Tag Archives: s

Crenezumab to prevent Alzheimer’s: The Columbia study.

Posted on by

Link. Done with great care. “… 100 family members who carry the mutation will receive the drug every two weeks… Another 100 mutation carriers will receive a placebo. And because many people do not want to know if they have the mutation, researchers will also include 100 non-carriers in the study; they will receive a placebo.”

It is unlikely to work. We hope it will cause no harm. Even if it fails it will guide treatments for at least the youngest of this afflicted clan.

Note that it will probably be 5+ years before we get results. That’s a clue as to how far we are from having good Alzheimer’s prevention. We should have treated Alzheimer’s as an emergency 30 years ago, but of course 30 years from now people will say the same about our attitude to climate change.

Germany’s choice

Posted on by

Link. “Greece never was a suitable member of the eurozone. That the Greek economy was extremely inefficient, that corruption was rife, that the government budgets were perpetually out of control, and that the official statistics were not to be believed were widely known. But, as in many marriages, Greece’s entry into the euro was a triumph of sentimentality and wilful blindness over realism.”

Return of civil war politics

Posted on by

Link. “… the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”

iPhone 4S slow shutter speed bug

Posted on by

Link. I’ve seen this too. “I’ve been frustrated with the iPhone 4S using ridiculously slow shutter speeds (e.g. 1/20 sec.) while failing to boost ISO sensitivity, which blurs many shots. (This wasn’t the case with my older iPhone 4 and earlier iOS versions…”