Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Extinction Pop


Can words be pop? A few decades ago, “Anthropocene” did not really exist, but its Google Ngram looks like a swift takeoff, similar in shape to the graphs for atmospheric CO2concentration or species extinction. It is at least bubbling under.

“Anthropocene” doesn’t refer precisely to climate change or global warming. Rather, it indicates the idea that we are living in an era akin to other geological epochs, like the Pleistocene, but characterized by the fact that human activities now make and remake the planetary ecosystem in the most concrete sense: the composition of the earth’s crust, the makeup of its atmosphere, the direct and indirect relations among the whole rig’s parts.

Formulated by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized around 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, “Anthropocene” is intended to signal a radical break and an absolute catastrophe. In previous epochs, the flora and fauna of the planet were part of a rolling equilibrium. Now anthropos has leapt from its limited role to give the entire ecosystem one direction. This is “the Great Acceleration.” The changes set in motion are at the point of becoming self-reproducing, of proceeding on their own no matter what we do. The direction is toward complete destruction of the planetary equilibrium. We’re taking it all down with us.

The fear haunting such knowledge has made its way into the traditional channels of culture, film especially. Half of the year’s blockbusters fit into Cinema of the Anthropocene. An annihilating power, beyond human scale but still somehow set loose by humans, cannot be recalled; the disaster will be civilizational, planetary—Godzilla, Noah, Edge of Tomorrow. What part of Transformers: Age of Extinction do you not understand?

There is certainly something suggestive about the whirling, recombinatory machines in Transformers, at which the puny humans gaze in apprehensive wonder. Are they the “Anthropocene”? Not really. The word itself is not an analysis. An analysis tells you where to intervene; “Anthropocene” fails this measure utterly. Anthropoi, humans, have a history stretching back at least 50,000 years. The standard accounts of the anthropogenic transformation of the planet date it only to the late eighteenth century, to the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the cauldron from whence the transformational machines arise.

But there is a fatal risk in associating “Anthropocene” with specific technologies, as if one could abolish them to make things right. Or as if good technology might overcome the bad to rescue humanity—the dream of the Autobots, surely stand-ins these days for green capitalism. But all of this is to misrecognize the history of machines. The idea that humans make machines out of some need to conquer nature, or out of some ineradicable appetite for power and destruction, can’t explain why this deep human nature would be born so suddenly and so late. In point of fact, the trajectory of ecocidal technologies is indissociable from the competition for ever-greater productivity, the need to make ever more things to be sold more swiftly, to exploit labor more effectively. Machines are an effect of capitalism’s compulsion. If we broke them, like the Luddites of 1811, they would be built again. Not because of someone’s greed or shortsightedness, but because capitalists have no choice but to outcompete each other or cease to exist. “Anthropocene,” we might say, is a social relation. It is the penultimate stage of capitalism. You don’t want to see the ultimate.

by Joshua Clover, The Nation | Read more:
Image:uncredited

Path Places: Your Personal Concierge


[ed. Interesting concept, but as the article notes, scalability could be a problem. Plus, how would Places determine if it was actually responsible for a sale (will it rely on merchants to do that, what's their incentive)? What if a customer buys something else? We'll probably be seeing other applications like this in the near future, but the human element in this one already seems kind of... dated.]

Path Talk 1.1 introduced Places, which aims to be a free digital assistant in ways that actually matter. Forget about messaging or humble brags to your friends about where you’re at (really, do we care?). Places is all about you and the places you want to visit. It’s so drastically different from what Path has previously offered that it’s tough to believe it’s coming from the same company. In a blog post, the Path Team, describes the service:
“Places gives you the power to message your favorite local businesses to request appointments, make reservations, or even check out prices and hours. It’s all by text. And it’s all for free. Getting answers from a local business is now as easy as texting a friend. Search for Places like your hair salon, favorite sporting store, or the new restaurant down the street. Then send a message asking for anything — a haircut appointment, availability of running shoes in your size, or reservations for 2 at 8 p.m. Once you send your message, one of our Path Agents will make the phone call on your behalf, doing all the talking for you. And when they get the response, they’ll immediately text you back with the answer or booking. You’ll never have to wait on hold again.” [ed.]
Game-changing announcements don’t happen in earnest very often in this space, but this has the potential to be precisely that. Highfalutin’ outfits like American Express have offered gratis concierge services to those who hold elite credit cards, but actually using those services has proven difficult — for AmEx Platinum card holders, ask yourself the last time you actually used the card’s concierge service to book a ticket. We’re willing to bet it hasn’t been anytime recent. Places works with any data connection, without requiring you to utter a word. Perhaps most importantly, Places relies on a team of actual humans behind the scenes to address your requests, which injects logic and reasoning and ensures that your demands are dealt with professionally.

Will It Work?

It just might. The obvious concerns are monetization and scale. It costs money to hire a network of always-on professionals to address requests as they arrive in real time. But look at it this way: what if you ran a small business and were approached by Path? If Path requested a small percentage of a sale for each person that it referred to you by way of an interaction in Places, might you consider it? There’s no setup cost for your business, and no ongoing risk or management requirements. Many businesses have been looking for something similar to this for years.

Scale could be an issue if revenues can’t match expenses for a prolonged period of time, but as we mentioned before, Path has millions in its coffers to experiment with. If it can cast its net wide enough, and get enough businesses in its network, this is the type of service that would become addictive after a single use. If you don’t believe that, try using Uber just once. Technologies may come and go, but instant gratification will forever be delectable.

by Darren Murph, Gear Patrol |  Read more:
Image: Eric Yang

Glut of Postdoc Researchers Stirs Quiet Crisis in Science

The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.

But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.

“It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” said Gary McDowell, 29, a biologist doing his second postdoc at Tufts University who hopes to set up his own lab in a few years. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.”

Postdocs fill an essential, but little-known niche in the scientific pipeline. After spending 6 to 7 years on average earning a PhD, they invest more years of training in a senior scientist’s laboratory as the final precursor to starting labs where they can explore their own scientific ideas.

In the Boston area, where more than 8,000 postdocs — largely in the biosciences — are estimated to work, tough job prospects are more than just an issue of academic interest. Postdocs are a critical part of the scientific landscape that in many ways distinguishes the region — they are both future leaders and the workers who carry out experiments crucial for science to advance.

The plight of postdocs has become a point of national discussion among senior scientists, as their struggles have come to be seen as symptoms of broader problems plaguing biomedical research. After years of rapid growth, federal funding abruptly leveled off and even contracted over the last decade, leaving a glut of postdocs vying for a limited number of faculty jobs. Paradoxically, as they’ve gotten stuck, the pursuit of research breakthroughs has also become reliant on them as a cheap source of labor for senior scientists.

Biomedical research training traditionally has followed a well-worn path. After college, people who want to pursue an advanced degree enroll in graduate school. The vast majority of biology graduate students then go on to do one or more postdoc positions, where they continue their training, often well into their 30s. (...)

The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs — teaching, industry, government or nonprofit jobs, or consulting.

This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

In 1970, scientists typically received their first major federal funding when they were 34. In 2011, those lucky enough to get a coveted tenure-track faculty position and run their own labs, at an average age of 37, don’t get the equivalent grant until nearly a decade later, at age 42.

Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands. They organized a Future of Research conference in Boston last week that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change.

“How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. Krukenberg plans to apply for faculty positions this year, and said that as she has neared the end of her long years of training, she has begun to think deeply about her future responsibilities to the people in her lab.

“Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run,” Krukenberg said.

by Carolyn Y. Johnson, Boston Globe | Read more:
Image: Jessica Rinaldi

Monday, October 13, 2014


Jan Versnel

Dancing Through Life


"In Germany, the Expressionist current triggered a wealth of exchanges between painters and dancers. While Laban embodied the new figure of the dancer as educator and theoretician, Mary Wigman, one of his pupils at the free community of Monte Verità, best epitomized the figure of woman beset with life and death urges, as illustrated in her famous Witch's dance. Wigman, who viewed herself as a dancer of humanity, proved equally fascinating to painters Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, not to mention her pupil Gret Palucca."

 via:
Mary Wigman via: Wikipedia

What If Gluten Sensitivity Isn’t Just About Gluten?

Gluten sensitivity — the kind that’s not associated with celiac disease — is a mysterious thing. An estimated 18 million people don’t fit the criteria for celiac disease, the genetic disorder that erodes the small intestine and causes digestive symptoms like bloating and stomach pain. And yet consuming gluten still makes them feel awful, notes health writer Jane Brody in a two-part series on the protein for the New York Times this week. But what if gluten is only a piece of the puzzle?

A bit buried in her second article, Brody nods to some overlooked nutrition research published last year, which indicates that for many who are currently considered to have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, gluten may not be the only thing that’s causing their health issues. The real culprit, this study suggests, may be a group of sugars represented by the somewhat unwieldy acronym FODMAPs, which Brody defines like so:
Fodmaps is an acronym for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, sugars that draw water into the intestinal tract. They may be poorly digested or absorbed, and become fodder for colonic bacteria that produce gas and can cause abdominal distress.
And this is a big deal, some nutrition scientists say, because so far non-celiac gluten sensitivity has mostly been defined by what it isn’t: It’s not a wheat allergy, and it’s not celiac disease. It does result in the same gastrointestinal issues that plague celiac patients, but it’s also often accompanied by symptoms outside the gut: headache, joint pain, foggy mind.

The idea of non-celiac gluten sensitivity was established in the scientific community back in 2011, when a study published in Nature by a team of Australian researchers concluded that it “may exist.” This research was among the first to show that people who did not have celiac disease could still suffer from celiac-like symptoms after consuming gluten, including bloating, intestinal pain, and tiredness.

But many of the people in this study still experienced these symptoms long after switching to a gluten-free diet. And so the researchers decided to continue to follow these folks. They asked the participants to switch from their gluten-free diet to a diet low in FODMAPs, which means avoiding a pretty extensive list of fruits, veggies, and grains containing those sugars that are harder for some to digest. Some of those foods do contain gluten, but many do not. For more detail, here’s a list of foods considered to be high and low in FODMAPs.

by Melissa Dahl, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Copenhagen Wheel: If an Electric Bike Is Ever Going to Hit It Big in the U.S., It's This One

On a sunny but brisk spring morning near the Charles River in Cambridge, I took a test ride on the bicycle of the future. No rockets or lasers (alas), the bicycle of the future looks pretty much like the bicycle of the present. But with the first pumps of my feet on the pedals, I felt the difference. The bike wasn't just moving, it was pushing, adding extra propulsion to my own pedaling, giving me a boost with every revolution of the pedals. Faster than expected, I reached the end of a quiet block leaning into a corner. I took a straightaway for a few blocks and pushed 20 miles an hour without hardly trying. My feet were putting out a solid paper-route effort, but the bike had me racing in the Tour de France.

The bike I tested was equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel, an electric pedal-assist motor fully contained in the oversized red hub of an otherwise normal back bicycle wheel. Inside that red hub is a delicately crammed array of computing equipment, sensors, and a three-phase brushless direct current electric motor that can feel the torque of my pedaling and add appropriately scaled assistance.

Replace the back wheel of any bike with the Copenhagen Wheel and it's instantly an electric bike—one that not only assists the rider but senses the surrounding topography and can even collect and share data about environmental, traffic, and road conditions. First developed in 2009, through a partnership between MIT's Senseable City Lab and the City of Copenhagen, the wheel is now in its first stages of commercial production. By the end of 2014, thousands will be shipped out to fulfill pre-orders around the world.

With its focus on design and simple application of complex technology, the Copenhagen Wheel is perhaps the sleekest version of the electric bike. But it's hardly the only one. Millions of electric bicycles are being used in cities all over the world, offering cheap and accessible forms of transportation in developing countries and dense urban environments. And though bicycling has long been considered recreation in the United States, the electric bicycle is about to become the next big thing in urban transportation.

by Nate Berg, CityLab |  Read more:
Image: Michael D. Spencer / Superpedestrian


Yo, Mr. White!
via:

Ernst Haas

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Marriage Is an Abduction

The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.

“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.

Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.

The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.

Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.

But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)

Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.

by Elif Batuman, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: 20th Century Fox

Scheherazade

"I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.

“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.

He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.

“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”

“Huh? Eels have jaws?”

“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.

“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”

“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”

Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.

“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”

“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.

“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”

Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.

“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”

“Can you remember eating them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”

“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”

“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.

“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.”

“And you can see all these things now?”

“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”

“To what you were thinking then?”

“Yeah.”

“What do lampreys think about?”

“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”

“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”

“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”

No, he said. He couldn’t.

“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”

“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Merlin

[ed. Go Seahawks!]
via:
[ed. 3hrs. later... ouch.]

Marc Marquez


A few years back, MotoGP fans and press began referring to the top four or five riders as "aliens" due to their consistent ability to be so much faster than what you'd otherwise refer to as the best riders in the world. The moniker essentially implied that this group of elite racers were from another planet. Consider them superhuman.

And then Marc Marquez came along, winning the MotoGP World Championship in his first attempt and then the first 10 races of the 2014 season. That begs the question: If alien is the term used to describe the top four or five riders (Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa, Valentino Rossi, and—previously—Casey Stoner), then what title could you possibly give Marc Marquez?

by Staff, Sport Rider |  Read more:
Image: via:

Edward Burra, The Snack Bar, 1930.
via:

Pat Metheny Group



[ed. I think I'll try learning this one this weekend... :)

Before the Advice, Check Out the Adviser

When Elaine and Merlin Toffel, a retired couple in their 70s, needed help with their investments, they went to their local U.S. Bank branch. The tellers knew them by their first names. They were comfortable there.

So when a teller suggested that they meet with the bank’s investment brokers, the Toffels made an appointment. After discussions and an evaluation, the bank sold them variable annuities, in which they invested more than $650,000. The annuities promised to generate lifetime income payments.

“We wanted to make the most amount of interest we could so if we needed it to live on, we could use it,” said Ms. Toffel, 74, of Lindenhurst, Ill.

What she says they didn’t fully understand was that the variable annuities came with a hefty annual charge: about 4 percent of the amount invested. That’s more than $26,000, annually — enough to buy a new Honda sedan every year. What’s more, if they needed to tap the money right away, there would be a 7 percent surrender charge, or more than $45,000.

Michael Walsh, a spokesman for U.S. Bank, said that the investments were appropriate for the Toffels, that fees were disclosed and that the sale was completed after months of consultations. But the Toffels now question whether they were given financial advice that was truly in their best interests. Like many consumers, they say they didn’t realize that their broker wasn’t required to follow the most stringent requirement for financial professionals, known as the fiduciary standard. It amounts to this: providing advice that is always 100 percent in the consumer’s interest.

Many people think that they are getting that kind of advice when they are not, said Arthur Laby, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law and a former assistant general counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Brokerage customers are, in a certain sense, deceived,” he said. “If brokers continue to call themselves advisers and advertise advisory services, customers believe they are receiving objective advice that is in their best interest. In many cases, however, they are not.”

Brokers, like those at the Toffels’ bank, are technically known as registered representatives. They are required only to recommend “suitable” investments based on an investor’s personal situation — their age, investment goals, time horizon and appetite for risk, among other things. “Suitable” may sound like an adequate standard, but there’s a hitch: It can mean that a broker isn’t required to put a customer’s interests before his own.

There are some specific situations when brokers must act as fiduciaries — for example, when they collect a percentage of total assets to manage an investment account, or when they are given full control of an investor’s account. But under current rules, a broker can take off his fiduciary hat and recommend merely “suitable” investments for the same customer’s other buckets of money. Confusing? Absolutely.(...)

It's a bewildering situation for consumers, particularly as they try to figure out which advisers do follow a fiduciary standard: Investment advisers, who generally must register with the S.E.C. or a state securities regulator, must put their customers’ interests first, regardless of what accounts they are working with.

This creates a muddle for investors. Say you sit down with a broker — one who isn’t legally required to act as a fiduciary — and the broker has access to a dozen mutual funds, all of which are deemed “suitable” for a particular customer. The broker can recommend the most expensive fund, even if it makes him more money at the consumer’s expense and isn’t preferable in any other way, Professor Laby said.

On the other hand, if advisers are following a fiduciary standard, the proper course is clear: “They have to recommend the one that is the lowest cost” because that will be in a consumer’s best interest, he added.

by Tara Siegel Bernard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Weber

Saturday, October 11, 2014

A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow

[ed. Talk about a "no-brainer". If pharmaceutical companies ever figure out how to get into the action, approval might occur quite a bit sooner. See also: this Washington Post story.]

This pill goes down easier if you forget what is in it.

Inside the experimental capsule is human feces — strained, centrifuged and frozen. Taking them for just two days can cure a dangerous bacterial infection that has defied antibiotics and kills 14,000 Americans each year, researchers said Saturday.

If the results are replicated in larger trials, the pill, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, promises an easier, cheaper and most likely safer alternative to an unpleasant procedure highlighted in both medical journals and on YouTube: fecal transplants.

Studies show that transplanting feces in liquid form from healthy people to patients with stubborn Clostridium difficile infections can stop the wrenching intestinal symptoms, apparently by restoring healthy gut bacteria.

But fecal transplants are not easy. The procedure requires delivery of a fecal solution via the rectum or a tube inserted through the nose. As with colonoscopies, patients must flush their bowels first.

Finding and screening donors is time-consuming and can delay the transplant. And the costs can be significant, certainly higher than taking a simple pill.

“Capsules are going to replace the way we’ve been doing this,” said Dr. Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist with the Women’s Medicine Collaborative in Providence, R.I., who was not involved in the study. Dr. Kelly performs five or six fecal transplants a month, but demand is so great she is booked through January.

“It’s so labor-intensive,” she said. “You have to find a donor, have to screen a donor. If you can just open a freezer and take out a poop pill, that’s wonderful.”

While the pills are not being marketed yet, the authors of the study, published in JAMA, are already making them available to qualified patients without requiring participation in clinical trials.

Their study was small and preliminary, but results were striking: 19 of 20 patients with C. difficile infections were cured of diarrhea and related symptoms. Most saw improvements after one two-day round of pills, the rest after two or three rounds, said Dr. Ilan Youngster, the lead investigator.

Other research teams, and at least one private company, are developing and testing fecal pills. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration effectively permits doctors to give fecal transplants to qualified patients with recurrent C. difficile infections. Pills marketed commercially would have to meet F.D.A. drug-licensing regulations.) (...)

Deirdre, 37, a technology consultant in Boston, acquired C. difficile after receiving antibiotics for a breast infection and struggled with recurrences for months before learning of the study.

“At first I was kind of grossed out,” said Deirdre, who asked that her last name be withheld because of privacy concerns. But about a week after taking the capsules, which “kind of felt like small ice cubes,” her digestive system began to normalize.

“If this is a treatment that was 90 percent effective and you can get over the gross factor, it seems to be kind of a no-brainer,” she said.

by Pam Belluck, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Hohmann Lab