Month: November 2013

FDA Tells Google-Backed 23andMe to Halt DNA Test Service

FDA Tells Google-Backed 23andMe to Halt DNA Test Service – Bloomberg:

“FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the PGS device,” the agency said today. “The main purpose of compliance with FDA’s regulatory requirements is to ensure that the tests work.”

The FDA used candid language in the letter to outline the work the agency has done with 23andMe since 2009 to no avail, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings and had hundreds of e-mail exchanges. The FDA said it has given the company feedback on study protocols, discussed regulatory pathways and provided statistical advice.

[Here’s the thing… genetic testing can’t tell you whether or not you will develop a disease, only whether you carry a gene mutation that *statistically* puts you at a higher risk. Meaning they’ve found a correlation, but as far as I can tell, no one knows whether an individual gene by itself affects anything. It seems quite the opposite from what I’ve read… changing one gene seems to cause other genes to change as well and explain why in part all this is such slippery stuff… why there are no “cures” being batted about. (Yes, I know people are working on all kinds of stuff, but it all runs counter my experience that this form of “reductionism” applies well in complex systems.) Negative tests for a given gene mutation also don’t mean that you’re in the clear: For example it seems that only ~5% of breast cancers and maybe as much as 15% of ovarian cancers are caused by hereditary mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 the genes made somewhat famous by Ms. Jolie. As always, I’m not telling anyone what to do, and certainly if you’re not relying it diagnostically have at it. But between the margin of errors in the tests themselves, the limited number of markers that a service like the above checks, etc… seems like a really low grade indicator of anything. I know it appears high tech and shiny, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate or reliable, or that we have any idea what it means when we see it.]

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule:

When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager’s schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day’s work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.

[Well explained. I try and line up meetings in a given day. When they can’t be aligned that way I use the middle of the day, reserving the morning and end of the day for “maker” time. Allez! ]

The NYS insurance exchange is good

The NYS insurance exchange is good:

Here’s a screen shot of the criteria you can use to filter out policies. I played with it quite a bit and learned a lot about insurance that I didn’t know before. I didn’t make a decision right now, I want to read some more, and think. But I was overall quite pleased with the process. Now maybe there are still more glitches to come, so I’ll have to let you know.

But one thing’s for sure — it’s been a long time since the insurance industry thought I was a useful customer. They control the health care market in this country, and health care is important. The experience here, though it had its glitches, made me feel welcome. If this is what it took to straighten things out, then I’m all for it.

[Progress. I wonder how much better this all could have been if the Feds had built an API instead of site and let the rest of the universe build sites….]

Source: Scripting News

Intel Is Under New Management – And It Shows

Intel Is Under New Management – And It Shows:

That Otellini found the inner calm to publicly admit his mistake — in an article that would be published on his last day as CEO, no less — is a testament to his character. More important, Otellini’s admission unburdened his successor, Brian Krzanich, freeing him to steer the company in a new direction.

And Krzanich is doing just that.

[In business that’s one earmark of leadership.]

Source: Monday Note

J.D. Power’s suddenly Samsung-friendly tablet numbers

→ J.D. Power’s suddenly Samsung-friendly tablet numbers:

The more likely story is that J.D. Power tweaked the survey’s scope to get the result they wanted to publish. By restricting the survey to certain models, price ranges, and survey respondents, and then denying that their published comparison chart has any mathematical relation to the scores, they can justify almost any manufacturer “winning”.

Why might they want to say that Samsung’s tablets are better than Apple’s?

Samsung spends a ton of money on marketing — far more than Apple — and frequently employs unethical marketing techniques. Apple isn’t known to play ball very well with the enterprise analyst or market-research rackets, which often implicitly require companies to pay for their high-end services in order for them to recommend the companies’ products. And publishing a conclusion like this gets J.D. Power a lot of attention in a market that the internet is constantly making less relevant.

With even their apparently arbitrary chart denying their conclusion and the numbers not making much sense, it’s at best a desperate stretch. They’re not even good at this game.

[And more yuck, from the “who can you trust?” dept.]

Source: Marco.org

More on the “War”

★ Rockstar, Patent-Holding Firm Partially Owned by Apple and Microsoft, Sues Google and Android Handset Makers:

If you want to argue that the whole patent system stinks, and that all of these tech giants are abusing it, I agree. But if you want to argue that Apple and Microsoft are in the wrong, and poor Google and their Android partners are victims of one-sided abuse, I’m going to have to disagree. If there’s a difference between Apple/Microsoft and Google in this war, it’s not over nobility, but rather over how well each side has played the game. It’s looking more and more like Google made a strategic blunder, underbidding for the Nortel patents and then subsequently overpaying for Motorola Mobility.

[Snip -ed]

The difference between Lodsys and Rockstar is that Lodsys is a bully, suing small (and in some cases, downright tiny) companies that lack the financial wherewithal to fight back. And in fact, when Lodsys’s targets do fight back, Lodsys runs away — settling for nothing in order to avoid a trial. Rockstar may be a patent troll, but they’re a patent troll that at least is picking on someone its own size.

[It is an incredible mess. So is it fighting fire with fire? Or worse? Or better?]

Source: Daring Fireball

Thermonuclear War

Thermonuclear War:

I’ve said this multiple times in the past, and I’ll say it again: I don’t like this game. Rockstar looks, smells, and now acts like countless NPE’s that have done more harm than good — namely Lodsys, which has been aggressively harassing Apple’s own ecosystem. It’s extremely disappointing to see Apple facilitate this kind of behavior. At the same time, the missed Nortel auction and dubious Motorola purchase look as awful a strategic blunder as ever for Google. They kept their head in the sand for too long.

[Agreed.]

Source: Apple Outsider