Simulations Plus

I recently had the occasion to visit the Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Several things about this exhibit blew me away.

A new graph library that provides the right graphs at the right time and with the right information has been developed by Cognigen Corporation, a leading provider of pharmacometric analysis and support services. Comprehensive graphical exploratory data analysis is essential to building pharmacometric models of drug behavior. Previously, deciding which graphs were required to describe the data and then creating a new program for each graph consumed excessive time from both scientists and programmers.

I have long been addicted to The New York Times Book Review. It is not that I am a writer groupie as much as I find it fascinating to read about how a book came about.

Few among us would think highly of a leader who directed us to innovate on demand. After all, innovation is something that comes from a mysterious creative force that strikes like lightning to the fortunate inventor, bringing with it fame and fortune. Think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Bill Gates; Mark Zuckerberg; or Tim Berners-Lee (huh?) [1].

Although some meteorological modelers may disagree, it seems to me that models predicting development and movement of hurricanes are getting more and more accurate.

Scientists in the field of pharmaceutical research and development face a most daunting challenge. Our understanding of the diseases we work to treat grows more complex and perplexing with each new published study. Take, for example, the gusher of information coming out on Alzheimer’s disease. How can research findings from genetics, neurology, nutrition, protein chemistry, pharmacology, and epidemiology (just to name a few) be tracked, sorted, and used?

Seems like every time we learn something new, whether it is in biology or cosmology, we learn something else that just makes us sit back and say Wow. So it is with a recent story in The Economist about new information regarding one of the universal “constants” alpha.