Ken’s Blog

Indonesia has refused to share samples of the bird flu virus in Indonesia with the World Health Organization, because the WHO was providing the samples to commercial companies in the West.

Indonesia will not share bird flu samples with the World Health Organization until the U.N. body agrees to stop providing the strains to commercial vaccine makers without its permission, the health minister said Thursday.

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The country hardest hit by bird flu is worried drug companies will use its virus to make vaccines that will ultimately be unaffordable to developing nations.

In today’s world, big pharmaceutical companies will develop vaccines and other medicines and will patent the technology, hold exclusive rights and a monopoly on the product. These commercial pharmaceutical  companies make billions every year, whilst holding the exclusive rights on these vaccines - vaccines which if shared could be mass produced around the world, potentially saving millions of lives.

Because of the intellectual property rights and market economics - the vaccines are generally provided to those companies which can afford them - the rich countries in the West. So poorer countries will be priced out of the market.

So these bird flu vaccines using virus samples provided by Indonesia will go towards developing vaccines will allow big companies in the West to develop vaccines which may never even reach the Indonesian people.

Intellectual Rights and Monopolies  

Economic theory suggests that for research and development to be cost-effective, there must be barriers such as patents, intellectual rights, monopoly rights. Indeed, why would I spend £100 million on developing a vaccine just to have a rival take my work (without any R&D costs of their own) and to produce and sell it at a lower price? 

So I guess we’re left with a bit of a moral dilemma. For a vaccine to be available to everyone regardless of where they live or how much money they have, the technologies and formulas for the vaccines must be open knowledge and available for free.

However if this were the case, there would be no vaccines. There would be no incentive for anyone to invest the money in research and development. There would be no profit to be gained in selling those vaccines; and certainly not enough to pay off those huge R&D costs.

So I suppose there are several questions: 

How can vaccines and medicines be made available to as many people as possible whilst still encouraging and maintaining research and development? 

Is it ethical for us to have these technologies which could save thousands from diseases or illnesses, but not to provide them on the basis that they can’t pay us for it?

Should vaccines be developed for the public good or for the pockets of shareholders in pharmaceutical companies?

Should the development of medical products be developed by governments for the public good?

I’m sure it happens to all of us… We sit down to do something but we easily get distracted. We can blame modern technology - mobile phones, the internet, MySpace…

Science Daily reports about a study which found the formula for procrastination. Of course, it only took him ten years to work it out.

Steel has also come up with the E=mc² of procrastination, a formula he’s dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Γ) and the person’s sensitivity to delay (D).

It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Γ (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / ΓD

The Toronto Star has a bit more analysis and information on the effects of procrastination.

"That stupid game Minesweeper – that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society," he said.

The U.S. gross national product would probably rise by $50 billion if the icon and sound that notifies people of new email suddenly disappear, he added.

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"People who procrastinate tend to be less healthy, less wealthy and less happy," Steel said Wednesday. "You can reduce it, but I don’t think you can eliminate it.”

I did read an article in The Economist reviewing a book which suggested that procrastination and being messy is actually a good thing.

Procrastination makes sense too. America’s Marine Corps, the authors repeat (several times), never make detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all.

I will agree with the fact that tidying up your desk and re-organizing everything doesn’t improve your productivity, but I don’t think I’d go as far as to say that procrastination is a good thing.

Does anyone suffer from any big procrastination issues, and how have you tackled them? 

I wrote an article on the simulation argument which puts forward the view that we’re living inside a computer and that we may indeed have a God/creator. The article explores various elements of astrophysics, life and xenobiology, history of computing, gaming and looks at various thought experiments such as "brain in a vat".

Read the article.

It was, of course, the lunar eclipse last night. I took some pictures at 5 minute intervals and created an animated gif out of them.

See larger version of animation. 

The first frame was taken at 9:53 PM GMT and the last at 10:33 PM GMT.

Taken using a handheld "point and shoot" Canon camera at 4x optical zoom so the quality isn’t too good, but I still think it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

I’m not sure why but the moon actually appeared blue around 10:18. The animation actually shows the moon becomes yellow, then blue, followed by red. Images were taken on a 1/350 exposure. 

Anyone else go out to see the eclipse?