This week in biotech was all about payers:

The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which provides guidance on use of new drugs and medical technologies, showed yet again that price is a key consideration, backing an Amgen drug only after being offered rebates by the manufacturer. This is one example of the general trend that regulatory approval is necessary, but not sufficient, for a successful product — .

Medicago, a Canadian company, because the US Department of Defense is paying $21-million towards a new 90,000 sq ft state-of-the art production facility in North Carolina. Meanwhile, . . . [more]

News junkies unite! Postmedia has made the daily newspapers for 10 larger Canadian cities available on the iPad!

• Vancouver Sun
• The Province
• Calgary Herald
• Edmonton Journal
• Montreal Gazette
• Regina Leader-Post
• Saskatoon StarPhoenix
• Ottawa Citizen
• Victoria Times Colonist
• Windsor Star

And for now, they’re free. :) It’s also interesting to note, they’ve jumped right over typical first step of creating an iPhone app. . . . [more]

Last week the New York Times featured Vitaly Borker, an online retailer who deliberately abused his customers so they could complain about him online. Some of Borker’s behaviour was completely outrageous, and included alleged threats of litigation and violence, both physical and sexual, against disgruntled customers.

The complaints by customers actually helped his Google ranking, which in turn helped him secure top search placements and more business, . . . [more]

Much ink has been spilled about the diplomatic cable leak facilitated by WikiLeaks. Almost as interesting as the leaks themselves, however, is the information war that is being waged against WikiLeaks, and the measures the site has had to take just to stay accessible.

Over the course of the last week, the site has suffered from a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. In such an attack, a group of computers – sometimes numbering in the millions – attempt to saturate a target host with a flood of requests, thereby consuming all of the hosts’ computation resources and . . . [more]

The 2010 CLawBies–or Canadian Law Blog Awards–are now open for nominations.

How to Nominate in 2010:
This year’s nominations deadline is Tuesday, December 28th, and the methods remain the same as in previous years. Publicly nominate a Canadian-authored law blog using ANY of the following:

1. Tweet your endorsement on Twitter.com with the hashtag text: #clawbies2010. We’ll be monitoring!
2. Email your favourite blog, including a couple sample posts or any other notable highlights, to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com. We’d prefer a public nomination, but this is still acceptable.
3. Write a blog post about three other Canadian law blogs

Stem Legal has relaunched the Canadian Law Blogs List at Lawblogs.ca started by Steve Matthews in September 2005. The List is an open directory of Canadian blogging lawyers, law librarians, marketers, IT professionals and paralegals (essentially anyone blogging in the legal industry in Canada).

Along with a new look, the new site features:

• browsing by practice area, by province, by industry topic, and latest additions
• subscription to LawBlogs.ca by RSS feed or by email to be notified of blog additions to the site
• a sample of recent blog posts from the various blogs on the front page

The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has provided a guide explaining How to Decipher a State Department Cable:

“This guide … might come in handy as you peruse the 251,287 Department of State cables recently released by wikileaks (…)”

“At the Archive, we have lots of practice reading declassified government documents. Since we will be using this space to share with you some documents from our trove of government releases, we thought it would be useful to give you some tips on what to look for in these documents. Several of our experienced analysts have created

eHealth has been a major and controversial topic lately. A lot of time and effort has been spent on it, as there are many issues such as costs, privacy, security, and standards.

I had an encounter with the health system recently, and from my observations as a patient we need to keep this initiative moving, find ways to solve those issues, and stop using paper. I paid particular attention to the paper and documents that were created. Throughout the process, I was asked the same thing multiple times. (Confirming who I was and what they were going to do multiple . . . [more]

Graphene. If you said graphene to me yesterday, I would have nodded and smiled, secretly hiding my complete lack of knowledge. Graphene is a two dimensional derivative of carbon that is the topic of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Nanodots. Again, I say, “What?” Shame on me, since there was news in April about a library on a chip thanks to nanodots.

Rather than letting Slawyers know about my shameful lack of knowledge on general scientific topics, I have a suggestion. Check out MIT’s Technology Review. Follow them on twitter if short snippets of article titles are . . . [more]

This week in biotech was all about the wisdom of the crowds:

The crowd comprising Canada’s Natural Resources Committee, including Conservative MPs, in order to maintain our domestic capability to produce isotopes for medical imaging and treatment.

The crowd of VenGrowth investors spoke clearly in favour of the funds’ deal with Covington, approving the transaction by a wide margin on 4 of the 5 votes, according to the Financial Post.

The crowd of recent biotech IPOs, however, is telling us that we are still in a challenging environment for the public markets. Anacor, Zealand and Zogenix , lowering their . . . [more]

There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and for-pay clip art, but many force you to deal with loads of pop-ups and advertising. Don’t bother with them! Your first and only stop—and the absolute best online source for free clip art, photos, animations and sounds—should be the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media page. It has thousands of free images and media files, all easily searchable by keyword and topics. Many of the photos are of professional quality.

Don’t forget to visit the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media page the next time you . . . [more]

Today Justice Michael Kelen of the Federal Court handed down a significant decision in DONNA JODHAN v. ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CANADA. Ms Jodhan sought a declaration under section 18.1 of the Federal Courts Act that the standards implemented by the federal government for providing visually impaired Canadians with access to government information and services on the Internet, and the way in which those standards are implemented, denied her equal access to government information and services, and thereby violated her rights under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. . . . [more]