High Prices: How to Think About Prescription Drugs

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Malcolm Gladwell pens a very useful look at prescription drug costs:

In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge–and the extraordinary profits they enjoy–by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn’t to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we’d already solved. “The Prilosec pattern, repeated across the pharmaceutical industry, goes a long way to explain why the nation’s prescription drug bill is rising an estimated 17 % a year even as general inflation is quiescent,” the Wall Street Journal concluded, in a front-page article that first revealed the Shark Fin Project.

Comair Shutdown: 16 Bit Buffer Overflow (essentially, an older design)

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Richard Smith offers up some background, and links on the Comair shutdown this past weekend.

According to the article, Comair is running a 15-year old scheduling software package from SBS International (www.sbsint.com). The software has a hard limit of 32,000 schedule changes per month. With all of the bad weather last week, Comair apparently hit this limit and then was unable to assign pilots to planes.
It sounds like 16-bit integers are being used in the SBS International scheduling software to identify transactions. Given that the software is 15 years old, this design decision perhaps was made to save on memory usage. In retrospect, 16-bit integers were probably not a wise choice.

It’s generally amazing things work as well as they do 🙂 This example also demonstrates the importance of keeping software up to date….

Cronkite Remembers the Battle of the Bulge

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Walter Cronkite remembers 1944’s Battle of the Bulge:

Sixty years ago this holiday season, the German army tried to push the Allies back one last time, as World War II neared its end in Europe. Earlier in 1944, the Allied army fought its way ashore at Normandy.
But in December, German leader Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with an offensive across Belgium and Luxembourg. By Christmas Eve, German forces had pushed the American defense line back 60 miles and trapped the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne.

Audio

My Case for Amateur Snorkeling: Maui Sea Turtle

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Floating in about 4m of water off Makena, Maui, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a sea turtle, swimming out from nearby coral. He was less than 1 meter in front of me, as this 7MB Quicktime movie shows.
I was later told that some people feed them hot dogs, which unfortunately explains his proximity. I was advised to keep an eye on my fingers. Screen saver jpeg sea turtle image (215K). The images were captured with a Canon S70 digital camera and a WP-DC40 underwater case.

Madison’s Third Wave Technologies Apparently Bounces Back

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Kathleen Gallagher visit’s Madison’s Third Wave Technologies:

Since arriving at Third Wave, he has helped guide the closing of two of the company?s three production facilities and the departure of more than 200 employees, stanch the cash drain and transform its product line to emphasize higher-margin offerings.
?He realized as a numbers person that getting profitable was the key to the success of the company,? said Daniel Kane, an analyst at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board. The pension plan manager is the biggest shareholder of Third Wave, holding 13% of its stock as of Sept. 30. ?What they?ve been able to do in terms of developing more products and becoming more customer-focused, that?s something John has understood all along.?
At least initially, Puisis didn?t ask for the job. In October 2001, Third Wave chairman and founder Lance Fors hired Puisis, then an executive recruiter at Egon Zehnder International, to conduct a search for a new chief financial officer – a position the company had not filled even as it went through its IPO.