Being a gigantic political donor to Democrats can only take you so far when it comes to the FDA, even if Democrats control it at the moment. And being a darling of science media and having a Silicon Valley pedigree has its limits as well.An FDA director recently hammered $100-million-in-venture-capital home DNA company 23andMe just a few weeks after co-founder Anne Wojcicki and "other billionaire...
read moreThe government set out to fix health care a few years ago - and what everyone feared about government making things worse has come to pass. They made it impossible for anyone except the government and entrenched businesses to exist.That means some of the brightest minds in the world won't bother to try and help.At his yearly CEO summit, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla spoke with Google...
read moreHow important is journalistic balance in 2014? The days when people believed journalism is impartial are long gone.But some issues are rather settled and BBC journalists are being sent on courses to train them to stop inviting so many cranks onto to air ‘marginal views’ as balance. The BBC Trust was criticized in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose...
read moreThey're data mining our children, notes Politico writer Stephanie Simon. She is talking about education technology startup Knewton and their use of data analytics to find out how kids think. They want to be able to predict who will struggle with fractions next week.Exciting, right? Obviously this can be misused and the fact that its potential problems (if they can forecast it, they can...
read morePNAS has issued an expression of concern about a study it published where Facebook attempted to manipulate the emotions of members by controlling their news feed (10.1073/pnas.1320040111). But they only bothered to notice and say anything after the outrage after the fact. read...
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