Drug platforms - for cats...

Why doesn't someone invent a trasdermal patch to deliver pet medicines so that we don't have to fight with a cat to give it a pill? J&J or Alza - are you listening?

Newspapers and Statistics

I know that most people don't understand statistics. I mean, if they did there wouldn't be a lottery. But I generally expect better from respected media sources like the NY Times. This Sunday's paper featured an article that was based entirely on a presentation at the International Builder Show about the home of the future. Architects and Builders were surveyed and in rather unscientific fashion, some themes were isolated that looked good in a graph. One rather impressive graph showed that 62% of respondants felt that the demand for custom homes with dual master bedrooms would increase by 2015. (62% said that it would increase or increase sinificantly). Through the magic of poor journalism akin to playing "telephone" this has been converted into a cover story claiming that 60% of custom homes will have dual-masters by 2015.

The article went on to present all sorts of reasons why people would want dual masters and the social stigma against it. Judging on the 160 comments posted to NYT website, it seems that they have hit on a chord -- a lot of poeple seemed to think this was just a great idea.

Never mind that very few homes have dual masters today or that a significant increase might be from 5% to 7%. Not exactly front page news or worth ruminating about the reasons.

The strange part is that since the media has so much sway over people, I wonder if we won't just see 60% of homes with dual masters in the next few years?

In case you are interested, the actual presentation is available at: http://www.nahb.org/fileUpload_details.aspx?contentTypeID=3&contentID=51299&subContentID=93019 -- Figure 23 on page 31.