[This is pretty amazing to watch. -egg]

https://goo.gl/o1veLu

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. Scott Spencer, general manager of Rodelis, said the company needed to invest to make sure the supply of the drug remained reliable. He said the company provided the drug free to certain needy patients.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

[Abridged]

Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight – The New York Times

[From the powerful and moving manifesto by the Dark Mountain Project. I don’t agree with everything they have to say, but a hell of a lot of it resonates with me. -egg]

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

…filming, recording and beholding a 10,000-year-old tree in northern Sweden.

Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn’t think poorly of them for it—we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle methods to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a clumsy sort of pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn.

Cat Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

When Enron collapsed and got hit with a lawsuit requesting discovery on its internal email, its top bosses decided that they’d skip spending money on pricey lawyers to go through the archive and remove immaterial messages — instead, the dumped the entire corpus of internal mail, including their employees’ personal messages.

For years, social scientists have used the Enron dataset to look at information cascades, social graphs, and linguistics.

Now, in Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy, Georgia Tech’s Eric Gilbert applies computational lexigraphic analysis to the Enron corpus with an eye to figuring out how subordinates talk to their bosses, and how bosses talk to their subordinates, and what role gender plays in the matter.It’s a fascinating read, and suggests loads of avenues for future work.

Source: How to send email like a non-metaphorical boss / Boing Boing

Direct link to paper

All heard today on Asheville FM’s Onward Through The Fog radio show: fun stuff that would work at most any old party:

• Gospel Machine: Walkin’ With the Dead
• Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats: S.O.B.
• Spearhead: Runfayalife
• I MONSTER: Daydream In Blue

[Interesting, although I don’t even know where to begin evaluating the truth of it. -egg]

On Thursday, the Federal Reserve kept its benchmark interest rate target pegged to a range of 0% to 0.25%, which is where it has been since December 2008.That’s low.Interestingly, rates aren’t just low within the context of American history.They also happen to be at the lowest levels in the 5,000 years of civilization.

Chart on 5,000 years of interest rates – Business Insider

Here’s an incredibly thoughtful and articulate critique of Noam Chomsky’s position on linguistic modeling from Peter Norvig, directory of research at Google. Just a totally fantastic read.

At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium held during MIT’s 150th birthday party, Technology Review reports that Prof. Noam Chomsky MIT: 150derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior.The transcript is now available, so let’s quote Chomsky himself:It’s true there’s been a lot of work on trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems. I think there have been some successes, but a lot of failures. There is a notion of success … which I think is novel in the history of science. It interprets success as approximating unanalyzed data.This essay discusses what Chomsky said, speculates on what he might have meant, and tries to determine the truth and importance of his claims.

Source: On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

Note: a fair amount of Norvig’s position seems to be drawn from Christopher Manning’s 2002 paper “Probabilistic Syntax,” which goes into more depth on some of these topics and is also a good read, although not as much fun as Norvig’s.