Memes, Money, Madness
by ilene - May 5th, 2010 12:29 pm
Memes, Money, Madness
Courtesy of Tim’s THE PSY-FI BLOG
Meme Machines
The appearance and disappearance of investment themes over time is a fact of life – remember “you can’t lose with the railways”? Me, neither, but in the 1840’s it was a guaranteed winner until it wasn’t.
Other dubious ideas have more legs, like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the theory that most analysts can figure out which shoe goes on which foot. All of these ideas influence markets and participants and help move prices, sometimes with startling synchronicity. A popular theory of how this happens is based on the idea of the meme, a cultural equivalent of the gene, propagating itself through human brains and influencing group behaviour. So are we meme machines, buying stocks at the whim of transient ideas?
The Selfish Meme
Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme in his book The Selfish Gene : 30th Anniversary edition
The idea of memes was elaborated into the broader subject of memetics, the study of how memes actually work. There’ve been lots of popular works covering the subject but the idea is, in fact, curiously hard to get a handle on. At root the memetic approach is an attempt to use Darwin’s Big Idea – that evolution occurs through natural selection and random mutation – to culture and thus argues that culture is itself a complex, adaptive system. This is not uncontroversial.
Econbiology and Memetics
However, the attraction for financial scholars is obvious. There’s a fair amount of work going on in the world of econobiology which also sees the financial ecosystem as a complex, adaptive system altering itself in response to both changes in its environment – interest rates, central bank liquidity, etc – and its internal state – securities prices, investor confidence levels, etc. So it’s not a particularly surprising leap to find that…
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Court rules against patenting human genes
by ilene - March 31st, 2010 2:22 am
Not having read the 152 page decision, I’m still happy with the outcome--if DNA is not patentable, then the argument that the "process of isolating genes makes them patentable" makes no sense. – Ilene
Court rules against patenting human genes
By TIFFANY O’CALLAGHAN, Courtesy of TIME
© Michael Rosenfeld/Science Faction/Corbis
In a decision that could have broad ramifications for future genetic research and medical practice, United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet ruled Monday that patents on two genes linked to ovarian and breast cancer, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, were invalid. The case brought by a group including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and several medical institutions and individual patients, argued that, because genes are products of nature, they cannot be patented, The New York Times reports. Sweet ultimately agreed with this argument, dismissing claims from Myriad Genetics, which holds the contested gene patents, that the process of isolating genes makes them patentable. (Drawing on a 1980 Supreme Court decision in favor of patents on living organisms, many expected the federal judge to rule in favor of the patent holder, the New York Times reports.) Yet, ultimately, Sweet found the patents to be in violation of a "law of nature," and openly condemned the argument that gene isolation should influence patentability, calling it "“a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”
The ruling from the U.S. Court for the Southern District of New York state, has two major implications. First, if it withstands appeal, "it should greatly widen access to BRCA testing in the US, where Myriad’s patent has inflated the cost," according to the Times of London. Currently, women have to pay Myriad Genetics some $3,000 in order to get tested for BRCA-1 or BRCA-2, NPR reports. In Europe, where patents on the two genes are either limited or shared with cancer research organizations, there is already wider access to the tests, according…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site