Clinical trials are the most credible and powerful form of marketing in the prelaunch period. --Francoise Simon and Philip Kotler (1) Two alarming trends have surfaced in the pharmaceutical industry these past two decades. The first is a surge in ethics violations. Despite journalists, researchers, bloggers, and lately lawmakers who have been working to shame the industry into self-reform, the pace at which new scandals are born appears, if anything, to be accelerating. (2) There is wrongdoing in every stage of drug development and promotion. The list includes campaigns to "ghost manage" the conduct of basic science, to rig clinical trials, to run trials in poor countries where ethical oversight is weak, to market medical conditions far beyond their natural incidence ("condition branding," as the marketers term it), to sway public health criteria for the threshold of disease risk, and to lure some of the nation's most respected doctors into risky off-label pro motion schemes. (3) All of these problems can be traced back to marketing-inspired ruses. The second, less apparent trend is a decline in new drug applications marking breakthrough discoveries. In the words of a 2006 Government Accountability Office report to Congress, "Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry has become stagnant." (4) Merrill Goozner, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, explains, "Three out of every four drug applications involve drugs that either replicated the action of medicines already on the market or were new formulations that at best added minor conveniences for patients and doctors." (5) Some have had the intuition that these two trends are connected, but the dots have not been empirically or even notionally linked in a way that would light a path to reform. The two appear to be effects of a different order. I will argue that they are joined because they reflect the ascendancy of marketing throughout the pharmaceutical industry and in particular because they result from the integration of pharmaceutical firms' marketing efforts with their formerly semiautonomous research and development (R&D) divisions. My goal in this essay is to connect some of the dots--to show that the decline of innovation is also linked to the rise of marketing. Discovery of medical cures relies on honestly pursued scientific outcomes and a clear separation of influence over scientific practices and goals. I specify the rise in the early 1990s of blockbuster drugs--the handful of brands that account for nearly half the industry's profit--as the catalyst for yoking R&D to marketing, a development that would have been unfamiliar and unnatural to most pharmaceutical executives of prior generations. I draw on industry sources to depict managerial principles at work in defining the relationship, the most telling of which is referred to as "precommercial planning and marketing." Precommercial planning and marketing demonstrates how the marketing-driven outlook in pharmaceutical companies today pushes these enterprises toward an escalation in the adoption of marketing rationales at the expense of public health. What emerges is a system in which the scientific search for cures and the marketing-led pursuit of meeting unmet medical needs stand not in cooperative tandem, one with the other, but in direct competition. Precommercial planning and marketing, in short, is a legal but unethical practice when applied to humanly vital industries such as the pursuit of medical cures. Marketing and R&D What is precommercial planning and marketing? A recent podcast at Pharmavoice, "a Website for life-sciences executives and other healthcare-service related professionals," was entitled "Pharmaceutical Marketing and Planning: Securing Future Success through Meaningful Differentiation." The guest speaker was Laurie Lucas, founder of L3 Healthcare Marketing, LLC, which explains its objective this way: "The pharmaceutical market is evolving rapidly, growing in complexity, and there is less time to maximize a product's potential. …


Open dumping of waste and discharging untreated wastewater into environment are key causes of environmental pollution in the developing world, including South Asian countries. Waste and wastewater however can be a source for recovering energy, nutrients and water if properly treated or recycled rather than a cause of pollution and diseases spread. The importance of adopting Resources Recovery and Reuse (RRR) technologies increases under growing demand for food and energy in contrast to depleting fossil fuel mines and groundwater reservoirs. However, institutional framework including the organizations and various stakeholders involved in the waste and wastewater management sectors, government policies and legislation, as well as financial arrangements and incentives to technological change play a pivotal role in adopting and scaling up RRR options. This study therefore focuses on institutional and financial aspects of challenges and opportunities for implementing RRR options in South Asia. It is argued that improving financial capacities, easing to obtain land use permits to expand RRR facilities, maintaining quality of RRR products (compost, biogas), and raising environmental awareness are imperative for the successful performance of the RRR projects in South Asia.


Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a mature cryptographic protocol, but has flexibility during implementation which can introduce exploitable flaws. New vulnerabilities are routinely discovered that affect the security of TLS implementations. We discovered that discrete logarithm implementations have poor parameter validation, and we mathematically constructed a deniable backdoor to exploit this flaw in the finite field Diffie-Hellman key exchange. We described attack vectors an attacker could use to position this backdoor, and outlined a man-in-the-middle attack that exploits the backdoor to force Diffie-Hellman use during the TLS connection. We conducted an Internet-wide survey of ephemeral finite field Diffie-Hellman (DHE) across TLS and STARTTLS, finding hundreds of potentially backdoored DHE parameters and partially recovering the private DHE key in some cases. Disclosures were made to companies using these parameters, resulting in a public security advisory and discussions with the CTO of a billion-dollar company. We conducted a second Internet-wide survey investigating X.509 certificate name mismatch errors, finding approximately 70 million websites invalidated by these errors and additionally discovering over 1000 websites made inaccessible due to a combination of forced HTTPS and mismatch errors. We determined that name mismatch errors occur largely due to certificate mismanagement by web hosting and content delivery network companies. Further research into TLS implementations is necessary to encourage the use of more secure parameters.


In this paper we describe research in which we have used sound as part of a mobile multimedia learning experience for children. In this work we have classified sound clips into categories that appear to have differing effectiveness. We have also observed unexpected behaviour by the children indicating that our devices are capable of further development. We propose further research using sound to explore the contribution to learning of environment, content type and interaction mode.


Background: Type Ia supernovae contribute significantly to the nucleosynthesis of many Fe-group and
intermediate-mass elements. However, the robustness of nucleosynthesis obtained via models of this class of
explosions has not been studied in depth until now.
Purpose: We explore the sensitivity of the nucleosynthesis resulting from thermonuclear explosions of massive
white dwarfs with respect to uncertainties in nuclear reaction rates. We put particular emphasis on indentifying
the individual reactions rates that most strongly affect the isotopic products of these supernovae.
Method: We have adopted a standard one-dimensional delayed detonation model of the explosion of a
Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf and have postprocessed the thermodynamic trajectories of every mass shellwith
a nucleosynthetic code to obtain the chemical composition of the ejected matter. We have considered increases
(decreases) by a factor of 10 on the rates of 1196 nuclear reactions (simultaneously with their inverse reactions),
repeating the nucleosynthesis calculations after modification of each reaction rate pair. We have computed as
well hydrodynamic models for different rates of the fusion reactions of 12C and of 16O. From the calculations we
have selected the reactions that have the largest impact on the supernova yields, and we have computed again
the nucleosynthesis using two or three alternative prescriptions for their rates, taken from the JINA REACLIB
database. For the three reactions with the largest sensitivity we have analyzed as well the temperature ranges
where a modification of their rates has the strongest effect on nucleosynthesis.
Results: The nucleosynthesis resulting from the type Ia supernova models is quite robust with respect to variations
of nuclear reaction rates,with the exception of the reaction of fusion of two 12C nuclei. The energy of the explosion
changes by less than ∼4% when the rates of the reactions 12C + 12C or 16O + 16O are multiplied by a factor of
×10 or ×0.1. The changes in the nucleosynthesis owing to the modification of the rates of these fusion reactions
are also quite modest; for instance, no species with a mass fraction larger than 0.02 experiences a variation of
its yield larger than a factor of 2. We provide the sensitivity of the yields of the most abundant species with
respect to the rates of the most intense reactions with protons, neutrons, and α. In general, the yields of Fe-group
nuclei are more robust than the yields of intermediate-mass elements. Among the species with yields larger than
10−8M , 35S has the largest sensitivity to the nuclear reaction rates. It is remarkable that the reactions involving
elements with Z > 22 have a tiny influence on the supernova nucleosynthesis. Among the charged-particle
reactions, the most influential on supernova nucleosynthesis are 30Si + p 31P + γ , 20Ne + α 24Mg + γ ,
and 24Mg + α 27Al + p. The temperatures at which a modification of their rate has a larger impact are in the
range 2 T 4 GK.


The interview examines the achievements of bilateral relations of Ukraine and Malaysia since the establishment of the Embassy of Malaysia in Kyiv.
It is stressed that Malaysia founded its diplomatic mission in Kyiv 15 years ago. At the nascent stage of cooperation, education was its most important component and catalyst of development due to many Malaysians pursuing studies in Ukraine. Nowadays, the Embassy changed the accent to popularization of Malaysia as an educational center for foreign students, including those from Ukraine. The Embassy is also increasingly focused on the development of tourism.
From the beginning of 2019, Malaysia has offered a range of courses in a wide spectrum of reams conducted under the auspices of the Malaysian Technical Cooperation Programme (MTCP), an international cooperation programme ensuring training and technical consulting in crucially important realms for developing countries. It offers services, inter alia, in diplomacy and crisis management, courses on physical infrastructure, combating corruption, and the development of electric power and solar power stations as well as customs system.
It is mentioned that bilateral trade turnover between Ukraine and Malaysia has increased for the last two years after stagnation. The accelerated increase in trade between Malaysia and Ukraine is partially driven by initiatives conducted by the Governments of Malaysia and Ukraine, with the assistance of Malaysian and Ukrainian business communities, to find common means for boosting cooperation. In January 2018, business meetings took place in Kuala Lumpur, organised with the assistance of the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE). The seminar brought together 19 Ukrainian companies and trade associations.
It is stated that despite the signature of the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Defense Sphere between Malaysia and Ukraine, activities of the two states in this realm are still limited.
Key words: Malaysia, cooperation, tourism, education, turnover.