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 Thursday, July 4, 2002
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Not just another accounting scandal. It is Dutch accounting versus English. But it is all about 'goodwill', the amount one company pays for another over and above the actual worth. Elsevier makes a lot of money by having the equivalent of proprietary software for scientific journals. While many important journals are publsihed by not-for-profit associations, Elsevier has created a large group of private, for profit journals that are must reads. So they can then get libraries to pay large fees to subscribe to these journals. A business model under severe pressure today. For example, the Journal of Biochemistry (JBC) or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) could, in the old world, only deal with a few hundred papers a year. The rest would have to be published elsewhere, many in prestigious journals from Elsevier. But now, there is no real limit to how many excellent peer-reviewed papers JBC or PNAS can publish, as long as they can find reviewers. JBC and PNAS now publish daily (or almost so). And they have almost free access. How can a for-profit journal really survive when scientific associations can give it for free? Not by charging so much for it.
And sites like BioMedCentral are working to create new ways of producing and presenting scientific work that fits the internet. Publishers like Elsevier may not be able to continue making their money off of subscriptions and ads. This article states as much, showing that Elsevier is getting into textbooks in a big way. Another captive market (watch out for Texas;-) but one that I think will be heavily impacted by the internet soon. 11:36:28 PM 
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Nitric oxide appears more and more in research into our bodily processes. This sensor could open up a lot of new areas of investigation. 11:22:49 PM
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Nice bit of sleuthing. Now if they can increase the diversity of the artificial ecosystems found in waste treatment facilities, I will be very happy. 11:18:52 PM
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This could be great news. It is orally active and I hope the price is low. Leishmaniasis affects over 500,000 people a year, literally decimating them by killing 1 in 10. Now if we can just take care of some of the other parasites, like trypanosome, much of the world could be a better place. 11:17:10 PM
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Great use for a database. I wonder if English is any better connected than other languages. Maybe this explains why artificail languages like Esperanto were not successful? 11:13:42 PM
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Most organisms use this, along with redundancy, to create beautiful solutions to natural pressures. Why have an elegant solution when a half-baked one will work almost as well? 11:12:32 PM
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How Did WorldCom Get Away With It For Even an Instant?. Amey Stone tries to understand how WorldCom could have gotten away for so long with what was really a simple, simple, transparent fraud stream. Certainly the auditors--Arthur Anderson--should have caught it. And why didn't the analysts following WorldCom catch it? They were supposed to have a good sense of what WorldCom's investments plans were. BusinessWeek Online: How Everyone Missed WorldCom | JULY 3, 2002 COMMENTARY By Amey Stone: The accounting fraud was obvious -- only to the few who had... [Semi-Daily Journal]
The Accumulation Century, the Education Century, and What Comes Next...?. The nineteenth century was the age of invention, innovation, and accumulation. New technologies were developed in the lab and installed in the field, on the road, and in the factory. These new technologies were for the most part embodied in expensive and sophisticated capital goods. Hence economic growth in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly the accumulation and deployment of physical capital goods that embodied productve modern technologies. By contrast, the twentieth century saw not a rise but a fall in... [Semi-Daily Journal]
Google Doesn't Worry About Stickiness. Jason Kottke meditates on how Google understands the web--how it is eager to make its website an elastic place that you use to trampoline to the rest of the web, rather than a sticky place that it is hard to get away from. kottke.org :: Elastic, not sticky | Google now has this bit of text on the bottom of each of their results pages now: "Try your query on: AltaVista Excite Lycos Yahoo!" Click on Excite (for example) and... [Semi-Daily Journal]
More from J. Bradford Delong. I figure that if I read this and InstantPundit I cover just about the whole range of political discourse ;-) Well, maybe just an interesting range. 11:08:34 PM
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An Historical Document. IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes... [Semi-Daily Journal]
I do like this site. The links are interesting and enlightening, even if he is an economist ;-) He is the only weblog I subscribe to that had the complete Declaration, with signatories. I sat with my son on my lap and went over with him. Rereading the parts that no one every does (i.e. the long list of specific grievances we had with Britain) was very interesting. 11:05:04 PM
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Stanford researchers switch off cancer gene; trick cells to self desruct. Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center have tricked cancer cells into self- destructing by briefly disabling a cancer-causing gene. Although the gene revs back up after deactivation, the brief hiatus gives the affected cells a chance to alter their cancerous destiny. This work in mice could open new avenues for treating some human cancers, researchers believe. [EurekAlert!]
Inhibitory RNAs may have a future. Better delivery systems may need to be used, though. 11:01:33 PM
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Not a lot of meat in this release but it is interesting. Is there a limit to the size of the genome for any organism that has an immune system? I tend to think that there are a lot more genes present in the genome than have been found. The techniques used are only able to sequence regions that are easily cloned. Regions of highly repetitious DNA are not easily cloanable and hard to read through. There is some evidence that the newest genes are hidden in this regions and are under tight regulatory control. Time will tell. 10:44:04 PM
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It looks like one of the reasons for a long childhood might be to help support those that are able to have offspring. Having a few children that you spend a lot of time rearing is the strategy that all hominids utilize. And they are really not very successful species. Random deaths mean that a lot of energy is expended for no genetic progeny. But, what if the progeny were really helpful at supporting the expenditures of the breeding adults? Then you might have a successful strategy. Is this what makes humans the only hominid that has increased its range over the last half million years or so? Interesting and testable idea. 10:36:14 PM
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Why Aren't We Collaborating?. Yet, here we are, almost 10 years into the Web revolution and companies still haven't figured out that the Internet - and intranets and extranets - can make it much easier to work together. How long is it going to take? [elearningpost]
Nice litle column by David Weinberger. He is absolutely correct. Heirachical organizations can NEVER effectively use collaborative tools. This slows them down. So they will ALWAYS be outmanuvered by those companies that can. It used to be that in order to effectively collaborate a company had to be small. Only heirarchies could deal with hundreds or thousands of employees. But networking tools are making it possible for larger organizations to maintain their collaborative skills. The companies that succeed at this will swallow those that cannot. 10:32:05 PM
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I hope it doesn't harm any migrating birds;-) 10:27:25 PM
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Another in a long list of reports that eating healthy decreases your risk of being unhealthy. Now, what I want to know is how to eat unhealthy and maintain my health!! The problem with this sort of report is it gives no idea of relative risk. Smoking cigarettes and drinking alot resulted in a huge increase in oral cancer risks. But how about eating a big thick steak? 10:23:25 PM
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I've been spending a lot of time on my blog at work but I hope to post here on weekends. There is a real need for new knowledge management technologies in biotechnology. The huge amount of information that is now being generated is useless unless humans filter it and create useful knolwdge. The best medical advances will come from thos epeople best able to deal with this knowledge. Technology like Radio will be as important for examing the human genome as the nulceotide sequences themselves. 9:31:34 PM
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