Bunge is quoting from this issue of Science – Trend towards unification of discipIines. (like Cognitive Science, which is Phil, Psych, Ling, ComSci, plus)
now Chapter 3 of Bunge’s book, which I haven’t bought yet. Ah, yes.
“As we saw in the previous chapter, systemism is the view that every thing is a system or a component of a system. In this chapter and the next I will argue that systemism holds for atoms, ecosystems, persons, societies, and their components, as well as for the things that they compose”
It’s a break with Individualistic, Western Philosophy. Science is shifting from micro to macro levels. Physics and Chemistry are well established. The Next fields are just starting to emerge out of theoretical mathematics. Reminds me of –
been reading this book Nexus, by Mark Buchanan (Former Editor of Nature and New Scientist), which ThaTha sent me. He’s talking about the Math of “small-world-graphs,” a mathematical theory that can describe Networks.
Social Networks turn out to be nearly identical in theirarchitecture to the World Wide Web, the network of Web pages connected by hypertext links. Each of these networks shares deep structural properties with the food webs of any ecosystem and with the network of business links underlying any nation’s economic activity. Incredibly, all these networks possess precisely the same organization as the network of connected neurons in the human brain and the network of interacting molecules that underlies the living cell.
We’re talking bout Terrorism now. I’m saying ignorance leads to killing, so Education is an answer
Talking about AIDS now. I think companies should write off Africa as ‘advertising’ and give up the goods.
“there are a lot of factors that go into the cost of drugs that we aren’t used to considering when we evaluate a product. Drugs are the heaviest research industry bar none. It costs approximately $500 million to bring a drug to market. That is before even one pill has been sold. That price includes research and the government approval processes. This expenditure is only possible because of the patent laws that we have in the United States that allow the company to profit from the sale of their drug. Now, a company only has 20 years from the time the patent is applied for before they lose patent protection.That seems like a long time, butremember that a) the patent has to be applied for as soon as possible in order to protect the company, b) it takes between five and ten years after-application to bring the drug to market, and c) a competing-drug can be introduced at anytime that might make your drug obsolete. That means that acompany has approximately five to ten years (and a maximum of 15) to make back this huge investment and sometimes they have less than two.
This brings us to number three,the marketing costs. Drug companies spend approximately as much on marketing as they do on research. The reason for this is simple: if nobody knows about the drug, how can they benefit from it? Now, our drug companies actually fit all their philanthropy under their marketing budgets as well, so you have to be careful when people decry the marketing budgets of drug companies. In fact, fully half the marketing cost of the drug companies is in the form of free samples given to doctors for their poor patients.”