Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.
On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)
we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.
As Tom Slee puts it, “Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don’t, however, believe in total transparency, and even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.
The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought.
We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy.
This intellectual and political victory didn’t, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don’t agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.
I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.
The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.
Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.
Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.
True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.
It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."
The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme -- this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.
The second aspect of the story -- the one that was the focus of the symposium -- is the changing relationship to government that technology has made possible.
Back in the year 2007, B.W. (Before WikiLeaks), Barack Obama waxed lyrical about government and the internet: "We have to use technology to open up our democracy. It's no coincidence that one of the most secretive administrations in our history has favored special interest and pursued policy that could not stand up to the sunlight."
Not long after the election, in announcing his "Transparency and Open Government" policy, the president proclaimed: "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset."
Cut to a few years later. Now that he's defending a reality that doesn't match up to, well, reality, he's suddenly not so keen on the people having a chance to access this "national asset."
Even more wikironic are the statements by his Secretary of State who, less than a year ago, was lecturing other nations about the value of an unfettered and free internet. Given her description of the WikiLeaks as "an attack on America's foreign policy interests" that have put in danger "innocent people," her comments take on a whole different light. Some highlights:
In authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable... technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights... As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools.
Now "making government accountable" is, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, a "reckless and dangerous action."
ay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled "From Judith Miller to Julian Assange." He writes:
For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.
That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed -- and ultimately inaccurate -- account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.
Miller's after-the-facts-proved-wrong response, as quoted in a Michael Massing piece in the New York Review of Books, was: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."
In other words, her job is to tell citizens what their government is saying, not, as Obama called for in his transparency initiative, what their government is doing.
As Jay Rosen put it:
Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.
And in the WikiLeaks case, much of media has again found itself on the wrong side of secrecy -- and so much of the reporting about WikiLeaks has served to obscure, to conflate, to mislead.
For instance, how many stories have you heard or read about all the cables being "dumped" in "indiscriminate" ways with no attempt to "vet" and "redact" the stories first. In truth, only just over 1,200 of the 250,000 cables have been released, and WikiLeaks is now publishing only those cables vetted and redacted by their media partners, which includes the New York Times here and the Guardian in England.
The establishment media may be part of the media, but they're also part of the establishment. And they're circling the wagons. One method they're using, as Andrew Rasiej put it after the symposium, is to conflate the secrecy that governments use to operate and the secrecy that is used to hide the truth and allow governments to mislead us.
Nobody, including WikiLeaks, is promoting the idea that government should exist in total transparency,
Assange himself would not disagree. "Secrecy is important for many things," he told Time's Richard Stengel. "We keep secret the identity of our sources, as an example, take great pains to do it." At the same time, however, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."
Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders' intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down. Government officials who now attack WikiLeaks don't fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.
It is not, as Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian, the job of the media to protect the powerful from embarrassment. As I said at the symposium, its job is to play the role of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes -- brave enough to point out what nobody else is willing to say.
When the press trades truth for access, it is WikiLeaks that acts like the little boy. "Power," wrote Jenkins, "loathes truth revealed. When the public interest is undermined by the lies and paranoia of power, it is disclosure that takes sanity by the scruff of its neck and sets it back on its feet."
A final aspect of the story is Julian Assange himself. Is he a visionary? Is he an anarchist? Is he a jerk? This is fun speculation, but why does it have an impact on the value of the WikiLeaks revelations?
The Roy Orbison looking Eyez will feature a 720p HD recording camera, microphone, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, 8 GB flash memory, and three hours of battery life. Using an iPhone or Android app you can transmit what your Eyez record directly to the web, or you can save and upload it later using a microUSB port.
Here’s a promo clip of the glasses from ZionEyez, the start-up company developing them:
At $150 a pair, these glasses are cheap enough to become invaluable tools for journalists in volatile regions, especially those living under regimes who restrict free speech and press — where being seen recording video can be dangerous
the notion of more and easier surveillance will draw the inevitable comparisons to Big Brother — and certainly, the notion that our deeds could be surreptitiously captured by strangers, even friends, without our knowledge is an uncomfortable one. But some would argue that given the amount of surveillance we now face by the state, the amount of information we willingly volunteer about ourselves to corporations and on social media sites anyways, pervasive video-taking goggles seem like a natural stage in the evolution towards something like David Brin’s transparent society.
So what's Utopianist about some fairly snazzy, semi-affordable spy glasses that allow their users to furtively record video of the goings-on around them?
Summary of the Unethical Marketing of Zyprexa by Eli Lilly: \n\nEli Lilly is a global pharmaceutical company. In the year 2006, it was charged with unethical marketing of Zyprexa, the top-selling drug. It is approved only for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. \nFirstly, Eli Lilly in a report downplayed the risks of obesity and increased blood sugar associated with Zyprexa. Although Eli Lilly was aware of these risks for at least a decade, they went ahead without emphasizing the significance of these risks, in fear of jeopardizing their sales. \nSecondly, Eli Lilly held a promotional campaign called Viva Zyprexa, encouraging off-label usage of this drug in patients who had neither schizophrenia nor bipolar disorder. This campaign was targeted at the elderly who had dementia. However, this drug was not approved to treat dementia. In fact, it could increase the risk of death in older patients who had dementia-related psychosis. \nAll these were done to boost the sale of Zyprexa and to bring in more revenue for Eli Lilly. Zyprexa could alone bring in $4billion worth of sales annually. \n\nEthical Question:\nTo what extent should pharmaceutical companies go to inform potential consumers on the side-effects of their drugs? \n\nEthical Problem: \nThe information that is disseminated through marketing campaigns have to be true and transparent. There should not be any hidden agenda behind the amount of information being released. In this case, to prevent sales from plummeting, Eli Lilly downplayed the side-effects of Zyprexa. It also encouraged off-label usage. \nIt is very important that pharmaceutical companies practice good ethics as this concerns the health of its consumers. While one drug may act as a remedy for a health-problem, it could possibly lead to other health problems due to the side-effects. All these have to be conveyed to the consumer who exchanges his money for the product. \nNot being transparent and honest with the information of the pr
The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.
Meanwhile, an independent film-maker, Chris Atkins, has revealed how he duped the BBC into running an entirely fictitious story about Downing Street's new cat to coincide with the site's launch.
The director created a Facebook page in the name of a fictitious character, "Tim Sutcliffe", who claimed the cat – which came from Battersea Cats Home – had belonged to his aunt Margaret. The story appeared in the Daily Mail and Metro, before receiving a prominent slot on BBC Radio 5 Live.
BBC Radio 5 Live's Gaby Logan talks about a fictitious cat story Link to this audio
Atkins, who was not involved in creating churnalism.com, uses spoof stories to highlight the failure of journalists to corroborate stories. He was behind an infamous prank last year that led to the BBC running a news package on a hoax Youtube video purporting to show urban foxhunters.
The creation of churnalism.com is likely to unnerve overworked journalists and the press officers who feed them. "People don't realise how much churn they're being fed every day," said Martin Moore, director of the trust, which seeks to improve standards in news. "Hopefully this will be an eye-opener."
Interestingly, all media outlets appear particularly susceptible to PR material disseminated by supermarkets: the Mail appears to have a particular appetite for publicity from Asda and Tesco, while the Guardian favours Waitrose releases.
Moore said one unexpected discovery has been that the BBC news website appears particularly prone to churning publicity material."Part of the reason is presumably because they feel a duty to put out so many government pronouncements," Moore said. "But the BBC also has a lot to produce in regions that the newspapers don't cover."
rather than being forced to wait for parliament to
meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties
are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms
online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's
political debate
Singapore's People's Action Party
(PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being
contested online and over social media like blogs,
Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived
pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's
opposition parties are using various new media to
communicate with voters and express dissenting
views. Alternative news websites, including The
Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong
followings by presenting more opposition views in
their news mix.
Despite its
democratic veneer, Singapore rates poorly in
global press freedom rankings due to a deeply
entrenched culture of self-censorship and a
pro-state bias in the mainstream media. Reporters
Without Borders, a France-based press freedom
advocacy group, recently ranked Singapore 136th in
its global press freedom rankings, scoring below
repressive countries like Iraq and Zimbabwe.
The country's main media publishing house,
Singapore Press Holdings, is owned by the state
and its board of directors is made up largely of
PAP members or other government-linked executives.
Senior newspaper editors, including at the Straits
Times, must be vetted and approved by the PAP-led
government.
The local papers have a long
record of publicly endorsing the PAP-led
government's position, according to Tan Tarn How,
a research fellow at the Institute of Policy
Studies (IPS) and himself a former journalist. In
his research paper "Singapore's print media policy
- a national success?" published last year he
quoted Leslie Fong, a former editor of the Straits
Times, saying that the press "should resist the
temptation to arrogate itself the role of a
watchdog, or permanent critic, of the government
of the day".
With regularly briefed and
supportive editors, there is no need for
pre-publication censorship, according to Tan. When
the editors are perceived to get things "wrong",
the government frequently takes to task, either
publicly or privately, the newspaper's editors or
individual journalists, he said.
The country's main
newspaper, the Straits Times, has consistently
stood by its editorial decision-making. Editor Han
Fook Kwang said last year: "Our circulation is
380,000 and we have a readership of 1.4 million -
these are people who buy the paper every day.
We're aware people say we're a government
mouthpiece or that we are biased but the test is
if our readers believe in the paper and continue
to buy it."
By Chua Hian Hou from Straits Times BLOGGERS and users of other new media may soon have to say so upfront if they receive gifts or money for their write-ups. The Media Development Authority (MDA)...
“There is absolutely no empiric evidence that shows that anyone actually uses the accounts produced by public bodies to make any decision. There is no group of principals analogous to investors. There are many lists of potential users of the accounts. The Treasury, CIPFA (the UK public sector accounting body) and others have said that users might include the public, taxpayers, regulators and oversight bodies. I would be prepared to put up a reward for anyone who could prove to me that any of these people have ever made a decision based on the financial reports of a public body. If there are no users of the information then there is no point in making the reports better. If there are no users more technically correct reports do nothing to improve the understanding of public finances. In effect all that better reports do is legitimise the role of professional accountants in the accountability process.
raw data – and the ability to interrogate that – should instead be made available because (quoting Anthony Hopwood): “Those with the power to determine what enters into organisational accounts have the means to articulate and diffuse their values and concerns, and subsequently to monitor, observe and regulate the actions of those that are now accounted for.”
Data is not just some opaque term; something for geeks: it’s information: the raw material we deal in as journalists. Knowledge. Power. The site of a struggle for control. And considering it’s a site that journalists have always fought over, it’s surprisingly placid as we enter one of the most important ages in the history of information control.
3 questions to ask of any transparency initiative:
If information is to be published in a database behind a form, then it’s hidden in plain sight. It cannot be easily found by a journalist, and only simple questions will be answered.
If information is to be published in PDFs or JPEGs, or some format that you need proprietary software to see, then it cannot be easily be questioned by a journalist
If you will have to pass a test to use the information, then obstacles will be placed between the journalist and that information
The next time an organisation claims that they are opening up their information, tick those questions off. (If you want more, see Gurstein’s list of 7 elements that are needed to make effective use of open data).
control of information still represents the exercise of power, and how shifts in that control as a result of the transparency/open data/linked data agenda are open to abuse, gaming, or spin.
the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society.
The bloggers who blog on 'corporate blogs' on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.
All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or ScienceBlogs. All posts carry a byline above the fold indicating the scientist's affiliation and conflicts of interest." This must be 100% transparent so our readers can evaluate the merit of the post for themselves.
Are we making a judgment about PepsiCo's science by hosting a blog for them on SB? No. (Nor are we making a judgment about your own research for that matter). Are we saying that they are entitled to have a seat at the table? Yes. Do they know that they are opening themselves us to debate? Absolutely. You may disagree with the substance of their posts (as you do on any other blog). You may even call into question their presence on a public forum dedicated to science. It will be up to them to respond. Better yet, it will be up to them to listen and take actions. The sustainability of this experiment lives or dies in the establishment of a transparent dialogue.
SB, like nearly all free content sites, is sustainable because of advertising. But advertising is itself highly unpredictable, as the last year has shown the industry. And securing advertising around topics like physics and evolution is even more challenging
We started experimenting with sponsored blogs a couple of years ago and decided to market long-term sponsorship contracts instead of sporadic advertising contracts. This is not a new idea: respected magazines have been doing the same thing for years (think Atlantic Ideas Festival going on now or The New Yorker Festival, where representatives of sponsoring companies sit on stage alongside writers and thinkers, or advertorials where companies pay to create content -- clearly marked as such -- instead of just running an ad). We think this may be a digital equivalent.
meaningful discussion about science and society in the 21st century requires that all players be at the table (with affiliations made clear), from all parts of the world, from every sector of society. And ScienceBlogs is where this is starting to happen.
Letter from Seed editor Adam Bly to ScienceBlogs.com contributors
* Sent to bloggers in response to the controversial decision by ScienceBlogs.com to host a blog on nutrition, written by PepsiCo
* Read and comment on the full story here
Reference: Krishnan, S. (2009, June 21). Measuring the effectiveness of online activism. The Hindu. Retrieved September 24, 2009, from Factiva. (Article can be found at bottom of the post) Summary...
Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman’s remarks in the Wall Street Journal Asia piece, “Leaked cable spooks some U.S. sources” dated 3 Dec 2010. The paragraph in question went like this:
“Others laid blame not on working U.S. diplomats, but on Wikileaks. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “deep concerns about the damaging action of Wikileaks.” It added, ‘it is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence.’” (emphasis my own)
on 25 Jan 2003, the then Singapore Minister of Foreign Affairs and current Senior Minister without portfolio, Professor S Jayakumar, in an unprecedented move, unilaterally released all diplomatic and official correspondence relating to confidential discussions on water negotiations between Singapore and Malaysia from the year 2000.
In a parliamentary speech that would have had Julian Assange smiling from ear to ear, Jayakumar said, “We therefore have no choice but to set the record straight by releasing these documents for people to judge for themselves the truth of the matter.” The parliamentary reason for the unprecedented release of information was the misrepresentations made by Malaysia over the price of water, amongst others.
The then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir’s response to Singapore’s pre-Wikileak wikileak was equally quote-worthy, “I don’t feel nice. You write a letter to your girlfriend. And your girlfriend circulates it to all her boyfriends. I don’t think I’ll get involved with that girl.”
Mahathir did not leave it at that. He foreshadowed the Wikileak-chastised countries of today saying what William, the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US and Iran today, amongst others, must agree with, “It’s very difficult now for us to write letters at all because we might as well negotiate through the media.”
I proceeded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs homepage to search for the full press release. As I anticipated, there was a caveat. This is the press release in full:
In response to media queries on the WikiLeaks release of confidential and secret-graded US diplomatic correspondence, the MFA Spokesman expressed deep concerns about the damaging action of WikiLeaks. It is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence, which is why Singapore has the Officials Secrets Act. In particular, the selective release of documents, especially when taken out of context, will only serve to sow confusion and fail to provide a complete picture of the important issues that were being discussed amongst leaders in the strictest of confidentiality.
The sentence in red seems to posit that the selective release of documents can be legitimised if released documents are not taken out of context. If this interpretation is true, then one can account for the political decision to release confidential correspondence covering the Singapore and Malaysia water talks referred to above. In parallel, one can imagine Assange or his supporters arguing that lies of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the advent of abject two-faced politics today to be sufficient grounds to justify the actions of Wikileaks. As for the arguments about confidentiality and official correspondence, the events in parliament in 2003 tell us no one should underestimate the ability of nation-states to do an Assange if it befits their purpose – be it directly, as Jayakumar did, or indirectly, through the media or some other medium of influence.
Timothy Garton Ash put out the dilemma perfectly when he said, “There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.”
the advent of technology will only further blur the lines between these two public interests, if it has not already. Quite apart from technology, the absence of transparent and accountable institutions may also serve to guarantee the prospect of more of such embarrassing leaks in future.
In August 2009, there was considerable interest in Singapore about the circumstances behind the departure of Chip Goodyear, former CEO of the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, from the national sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings. Before that, all the public knew was – in the name of leadership renewal – Chip Goodyear had been carefully chosen and apparently hand-picked to replace Ho Ching as CEO of Temasek Holdings. In response to Chip’s untimely departure, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was quoted, “People do want to know, there is curiosity, it is a matter of public interest. That is not sufficient reason to disclose information. It is not sufficient that there be curiosity and interest that you want to disclose information.”
Overly secretive and furtive politicians operating in a parliamentary democracy are unlikely to inspire confidence among an educated citizenry either, only serving to paradoxically fuel public cynicism and conspiracy theories.
I believe that government officials and politicians who perform their jobs honourably have nothing to fear from Wikileaks. I would admit that there is an inherent naivety and idealism in this position. But if the lesson from the Wikileaks episode portends a higher standard of ethical conduct, encourages transparency and accountability – all of which promote good governance, realpolitik notwithstanding – then it is perhaps a lesson all politicians and government officials should pay keen attention to.
Post-script:
“These disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do….If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.” –Simon Jenkins, Guardian
Today's FT has this interesting graph and an accompanying story, showing a sort of inverse Moore's Law of drug development. Over almost 60 years the number of new drugs developed per unit of investment has declined in a fairly constant manner, and some drug companies are now slashing their R&D budgets.
why this trend has occurred. The FT points to a combination of low-hanging fruit that has been plucked and increasing costs of drug development.
To some observers, that reflects the end of the mid to late 20th century golden era for drug discovery, when first-generation medicines such as antibiotics and beta-blockers to treat high blood pressure transformed healthcare. At the same time, regulatory demands to prove safety and efficacy have grown firmer. The result is larger and more costly clinical trials, and high failure rates for experimental drugs.
Others point to flawed innovation policies in industry and governments:
“The markets treat drug companies as though research and development spending destroys value,” says Jack Scannell, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “People have stopped distinguishing the good from the bad. All those which performed well returned cash to shareholders. Unless the industry can articulate what the problem is, I don’t expect that to change.”
Mr [Andrew] Baum [of Morgan Stanley] argues that the solution for drug companies is to share the risks of research with others. That means reducing in-house investment in research, and instead partnering and licensing experimental medicines from smaller companies after some of the early failures have been eliminated.
Chas Bountra of Oxford university calls for a more radical partnership combining industry and academic research. “What we are trying to do is just too difficult,” he says. “No one organisation can do it, so we have to pool resources and expertise.” He suggests removing intellectual property rights until a drug is in mid-stage testing in humans, which would make academics more willing to co-operate because they could publish their results freely. The sharing of data would enable companies to avoid duplicating work.
The challenge is for academia and biotech companies to fill the research gap. Mr Ratcliffe argues that after a lull in 2009 and 2010, private capital is returning to the sector – as demonstrated by a particular buzz at JPMorgan’s new year biotech conference in California.
Patrick Vallance, senior vice-president for discovery at GSK, is cautious about deferring patents until so late, arguing that drug companies need to be able to protect their intellectual property in order to fund expensive late-stage development. But he too is experimenting with ways to co-operate more closely with academics over longer periods.
He is also championing the “externalisation” of the company’s pipeline, with biotech and university partners accounting for half the total. GSK has earmarked £50m to support fledgling British companies, many “wrapped around” the group’s sites. One such example is Convergence, a spin-out from a GSK lab researching pain relief.
Big pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to find ways to overcome the loss of tens of billions of dollars in revenue as patents on top-selling drugs run out. Many sound similar notes about encouraging entrepreneurialism in their ranks, making smart deals and capitalizing on emerging-market growth, But their actual plans are often quite different—and each carries significant risks.
Novartis AG, for instance, is so convinced that diversification is the best course that the company has a considerable business selling low-priced generics. Meantime, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has decided to concentrate on innovative medicines, shedding so many nonpharmaceutical units that it' has become midsize. GlaxoSmithKline PLC is still investing in research, but like Pfizer it has narrowed the range of disease areas in which it's seeking new treatments.
Underlying the divergence is a deep-seated philosophical dispute over the merits of the heavy investment that companies must make to discover new drugs. By most estimates, bringing a new molecule to market costs drug makers more than $1 billion. Industry officials have been engaged in a vigorous debate over whether the investment is worth it, or whether they should leave it to others whose work they can acquire or license after a demonstration of strong potential.
To what extent can approached to innovation influence the trend line in the graph above? I don't think that anyone really knows the answer. The different approaches being taken by Merck and Pfizer, for instance, represent a real world policy experiment:
The contrast between Merck and Pfizer reflects the very different personal approaches of their CEOs. An accountant by training, Mr. Read has held various business positions during a three-decade career at Pfizer. The 57-year-old cited torcetrapib, a cholesterol medicine that the company spent more than $800 million developing but then pulled due to safety concerns, as an example of the kind of wasteful spending Pfizer would avoid.
"We're going to have metrics," Mr. Read said. He wants Pfizer to stop "always investing on hope rather than strong signals and the quality of the science, the quality of the medicine."
Mr. Frazier, 56, a Harvard-educated lawyer who joined Merck in 1994 from private practice, said the company was sticking by its own troubled heart drug, vorapaxar. Mr. Frazier said he wanted to see all of the data from the trials before rushing to judgment. "We believe in the innovation approach," he said.
A transparent approach
Based on data analysis
Our aim is to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Our results will include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.
The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.
In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.
One of the companies that has access to Twitter’s data firehose is Gnip. As we discussed in November, Twitter has entered into a partnership with Gnip that allows the social data provider to resell access to the Twitter firehose.This is great on one level, because it means that businesses and services can access the data. The problem, as noted by panelist Raj Kadam, the CEO of Viralheat, is that Gnip’s access can be prohibitively expensive.
The problems with reliable access to analytics and measurement information is by no means limited to Twitter. Facebook data is also tightly controlled. With Facebook, privacy controls built into the API are designed to prevent mass data scraping. This is absolutely the right decision. However, a reality of social media measurement is that Facebook Insights isn’t always reachable and the data collected from the tool is sometimes inaccurate.It’s no surprise there’s a disconnect between the data that marketers and community managers want and the data that can be reliably accessed. Twitter and Facebook were both designed as tools for consumers. It’s only been in the last two years that the platform ecosystem aimed at serving large brands and companies
The data that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare collect are some of their most valuable assets. It isn’t fair to expect a free ride or first-class access to the data by anyone who wants it.Having said that, more transparency about what data is available to services and brands is needed and necessary.We’re just scraping the service of what social media monitoring, measurement and management tools can do. To get to the next level, it’s important that we all question who has access to the firehose.
We Need More Transparency for How to Access and Connect with Data
Twitter didn't bust an injunction just for the hell of it. It pointed to a need for greater transparency. The medium is the message. Those in power can't afford to not know how this works.
What is more arrogant: to think you can ignore a huge part of the culture? Or to think someone out there might be interested in what you had for lunch? Those who think that's all the net or Twitter are about are indeed twits.
Review sites depend on user trust, and that trust is eroded when businesses are able to manipulate their own reviews. Some, including Yelp, view themselves as passive conduits for their users' reviews. Others take a more active role in fighting against censorship of patients. We think the latter approach makes more sense.
"it's scary to be involved in litigation," Levy said. "For many ordinary people, the easiest thing is to move on with your life."
Review sites can protect the integrity of their review processes by actively fighting such takedown requests.
review sites could do more. For example, Yelp could have offered to represent Alice itself, or even filed for a declaratory judgment that Alice's post was not an infringement of copyright.
According to Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose, that isn't Yelp's role. "The way we approach this space is that we're a platform," she told Ars by phone. When faced with a lawsuit threat, "some reviewers might choose to take down their reviews, others may choose to leave them intact."
Wendy Seltzer, founder of the Chiling Effects clearinghouse, thinks that's not good enough. "It's in Yelp's interest not to let it or its submitters be manipulated by these agreements," she said. "The reading public is going to learn that these things exist and then come to distrust the sites."
Transparency is another key weapon against review censorship.
Ars talked to Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, about the steps her company takes to prevent manipulation by business owners.
"Angie's List is positioned very differently in the review space," she said. "We don't accept anonymous reviews. Consumers pay to be a part of Angie's List. And any time a flag is raised about a review, it's reviewed by a human."
Angie said that her company actively penalizes businesses who try to use user agreements to censor her users. "Whenever we find that a doctor is asking patients to sign this kind of agreement, we put a notification on that provider's record," she said. "We also take them out of search results."
These websites started primarily as a way to provide funding for creative projects involving film, music and other art mediums. Scientists using crowd funding is a relatively new phenomenon. Here's how The New York Times described it:
"As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom - and generosity - of the crowds will come to the rescue."
"Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: the public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BNO/is_2000_Sept/ai_64769669/ The post-911 obsession with eliminating risks and threats has produced an architecture of mass surveillance where national sec...
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Aleem Walji, practice manager for innovation at the World Bank Institute, which assists and advises policy makers and NGOs, tells the Guardian's Activate summit in London about the organisation's commitment to open data
