Post: #326

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/575202567...show-clips

Post: #327

(07-10-2014 07:21 PM)Icarus Wrote:  

(07-10-2014 07:01 PM)Sawyer Wrote:  But some very heavy hitters trust her.

Did they? How do you define "heavy hitter"?

Kissinger was Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. How is he qualified to judge the scientific quality of Ms. Holmes's work?

It's one thing to be groomed to be a CEO. It's another to be groomed to be an empire-builder. The article on Fortune is fascinating; I have never read such shameless hagiographic mythmaking in my entire life!

From the article:

Quote:In what respect, then, does Holmes’s first patent application–the wearable patch that would radio the doctor what is going on in your blood in real time–lead to Theranos, a player in the $73 billion diagnostic lab business?

See, even though she was just a chemical engineering sophomore, she was also a high-frequency engineer, a chip designer, an expert on bioengineering, an expert on biosensors, etc.

In grad school, I met a professor who was an expert on some of these topics, and he had over a decade of R&D work under his belt, yet the established professors mostly ignored his work, while waiting for him to get tenure and to establish a reputation. By contrast, as a sophomore, Ms. Holmes figured it all out, because those PhD's were all stupid, and it just happened that she, despite being too young to have read all the papers and books required, just bumped into the greatest idea of the 21st century!!!

This Ms. Holmes is a charlatan until proven otherwise...

I think that Icarus deserves massive credit for calling her out as early as he did while others were singing her praises swayed by the moronic ululations of the press.

You have to remember that the press is only the friend if you are fitting the agenda. The press praised Hillary Clinton, the press also praised that Fyre Festival cokehead just because he came from the right family. The press equally praises all businessmen who are investing into the global warming scam, because obviously they are geniuses and are not only abusing the tax-funded bullshit to make billions.

I also remember that some members even believed the Rhonda Roussey bullshit and thought that she actually had a real chance against a male pro-boxer.

When it comes to the media we have to doubt the story first.

Post: #328

(03-15-2018 10:41 AM)[email protected] Wrote:  http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/575202567...show-clips

The victims of Shkreli testified for him.
He gets 7 years in a mostly victimless crime.

The victims of Holmes not only lost money - some victims lost their lives because of her shitty tests.
She walks free and pays a 500.000$ fine.

Pussy pass extraordinaire.

Post: #329

If Holmes does not receive anything like the penalty that Shkreli did, I will assume that we have an oligarchy very similar to that of China and Russia, where some people get off light because they have the right connections or mouth the right ideology and the like. I will make this assumption unless someone here with a background in law can argue that the differential in penalty is justified.

Post: #330

Shkreli funneled money from his first company to pay off investors from his two failed hedge funds. What he did was essentially a ponzi-scheme. However, the money involved was rather small and it was only a one-time "event". If this is worth 7 years in the federal pen, then what Holmes did is worth at least 20 years. If she manages to wiggle out of this, I will assume this is because she is a part of the "favored" oligopoly, whereas Shkreli is not, and that our system is inherently corrupt.

During the bailouts of late '08, I was apt to tell people that we are are Chinese now (in terms of a corrupt crony system that favors insiders). This case will likely confirm this.

Post: #331

(03-15-2018 02:46 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  Shkreli funneled money from his first company to pay off investors from his two failed hedge funds. What he did was essentially a ponzi-scheme. However, the money involved was rather small and it was only a one-time "event". If this is worth 7 years in the federal pen, then what Holmes did is worth at least 20 years. If she manages to wiggle out of this, I will assume this is because she is a part of the "favored" oligopoly, whereas Shkreli is not, and that our system is inherently corrupt.

During the bailouts of late '08, I was apt to tell people that we are are Chinese now (in terms of a corrupt crony system that favors insiders). This case will likely confirm this.

She already wriggled out of it - the case with the SEC is settled.

Post: #332

Wow! Very well done. Well done indeed.

Post: #333

(03-15-2018 02:59 PM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  She already wriggled out of it - the case with the SEC is settled.

http://www.businessinsider.com/will-eliz...go-to-jail
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elliekincai...5a975015b1

(sorry for linking to Forbes, their site is trash)

tl;dr - The SEC cannot level criminal charges at anyone, only civil. They are not a law enforcement body. No actual law enforcement bodies have brought criminal charges yet. Its possible they wont, but all that has happened now is a civil fine agreement from the SEC. The US Attourney in SF is still investigating criminal charges.

Quick edit - The deal with the SEC also need court approval, which hasn't happened yet. They usually don't find against the SEC's deals though.

Post: #334

(03-14-2018 07:21 PM)SteezeySteve Wrote:  Haha I used to watch Cramer when I was 5 and read pages from his book as soon as I could read.

Obviously if you follow his picks you're just following the herd. But I think hes the reason why I've wanted to work in finance and knew goldman sachs and Apple were publicly traded companies since I could read........dont call my favorite teletubby a schmuck.....hes good for the children.

CNBC picks are dogshit, and most seem to involve insider trading (no evidence except that not much is stopping them, just don't tip off people you have phone calls or other traceable communication with.)

Post: #335

(03-15-2018 04:37 AM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  The media is a PR arm of big business.

You may want to read Paul Graham's 2005 essay, The Submarine. An excerpt:

Quote:One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

Post: #336

(03-18-2018 05:27 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

(03-15-2018 04:37 AM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  The media is a PR arm of big business.

You may want to read Paul Graham's 2005 essay, The Submarine. An excerpt:

Quote:One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

A lot's changed since 2005 - I would not exclude stories about politics nowadays. Definitely not.

Post: #337

I hope and pray she ends up in jail. We need a poster girl to be behind bars to put some of this gogurlllllll bullshit to rest.

Post: #338

< It's a hilarious case. 600 mio. $ invested into a venture capital company with no working product. Even better - the claims that they already had a somewhat working product were made even before 10 mio. $ were raised.

No wonder the lead scientist committed suicide. Icarus shared way back a vid of a Nobel price laureate who was working on similar tests for decades now and still could not make it work to the degree that Theranos was promising.

Also I hardly see the terrible need to cut down for all the vials. I know - it's a bit of a bother to take so much blood, but the actual tests are in truth dirt-cheap at least for everyone in the developed or even developing world. So it's essentially about pure convenience and the 3rd world. And as far as the 3rd world is concerned - those buggers need rather clean water, sanitation and full nutrition before they have to worry about correct diagnosis.

The entire case gave me a great idea for my already properly working prototype of the medical tricorder that gives you all the blood-tests you will need:





Our company will allow you to wave that medical stick in front of your child's face while transmitting all the data without even a drop of blood.

All I need is 10 bio. $ as a investment lump sum and some 30 years development time.

The entire case reminds me of the Fyre Festival moron, just more high-brow and with less cocaine consumption.

" LET's pull off the impossible and be legends!" Yeah - fucking millennials and their stupid "positive thinking everything is possible" mentality. No - you shitheads - not everything is possible every time even if you believe in it strong enough.

Post: #339

I read about this in a Forbes newspaper and have been following. Apparently, she's been banned for 10 years from running a company. That's too nice, how about she never runs a company again.

She's looks like the overly attached girlfriend, but with a CEO flair.

Post: #340

Reminds me a lot of the Tilda Swinton character in Michael Clayton, a great thriller that everyone should watch. A total control freak that has her whole operation collapse on her. Watch it:

Post: #341

(03-15-2018 06:31 PM)godfather dust Wrote:  CNBC picks are dogshit, and most seem to involve insider trading (no evidence except that not much is stopping them, just don't tip off people you have phone calls or other traceable communication with.)

In cryptocurrency trading CNBC is considered a contrarian indicator, when they say "Bitcoin is dead!" it's time to load up on buy orders, and when they're raving about bitcoin it's time to sell.

This particular image, about CNBC and a cryptocurrency called "Ripple", is unfortunately fake, but it more or less describes CNBC's "picks".

Post: #342

(03-20-2018 06:42 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:  







I hope and pray she ends up in jail. We need a poster girl to be behind bars to put some of this gogurlllllll bullshit to rest.

The guy from Forbes is pretty sloppy - she is not criminally charged by the SEC, that's legally impossible. Still waiting on the DOJ to deny her the pussy pass, but will see.

Post: #343

(07-10-2014 05:59 PM)Icarus Wrote:  I find Elizabeth Holmes's story very, very strange.

And, almost 4 years later, I still find her story very, very strange.

Suppose you're a WASP "aristocrat" who knows many extremely influential people who worked at the top echelons of the U.S. Government. Naturally, you would like to convert those connections into money. However, since you're a white male, why not make your daughter empress? The U.S. has had its share of robber barons. It needs a baroness!

So, you pull some strings and your daughter is admitted to Stanford. A professor there owes you some favors, so he accepts to "mentor" your daughter. He has an idea for a product that could potentially become a billion dollar company. Your precious daughter thus drops out of Stanford and founds her company, which she calls Theranos.

Unfortunately, Theranos is still "contaminated" with technology risk. It is far from certain that the idea for a product actually does work! Why couple your precious daughter's reputation to such a risky venture? An expendable pawn is needed to replace your precious daughter at the helm of Theranos.

Who should be the new CEO? Ideally, a tall, athletic, good-looking, sociable MBA type who charms investors. Ideally a McKinsey veteran. He needs to possess one crucial trait: he needs to be clueless to the point of believing that any technical problem can be solved if one throws enough money and time at it. Knowing several MBA types, it should not be hard to find such an overconfident useful idiot.

So, the useful idiot CEO charms investors for years to keep funding Theranos's research. Your precious daughter takes some time off to procreate with some Silicon Valley VIP and produce princes and princesses who will inherit her empire. She remains an owner of Theranos, of course.

Once it is proved that Theranos's technology actually works, the company is de-risked, for the technology risk has been aggressively mitigated. It is now time for the useful idiot CEO to fall. A manufactured scandal involving sexual harassment would be ideal! Of course, someone must become the new CEO. Why not the founder herself? Your precious humanoid daughter finally sits on her throne, ready to become the saintly figure that the clueless masses demand.

Who was the useful idiot?

Ramesh Balwani was the President of Theranos. Holmes was CEO. Where is the useful idiot? I don't see any.

Hence, I am tempted to conclude that Holmes's parents were idiots themselves. They seemed to actually believe that any technical problem can be solved if one throws enough money and time at it! And they did not even manage to find a beta in Silicon Valley willing to marry their humanoid daughter. Now, instead of a baroness, she is arguably the most infamous female white collar criminal in U.S. history. And, to make matters even worse, not only is her reputation tarnished beyond repair, she is also a genetic dead end.

Such megalomaniacal hubris is not exactly unprecedented, though.

Post: #344

Tim Draper is still the useful - but rich - idiot. Last I looked, the fool was still defending Theranos.

Post: #345

• Meaghan M. Bond, Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum, Drop-to-drop variation in the cellular components of fingerprick blood: implications for point-of-care diagnostic development, American Journal of Clinical Pathology, Volume 144, Issue 6, Pages 885–894, December 2015.
  

Quote:Abstract

Objectives

Blood obtained via fingerprick is commonly used in point-of-care assays, but few studies have assessed variability in parameters obtained from successive drops of fingerprick blood, which may cause problems for clinical decision making and for assessing accuracy of point-of-care tests.

Methods

We used a hematology analyzer to analyze the hemoglobin concentration, total WBC count, three-part WBC differential, and platelet count in six successive drops of blood collected from one fingerprick from each of 11 donors, and we used a hemoglobinometer to measure the hemoglobin concentration of 10 drops of fingerprick blood from each of 7 donors.

Results

The average percent coefficient of variation (CV) for successive drops of fingerprick blood was higher by up to 3.4 times for hemoglobin, 5.7 times for WBC count, 3 times for lymphocyte count, 7.7 times for granulocyte count, and 4 times for platelets than in venous controls measured using a hematology analyzer. The average percent CV for fingerprick blood was up to 5 times higher for hemoglobin than venous blood measured using a point-of-care hemoglobinometer. Fluctuations in blood parameters with increasing volume of fingerprick blood are within instrument variability for volumes equal to or greater than 60 to 100 μL.

Conclusions

These data suggest caution when using measurements from a single drop of fingerprick blood.

Post: #346

(03-26-2018 05:25 PM)SlickyBoy Wrote:  Tim Draper is still the useful - but rich - idiot. Last I looked, the fool was still defending Theranos.

https://www.axios.com/tim-draper-keeps-d...44d6b.html

Quote:Draper: "There are a lot of things that go through our minds when we're making investments in new startups and what I tend to do is focus on great opportunities that can transform industries. In this case, Elizabeth came in and said, 'I'm going to transform healthcare as we know it.' She was very dynamic and answered all of our questions to our satisfaction. It was just getting started, which is why our investment was so small."

This is a fucking blood test - whether you take bigger samples or just prick the finger - you still have to take blood. That is not some kind of immense revolution. Antibiotics and the scientific method were immense revolutions. Even basic hygiene and the discovery of bacteria were tremendous transformations.

This bullshit is just a fucking gimmick that facilitates a process which is already very cheap and efficient.

It's possible that in the future blood can be tested with tiny droplets, but what tech will be necessary for that - nano-bot miniature analysis? Heck - that may come right before Star Trek tricorder tech where you don't even have to take blood to analyse it.

And even then - I would not fucking call this any huge revolution! Healing cancer is a revolution, not the way you analyze blood especially when the current tests are dirt-cheap already.

In most countries in the world I can have my blood analyzed on almost all levels for 10-20$. It costs more in the US, but that is mainly because of the nature of the system - even the Swiss offer far cheaper blood tests despite paying their workers twice as much. But I guess the HMOs need to make some dough.

Post: #347

^^^

This whole idea, getting reliable stats from a single drop of blood, is classic thintelligent thinking. It's exactly the same foolishness that gives rise to Taleb's classic joke: so far as dumb statistics or dumb averages are concerned, there is not a lick of difference between someone whose body temperature is 37 degrees for two hours and alive and someone whose body temperature is 0 degrees for the first hour and 74 degrees for the second hour and therefore dead.

Most elements of our biological form are volatile. Indeed it might well be, as Taleb argues, that our bodies crave volatility, right down to not being suited to walking on concreted, uniform roads.

Take body temperature, for example: across 24 hours, in a healthy human being, it changes constantly. Constantly. Your heartbeat is rhythmic, but not mechanical: it varies up and down, and even the space between beats will vary in small amounts from moment to moment. People who want to lose weight learn pretty early in the process not to get on the scales every day, or if they do, to only look for an overall downward trend on the numbers over a longer period of time, not a constant downward march.

But no, we think our blood is boring and matches the average, and that one drop is pretty much the same as the next. Idiocy!

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #348

(03-27-2018 04:04 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  It's possible that in the future blood can be tested with tiny droplets

That technology already exists. For example, low-cost HIV tests.



However, the output of an HIV test is binary...

Post: #349

A good answer on Quora:

Quote:Tirumalai Kamala, Immunologist, Ph.D. Mycobacteriology
Answered Feb 25, 2016

Pricked first by WSJ and then speeded up by federal regulators, slowly but surely the air's leaking out of the Theranos bubble. One foundational piece, its scientific raison d'etre, yet remained unassailed but now even that looks set to collapse. Implicit in Theranos' claim that >200 diagnostic blood tests can be done using just a drop of blood is the notion that a finger-prick can recapitulate the standard arm vein blood draw in all its essential features. What if that weren't the case? What if test results from fingerpricks are inherently variable from drop to drop? That's just what a recent Rice University study shows.

Collecting finger prick blood drops, the study authors found

• Results from a single blood drop were highly variable.
• Results from 6 to 9 drops needed to be combined to get consistent results.
  

This even though they only examined hemoglobin, total white cell (WBC), platelets and glucose, 4 not >200 tests.

Authors say

Quote:Some of the differences were surprising," Bond said. "For example, in some donors, the hemoglobin concentration changed by more than two grams per deciliter in the span of two successive drops of blood.

Quote:Fingerprick blood tests can be accurate and they are an important tool for health care providers, particularly in point-of-care and low-resource settings," Bond said. "Our results show that people need to take care to administer fingerprick tests in a way that produces accurate results because accuracy in these tests is increasingly important for diagnosing conditions like anemia, infections and sickle-cell anemia, malaria, HIV and other diseases.

In hindsight, isn’t it self-evident it should be so? A fingerprick collects a tiny amount of capillary blood. Since it pierces skin and underlying tissues to do so, it's fair to assume that this blood drop also contains skin cells, body fluids, all of which serve to dilute the blood components. Same contaminants would be part of an arm vein blood draw too but a much, much more smaller proportion. In fact, vanishingly small compared to their proportion in a fingerprick and that could make all the difference between reliable versus unreliable results.

For a company that birthed in 2004, 2016 is far too late in the day for Theranos to not have done such a simple, basic test of their foundational hypothesis themselves. That an academic team actually did do this study and published data showing fingerpricks can't replace arm vein bleeds could be one of the final nails in the coffin for Theranos, at least in its present form with its present mission of fingerprick tests for routine blood diagnosis. Did Theranos' investors never ever ask for such a simple proof of concept? How could that be? Do investors in other biotech ventures ask such simple duh type questions about the core scientific concepts underpinning them? Have they thoroughly kicked the tires, checked the engine, etc.? Lesson from Theranos is that now more than before such due diligence becomes incumbent on other biotech ventures and their investors.

Post: #350

(03-27-2018 04:42 AM)Icarus Wrote:  Did Theranos' investors never ever ask for such a simple proof of concept? How could that be? Do investors in other biotech ventures ask such simple duh type questions about the core scientific concepts underpinning them? Have they thoroughly kicked the tires, checked the engine, etc.? Lesson from Theranos is that now more than before such due diligence becomes incumbent on other biotech ventures and their investors.

[/quote]

No - they often don't:



Silicon Valley is a hotbed of the green-leftie-domain.

It's also a dumping bed of all the heirs of billionaires and multi-millionaires who get start-up money for one inane project after another with the often reasonable rationalization that one of 10 will be a winner, so the moronic son scion can claim to be an entrepreneur extraordinnaire.

Many start-ups are founded more on a clever sales-pitch and who is involved or who is pushing it.

Meanwhile countless coders and scientists in this case get wasted while getting paid little in the hope of getting shares in some distant future.