The second installment of PBS NewsHour’s series on the antibiotics crisis delves into why the pharmaceutical industry has little incentive to develop new ones. In brief, the wise approach to new antibiotics is to develop them but hold them in … Continue reading
The medical system in encountering more and more drug-resistant disease pathogens, so-called “superbugs,” and we’re not developing new antibiotics anywhere near fast enough to fight them. One major reason is the massive overuse of antibiotics, which are too often prescribed … Continue reading
This from John Oliver on HBO’s Last Week Tonight from June 11 is genuinely hilarious but also very informative on just how complicated and confused Brexit is. (Bear in mind that this is HBO, so the language may not be … Continue reading
A week ago I posted a talk by professor Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who tragically died of pancreatic cancer earlier in 2017. Here’s another talk of his from 2007 that everyone should see. The overall message … Continue reading
Net neutrality basically says that companies providing provide Internet access can make money charging for bandwidth, but they can’t use their monopoly power to extort extra payments from successful Internet businesses, large and small, by threatening to block or slow … Continue reading
This article on game designers from the July 5 issue of IndyWeek (a weekly newspaper in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area of North Carolina) is definitely worth a quick read. Just as there are scads of novelists, … Continue reading
An interesting report broadcast June 29 on PBS NewsHour explained what some economists call the “Elephant Chart” because it looks a lot like the profile of an elephant facing to the right. To read the chart, imagine every adult in … Continue reading
Net neutrality is a policy that requires Internet service providers to treat all traffic equally. ISPs would prefer to be able to make free money by letting giant corporations pay to slow down access to competitors’ websites (or refrain from … Continue reading
The United States Department of Agriculture has ended a longstanding practice of making animal welfare reports available on its website. Previously tens of thousands of reports could be read online concerning treatment of animals at nearly 8000 facilities, including about … Continue reading
The Big Short begins with an on-screen quotation: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Perhaps appropriately for a film largely about mistakes and fraud, it … Continue reading