Michael Eisen

My favorite story of algorithmic pricing gone mad was discovered by a postdoc in my grad school lab, leading to an out of print book being listed on Amazon for over $23 million: https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Could be bots running amok. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358M “A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping). […] Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook’s price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook “noticed” profnath’s change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath’s higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week”

There is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft. Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Berkeley if we don’t hand over our patents. This paper is the latest entry in Lander’s decades long assault on the truth... http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825

This isn't exactly related, but it's one of my favorite blog posts. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

I'd encourage all active researchers who support the move to open access to sign the following petition: http://michaeleisen.org/petition/ It basically tells funders that you support them to negotiate better open access deals, even if that risks limiting the number of venues you can publish in.

Personal blogs and twitter are the main outlets. See https://twitter.com/mbeisen and http://www.michaeleisen.org/ for an example of an extremely publicly engaged scientist. You can poke around his twitter graph to see other hubs.

I can't help but link to a classic fight between two algorithmic book bots: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Michael Eisen is a genetics professor at Berkeley, and started PLos (a group of open access journals). He's very eloquent on the subject, and it's great to hear that Harvard is supporting open access so publicly - as he says, 'In most scientists’ minds, a publication in an elite journal like Nature or Science is as good as gold – a ticket to a job, grants and tenure.'[0] So knowing that publishing in PLoS (as opposed to Nature) might not exclude you from a position at Harvard is really great for the future of open access publishing. [0] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346

This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made. First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some of the most ambitious and amazing directed differentiation of stem cells into neural tissues including the retina (see an old news story here [1]). Whether or not he was deeply involved in this latest STAP cell controversy is immaterial to the tremendous contributions his lab has made to the field. Second, we should be more careful on how we as a scientific community react to scientific scandal. Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley DevBio Prof, HHMI, Founder of PLoS), who's father committed suicide in a similar incident many years ago, had some poignant comments [2]. [1] http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232 [2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619

And more generic cult checklists apply to a lot of groups. My favorite remains "Is the NIH a cult?" http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1217

It's really sad that much of the public get their scientific beliefs from misleading press releases that lead to utterly incorrect headlines and articles like this, and the ENCODE consortium should be ashamed of themselves. They've done lots of damage that many other scientists will have to spend time and effort to correct. splatterdash posted a link to an excellent summary of the problems in this thread, and I'd add a couple more links: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1172 and http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2012/09/07/reports-of-junk-dna…

The author has had a series of really great blog posts on the subject as well on his personal site. In particular, check out: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807 and make sure to read the comments, which includes a defense of the legislation by Tom Reller, Elsevier's VP.

There seems to be two issues here being conflated as one (judging by the follow-up/updates): 1.) Two different items - because the same item is being offered by two different sellers. The $9 is Amazon's main one, the $12 is Macmillan's own specified price (note the "Sold by Macmillan" in that entry). 2.) Prices on the same item (identified by ASIN) do change at Amazon: sellers can change their prices, even to ridiculous lengths such as this from last year: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 . In the retail part of Amazon, Kindle books are treated in much the same way as physical items, so the same flexibility of pricing is offered. Physical goods have cost of holding stock and 90-day-invoicing cycles, hence pricing seem to fluctuate based on that 90 day window and items still on hand at payment day. Kindle ebooks, less so, but there's still A/B testing to consider. Online, especially for non-physical items are tending to have fluctuating prices, trying to find the ideal price to maximise profits. One of my friends recommends http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/ for price watching items on Amazon. I tend to keep an eye on the Lego-focused variant over at http://brickset.com/buy/uk/amazon/ -- price watching is proving to be an interesting cottage-industry. Clearing cookies / incognito mode triggers re-selecting a different bucket - that's why you are seeing different pricing. So, if you want, clear cookies over and over, find the lowest price, and buy right there and…

The "don't need to have it to sell it" is how we got "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies": https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 A bot with a good reputation adds a listing at 1.27x the price of a worse-reputation listing. Another bot had a conflicting strategy: selling at 0.99x the price of the next cheapest.

Reminiscent of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [1] where there were and are ongoing patent disputes for the last 30 years. The highly esteemed Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, who recently got turfed out of the Whitehouse for being an asshole following testimony by 14 different staffers [2], wrote a highly biased reinvention of history around CRISPR published in Cell [3] which was severely criticised [4,5]. To this day, this highly cited 'review' still does not have a conflict of interest statement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Patent_dispute… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lander#Science_Advisor_to_the_Presi… [3] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5 [4] https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/25/why-eric-lander-morphed/ [5] https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825

Madness.. Its not like such a feedback loop hasn't been encountered before in systems. I like this example: https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Most likely, although that solves a different pricing aspect. I would guess most of those are the result of automated pricing optimizations to influence your offers position among other sellers for the same product. There are services that automatically do this for amazon and other price comparison services. It can also result in a book priced at $23,698,655: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 :-)

Famously, the million dollar book feedback loop: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

At least in some cases, it's two competitors using (bad) automated pricing tools. When one auto-raises the price, the other responds, which triggers the first to raise again. Over and over. To the point where you get book listings priced over $20M. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 But yeah...you'd think Amazon would have some sort of sanity filter.

I think for 1, we had a story on HN a few years ago, for a academic book. It was linked elsewhere in the thread: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Probably thinking of: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 Laundering may explain some odd prices on Amazon. But in that article, the author witnessed the two bots one-upping each other on a certain schedule. I don't think that was laundering.

A lot of this is because of 3rd-party sellers. To make things easier, I usually filter by "ships from and sold by Amazon". Some of the pricing and "styles" for 3rd parties are ridiculous because they're algorithm-driven. That's likely why the $9.99/oz price happened. https://www.fastcompany.com/3060803/algorithmic-pricing-is-creating-an… has some context on why and http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 talks about how . TL;DR Amazon picks (using their secret algos, ofc) which selection should be the default among the sellers. Everyone wants to be that to get more sales. Sellers then fix the price to a different item which has the price sometimes fixed to that other item, or potentially a loop with more products involved. They then proceed to algorithmically price each other far beyond normal costs for the item.

use of CRISPR in humans is what Harvard/MIT want to protect. According to the judges, UC Berkeley didn't make that clear. Even being a biologist who understands CRISPR well and having trained at Harvard/MIT (disclosure to provide context about biases), it's not clear what Harvard/MIT will gain with winning this fight. Because the incentive is incredibly strong, I feel like everyone will find a way to work around whatever patents Harvard/MIT collect. I see UC Berkeley's side in these patents because their discovery proceeded Harvard/MIT and Harvard/MIT (Eric Lander) is just sucking up airtime like Trump does to come out on top. See this: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825

There has been tremendous lobbying, pressure and marketing from the Broad Institute on this issue. For instance, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 I have personally talked to a student at the Broad Institute who told me a number of people there do not agree with the Broad positions (namely the Cell article and Lander's statements). Disclaimer: Also a graduate student at UC Berkeley (not in Bio).

It's quite likely that many sellers don't actually have the stock they claim to have and relies on getting them elsewhere in case a large order comes through, which incurs an overhead. My experience in online retail is limited to electronics but this kind of inventory inflation is extremely common. Apparently book sellers do this as well. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

The article, written by Eric Lander of the Broad Institute, was widely criticized[1][2][...] at its publication for being a veiled attempt to reframe history to support the Broad Institute's patent claims. Note a number of their framing decisions - choosing to group Doudna et. al.'s contributions as #4 in a long list and setting Zheng's contribution by itself in a different color. Seems innocuous when skimming over it, but the choice of what to emphasize and categorize is not objectively deterministic, and this particular framing and coloring was no doubt chosen deliberately. Many think there was purposeful deception behind that deliberate choice. [1] http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/ [2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_pub… "The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available." Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312

Maybe an example of this: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

There's quite a bit of algorithmic pricing going on @ Amazon by all parties. Sometimes it leads to hilarious results. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Could be pricing algorithms gone wild, too. For a really extreme example of this, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358