Renting a movie for $25 bucks!

Movies could be available as a VOD rental before DVD, Blu-ray — for $20 to $30 each
[Via Engadget]

The MPAA has often stated its desire to offer movies through video on-demand ahead of their release on DVD or Blu-ray — provided the analog hole was closed — and now that it has been, the Wall Street Journal reports Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. are considering a pitch from Time Warner Cable to do just that. The price for cutting the usual four month wait for home viewing to just 30 days? As much as $20 to $30 for a rental. Sony’s already tried experimenting with a higher price point on early delivery of Hancock and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to BRAVIA HDTV owners, but at least they threw in a free Blu-ray copy with the former. So far the studios have only agreed that their current release strategy needs some sort of change, but unless they add some sweeteners we don’t see this one shifting us from our current rental/purchase habits.

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Am I really going to pay as much for a rental as I would for the DVD? I guess the studios just figure no one will really buy the DVD anyway. I for certain am not going to spend that amount of money when I can get a physical copy I can watch anytime I want.

Or use Netflix and spend a lot, lot less.

This is really stupid. They charge more than the movie price for something that really costs them very little to distribute. When was the last time anyone got excited with the pricing of any content when the publishers/studios had direct control? It is only when someone else, such as Apple or Amazon, pushes the price down that we get exciting pricing models.

The content companies – not so much.

How an efficient company makes a ton of money

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by NeoGaboX

Apple’s Incredibly Efficient Growth
[Via Daring Fireball]

Steve Cheney analyzes Apple’s R&D expenditures and acquisition pace:

Organic growth is the term coined for growing internally, not via merger or acquisition. Apple has embraced this strategy over its existence, averaging only about 1 acquisition per year during the past 25 years. In contrast — during the past four years alone — Microsoft bought 45 companies, Google 40, and Cisco 30.

Microsoft spent seven times as much as Apple on R&D over the past four years.

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I saw this while working at Immunex – a well-designed and well-run company with a culture of innovation can beat larger, more well-funded companies every time.

Big Phama outspent us by a huge amount, and had many more people working on the same projects, yet we continued to get things done before them. Same with Apple.

It is possible to grow quite large and still maintain this culture. It helps tremendously if the guys at the top are not sales or marketing types, who generally seem to have no clue about rapid innovation and efficient management design.

Buying companies sucks away energy that could have been more efficiently used. It seems that MBAs think the mergers and acquisitions are the way to grow. Immunex did not think so and neither does Apple.

Big Day for David Valentine, UCSB Oil Slick Researcher

by Schristia

Researcher: we’re not doing enough to track oil spill
[Via Ars Technica]

The US has a fleet of research vessels that it could deploy to monitor the spread of oil trough the Gulf of Mexico, and deploying them would cost a few million dollars or less. That argument comes courtesy of the University of California’s David Valentine, who makes a plea for action in an editorial released by Nature over the weekend. Although most of the editorial focuses on what the vessels might do to track the size and spread of the spill, Valentine wraps up by pointing out that unless there’s a concerted effort by the research community to spur the government into action, inertia might end up leaving the research vessels on the sidelines.

Valentine, who’s based at UC’s Santa Barbara campus, points out that nobody is even sure how much oil is coming out of the ruptured well; published estimates have ranged from 1,000 to 100,000 barrels daily. Although we can track some of the oil that has made its way to the surface, it has become increasingly clear that a large portion of the leak is spreading through currents that travel at intermediate depths. Without knowing how much is there or where it’s headed, just about everything we need to do about the spill—plan for mitigation, assess damage, assign liability—is a matter of educated guesswork.

His solution would be to turn the methane spewing from the leak, which caused problems from day one, into a tool. BP has said that about 40 percent of the leak, by mass, is methane (even if we consider most of what the company has said so far as unreliable, the amount of methane appears to be substantial).

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Well, the same day this editorial is being discussed, he gets a major grant from the NSF to research the oil slick. I hope he is able to do some methane monitoring. Maybe that is in another grant.

NSF funding research on Gulf oil spill

by marinephotobank

Gulf Oil Spill: NSF Awards Rapid Response Grant to Study Microbes’ Natural Degradation of Oil
[Via NSF News]

To understand how the use of dispersants impacts the degradation of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a rapid response grant to scientist David Valentine of the University of California at Santa Barbara and colleagues.

The massive release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon incident on April 20, 2010, has led to an unprecedented use of oil dispersants, which include a mix of surfactant compounds designed to dissolve oil and to prevent slick …

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Nice to see some rapid funding of an ongoing event. This should provide some information regarding the effects of dispersants and microbes on the degradation of the slick.

Maybe this will be useful next time.

Venter’s lifeform – revolutonary or incremental

by jurvetson

NYT, Chronicle, more: Venter’s synthetic cell–Landmark or ho-hum?
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

Page A17?

That’s where the New York Times plays Craig Venter’s announcement of a computer-generated synthetic genome able to take over a cell’s operations–and reproduce. In the second graf, Nicholas Wade quotes Venter as saying this is “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

That’s obviously a carefully crafted comment, and reporters are free to react with skepticism–indeed, that’s exactly what they should do. But when a prominent and highly accomplished scientist makes that claim, doesn’t that deserve better than Page A17? Or, to put it another way, how the hell can that NOT make Page 1?????

The Times didn’t even put it on the National page; it’s merely one in a grab-bag of national stories. The National page leads with student protests over budget cuts at Puerto Rican campuses, a story few of us will remember tomorrow, unless we happen to be students at a Puerto Rican college. Do you remember the last student protests over budget cuts? Of course not.

Also placed more prominently than Venter’s research are a story on a Harrisburg, Pa. incinerator, one on the White House gate crashers, and, on the front page, one on the sex life of a Chinese computer science professor and another on inflated pensions in Yonkers, N.Y.

No comment.

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A really nice compilation of some of the articles ranging from its one of mankind’s greatest achievements to its a small technical advance. I would probably lean towards the latter.

To me, the big deal is getting the one large chromosome constructed, with all the appropriate genes. Once that hurdle is overcome, the rest is a pretty straightforward shot. It still requires a living cell to start things up.

But being able to make a self-replicating cell using DNA that you created is really neat.

This opens up all sorts of possibilities regarding examination of genes and proteins. That is pretty exciting but does not seem to be the paradigm-shifting event some are heralding. To me, Venter’s greatest paradigm shift was one of his first – instead of sequencing chromosomal DNA from humans, sequence the mRNAs that correspond to genes. That way we can ignore all the complicating ‘junk’ DNA.

Natural stem cell transplants

by euthman

Do we clamp the umbilical cord too soon?
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

(University of South Florida Health) The timing of umbilical cord clamping at birth remains controversial. The cord has been clamped early to facilitate resuscitation and stabilization of infants. Now, a new review paper by researchers at the University of South Florida suggests clamping should be delayed in normal births to tap the physiological benefits of “nature’s first stem cell transplant.”

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I don’t expect this to be resolved anytime soon. There are good medical reasons for clamping early and for delaying. My gut feeling is that the benefits for most infants from delay may be greater, that we evolved this process for a reason.

But the possibly devastating effects of delaying for some infants supports not waiting. I guess we will just have to learn some more first.

The increasing complexity of our immune systems

by GE Healthcare

When helper cells aren’t helpful
[Via Eureka! Science News]

Current research suggests that T helper-type 1 (Th1) cells, previously thought to mediate autoimmunity, may actual inhibit the development of experimental immune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS), by suppressing Th17 cells. The related report by Wildbaum et al, “Antigen-specific CD25^-Foxp3^-IFN^-γ ^high CD4⁺ T cells restrain the development of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis by suppressing Th17 cells,” appears in the June 2010 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

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I really feel for the poor person who has to write up releases dealing with immunology. Immunology has its own nomenclature that is not really penetrable if you do not live in the field. The writer actually does a pretty good job, even if this is jargon-rich:

Current research suggests that T helper-type 1 (Th1) cells, previously thought to mediate autoimmunity, may actual inhibit the development of experimental immune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS), by suppressing Th17 cells. The related report by Wildbaum et al, “Antigen-specific CD25^-Foxp3^-IFN^-γ ^high CD4⁺ T cells restrain the development of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis by suppressing Th17 cells,” appears in the June 2010 issue of The American Journal of Pathology. MS is believed to be an autoimmune disorder, where damage to the nervous system is caused by the patient’s own immune system. Th1 cells, which secrete high levels of the inflammatory mediator interferon-γ(IFN-γ), have been previously implicated as being pathogenic in autoimmune diseases such as MS. More recent data, however, suggests that antigen-specific T cells that produce the molecule IL-17 (Th17 cells) initiate the inflammatory process in EAE.

As IFN-γ suppresses Th17 cell development, a group led by Dr. Nathan Karin at the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences hypothesized that IFN-γ-expressing T cells may serve as regulatory cells to block the development of autoimmunity. They discovered that EAE development depended on the death of these antigen-specific IFN-γ-expressing regulatory cells at early stages of disease and that inhibiting the killing of these cells at early stages of EAE suppressed disease development. In addition, overexpression of IFN-γ in EAE-mediating T cells caused them to act instead as antigen-specific regulatory cells. Thus, early suppression of Th17 cells may block the development of autoimmunity.

So, Th17 cells, which are probably responsible for some auto-immune diseases, can be regulated by a specific subset of T helper cells. So, inhibiting the death of these specific cells stopped the development of a model for autoimmune diseases. Sounds about as complicated as immunology is today.

When I first took immunology, we had T-cells, B-cells, lymphocytes, leucocytes macrophages and maybe a few other types. All mainly discernible in the microscope.

Now we separate at out cells based on surface markets. Not just 1 or 2 but sometimes up to 13 or more. And our ability to find specific subsets has gotten so much better as we have gained greater experience modulating the immune system.

But come on. Can’t we start coming up with real names for some of these? Antigen-specific CD25^-Foxp3^-IFN^-γ ^high CD4⁺ T cells. It’s like chemistry nomenclature, simply adding on more markers.

Perhaps we need to come up with a standard name for these, like we do for interleukins.

Is that legal?

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

TransOcean Profits From Oil Spill
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

In case you’re not disgusted enough by the gulf oil spill, it appears that TransOcean actually profited from the disaster:

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the rig leased by BP PLC which is currently leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster, the Sunday Times reports.

The amount, revealed during a conference call to analysts, was made because its insurance policy for Deepwater Horizon rig was greater than the value of the rig itself, the paper reports. The Times says Transocean has already received cash payment of $401 million and the rest is due in the coming weeks.

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I wonder why the insurance company is not launching an investigation at all? Deepwater Horizon cost $560 million to build. I would assume its value is less after so many years in service. Insuring your property for $270 million more than it is worth and then, oops, its at the bottom of the sea? And they just hand over the check.

If you or I insured our house for 150% what it was worth and then it burned down, would we be getting a check so promptly? Not that I think they purposefully destroyed their own property but it seems odd that they made $270 million dollars on this whole deal.

And these guys are not responsible for any of the clean up. What a great racket. Lots of profits when successful. Lots of profits with failure. And no responsibility to the rest of us.

Some stop action movies to make you feel good

Skateboarding on a human with the appropriate sounds brings a smile to my face:

This reminded my of this old classic which I remember seeing in the late 60s, particularly when Gulf Oil used them for some ads. Best use of stop action motorcycles ever:

I even found out there is a term for this, pixilation.