Another wonder drug bites the dust - try to remember this.

We were told Avastin would be a wonder drug. A breakthrough. It would cure nasty cancers. Time, Newsweek, all the usual suspects loved Avastin. Turns out, it's just a good drug that's also incredibly expensive ...

Costly Cancer Drug Offers Hope, but Also a Dilemma - Series - NYTimes.com...

...Avastin, made by Genentech, is a wonder drug. Approved for patients with advanced lung, colon or breast cancer, it cuts off tumors’ blood supply, an idea that has tantalized science for decades. And despite its price, which can reach $100,000 a year, Avastin has become one of the most popular cancer drugs in the world, with sales last year of about $3.5 billion, $2.3 billion of that in the United States...

...But there is another side to Avastin. Studies show the drug prolongs life by only a few months, if that. And some newer studies suggest the drug might be less effective against cancer than the Food and Drug Administration had understood when the agency approved its uses...

Every journalist who covers healthcare needs to keep two headlines stuck to their monitor. One should be about Avastatin the wonder drug, the other about Avastatin the good but very expensive drug.

The next time I read about a new wonder drug that will cure Cancer, or prevent Alzheimer's, I'll link to this post.

Wonder drugs do happen (biphosphonates for Paget's disease of the bone?), but they're like baseball superstars. You can spend an entire career playing AAA ball and only see one or two of 'em.

Update 7/8/08: My wife noticed I'd spelled Avastin - Avastatin. She thinks I'm suspicious of the wonder-drug statins, that maybe I still remember studies showing they don't seem to increase lifespan in patients without a history of MI ...

The downside of building IE into Windows

When Microsoft integrated IE into Windows, this was generally assumed to be a good technical move with the desirable side-effect of destroying Netscape.

I don't remember anyone pointing out that this would make it difficult to deploy rapid updates to IE driven by relentless attacks.

Even today, I haven't seen that pointed out. This writer almost has it, but he thinks the trouble is integration with Windows Update:

Still more reasons to avoid Internet Explorer | Defensive Computing - CNET News.com 

...Not only is the Firefox self-updating system well designed, it benefits from only having to update Firefox. Internet Explorer is updated as part of Windows Update and Microsoft Update and thus lives in a bigger more complicated, more intimidating system...

A much bigger challenge is that IE is part of the OS, not to mention vast corporate applications used by key Microsoft customers. Updating IE has the potential to break everything.

If IE were walled off from the OS, a distinct application, it might be easier for Microsoft to safely patch and update it.

I wonder if IE 8 will reverse the Windows integration of old.

If anyone mentioned the update challenges of OS integration in 1998 or thereabouts I really would love to know. That person would be frighteningly prescient.

The endowment effect, and other defects of human reason

In an article on the "endowment effect" (apparently hard coded in our genes) the Economist provides a nice list of our irrational features.

If I can keep this list in mind, maybe I can recognize the behaviors in myself, and adjust for them. Apparently successful professional traders learn to overcome to endowment bias ...

The endowment effect | It’s mine, I tell you | Economist.com:

... once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it—an observation first called “the endowment effect” about 28 years ago by Richard Thaler, who these days works at the University of Chicago. ...

... Other “irrational” phenomena include confirmation bias (searching for or interpreting information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions), the bandwagon effect (doing things because others do them) and framing problems (when the conclusion reached depends on the way the data are presented)...

Distributed processing of the universe - Hanny's voorwerp

A Dutch physics professor discovered an unusual astronomical object from the Galaxy Zoo

The "Zoo" is designed for human visual processing and classification of galaxies:

... With your help, we've been able to collect millions of classifications, with which to do science faster than we ever thought possible... From now on, if you classify galaxies on the ANALYSIS page, your classifications will continue to be recorded and will be part of the public release, but it won't be part of the first round of papers. Don't be alarmed if the galaxies are odd, this is part of the process of checking our results.

But we still need you! As part of our follow-up work, we need volunteers to review our set of possible merging galaxies. If you're already familiar with basic Galaxy Zoo analysis, click here to read the instructions and click here to take part. Galaxy Zoo 2 will go live in the near future featuring a much more detailed classification system, while further off we plan GalaxyZoo 3 with lots of exciting new data...

Most humans are very good at visual classification. This is a return to the original meaning of the word "computer" -- which was a human profession. (Hand calculating logarithm tables, for example.)

After 9/11 mention was made of using humans to view satellite and surveillance and look for "suspicious" images (tall one legged men, for one). Nothing came of that, but classifying galaxies is a happier alternative.

When you don't know why someone does something ...

When you don't know why someone does something, assume the result is the intent.

Ok, so this sounds pretty stupid.

Try it.

When someone does something that seems boneheaded or obstinate, and either they can't explain their behavior or their explanation isn't credible, try assuming the result is the intent.

Then work backwards to understand the actor.

If Obama is President ...

The media claims McCain is embarrassed by this stuff:

GOP convention button asks - ‘If Obama is president…will we still call it the White House?

I don't trust most of the mainstream media, but Rove/McCain might be worried that his people are showing their inner raving loon. Overt raving loonhood might, someday, conceivably, possibly, irritate the GOP's corporate constituency and worry media ad buyers. That would be bad for McCain's campaign.

Should be a fun campaign season. 

The three meanings of peak light sweet oil and praise for rational speculation

I'm sticking with my March declaration that I'd make my call on "peak sweet" August 1st.

It's still too soon for a non-insider to judge. We can only distinguish psychological speculation (a bubble) from concrete speculation (expectation of demand/supply constraint) by how long it lasts.

Still, Peak Oil of one sort or another is an increasingly popular meme. So I thought it might be worth pointing out that, even if we speak only of "sweet crude", that there are three sorts of Peak:

1. Absolute: someday, even with magical technologies, we will have extracted more than 50% of the "sweet crude" on earth. This is kind of irrelevant, since before then we might be using vacuum energy (joke) rather than oil. Or we might be huddling in caves, and not need much oil. Or we might be extinct. So this is uninteresting.
2. Market: Demand exceeds supply until prices rise to increase supply and reduce demand.
3. Market predictive: Rational expectation that #2 will occur within a meaningful timeline (5-10 years).

Speculation about the timing of #2 is the foundation for "market predictive peak sweet". This kind of speculation is the brains of the market; eliminating it would be like using a frontal lobotomy to simplify a difficult decision.

Eliminating the "psychological speculation" (bubble) would be like getting a alcoholic on the wagon. That would be a good thing, but hard to do.

My August call will be about whether we're in the "Market predictive" variety of Peak Sweet Oil.

PS. It always bears repeating that Peak Sweet is a disaster for global climate, since in the absence of a wicked carbon tax we'll burn coal like there's no tomorrow. Which there might not be, at least for our civilization.

CH's guide to the ultimate office chair.

Coding Horror: Investing in a Quality Programming Chair is a classically over-analyzed CH post.

I am in the market for a 1st rate office chair, so I'll be following this advice.

The acceleration of corporate senescence: Microsoft and Google

A few days ago I noted Cringely's summary of Microsoft's fallen state. Today I posted on how NYT makes Balmer's day - Google's mortal nature.

Neither Google nor Microsoft are as decrepit as GE, much less GM. Microsoft will print money for decades, and Google is still delivering tools I love to use. 

And yet ...

Twenty years ago Microsoft was a fierce competitor. Ten years ago they were the Naked Plains Ape of their world, exterminating every possible competitor. Now they're doddering.

Ten years ago Google was an explosive phenomena. Now they show a combination of the vices of private and publicly held companies of a far greater age.

Are these corporations aging far faster than their predecessors? Does hyper-growth equate to accelerated senescence for publicly traded companies?

Carr's annoying Atlantic article on Google's mind perversion

The Atlantic delays online publication of articles by a month or so. 

It's a hoary tradition in print magazines, but it really breaks the blogging model. 

So I was going to wait until Nicholas Carr's article was online before commenting on it, but his latest post forced my hand: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More food for thought. 

Basically Carr says that Google and the Net have rotted our minds, turning us into bovine grazers of grassy irrelevances rather than the taut hunters of elusive game we used to be. Dozens of worthies have written to agree that they can no longer handle anything longer than a screen's worth of text. Doris Lessing would be pleased. 

Bah. This "new stuff rots the mind" meme has been sure-fire best seller since the discovery of fire, but it's boring and superficial.

Sure, search and retrieval will change the way we think over the next hundred years or until the Singularity (whichever comes first), but I don't buy the "rots the mind" meme.

My equally well researched opinion is that I am as able as ever to read a novel I like, or even a non-fiction book I like, but I have no patience for flab. 

I always found it hard to work through the "pad-the-word-count" faux-suspense fat of a NYT Magazine article, but now it's flat out impossible. I want the author to "get to the point", and then move on to new stuff. If they have tons to teach me then write for pages, if not, then say it in 3 paragraphs. 

That's not the same as becoming a bovine grazer. It's more like becoming a faster, stronger carnivore who wants tastier prey and more of it.

What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion

[Firefox 3 and Blogger are wreaking havoc on my posts, so I'm now using Safari 3 and Blogger-In-Draft. The original version of this post was messed up.]

I used to think I wrote my blogs as a way to exercise my mind, get my feedback fix, and plant covert memes in the emergent Googlian metamind. Last year I wrote:

...my ... blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.
2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.
3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself. [I try reasonably hard not to contaminate this blog with too much of my personal speculation or political opinions.]
4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife... [Full of opinion, and this is about meme injection]

I still think that's true, but I realize that the #1 item on the list is evolving, and merging with #2.

This is a theme I want to explore more, but it's bigger than one post.

It's an extension of my ancient interests in Personal Information Management (ahh, fond memories of the "PIM-L" email list I ran), my 1997 "Snippets" project, and Xanadu stuff, now built on my increasing experience with full text search of personal corporate multi-gigabyte text archives.

I'm calling this "memory management" for now, and I've added a new tag to my Blogger "label" collection to track this. Memory management includes:

• My private personal (John ****) memory management: tagging, hierarchical organization, cyclic graph links and full text search of my personal and family datasests.
• My public personal (John Gordon) memory management: full-text indexed, tagged, and linked posts (more on the missing backlinks below)
• My private corporate memory management: memory of mine that's legally owned by my employer, and by law stays with them.
• My semi-public corporate memory management: limited to my writing and posting that's visible only within the corporation.

The technology of memory management becomes increasingly important because of two currently irrestible trends:

1. My experience grows far beyond the ability of my aging brain to contain it all
2. My declining cognitive faculties make my productivity more dependent on past knowledge and experience. (I'm older than 25. If you're older than 25 your primary processing faculties are also declinining.)

There's more to come here and in my tech blog about the technical progress on this agend and how this relates to the blogs, but I'll end here with excerpts from a recent Gordon's Tech post. I really want Blogger to resuscitate there moribund "backlinks" feature by making backlinks robust for whitelisted URLs:

Gordon's Tech: My new number one Blogger request: fix backlinks with whitelisted URLs

I've created a new category called "memory management" that will expand this idea, both here and in Gordon's Notes....

... "Memory management" involves personal memory management and corporate memory management, private memory management and public memory management, and an early ... version of gordon-google mind-fusion (one decaying, one growing)....

....Which brings me to my new #1 Blogger request. Fix the backlinks...

... the original purpose of backlinks collapsed due to fraud, webspam attacks, and search engine optimization.

Google has given up on them for all but very high end blogs, and one of their defenses has been to block backlinks within blog domains (to reduce search engine optimization and link farm fraud)....

... but backlinks are an aspect of what we used to call "backward chaining" in inferencing systems. In people-speak they allow one to explore semantic connections (insert obligatory semantic network, xanadu, memex, etc reference) to antecedent or precedent posts.

This capability is a strategic component of my personal memory management obsession.

So I want Blogger to create a new sort of backlink -- to posts that are within domains that I specify. I would create a set of whitelisted urls for my blogger account, and links from those urls to a specific posts would always become backlinks. I could remove them if I wished of course.

To avoid linkfarm abuse Google would exclude this type of backlink from their value estimation algorithms...

... As of first posting a search on "URL backlink whitelist" returns no meaningful hits. I wonder when that will change...

NYT makes Balmer's day - Google's mortal nature

Readers of Fake Steve Jobs read murmurings of Google's mortal nature, mostly about flaws of the founders and the usual effects of vast wealth on young fonders.

Today the NYT brings a smile to Balmer's (Microsoft CEO) day ...

Talking Business - On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble - NYTimes.com

... From November to April, Google’s once high-flying stock dropped 44 percent, to $412 from $744. (It has since gained some of that back, closing on Thursday at $537.)...

...Ms. Wojcicki is a figure of significant stature at Google; hers was the garage that Mr. Brin and Google’s other founder, Larry Page, rented while starting up Google. Today she is the company’s vice president for product measurement, though as I discovered in talking to unhappy Google parents this week, not many Googlers seem to know what her exact duties entail. Everybody, however, knows that she’s Mr.Brin’s sister-in-law...

Oops.

Cringely on fraud and the net - vs. Charles Stross and the Golden Age of Fraud

Cringely refinanced online last year, but unlike most mortgage scam victims he actually read the materials ..

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Independence Day | PBS

...From where did that number come? It certainly never came from me. Since my signature would be at the bottom of this application I wanted to make sure everything was correct, so I called the mortgage broker. For the first time we spoke. She was a very nice lady, too, and explained that number was the variable required for all the ratios to be correct so I could qualify for the loan.

"But it isn't true," I said.

"Do you want the loan or not?" she asked.

Not.

I wasn't so principled as cowardly, but maybe that doesn't matter: I did what I knew was the right thing for me, which was to walk away from the loan. But evidently a lot of other people took the other course and today are having trouble paying for their houses, which is a big part of the reason why we are in this current economic mess...

Cringely tries to connect net-based disintermediation with the general problem of deceptive products, but he manages to mention "fraud" only in passing and he never connects the phenomena with the fall of brands, reputation management, fake dog food and pithed Americans, the libertarian transformation of American culture, and the exploitation of the weak.

He does get points for mentioning eBay and PayPal, which I'm betting are hiding a very ugly can of worms, and for being old enough to remember when the net was supposed to enable transparency and informed consumers. Hoo boy, did that not work!

So, only a C+ effort today, but at least he's thinking the right thoughts.

In a related vein, Charles Stross has a project brewing on the Golden Age of Fraud, including a $242 million Nigerian 401 scam. I hope Cringely gives us a review when the Stross book is out.

On the Internet everyone knows you're a dog

In the very early days of the web, anonymity was the default. You had to do things to reveal your identity. This led to a famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon, captioned: "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog".

That lasted about as long as the first cookie.

Now, everyone knows you're a dog. They know your breed, your taste in poodles, your favorite food, where you buried your bones, and the fact that you have a shameful chewing habit.

There are no secrets on the net. Analog information was a solid, it moved with difficulty. Digital information is a gas, it expands to fill any opening. I pontificated about this to my informatics classmates in the early 90s, but it soon became apparent the cause was lost.

Nobody seemed to care. Now we understand Humans are programmed to ignore privacy considerations. Our natural state is to forget that people observe and remember what we do. We can imagine that we developed this trait as a way to stay sane in very crowded ancestral living conditions, but we don't know why it is.

Maybe Gen Y will understand this, but Gen X and the Boomers mostly don't.

So people are shocked to read about stories like Google must surrender YouTube viewer records. Including those XXX videos you've been enjoying, the movies you've been illegally consuming, and those videos that Cheney really hates. Sure this sort of thing happens every few months, but net users are programmed to forget.

Try to remember. There is no easy privacy on the net. Only the most technically competent can get some measure of privacy, and it will come with a constantly annoying cost. If someone with power cares enough, it will be penetrated.

On the other hand, there is a peculiar sort of forgetfulness. I used to write my blogs using my birth name. This led to some odd interactions with corporate executives who'd googled on my name. I changed the title of the blog, moved to URL to a custom domain, and now, if you Google on my "true name" you'll have to look very hard to find a reference to the blogs.

There's hope for those Facebook teens after all.

Try to remember the bit about no privacy though. It's gone, and it ain't coming back.

Rove and the Swifties are back -- and the media is still their toy

Krugman marks the event. Rove and the Swifties are back, with or without Rove the man. They serve John McCain, aka Bush III -- aided mightily by a dying, desperate, media engine:

Op-Ed Columnist - Rove’s Third Term - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.

But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing.

The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service...

I once wrote that McCain was the least bad of the 2008 GOP slate. That might still be true, but it's like saying that a rabid fox isn't quite as bad as a rabid wolf.

McCain is bad news, because of the party he represents, because he's repudiated almost everything honorable he's ever said (signing on for the torture policies) and because he'll be another Rovian pawn.

I don't love Barack Obama. Anyone capable of winning in modern American politics has to be an egomaniacal loon with sociopathic tendencies. That's who Americans want. Doesn't matter. Obama is light years better than McCain.

The real problem, of course, is that the media is still playing along with Rove and the Swifties. They're playing along because they're drowning and grasping for straws, and the public hasn't rejected these ploys.

It's the 4th of July today. A good time to remember that we are still in a democracy, and that the American people need to stop falling for media ploys, so the desperate media will raise their own game.