An article in Psychology Today describes China's "little emperors":
When
China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy's
most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. Read the rest!
From microbiologist Richard Lenski's reply to Andrew Schlafly, a
creationist who found it difficult to accept that a population of E.
coli maintained by Lenski's group for 20 years had evolved the ability
to metabolize citrate.... Read the rest!
It's becoming increasingly apparent that engaging in chemistry as a
hobby is unacceptable behavior. Earlier this year, a kid in South
Hadley, Massachusetts, was raided by the ATF, which descended on his
home in force, removed his basement lab and blew it up at a nearby
landfill.
Now a retired chemist -- READ THE REST!!
It's
no secret that Beijing's primary objective for the Olympics is to show
the world how far it has come. However, the country's efforts to
present a "perfect" event ironically highlights exactly what continues
to hold China back -- a systemic focus on appearances over substance.
The opening ceremonies offered an interesting example.... click through!
According to the Indian Drug Manufacturers Assoc., Olympics-related
shutdowns of key raw materials suppliers in India are going to mean
drug shortages in India in the next few months. Click through for more....
Seeking Alpha today notes an interesting development that highlights two
up-and-coming Shanghai CROs. Morningside Venture, Lilly Asian Ventures
and Pfizer Venture Investments have... click through!
Lonza is starting up a new engineering business that will focus on China. It'll offer engineering, design and maintenance. Quite an interesting way of... click through...
Earlier I wrote about a report on NPR radio that tried to show the superiority of Britain's National Health Service to the US system of healthcare.... click thru...
A US Senator is hot and bothered about outsourcing by big pharma, says a piece at Outsourcing-Pharma, and the Congressional Record may shortly feature some interesting info....
To read the rest go here: http://gaolin-highhill.blogspot.com/2008/07/elephant-in-pill-bottle.html
(The blogging software at this site has become too much trouble to use.)
Here's
a story from NPR purporting to compare Britain's National Healthcare System with healthcare in the US. It actually compares only two cases, one in the US and one in the UK. That would be okay if they were used to illustrate statistical data, but there is no such data provided. The reporter, Joanne Silberner, instead tries to create the appearance of statistics by offering a "scorecard":
So the scorecard comes to this.
Linda Oatley of Buckland, England, had several months' delay in getting coverage for a new treatment. She also has to pay a small fee for weekly physical therapy. Overall, she's happy with the National Health Service.
"In the end, if you ask the right questions, go to the right places, you can get the care you need from the get-go," she says.
And the scorecard for Jeff Rubin? A year and a half of cutting drug dosages, a repossessed house and bankruptcy.
A few years ago, he wouldn't have supported a British-style system, with its slower drug approvals and limited ability to pick your own doctors.
Now, he feels differently. He says his healthy friends might not agree, but the free care from the start that Linda Oatley got and the ability to focus on his illness and not his finances sound pretty good.
Overall, it's a long piece full of meaningless color that could easily have made space for real information, but NPR is more interested in propagandizing.
Ironically I encountered this piece in the UK's Daily Mail within a day or two of the NPR report. The juxtaposition is pretty devastating. Here are the first few paragraphs, which demolish the "argument" of the NPR piece.
At least 30,000 patients were left starving on NHS wards last year, despite ministers’ pledges to make proper nutrition in hospitals a priority.
Last year, Health Minister Ivan Lewis admitted that some patients were given a single scoop of mash as a meal.
Others were ‘tortured’ with trays of food placed just beyond their reach while nurses said they were too busy to help them eat.
And now, official figures show that between 2005 and 2007, there was an 88 per cent rise in reported cases of poor nutrition leading to a serious deterioration in a patient’s health.
Last year, NHS whistleblowers reported 29,138 such errors to the National Patient Safety Agency – up from 15,473 in 2005.
They refer to elderly patients who are not properly fed and those given the wrong types of food, causing their health to worsen.
Let's do a little editing to make the NPR story more accurate:
A few years ago, [Jeff Rubin] wouldn't have supported a British-style system, with its slower drug approvals, limited ability to pick your own doctors and starvation.
But that wouldn't suit Silberner's agenda, would it.
I love this comment beneath the Daily Mail story:
Most of you are missing the point. You are blaming the inept nurses etc.
The government caused inept nurses and the current lack of money, decent food and lack of proper care. A government gets what it pays for. What it wants, it gets.
If, on the other hand, you consider that current hospital climate results in the death of many elderly pensioners, "useless eaters", then it all begins to make sense.
Doesn't it.
Who doesn't like otters? Be sure to watch the last 30 seconds.....
Researchers at MIT have started up a company, Covalent Solar, to commercialize a solar concentrator based on glass and organic dyes. It looks promising. Solar concentrators are used to focus sunlight onto photovoltaics -- to get more bang for the buck, you might say. The ones used today are expensive and unwieldy, however. They involve mirrors, lenses, and the mechanics necessary to keep them directed toward the sun. Covalent Solar's technology is passive. Special organic dyes, which coat the surface of a glass sheet, collect light and direct it toward the edges, where solar cells can catch the light and transform it to electricity. From a piece in the MIT Technology Review:
The amount of light
concentration depends on the size of the sheet--specifically, the ratio between
the size of the surface of the glass and the edges. To a point, the greater the
concentration, the less semiconductor material is needed, and the cheaper the
solar power.
From a related fact sheet, Mark Baldo, one of the researchers:
We demonstrated a large improvement in the performance of low-cost
solar concentrators. Our new devices increase the power obtained from
solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the sun.
Our results are at least a factor of four better than previous results.
The dyes can be tailored to the PVs to maximize their efficiency.
The team's results were published in Science this month, and there is a press release at MIT's site. A story in Venture Beat considers some of the obstacles ahead.
I'd like to know what these dyes are, and who makes them, but I don't have access to the piece in Science.