Bjorno

Half of new HIV cases in Greece self-inflicted for benefits | The Daily Caller:

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At the same time that the NSA is secretly and illegally obtaining information about Americans the FDA is making it illegal for Americans to obtain information about themselves.

In a warning letter the FDA has told Anne Wojcicki, The Most Daring CEO In America, that she “must immediately discontinue” selling 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service, more affectionately known as the spit kit.

As I wrote when this issue first surfaced in 2010:

The ability of genetic tests to predict diseases is currently limited; if the FDA were simply to require firms to acknowledge this point, say with a clear statement of probabilities, that would be one thing (although this task is better met by the FTC under advertising regulation). But the FDA is brazenly overreaching in trying to regulate genetic tests as medical devices. First, there is no question that these tests are safe–safer than brushing your teeth!–and also effective in identifying genetic markers. Thus, there is no medical reason whatsoever for regulation.

Moreover, genetic tests provide information, personal information about our bodies and our selves. The FDA has no standing to interfere with the provision of such information.

Consider, I swab the inside of my cheek and send the sample to a firm. The idea that the FDA can rule on what the firm can and cannot tell me about my own genes is absurd–it’s no different than the FDA trying to regulate what my doctor can tell me after a physical examination or what my optometrist can tell me after an eye examination (Please read the first line.  ”G T A C C A…”).

The idea that the FDA can regulate and control what individuals may learn about their own bodies is deeply offensive and, in my view, plainly unconstitutional.

Let me be clear, I am not offended by all regulation of genetic tests. Indeed, genetic tests are already regulated. To be precise, the labs that perform genetic tests are regulated by the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) as overseen by the CMS (here is an excellent primer). The CLIA requires all labs, including the labs used by 23andMe, to be inspected for quality control, record keeping and the qualifications of their personnel. The goal is to ensure that the tests are accurate, reliable, timely, confidential and not risky to patients. I am not offended when the goal of regulation is to help consumers buy the product that they have contracted to buy.

What the FDA wants to do is categorically different. The FDA wants to regulate genetic tests as a high-risk medical device that cannot be sold until and unless the FDA permits it be sold.

Moreover, the FDA wants to judge not the analytic validity of the tests, whether the tests accurately read the genetic code as the firms promise (already regulated under the CLIA) but the clinical validity, whether particular identified alleles are causal for conditions or disease. The latter requirement is the death-knell for the products because of the expense and time it takes to prove specific genes are causal for diseases. Moreover, it means that firms like 23andMe will not be able to tell consumers about their own DNA but instead will only be allowed to offer a peek at the sections of code that the FDA has deemed it ok for consumers to see.

Alternatively, firms may be allowed to sequence a consumer’s genetic code and even report it to them but they will not be allowed to tell consumers what the letters mean. Here is why I think the FDA’s actions are unconstitutional. Reading an individual’s code is safe and effective. Interpreting the code and communicating opinions about it may or may not be safe–just like all communication–but it falls squarely under the First Amendment.

The FDA also has the relationship between testing and clinical validity ass-backward. The FDA wants to say no to testing until clinical validity is established but we are never going to discover clinical validity until we have mass testing. 23andMe is attempting to leverage individuals thirst for knowledge about themselves into a big data project that will discover entirely new connections between genotype and phenotype. But personalized medicine, just like personalized movie recommendations, only works with databases of millions. In the 20th century we took on many of our common diseases but it is now time to take on the uncommon diseases. There are some 7,000 known diseases and only about 500 have a treatment. Individual and disease heterogeneity is so large that even the diseases that we can treat are often not treated well. New approaches are necessary for progress. The collection of large amounts of DNA data is not the last step of personalized medicine but the first and by pushing back against the first steps the FDA is delaying the promise and progress of personalized medicine.

Full Disclosure: The FDA’s threat to regulate genetic tests in 2010 made me spitting mad so I put that spit to good use and became a 23andMe customer. Well worth it, if only to point out to my wife that contrary to all evidence I am in fact only 2.2% Neanderthal.

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This has been an excellent year for movies, in fact I can’t remember a period so good.  Here is what I liked, noting that foreign films are classified by “what year did I have a chance to see them?” and not by their initial years of release, which are usually pre-2013.  Here goes, more or less in the order I saw them:

Amour, by Michael Haneke.

The Chilean movie NO, which is an account of how, even in the strangest of circumstances, democracies filter policy outcomes, as indeed autocracies do too (in different ways).

Spring Breakers

The Gatekeepers, I taught that one in Law and Literature class last year.

Room 237, an excellent mock on Straussians, through the medium of the fandom cult for Kubrick’s The Shining.

Oblivion

Stories We Tell

Before Midnight, completes the trilogy realistically, with charm and bite.

In a World…, “a subtle and entertaining movie with much economics in it, most of all the economics of superstars in the “voiceover” sector.”

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceacescu, “is mesmerizing, like watching one of the great silent films of the past, and the scenes where the Chinese communists praise the Romanian communists are some of the best ever filmed.”

Pieta, brutal Korean brutal tale involving money lenders and non-price compensation schemes.

Fill the Void

World War Z

In Another Country, Korean and French juxtaposed.

The Attack, possibly my favorite of the year, if I had to pick.  Lebanese and Israeli in its sources.

The Act of Killing, mostly set in Sumatra, brutal, has lots of social science.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, don’t tell Stevenson and Wolfers.  Directed by Werner Herzog.

Gravity

Captain Phillips — treat the two embedded stories as implicit commentary on each other.

12 Years a Slave

Hollywood redeemed itself with those last three, after what was otherwise a dismal year for mainstream releases.

I loved the documentary In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey, although perhaps it is for fans only.

The crop of Christmas movies isn’t even out yet.

There were more strong candidates this year than usual.  The order here is more or less the order I read them in, not the order of preference:

Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschmann.

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities.

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.

I liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music and also Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century.

M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.

Rana Mitter, China’s War With Japan 1937-1945, the US edition has the sillier title Forgotten Ally.  The return to knowing some background on this conflict is rising.

Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics.

William Haseltine, Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health System.

Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China.  Good text but mostly a picture book, stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons.

Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.

Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our Gamble Over Earth’s Future.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: An Authorized Biography, from Grantham to the Falklands.

From books “close at hand,” I very much liked John List and Uri Gneezy, Virginia Postrel on glamour, Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education, and Tim Harford on macroeconomics.

Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia gets rave reviews, although I have not yet read my copy.  From the UK I’ve ordered the new Holland translation of Herodotus and Richard Overy’s The Bombing War and have high expectations for both.

If I had to offer my very top picks for the year, they would all be books I didn’t expect to like nearly as much as I did:

Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region.

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy, Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, volume I.

Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

Apologies to those I left out or forgot, I am sure there were more.

Every year I offer my picks for best books of that year, today we are doing fiction.  I nominate:

1. Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two: Man in Love.

2. Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs.  Great fun.

3. Amy Sackville, Orkney.  Not every honeymoon works out the way you planned.

4. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

5. Kathryn Davis, Duplex: A Novel.  Non-linear, not for all.

Since I think the Knausgaard is one of the greatest novels ever written, I suppose it also has to be my fiction book of the year.  (Except, um…it’s not fiction.)  But otherwise I found many books disappointing, perhaps because my own expectations were out of synch with contemporary writing.

Elizabeth Gilbert and Donna Tartt produced decent plane reads, but I wouldn’t call them favorites.  The new Thomas Pynchon I could not stand more than a short sample of.  I sampled many other novels but didn’t like or finish them.  I read or reread a lot of Somerset Maugham, which was uniformly rewarding.  The Painted Veil may not be the best one, but it is a good place to get hooked.  I reread quite a bit of Edith Wharton and it rose further in my eyes.  Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence are my favorites, more intensely focused than the longer fiction.  I loved discovering the Philip Pullman trilogy and vowed to give George Martin another try this coming year.

The trailer for Alfonso Cuarón's "Ikea", a film about a man and a woman lost in the vast nothingness of Ikea.

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Tags: Alfonso Cuaron   Gravity   Ikea   movies   trailers

A Silicon Valley startup aims to help you rid your wallet of excess plastic with a new Bluetooth-enabled "connected card," called Coin, that can be reprogrammed on the fly and swiped at point of sale terminals like a traditional credit card.

Bill Gates: Here's My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help | Wired Business | Wired.com:

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Maybe your boss (or spouse?) will want you to wear it:

And then there’s the lie-detector feature. “Optionally,” the filing muses, “the electronic skin tattoo can further include a galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user. It is contemplated that a user that may be nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth telling individual.”

There is more information here.  The pointer is from Charles C. Mann.

Some breathtaking shots. My favorite is number 69, Invisible Reflection. Wow.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Little-noticed research refutes conventional wisdom on value stocks

Did Obama spy on Mitt Romney? As recently as a few weeks ago if anyone had asked me that question I would have consigned them to a right (or left) wing loony bin. Today, the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable. Indeed, in one sense the answer is clearly yes. Do I think Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain? No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, facebook metadata and other data are being collected.

The answer is yes, however, if we mean did the NSA spy on political candidates like Mitt Romney. Did Mitt Romney ever speak with Angela Merkel, whose phone the NSA bugged, or any one of the dozens of her advisers that the NSA was also bugging? Did Romney exchange emails with Mexican President Felipe Calderon? Were any of Romney’s emails, photos, texts or other metadata hovered up by the NSA’s break-in to the Google and Yahoo communications links? Almost certainly the answer is yes.

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.

The Nixon administration plumbers broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to gather information to discredit him. They busted into a single file cabinet (pictured). What a bunch of amateurs.

The NSA has broken into millions of file cabinets around the world.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Who will pay for the NSA break-ins?

Via the Washington Post, here is a 2010 memo that my Harvard colleague David Cutler wrote to Larry Summers about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Its subject line is "Urgent Need for Changes in Health Reform Implementation."

David concludes: "All in all, the administration has immense decisions to make about transforming health care delivery and coverage. But no one I interact with has confidence that your current personnel and configuration is up to the task."

Stock prices are going up as earnings growth expectations are going down. 

"During the month of October, analysts lowered earnings estimates for companies in the S&P 500 for the fourth quarter," said FactSet's John Butters. "The Q4 bottom-up EPS estimate (which is an aggregation of the estimates for all 500 companies in the index) dropped 1.5% (to $28.46 from $28.90) during the month."

"At the same time, the value of the S&P 500 increased 4.5% (to 1756.54 from 1681.55) during October, and it closed at a record high on October 29 (1771.95)," added Butters.

There's arguably nothing more important to long-term stock market returns than earnings (or profit) growth.

"Profits are the mother's milk of stocks," says Larry Kudlow.

This phenomenon of prices rising faster than earnings is referred to as multiples expansion.  In other words, valuations are rising as reflected by an increasing price-earnings ratio.

However, price-earnings ratios are drifting farther and farther away from their long-term averages, causing some market watchers to warn that we are in a bubble.

Surely, stock market bears warning of a sell-off can't help but rip their hair out when they see charts like this.

Join the conversation about this story »

Great chart, via Meb Faber:

Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra “first do no harm” did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.

That concerns doctor involvement in the U.S. torture of prisoners.  The pointer is from Ted Gioia.

NYTimes: New York’s cabbies howled when the city began forcing them to take credit cards. Some even went on strike, calling the requirements a kowtow to tourists and a burden on drivers.

But two years later, the back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry, even as other cities’ fleets struggle to find fares in a deep recession.

The saving grace appears to be a simple nudge. Before the credit card swipe system the average tip was around 10% but the computer offers three tip sizes 30%, 25%, 20% and the average tip has now risen to 18-22%!

Joshua Gross estimates, that this simple nudge has increased the income of taxi drivers by $144 milion per year. Had the drivers demanded this increase via an increase in rates it probably never would have happened.

Sometimes it can be better to be nudgy than pushy, even in New York.

Hat tip: Cheap Talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql8xkSYvwJs

Well...actually just a LOT more careful about which meat I eat.  But, for short elevator speeches, vegetarian will do.

Ben Thompson:

The problem for Microsoft in mobile is that Android has completely destroyed the value of a licensed OS; Microsoft’s traditional software model is broken.

And Microsoft doesn’t really know what to do.

Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan, reporting for the NY Times:

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

All of it in the dark:

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy. “All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

Who Will Prosper in the New World?:

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Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

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That is the new web site run by my colleague Jerry Brito.  It ranks what is hot now on the web, drawing upon wonky articles and sources, no cat photos, etc.  I have found it very useful in the beta version.

The authors are Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee, and the subtitle is Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

It is due out January 2014, self-recommending, and t is likely to be the best and most important economics book of the forthcoming year.

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments:

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Another classic from The Onion.

Wait, what?

In a remarkable paper Allison et al. (2011) gather data on the weight at mid-life from 12 animal populations covering 8 different species all living in human environments. Dividing the sample into male and female they find that in all 24 cases animal weight has increased over the past several decades.

Cats and dogs, for example, both increased in weight.  Female cats increased in body weight at a rate of 13.6% per decade and males at 5.7% per decade. Female dogs increased in body weight at a rate of 3% per decade and males at a rate of 2.2% per decade.

One ready, although not necessarily correct explanation, is that fat people feed their cats and dogs more and exercise them less. Thus, the authors also looked at animals not directly under human control such as rats.

…For the 1948–2006 time period, male rats trapped in urban
Baltimore experienced a 5.7 per cent increase in body
weight per decade from 1948 to 2006 and a nearly
20 per cent increase in the odds of obesity. Similarly,
female rats trapped in urban Baltimore experienced a
7.22 per cent per decade increase in body weight, along
with a 26 per cent increase in the odds of obesity.

that too has a ready, although not necessarily correct, explanation:

… just as human real wealth and food
consumption have increased in the United States, rats
which presumably largely feed on our refuse, may also
be essentially richer.

To counter both of these objections the authors do something very clever, they gather data on the weight of control mice used in many different experiments over decades.

Among mice in control groups in the National Toxicology
Programme (NTP), there was a 11.8 per cent
increase in body weight per decade from 1982 to 2003
in females coupled with a nearly twofold increase in the
odds of obesity. In males there was a 10.5 per cent
increase per decade.

Control mice are typically allowed to feed at will from a controlled diet that has not varied much over the decades, making obvious explanations less plausible. Could mice have gained weight due to better care? Possibly although that is speculative.

More generally, there are specific explanations for the weight gain in each of the animal populations, just as there are for humans. Each explanation looks plausible taken on its own but is it plausible that each population is gaining weight for independent reasons? Could there instead be a unifying explanation for the weight gain in all populations? No one knows what that explanation is: toxins? viruses? epigenetic factors? I am not ready to jump on any of these bandwagons and in some cases the author’s samples are small so I am not yet fully convinced of the underlying facts, nevertheless this is intriguing and important research.

Hat tip: David Berreby writing in Aeon about The Obesity Era.

We’re pleased to announce that The Old Reader will officially remain open to the public! The application now has a bigger team, significantly more resources, and a new corporate entity in the United States. We’re incredibly excited to be a part of this great web application and would like to share some details about its future as well as thank you for remaining loyal users. We’re big fans and users of The Old Reader and look forward to helping it grow and improve for years to come.

First off we want to say that it’s rare to have an application that inspires as much passion as The Old Reader has as of late. We think that’s a sign of greatness and all credit for that goes to the wonderful team that has been running the show including Dmitry and Elena. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well this past week and they are smart, honest, and passionate people. We’re happy to announce that they are still a part of the team and we hope they will be for a long time to come.  The new team will be managing the project and adding to the engineering, communications, and system administration functions.

So now for the future. The Old Reader is going to retain all of its functionality and remain open to the public. Not only that, we’re going to do everything in our power to grow the user base which will only accentuate the things that make this application special. To facilitate these improvements, we’re going to be transitioning The Old Reader to a top tier hosting facility in the United States this coming week. It’s going to require some downtime and for that we sincerely apologize, but it’s also going to mean A LOT more servers, 10x faster networks, and long-term stability. We realize that doesn’t make the downtime easy but rest assured that things are looking up.

Over the coming weeks we’ll talk more about the new team of The Old Reader. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves and making significant improvements to this incredible application. Thanks for reading and thanks for using The Old Reader!

UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov