Month: June 2007

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Sprawl for Some

I don’t recall why I never finished reading Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. Presumably this was because of the standard reason I don’t always finish non-fiction books: I picked up some novel that caught my interest and never looked back. That doesn’t mean that I won’t get around to finishing the book, but my readings are all over the darned place right now. I’m reading annual reports this month, but that’s the job.

Anyway, here’s an article by Prof. Bruegmann about the virtues and decline of sprawl:

But let’s assume for a moment that I’m entirely wrong and that sprawl is terrible. Could we stop it if we wanted to?

The record is not encouraging. The longest-running and best-known experiment was the one undertaken by Britain starting right after World War II. At that time, the British government gave unprecedented powers to planners to remake cities and took the draconian step of nationalizing all development rights to assure that these plans could be implemented. The famous 1944 Greater London plan, for example, envisioned a city bounded by a greenbelt. If there happened to be any excess population that couldn’t be accommodated within the greenbelt, it was supposed to be accommodated in small, self-contained garden cities beyond the belt.

Did the plan work? In one sense it did: The greenbelt is still there, and some people consider that an aesthetic triumph. But the plan certainly did not stop sprawl. As usual, the planners were not able to predict the future with any accuracy. The population grew, household size declined and affluence rose faster than predicted. Development jumped right over the greenbelt–and not into discreet garden cities, because this policy was soon abandoned.

The ultimate result was that much of southeastern England has been urbanized. Moreover, because of the greenbelt, many car trips are longer than they would have been otherwise, contributing to the worst traffic congestion in Europe.

I’m gonna get back to AstraZeneca’s annual shareholder letter now.

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In bloom

Sorry I haven’t written too much lately, dear readers. I’ve been busy with work, and I’m also spending a lot of time reading and trying to write fiction. I have a bunch of posts I’d love to get around to writing, and I really do have notes about them on my bulletin board.

Till then, here’s a picture I took last week:

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Shock ending

I watched the first season of The Sopranos a year or two after it had aired. My excuse was that I thought it was overrated because most of the praise I heard came from my co-workers here in northern NJ. As it turns out, that first season was fantastic. But I heard that the second season was utterly terrible, so I never watched it, nor the subsequent ones.

Still, I sat down to watch the final episode last night, figuring Amy could fill me in on any backstory I was missing. A few minutes in, it occurred to me that this episode may get higher ratings in northern NJ than either the 1986 or 1991 Superbowl games.

SPOILER ALERT (so click “More” if you want to read the rest)

Continue reading “Shock ending”

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Cat-era Obscura

One winter afternoon, my cat returned to the house in a panic, bleeding from one paw. He’d ripped a claw on something, so we cleaned him up and decided he wasn’t going outside for a while.

Since there was a light snow on the ground, I decided to investigate by following his paw-prints. They led on through the yard, across the street, and into some woods behind the neighbor’s house. Given the distance between prints, I figured that he ripped his claw while racing back home, probably on rocks or hard ground.

Of course, anytime we let him out, we wondered what he was up to. A gentleman in Germany wondered the same thing about his cat, so he rigged up a tiny digital camera to hang from Mr. Lee’s collar, and thus began CatCam site.

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I want a new drug

I enjoy writing the big Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report each June. Sure, it’s not what I imagined I’d be doing when I was a brooding, pretentious idiot in college, but it turns out that there’s plenty of fun to be had in researching and writing these profiles.

For one thing, there’s the mystery/police procedural aspect of reading through annual reports and SEC statements and trying to figure out just what certain companies are trying to hide. Maybe it’s awful revenues from a new product (now conveniently reclassified into a group of products, so its figures aren’t broken out), or a diminished product pipeline (“I wonder why [company x] isn’t mentioning any of its late-stage projects”), or a quiet reorganization (last year, a company detailed its layoffs and plant closures, but made no statement anywhere about how much money it hoped to save in the process). It can take some detective work to figure this stuff out; I’m sure if I’d gotten myself an MBA, I could parse it more easily.

And for another thing, there’s the drugs.

I always enjoy reading through these companies’ reports to see about all the neat new therapies, the increased survival rates they bestow, the alleviation of previously uncureable conditions, the lifestyle changes we never thought possible. This, too can take some detective work, because some companies don’t seem to know what they have.

Por ejemplar: Today, I added UCB Group to my Top Biopharmas ranking. The company doesn’t have any biologic-based drugs on the market, but it’s got some in the pipeline, which is better than some of the other companies that I’ve included for years.

As part of its profile, I needed to list UCB’s best-selling drugs and how they performed last year. And that was how I discovered Nootropil, which posted around $125 million in 2006 sales.

“Nootropil?” thought I. “I wonder what that’s for . . . ?” Since I got a masters degree in liberal arts rather than business, I knew that the ‘noo-‘ root means ‘mind’ in Greek, and that left me intrigued.

According to UCB’s annual report, Nootropil’s a “cognitive enhancer.” Well, that begged more questions than it answered! Fortunately, the Internet has plenty of answers! It’s my cognitive enhancer!

Nootropil is known generically as piracetam and, according to this wiki page, it’s “a cerebral function regulating drug which, it is claimed, is able to enhance cognition and memory, slow down brain aging, increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain, aid stroke recovery, and improve Alzheimer’s, Down’s Syndrome, dementia, and dyslexia, among others.” Oh, and it has virtually no side effects.

Now if only I can convince them to send me some samples!

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Utilitarianism

Every summer, when we get rolling on the annual Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report, my trusty associate editor compiles pipeline information for the past year. While I suss out sales figures and try to parse the arcana of accounting, she puts together lists of new drugs that were approved, extensions or new indications for approved drugs, those that are filed and pending approval, those that have lost patent protection, research projects in late-phase or early-phase studies, and those that were canceled or rejected.

That last category, the could-have-beens, is a testament to the enormous risk that drug companies take on. This year’s #1 company, Pfizer, recently had to cancel development of a drug that would have brought in upwards of $50 billion in revenues during its lifecycle. Future revenues are kaput and $1 billion in R&D investment has been flushed away with it.

Fortunately, Michael Moore has a strategy for eliminating this expense and the risk! America needs to regulate drug companies “like utilities since they’re just as important as electricity and water.” That’ll make them more productive and less expensive! Of course!

I mean, outside of the fact that the U.S. power grid is antiquated and prone to collapse, and that the water supply in this house was provided by a well for 35 years, I’d have to say he almost knows what he’s talking about.

I do find it funny when people tell me the pharma industry needs more regulation, and that drugs should be cheaper.