Guilin, Li River, China
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How an $84,000 Drug Got Its Price

Gilead Sciences executives were acutely aware in 2013 that their plan to charge an exorbitantly high price for a powerful new hepatitis C drug would spark public outrage, but they pursued the profit-driven strategy anyway, according to a Senate Finance Committee investigation report released Tuesday.

"Let's not fold to advocacy pressure in 2014," Kevin Young, Gilead's executive vice president for commercial operations, wrote in an internal email. ‘‘Let’s hold our position whatever competitors do or whatever the headlines."

Gilead gained federal approval for its drug Sovaldi in late 2013 and ultimately settled on the price of $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment. To the company, that price seemed to deliver the right balance: value to shareholders while also not so high that insurers would "hinder patient access to uncomfortable levels," according to internal documents. But they also got more than they bargained for: an outpouring of outrage from the public, a backlash from government and private payers, and political scrutiny.

The 18-month Senate committee investigation reviewed more than 20,000 pages of company documents.

“The documents show it was always Gilead’s plan to max out revenue, and that accessibility and affordability were pretty much an afterthought," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-led the investigation with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), in a news conference.

In a statement released Tuesday, Gilead disagreed with the conclusions of the report, saying that the price was "in line with previous standards of care.” The company noted that it has programs in place to help uninsured patients and those who need financial assistance access the treatments. More than 600,000 patients around the world have been treated with Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs since 2013, according to the company.

Here are four key takeaways from the investigation:

1. It could have been priced at $115,000 for a course of treatment.

Gilead considered a range of prices for Sovaldi and weighed the value to its shareholders against the "reputational risks," meaning the potential outrage from patients, physicians and payers. The potential prices ranged from $50,000 to $115,000.

Executives believed a $50,000 price would build good will and ensure easy access to the drug because it would be covered by most plans. But it would cause "significant foregone revenue," and activists would still critique the price, even at this relatively low level.

At $115,000, executives were concerned about "external considerations" and predicted: "High levels of advocacy group criticism and negative PR/competitive messaging could be expected at $115K and it would be increasingly difficult to manage at these levels."

2. Gilead priced Sovaldi partly based on the expectation it would set a benchmark for the next drugs in the pipeline.

A company presentation noted that Gilead has "considerable pricing potential" for Sovaldi, but that future pricing for next-generation drug launches would be limited by competition -- what it referred to as a second wave of treatments.

"Wave 1 will set a price benchmark against which Wave 2 will ultimately be evaluated," the presentation stated.

"By elevating the price for the new standard of care set by Sovaldi, Gilead intended to raise the price floor for all future hepatitis C treatments, including its follow-on drugs and those of its competitors," the report states.

Its next hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, was priced at $94,500.

by Carolyn Y. Johnson and Brady Dennis, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Gilead Sciences

A Baby Boomer's 9-Step Guide to Millennial Golfers

By now, as you know, the survival of our sport depends entirely on a group of people called millennials. Without their participation, experts agree, welcome to croquet. If you're saying, "Why is this group so important, and do I have to meet any?" you'll benefit from our guide.

1) What are millennials, exactly?

The most important group of human beings in history, age 20 to 35, and thin. They're the new guys at your club who say the course is too short and your dress code is prehistoric, meaning pre-Windows 10. Every golf company in America loves millennials, who are so totally high-tech they can understand most driver ads.

2) Are they pretty much all alike?

No. There are two types: Entrepreneurial Millennials (EMs) are rich. They start and sell companies like Cub Scouts sell donuts. Broke Millennials (BMs) flock to work for them at "start-ups," which are basically Junior Achievement projects with serfs. In the time it took to read this, an EM joined your club, added an assessment and lengthened the fifth hole by 50 yards.

3) Why are millennials so important compared to, say,... me?

Companies want their brands to be youthful and vibrant, like millennials. You are a Boomer—old, and old hat. If advertisers were honest, they would tell you: "Your money's no good, old man. Your replacement has arrived." From now on, your survival in the world of commerce—much less golf—depends on your ability to relate to the common millennial.

4) How do I identify one?

The first place to look is your basement. The millennial is typically moody and communicates in clever, ironic bursts. I had one who disappeared after years in my home but left the television set on its video-game function. I have no idea how to get it back to Golf Channel. Millennials start companies like PicPKT, which tells you how many ball markers you have at any time in any of your pockets, and which hand to use to get them. Clever. But keep an eye on the remote.

by Bob Carney, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Miley Cyrus’s World of Excess

by Caryn Ganz, NY Times

Appalachia Grasps for Hope as Coal Loses Its Grip

The seams of coal in some of Eddie Asbury's mines in McDowell County are so thin workers can barely squeeze down them. They enter on carts nearly flat on their backs, the roof of the mine coursing by just a few inches in front of their faces. They don't stand up all day.

To keep his business operating with such a paltry amount of coal, Asbury has to do everything himself. He has no use for the shiny, multimillion-dollar mining machines on display this fall at the biannual coal show nearby. His equipment is secondhand stuff that he repairs and refurbishes. The coal he and his workers scrape out of the mountain is washed and prepared for sale in a plant Asbury and a colleague built themselves.

"It's how we survive," says Asbury, 66, a miner since 1971.

Even coal is barely surviving in coal country - and coal is about the only thing that Central Appalachia has.

West Virginia is the only state in the country where more than half of adults are not working, according to the Census Bureau. It is tied with Kentucky for the highest percentage of residents collecting disability payments from Social Security, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the death rate among working-age adults is highest in the nation, 55 percent higher the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And now the one main source for decent-paying work, the brutal life of coal, seems to be drying up for good. The thick, easy, cheap coal is gone, global competition is fierce, and clean air and water regulations are increasing costs and cutting into demand.

Central Appalachia's struggle is familiar to many rural regions across the U.S., where middle-class jobs are disappearing or gone and young people have no other choice than to leave to find opportunity. But the problems are amplified in coal country, where these difficult economic and social conditions have gripped the region for decades and where there is hardly any flat land to build anything.

Every year since 1979, West Virginia has led the country in the percentage of people who are either not working or looking for work. But businesses are reluctant to come set up shop in Central Appalachia and take advantage of the available labor in part because education levels are so low. Forty-two percent of prime-age West Virginians have no more than a high-school degree, nearly double the national average.

"We have a mismatch between the job skills that employers want and the job skills West Virginians have," says John Deskins, director of the Bureau for Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University. "It's a little bit grim. You can cut the data in multiple ways, and West Virginia still lags the nation."

But this crisis - and the realization that there won't be another coal boom in these parts - is leading to a growing understanding that new approaches are needed to help Central Appalachia emerge from decades of deep poverty, under-education and poor health.

by Jonathan Fahey, AP |  Read more:

Image: David Goldman

The Peculiar Ascent of Bill Murray to Secular Saint

Over the last few years, Mitch Glazer, the screenwriter and producer, has watched with awe and bewilderment what has happened to Bill Murray.

Mr. Glazer has been friends with the actor for decades, and they have worked together on several projects, including “A Very Murray Christmas,” his Netflix holiday special having its premiere on Dec. 4. Mr. Murray first gained notice during his “Saturday Night Live” days in the late ’70s before shooting to stardom with the 1984 comedy “Ghostbusters.” But in the recent past, his fame transcended mere Hollywood celebrity.

“It’s the feeling of how they make crystals,” Mr. Glazer said. “It’s water, it’s water, it’s water, and then it reaches this density, and all of a sudden, it’s this other thing.”

What Mr. Glazer means by “this other thing” is the transformation of Bill Murray the actor into a pop icon.

The kind of figure for whom there is a coloring book, frameable art prints and T-shirts bearing his face in its many moods, from the smirking mug of “Stripes” (1981) to the pensive gray-bearded visage of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004)

The bro-centric website theCHIVE.com holds him up as a hero and wise elder, and sells a popular T-shirt printed with the words “Bill [Expletive] Murray” across the front, with matching stickers available.

Indeed, he now rivals James Dean, Elvis Presley and Albert Einstein in image appropriated bric-a-brac. On Etsy, you can buy: a “Saint Bill Murray” prayer candle; a galvanized metal planter pot showing the actor as the demented, but possibly enlightened, Carl Spackler in the 1980 comedy “Caddyshack”; a set of Bill Murray coasters; coffee mugs in varying graphics; a baby mobile with dangling felt dolls representing his movie characters; and much, much more.

The actor has little or nothing to do with these products and seems not to have brought legal action. People are strangely moved to make this stuff and others to purchase it.

As Mr. Glazer wrote in his recent Vanity Fair cover article on his old friend, there is no equivalent for the Murray worship, even among A-listers. One aspires to the suaveness of George Clooney or the intensity of Daniel Day-Lewis, and perhaps enjoys their movies, but no one buys the T-shirt.

There are murals of Bill Murray that decorate the interiors of bars from Toronto to Sydney, and tattoos of the actor’s face inked onto the arms and calves of 20- and 30-somethings. Tumblr blogs celebrate his awesomeness.

It’s clear that he has come to symbolize something. But what, exactly?

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Justin Cozens

Bob Marley

[ed. For Cal B. Get up, Stand up...]

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Liam O’Neill, Beta Male (2014)
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Hit Charade

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.

After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.

Most Americans will recognize their songs, however. As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean. And so on. If you flip on the radio, odds are that you will hear one of their songs. If you are reading this in an airport, a mall, a doctor’s office, or a hotel lobby, you are likely listening to one of their songs right now. This is not an aberration. The same would have been true at any time in the past decade. Before writing most of Taylor Swift’s newest album, Max Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, and Katy Perry.

Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed as their songs and dances. The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.

Impressionable young fans would therefore do well to avoid John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.

The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”

Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.

by Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Nicolas Dehghani

Naomi Klein: Climate Change Makes for a Hotter and Meaner World

Naomi Klein is a journalist and author who has written for a number of publications about environmentalism, globalization, the wars in Iraq, and the impact of unrestrained neoliberal economics. She has also written several books on the anti-corporate movement (and in addition to print, has made documentary films on the subject with her husband, Avi Lewis). Her critiques of free market fundamentalism earned her the £50,000 (about $76,000) Warwick Prize for Writing and a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

In this interview, Klein tells the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette about her latest non-fiction book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. The book takes no prisoners, pointing at weak government efforts to address climate change; environmental groups that have compromised with industry on too many issues; what she considers to be pie-in-the-sky “techno-fixes” such as carbon sequestering; conservatives who consistently deny climate change is even happening; and corporations that Klein thinks are seeking to earn a profit by scuttling efforts to deal with the crisis. (...)

BAS: One of the shocking things to read in your book was that all these trade agreements essentially say that free trade trumps everything else, including environmental concerns. Economic growth always comes first; climate second.

Klein: And we’re seeing a flurry of these new trade deals, with the United States and China, and with Europe and the United States, to name just a few of the larger partnerships. There is this fundamental contradiction between what governments are negotiating in trade summits and what they’re negotiating at climate summits. There’s seemingly very little desire to reconcile the two.

It’s like they’re on these two parallel tracks and don’t communicate with each other.

Twenty years ago the trade lawyers could plead ignorance and say that they weren’t really up on climate change. But that’s not true anymore. It’s really a willful compartmentalization, because it’s hard to reconcile that kind of trade with a radical carbon reduction agenda.

BAS: The book laid out a case for the large environmental groups—“Big Green”—being in bed with Big Oil. The Environmental Defense Fund came off particularly badly.

Klein: Even the Sierra Club had a really ugly chapter, in which they were taking many millions from a natural gas company which had a very clear financial interest in shutting down coal plants because it was creating a market for them.

And frankly I think the same is true for Michael Bloomberg—who continues to be a major funder for the Sierra Club—because Bloomberg as a businessman is massively invested in natural gas. He has a dedicated fund for his $33 billion worth of wealth that specializes in oil and gas. And he continues to be a vocal advocate in favor of fracking in New York State.

What do I take away from this? I love the Sierra Club, I have friends who work there, they do fantastic work. But I frankly don’t see a huge difference between the conflict of interest with Michael Bloomberg and some of the other conflicts of interest I mentioned in the book.

That said, I think the Sierra Club has definitely gotten on the right side of the fracking fight. Unlike the Environmental Defense Fund, which continues to try to broker these so-called “best practices” for fracking at a time when the people affected by fracking are being very clear that they want outright bans.

What’s interesting is what has been happening in places like New York State, where local green organizations have been challenging the relevancy of some of these Big Green groups that started that whole “split the difference” middle ground approach—and Big Green is to the right of Cuomo, which is not a place where you want to be. There’s been the emergence of a harder-core, grass-roots movement that I call ‘Blockadia’—and because it is growing, and so strong, and resonating with so many people, these new movements are winning huge victories, like the ban on fracking in New York State. And the grassroots is making these Big Green groups irrelevant. (...)

BAS: In the book, you rebutted the claim by some environmentalists that the fight against climate change would bring us all together. You cited examples in which some people found a way to profiteer off of this—such as a private security firm to patrol your expensively engineered, stormproof home and protect your possessions when the next flood arrive—with the net result that wedges were driven between everyone.

Klein: This is where I come to climate from. My previous book, The Shock Doctrine, was all about this. It was about the rise of “disaster capitalism” after wars. When I started writing it, the book was about military and economic crises and how they are used to push further privatization—and how these situations offer moments for intense profiteering. Because that’s what was happening in Iraq after invasion.

And as I was writing it, I was starting to see how the same sort of thing was cropping up in the aftermath of natural disasters like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina: privatized aid, privatized security infrastructure, privatized military, and so on. I felt like I was catching a glimpse of the future when I was doing the field reporting.

And I think that’s why I feel so passionately about the fact that climate change is not just about things getting hotter, it’s about things getting meaner and much more divided. We saw this during Hurricane Katrina—and to a lesser extent, during Hurricane Sandy—where there was such a huge gap between how that storm was experienced by people of means and people who were in public housing. It’s very cruel the way this plays out.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is when the developers come in and say, “Well, let’s just bulldoze the public housing and have condos instead.” Or, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to privatize the school system,” which is what happened in New Orleans.

This is what our current economic system is built to do, and it does it. And I’ve spent a lot of time documenting that.

We can count on that pattern continuing, unless there is a plan for a progressive response to the climate crisis.

by Dan Drollette Jr, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: Anya Chibis For The Guardian

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The Neurofix: Chicken Soup for the Ageing Brain

Stem cell therapies for the scourges of old age are on the near horizon. Will they come in time for the Baby Boomers?

No amount of Botox or Pilates can stave off the loss of brain cells, a steady erosion that began, ironically, in the days when we were part of the Woodstock nation. The brain reaches its maximum weight by age 20 and then slowly starts shrinking, losing 10 per cent or more of its volume over a lifetime. By our 50s, we’re experiencing mild mental glitches, those unsettling ‘senior moments’ when we’ve misplaced the keys for the umpteenth time or can’t remember the name of an acquaintance, all of it symptomatic of the steady erosion of neurons in our brains.

We make feeble jokes about our failing memories, but quietly worry that they are harbingers of something worse – such as scourges from dementia to Parkinson’s, which increase in frequency as we age. No matter how it manifests, the progressive shrinkage of our brain and the faulty wiring in our neural circuitry slowly rob us of our memories, identity and personality, the abilities that give our lives meaning and purpose, and the physical and emotional capacity to fully embrace the world.

All this is magnified by the demographic time bomb that threatens to exhaust society’s resources: by 2050, more than 400 million people worldwide will be aged over 80, many caring for the explosion of friends and family suffering from brain afflictions of varying kinds. The burden could bankrupt our health system – or, new technology based on neural stem cells, the progenitor cells of the nervous system, could intervene, reversing neurodegeneration, healing damaged brains and averting catastrophe in the nick of time. (...)

A team researching Alzheimer’s at the University of California, Irvine has shored up memory by transferring stem cells to the brains of mice. To do their work, they compared the performance on a simple memory test of a group of healthy mice with ones who were genetically altered to develop brain lesions that mimic Alzheimer’s. The fit mice remembered their surroundings about 70 per cent of the time, while the recall rate for the impaired animals was a scant 50 per cent. Scientists then injected the hippocampus – the brain region responsible for memory storage – of the injured mice with 200,000 neural stem cells that were engineered to glow green under an ultraviolet light so their progress could be tracked. Three months later, when both groups of mice were given the same test, they scored the same – about 70 per cent recall – while a control group of damaged mice that didn’t receive the stem cells still had significant mental deficits.

Significantly, only a handful – about 6 per cent – of the implanted cells were transformed into neurons, so the beneficial effects didn’t occur because they simply replaced dead cells. Yet there was a 75 per cent increase in the number of synapses – the connections between neurons that relay nerve impulses. Subsequent experiments suggest the stem cells release a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) that seems to nurse the injured neurons back to health by keeping them alive and functional, and prompt the surrounding tissue to produce new neurites (long, thin structures called axons and dendrites that transmit electrical messages).

In replications of these studies at labs around the world, treated lab animals showed improvements even after months – roughly the equivalent of about a decade in human years. ‘The stem cells were acting as a fertiliser of sorts for the surviving cells,’ says Mathew Blurton-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine involved in the research. When scientists artificially reduced the amount of BDNF the stem cells produced, the benefit disappeared too. (...)

A dose of stem cells delivered to just the right sweet spot could mend the fractured neural circuits that ferry signals throughout the brain, holding promise for relief of psychiatric diseases from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. The technology might one day ease learning disabilities, including deficits in information processing and attention. But the application closest at hand is the one that could rescue the boomer generation, my friends, and me, from the looming loss of our memories, our social skills, and our very selves. One day soon, neural stem cells will be used like brick and mortar to shore up the crumbling walls in our brains and restore lost functions so we’re almost good as new. ‘We can change the face of therapeutics with neural stem cells,’ says Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan who is a leading stem cell researcher. ‘They’re like chicken soup for the brain.’

by Linda Marsa, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Centre Jean Perrin/SPL

Trapped in Tokyo Forever Now
by Nina Geometrieva and Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov

Machine Intelligence In The Real World

I’ve been laser-focused on machine intelligence in the past few years. I’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs, researchers and investors about helping machines make us smarter.

In the months since I shared my landscape of machine intelligence companies, folks keep asking me what I think of them — as if they’re all doing more or less the same thing. (I’m guessing this is how people talked about “dot coms” in 1997.)

On average, people seem most concerned about how to interact with these technologies once they are out in the wild. This post will focus on how these companies go to market, not on the methods they use.

In an attempt to explain the differences between how these companies go to market, I found myself using (admittedly colorful) nicknames. It ended up being useful, so I took a moment to spell them out in more detail so, in case you run into one or need a handy way to describe yours, you have the vernacular.

The categories aren’t airtight — this is a complex space — but this framework helps our fund (which invests in companies that make work better) be more thoughtful about how we think about and interact with machine intelligence companies.

“Panopticons” Collect A Broad Dataset

Machine intelligence starts with the data computers analyze, so the companies I call “panopticons” are assembling enormous, important new datasets. Defensible businesses tend to be global in nature. “Global” is very literal in the case of a company like Planet Labs, which has satellites physically orbiting the earth. Or it’s more metaphorical, in the case of a company like Premise, which is crowdsourcing data from many countries.

With many of these new datasets we can automatically get answers to questions we have struggled to answer before. There are massive barriers to entry because it’s difficult to amass a global dataset of significance.

However, it’s important to ask whether there is a “good enough” dataset that might provide a cheaper alternative, since data license businesses are at risk of being commoditized. Companies approaching this space should feel confident that either (1) no one else can or will collect a “good enough” alternative, or (2) they can successfully capture the intelligence layer on top of their own dataset and own the end user.

Examples include Planet Labs, Premise and Diffbot.

“Lasers” Collect A Focused Dataset

The companies I like to call “lasers” are also building new datasets, but in niches, to solve industry-specific problems with laser-like focus. Successful companies in this space provide more than just the dataset — they also must own the algorithms and user interface. They focus on narrower initial uses and must provide more value than just data to win customers.

The products immediately help users answer specific questions like, “how much should I water my crops?” or “which applicants are eligible for loans?” This category may spawn many, many companies — a hundred or more — because companies in it can produce business value right away.

With these technologies, many industries will be able to make decisions in a data-driven way for the first time. The power for good here is enormous: We’ve seen these technologies help us feed the world more efficiently, improve medical diagnostics, aid in conservation projects and provide credit to those in the world that didn’t have access to it before.

But to succeed, these companies need to find a single “killer” (meant in the benevolent way) use case to solve, and solve that problem in a way that makes the user’s life simpler, not more complex.

Examples include Tule Technologies, Enlitic, InVenture, Conservation Metrics, Red Bird, Mavrx and Watson Health.

by Shivon Zilis, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: Razum Shutterstock

Korean Thanksgiving

Ths is where Bing Crosby’s buried,’ says my mom from the front seat of my middle aunt’s car. Mother is feeling triumphant because she’s conned me into a twofer. I’d been guilt-tripped into attending Catholic mass and now we were on our way to visit her parents’ gravesites. I should have brought my own car — a Corolla rental — but I’d felt so pleased with myself, so pious and doting to accompany my 65-year-old mother to church, that I never imagined she’d pull a stunt like this.

My youngest aunt is in the back with me, clutching three cellophane-bundled bouquets of flowers in her tiny, star-shaped paws. All four of us are wearing enormous, aggressively Asian sun hats. Mom and I got ours from the Korean dollar-store the day before. They are identical. I picked mine first — an angular, stylised, straw Regency bonnet that looks cool if you dress sort of goth and deconstructed — and she got hers to match. I thought about switching but relented. From the back there is no mistaking that we are together. We don’t look cool.

We’re 15 minutes late like we always are. On the verdant lawn of Holy Cross Cemetery, in Culver City, California, about three hills in from the main gate, I see my mother’s oldest brother, his wife (also in a massive sun hat) and their Yorkshire Terrier, Cherry. The outlook is grim. They’ve staked their claim with two picnic blankets side by side. The blankets mean business. They are flanked by five heaving bags of food, which means we’re in for the long haul.

This is one of two cemeteries I’ve ever been to ever, and I had no idea dining al fresco among tombstones was a thing. I wonder if it’s an Asian thing — which it so would be — and do a 360-degree turn to confirm that, while not exclusive to yellows, most of the families with an elaborate buffet set-up and another blanket to indicate ‘post-lunch napping zone’ are 100 per cent not white.

I text the cousins: no dice. It seems I’m the only kid dumb enough to get roped. Everyone else submitted iron-clad excuses ages ago — work, kids of their own, vague previous engagements (that I suspect to be golf), distance — and no one gave me the heads-up. Rookie move: it’s the weekend before the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar. That means it’s almost Korean Thanksgiving, an occasion for reflection and time-suck ancestral memorial rites.

Lately, I’m off my game with this stuff. I’d forgotten it was Sunday too, since I live in New York and work as a freelancer: days of the week are insignificant unless it comes to deadlines. Either way, I’ll be lucky to get out of here in less than two hours. My uncle’s wife squeals when she sees my mother. They haven’t seen each other in more than a year, and have stockpiled gossip to workshop. I should have brought a book.

by Mary H.K. Choi, Morning News | Read more:
Image: Michel Setboun

Food, Interrupted

The problem with food is we care too much. Take the example of Diane, a 48-year-old office manager who took part in a study of eating habits in 2010. She believed food was entirely about pleasure and imagination, a matter of “what I like and what I fancy,” she told an interviewer. She obsessed over the variables that might interfere with her enjoyment—as a gourmet might critique the texture of a sous vide chicken breast or frown at the seasoning of a broth. The temperature of her food was particularly important. Diane invited the researchers to a café nearby so they could see her navigate the menu, or rather navigate its dearth of appetizing options. When dinner was served, she ate rapidly but didn’t finish. She would only eat a cooked meal, she explained, when it was still piping hot.

So Diane was a picky eater. And this might have given the food she ate greater meaning, since in order to truly love a certain dish—not too salty, not too sweet—you have to reject other, lesser forms of it. But in truth Diane complained of being deeply miserable. Her selections were more pained than indulgent. The food she made such a show of ordering at the café was nothing more than a plain egg on toast, which quickly became revolting to her as it cooled. As she neared the age of 50, she felt she’d let her mother down because her fussiness meant they could never share a meal together; her friends no longer invited her to dinner. Though Diane wanted to change her ways, she doubted she could. She lived on a diet of de-food-ified food: processed cheese, breakfast cereal, potato chips, and sliced bread.

Of course, these culinary preferences and the anguish that often trails behind them aren’t uncommon. The British historian Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite takes on the subject of how we learn to eat as children and the habits we end up with as adults. As well as negative health effects, the book describes the contortions people perform in their social and professional lives because of disordered eating: One woman chooses her college on the assurance the cafeteria will serve the kind of pizza she finds acceptable; another has to call any restaurant she plans to visit and check that they will cook a hamburger with absolutely no fixings. Nor are the outcomes of these situations so different from the person who likes a wide range of foods but ends up buying a sandwich for lunch and pizza for dinner. These daily struggles are good examples of a much bigger dysfunction: Why do we find it so hard to eat nourishing, whole foods, even if they are available and we can afford them and we want to eat them?

Any account of the Western diet in the twenty-first century is going to be both a bleak picture and one that contains a lot of candy. A 2002 study of the foods children like to eat—tastes they would, it was hoped, grow out of—revealed that their parents favored the same popcorn, pancakes, ground beef, and pizza. Nostalgic, fattening “kids’ foods” have become part of everyday life: Wilson cites the “cereal milk” sold at David Chang’s Momofuku Milk Bars in New York and the rise of birthday-cake-flavored ice cream that asks to be consumed on the 364 un-special days of the year. (She also has a disdain for cupcakes that made me instantly trust this book.) The average American in 2006 consumed 2,533 calories per day, including 422 calories worth of drinks, compared with 2,090 calories in 1977. In studies of portion size, a common reason to stop eating was boredom.

Wilson’s explanation of how we got to this state of affairs feels the most human of the many that have been offered in the past 15 years. There is a lot of blame to go round after all, and you could start with Eric Schlosser’s target in his 2001 best-seller Fast Food Nation: the huge fast-food companies that invented supersize portions and use Disney-style marketing tactics to sell them to families. Or you could look at the corrupt politics that have given us sugary drinks in schools and deliberately confusing government dietary advice, as Marion Nestle does in Food Politics (2002). Naturally, the military is behind much of this. After World War II, the Army partnered with corporations to create a permanent market for processed foods originally developed as soldiers’ rations, as described in The Combat-Ready Kitchen (2015) by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo. And maybe Kraft and Frito-Lay are just really, deceptively good at what they do. The $1 trillion snack industry, Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat (2013) argues, is built on the “bliss point,” an addictive combination of the three title ingredients. It doesn’t help, Michael Pollan suggests in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), that Americans have few long-established food traditions to guide us—what we need is “food rules.”

Wilson doesn’t deny that all of these books identify powerful forces. These factors shape the environment in which we all now must make our individual choices: whether to breakfast on melon, grapefruit, and kombucha, for instance, or to grab a cream cheese-laden bagel and coffee from the nearest food truck en route to work? But ultimately our decisions about food are determined by long-ingrained patterns of likes and dislikes. If I choose the bagel, Wilson would argue, it’s not because I don’t know that it lacks the vitamins of the fruit salad or that I’m about to experience a huge spike in blood sugar, meaning I’ll be hungry but still strangely stuffed by 11 a.m. I know all of this and so do plenty of people—three of the books above were New York Times best-sellers. The major barrier is just that I prefer everything about the bagel. Before the day has even started I will have broken all three of Pollan’s famous rules for a healthy diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That is because, as Wilson puts it, in order to follow those rules you have to: “Like real food. Not enjoy feeling overstuffed. And appreciate vegetables.”

by Laura Marsh, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Davide Luciano

Franco Matticchio
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Sex After 50 at the Supreme Court

Fifty years after the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, granted married couples the constitutional right to use birth control, here we are back at the court, still wrestling with contraception. Am I the only one who finds this remarkable?

It’s less startling to find abortion also back at the court, given that we’ve never stopped debating abortion even as the birth control wars receded into a dimly remembered past. It’s the conjunction of the two issues that deserves more notice than it has received. Maybe it’s just a coincidence of timing that they now sit side-by-side on the court’s docket, in cases the justices accepted on consecutive Fridays earlier this month for argument and decision later in the current term.

But it feels like more than mere coincidence. Big Supreme Court cases don’t arrive randomly at the justices’ door. Rather, they are propelled by contending forces deep within American society, conflict eventually taking the shape of a legal dispute with sufficient resonance to claim the Supreme Court’s attention. It’s from that perspective, in the waning weeks of Griswold’s anniversary year, that I propose to consider these two crucially important cases.

The birth-control case — actually seven separate appeals that the court has consolidated under the name Zubik v. Burwell — is a challenge to the accommodation the Obama administration has provided for nonprofit organizations with religious objections to covering birth control under their employee health plans, as required under the Affordable Care Act. All these organizations have to do to claim the privilege of opting out is to send a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The abortion case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, is an appeal by abortion clinics in Texas from a decision upholding state regulations that invoke women’s health as a pretext for destroying the state’s abortion-provider infrastructure.

There are obvious differences between the two cases, which I’ve written about in some detail recently. The contraception case invokes not the Constitution but the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law aimed at shielding religious practices from federal laws that impose on them a “substantial burden” without sufficient justification. Constitutional interpretation will govern the Texas case, in which the clinics are challenging the regulations as the kind of “undue burden” that the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey prohibited: a regulation that has “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.”

But here’s what’s the same: sex, women and religion.

by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

Charlie Brown, “Mojarra”
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