Nice little earner

Tamiflu: "a nice little earner".

Viewed with hindsight, the story of flu antiviral drugs seems to be a classic story of “big pharma” greed. On the back of media hype and unfulfilled fears, a new medicine backed by only modest clinical data became a “blockbuster” generating billions of dollars for its producer. The reality is more nuanced, and the tale could easily instead have been a commercial and public health nightmare. The...

The Young Wage-Earner

This is a meaty book. Its 190 pages and 129 tables are crammed with facts about boys?1,349 of them. It is easy enough to collect a batch of facts from a selected set of boys, ones who are ready to talk. But it is a herculean labour to dig out specific facts from all the boys of a particular group who will linclude the tongue tied, the lazy, the shy, the facetious, the forgetful and the plain ni...

A little learning: reflections on 10 years of NICE technology appraisals.

Within just a few days of joining NICE, I realised the scale of the task. I thought that grounding in biological science, pharmaceutical R+D and the actual production of submissions to NICE had equipped me with relevant knowledge and skills. How naïve; this grounding was merely the starting point of what was needed. The realisation crystallised for me over initial briefings on the ongoing appra...

Cute Little Puppies and Nice Cold Beers: An Information Theoretic Analysis of Prenominal Adjectives

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One longstanding puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye et al. (2017) enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender con...

Wage Earner Bankruptcies: State vs. Federal Control