bit more of melanoma too, in the near future.


And there you are, the NY TImes as usual reports that the artic sea ice cap is melting faster than previously thought. Woah! Here's the link. And here's some text:

Climate scientists may have significantly underestimated the power of global warming from human-generated heat-trapping gases to shrink the cap of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, according to a new study of polar trends.

The intergovernmental panel concluded that if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide were not significantly reduced, the region could end up bereft of floating ice in summers sometime between 2050 and the early decades of the next century.

For the new study, Dr. Stroeve and others at the ice center reviewed nearly six decades of measurements by ships, airplanes and satellites estimating the maximum and minimum area of Arctic sea ice, which typically expands most in March and shrinks most in September.

Dr. Stroeve’s team found that since 1953 the area of sea ice in September has declined at an average rate of 7.8 percent per decade. Computer climate simulations of the same period had an average rate of ice loss of 2.5 percent per decade.

Yes, its just computer simulations, some may say. No! the opposite! computer suimulations were optimistic, and showed less ice loss than observed. I wish I had used my bike this morning to come here (although it would have taken the best part of the day to cycle a hundred km)

Finally, the End is Near for Pharma Reps

The NY Times reports on the malsane (for me) habit of big and small pharma to give away free samples to doctors. These samples are then passed to patients, often against suggested first line treatments. now, that's bad. It's also bad that pharma reps invite out for expensive dinner/lunches
doctors, with the pretext of talking them about the latest drug from their companies. I don't say this because my lady is a doctor and I am jaealous of the pharma shills knocking at her door. Well, that doesn't make them wellcome to me, for sure. I am an italian boy, after all. What really pisses me off is seeing all that money being spent in marketing ploys of doubtful effect on doctors. Money which the patients end up paying, at the end, with higher medicines costs, and therefore higher taxes. It's a lose-lose situation, excluded may be for pharma shills which, after all, have to eke out a living (and were more interested in driving a powerful free car than in doing actual science - stab!).

In the great scheme of things, probably, free samples do the least arm, I would say. As a child of a poor family, I have often been treated with free sample coming from my family doctor's cabinet. And, I am also OK with big pharma paying out conferences to doctors (and scientist, although the numbers involved aren't nearly the same - even as orders of magnitude) - but is it really necessary to run every single shitty medical conference at the Sheraton or Plaza? Isn't it enough to talk in the auditorium of some University, equally well equipped and certainly less expensive? I can't tell for sure, but hey, here's my two cents. If that is, doctors really are interested in hearing about the latest treatment, and not merely in getting a free paid holiday in a luxury hotel, all in.

Farm Bill is coming...

and Coturnix beat me to it. For those of you that, like me, didn't know how this US legal document influences the state of the whole world, have a read at the latest piece from Michael Pollan.

In the most powerful nation on Earth...

there's places where 11 out of a thousand babies die. And if you restrict to blacks, it's 17 out of 1000. This is to be compared with an US average of 6.9. Still, markedly higher than in Western Europe or the developed chunks of Asia.

check the table at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html to get an idea.

I am sorry, but have nothing else meaningful to say.

Want to abort? Ok, as long as you shred it first.

Silly decision of the US supreme court to ban a method of abortion. Not even particularly cruent.

The banned procedure, known medically as “intact dilation and extraction,” involves removing the fetus in an intact condition rather than dismembering it in the uterus.

so, what's wrong with this? I mean, I am no expert but may be those fetuses would have been 'useful' at least. don't know how, but asking for shredding them before extracting doesn't seem to me to expresses respect for the dignity of human life,” as Justice Kennedy said.

most likely, as someone else has put it:

"Those who support this law are trying to outlaw all abortions, one step at a time."

Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter

I strongly feel about chimpanzees.

I believe they should be awarded almost-human rights, if not fully human altogether. They may not look exactly like us, but (starting from Jane Goodall onward) they have shown in many occasions to have an elaborate culture, tool-making and surprising cognitive abilities.

The latest discovery that made the news was the recent report of adult, mostly female chimpanzees fabricating and using spears to hunt bushbabies.

I've now come to know, reading this very nice piece in the NY Times, that chimps can actually outperform humans in some immediate memory-related tasks, computer version of the Kim's game we would play at the boyscouts.

Also, I read of the sad fact that in fifty years their number has gone from an already low million to 150 thousands, may be some more. By comparison, the very same continent contains 800 millions people. All this makes me sad.

If we humans were just able to get our act together forget the source of all diversity (also known as 'religion'), we would be better steward of this planet. And make sure that our siblings (and not only) survive.

anyway, just go, read the article and make up your mind by yourself.

Virginia Tech

Everybody must be aware of it right now.

Yet another shooting in an education institute in the US. I don't want to enter any discussion about gun control or else, tghis is my blog, not a newspaper. So, it better be personal. And in fact, I remember pondering on whether to apply to Virginia Tech, some years ago, when my PhD was nearing its end and I was looking around. The place did seem nice, and they had just received a 1000-G5 Apple cluster... So lots of cpus to crunch my numbers on...

Today, i found myself secretly thanking the decision to never apply there. Founded in part on my disliking of living and may be growing my (future) children in a place where guns are, like it or not, too easily available, and things like this do not seem to cause any reaction -be it because of de-sensitivisation of the people, be it because some lobbies instill a misplaced sense of security in those same people. as if having a gun were a deterrent for anybody to break in and enter your house. Quite the opposite, I'd say. The criminal will make sure he has superiori firepower, so that you'll be shot dead instead of punched in your face. Well, whatever you prefer.

I'm just sorry for those poor students, and their families.

See you later.

Friedman on Green America

Here's the guy who wrote "The World is Flat", columnist of the NY Times, writing on how the USofA should change their face (and hearts) to regain the position of leading nation of the world, morally, technologically and environmentally.



The article is quite long, so I'll print it out to read it, may be at my bedside. Cheers

The lancet against the cluster bomb...

In 2005, editors and authours affiliated with the famous british journal "the Lancet" (it: Il bisturi) discovered that their publisher, Reed Elsevier, also organises and sponsors weapons expositions - a position that most of them consider inconsistent. I do agree.

More info and thoughts are expressed by Revere on his Effect Measure. Go and check it out.

And oh, check out also John Wilkins summary of France, Great britain and Germany strive to mantain biodiversity at Evolving Thoughts.