Sports Medicine Tips to Keep You in the Game Sports Check Up is a podcast with former New England Patriots Tight End and two-time Super Bowl Champion, Christian Fauria, and one of Bostons premier sports medicine doctors, and orthopedic surgeon to the pros, Dr. Thomas Gill of Steward Health Care...
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Bradfo Sho, Ep. 34: Anatomy of clubhouse confrontations - WEEI.com
Cant Take The Hunt Out of the User
While technology continues to advance, the core nature of human behavior remains the same. Yes, weve evolved; however the fact that we now use a microwave instead of starting a fire with sticks and rocks does not change the fact that we still need to eat!
All kitchen tools aside; the core nature of human behavior plays a crucial role in several aspects of the Enterprise world. Take a SharePoint or Office365 intranet portal as an example; when evaluating your employees user experience, the focus is on how comfortable the portal suits an employees needs. Having an intranet portal is meant to make employees work-life easy, organized and efficient. However, when human nature is disregarded during the creation or alteration process of a portal, the attempt to optimize employee work-life backfires as frustration leads to lack of motivation, and overall productivity- not to mention a decrease in ROI.
Recent statistics implicate just how impacting user experience is at work; 52% of people claimed that negative user experiences made them less likely to engage with a company. In addition, studies are predicting that user experience will take over price and product as the key differentiation by 2020.
The Hunters Choice
In the times where hunting and gathering were crucial practices for survival, one would choose to engage with the tool he or she deemed useful to fulfill his or her needs. In modern days, where work replaces hunting, getting an employee to engage with your intranet tool boils down to this ancient decision regarding the usefulness of a tool. The very basics of human behavior shows that three hemispheres of the brain come into play when coming to such a decision. Firstly, the reptilian brain which deals with human needs. Users have a mission, and they want to know that their portal is giving them what they need in order to complete it. Next, the emotion center of the brain, or the limbic system. In order to prevent frustration and anger from affecting work ethic, a users emotions must move in a positive direction when executing tasks. Lastly, the executive and logical branch of our brain: the neo-cortex. A user must logically conclude that their portal ranks highly in its level of usefulness.
Webcast, June 21st: 5 Keys to Operational Excellence
Hitting the Trifecta
Tapping into human nature and hitting the trifecta where all three hemispheres are satisfied becomes achievable with advanced analytics. Rather than making decisions about your portal based off of a hunch, data that provide insight on precisely where changes need to be made in order to fit the needs of users can be collected prior to making alterations. For example: advanced analytics can identify content-crammed pages that take too long to load, irrelevant content, failed searches, specific departments and users lacking engagement, exit pages, and more areas in need of improvement. These metrics highlight where needs are not being met, and where user frustration stems from. Neglect to these areas heavily influence an employees decision to further engage in the portal as it does not serve useful and efficient.
Sharp Checkup
Reaching a portals prime positive experience requires trial and error. After changes are made, advanced analytics can offer metrics that suggest the success rate of the changes, such as a spike in the average number and length of page visits. To secure that changes to the portal were successful in a manner that is more personalized to the individual user, campaigns can be implemented in the form of email, text, time-sensitive pop-up questions, and context-based pop up questions, which allow the user to add in their own insights about what is helpful or frustrating to them. The personalized campaigns strengthen an employees decision to engage with the portal as it is calming and logical to continue with a tool that is actively molding to user needs.
People may not be searching for sharper hunting tools to capture dinner, however they are still looking for the sharpest tools in technology to help them achieve success. Advanced analytics actively works with portals, improving them by analyzing user behavior and checking that needs are being met in order to provide a prime user experience.
Marketing Specialist at Intlock/ Cardiolog Analytics. Major in Psychology and a Minor in Business. The mix of my interests, business and psychology, allow me to have a great appreciation for analytic tools that look to improve the quality of "work-life" while simultaneously guiding a business to reach its maximum potential. Viewfullprofile
Harvard University says it has canceled offers to admit at least 10 students after it found they exchanged offensive memes on social media.
The universitys student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, reported the move on Monday.
The Crimson reported that the individuals connected through the Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group. It said they traded memes and messages with a private Facebook group, which was set up last December.
Those memes included images making fun of sexual abuse, racial minorities and the deaths of children.
For example, one student in the private group called the imagined hanging of a Mexican child piata time, The Crimson noted. Others made jokes about the Holocaust, Germanys systematic killing of Jews and others during World War II.
A Harvard spokeswoman did not comment, saying the university does not discuss the admission of individual students. The university tells accepted students that an offer of admission can be canceled for a number of reasons. They include behavior that brings into question (student) honesty, maturity or moral character."
What happened?
The Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook group had about 100 members. Later, some of them then created the smaller, private Facebook group. They shared the offensive images and messages in this group.
In April, Harvard officials sent letters to some of the members, asking them to explain their offensive posts. The students were told the school was reconsidering its offer of admission. The admissions office also said the students should not attend Harvards freshmen visiting event in April, the Crimson reported.
About a week later, at least 10 were told their offers were canceled, the newspaper said.
Jessica Zhang was a member of the larger Facebook group, Class of 2021.
A lot of students were excited about forming group chats with people who shared similar interests," she told The Crimson in an email.
She said the group began because someone posted about starting a chat for people who liked memes.
Zhang told The Crimson she did not post in the smaller group.
Cassandra Luca told the student newspaper that some members of the Class of 2021 group had suggested a group that posts more "R-rated" memes. Luca will also start taking classes at Harvard later this year.
Luca said the founders of the smaller group required students to first post shocking memes to the main group if they wanted to join the smaller group.
They were like, Oh, you have to send a meme to the original group to prove that you could get into the new one, Luca said.
Neither Zhang's nor Luca's offers of admission were canceled.
A student whose admission was canceled said the office asked the students to share with them all of the memes they sent to their private group.
This student spoke under the agreement that reporters would not use their name.
Right or wrong?
Some students, such as Luca, were unsure how they felt about the university's decision, she told The Crimson.
She said that if the students had threatened someone with harm, it would be a reason to cancel their admission offer.
But Zhang agrees with the school's decision. She told The Crimson that she respects the school's decision because "those actions really spoke about the students' true characters."
This is the second year that Harvard officials have dealt with students sharing offensive messages on the Internet. Last year, students from the Class of 2020 shared racist and sexist jokes in an unofficial Group Me chat. School officials released a statement saying the messages were unacceptable.
Harvard is one of the nation's top universities. It accepted only 5.2 percent of the nearly 40,000 students who applied for the Class of 2021.
I'm Jill Robbins.
And I'm Alice Bryant.
Alice Bryant reported on this story for VOA Learning English. Her report was based on information from the Associated Press, The Harvard Crimson newspaper and VOAs Student Union. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.
________________________________________________________________
meme - n. an amusing or interesting picture or video that is spread widely through the Internet
chat / chat group - n. a group of people who communicate regularly via the Internet, usually in real time but also by email.
piata - n. a decorated container filled with candies, fruits and gifts that is hung up at parties or celebrations and hit with a stick by children until it is broken and the things inside it fall out
The Holocaust - n. the killing of millions of Jews and other people by the Nazis during World War II
moral - adj. concerning or relating to what is right and wrong in human behavior
R-rated - adj. (informal use) not meant to be seen by children under the age of 17
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Harvard Cancels Admissions Offers Over Social Media Behavior - Voice of America
The MIT AgeLabwill build and analyze new deep-learning-based perception and motion planning technologies for automated vehicles in partnership with the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC). The newresearch initiative, called CSRC Next, is part ofa five-year-old ongoing relationship with Toyota.
The first phase of projects with Toyota CSRC has beenled by Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT AgeLab, which is part of theMIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Reimermanages a multidisciplinary team of researchers, and students focused on understanding how drivers respond to the increasing complexity of the modern operating environment. He and his team studied the demands of modern in-vehicle voice interfaces and found that they draw drivers eyes away from the road to a greater degree than expected, and that the demands of these interfaces need to be considered in the time course optimization of systems. Reimers study eventually contributed to the redesign of the instrumentation of the current Toyota Corolla and the forthcoming2018 Toyota Camry.(Read more in the 2017 Toyota CSRC report.)
Reimer and his team are also building and developing prototypes of hardware and software systems that can be integrated into cars in order to detect everything about the state of the driver and the external environment. Theseprototypes are designed to work both with cars with minimal levels of autonomy and with cars that are fully autonomous.
Computer scientist and team memberLex Fridmanis leadinga group of seven computer engineers who are working on computer vision, deep learning, and planning algorithms for semi-autonomous vehicles. The application of deep learning is being used for understanding both the world around the car and human behavior inside it.
The vehicle must first gain awareness of all entities in the driving scene, including pedestrians, cyclists, cars, traffic signals, and road markings,Fridman says. We use a learning-based approach for this perception task and also for the subsequent task of planning a safe trajectory around those entities.
Fridman and his team, now firmly entrenched in the next phase of the project with Toyota CRSC, set up a stationary camera at a busy intersection on the MIT campus to automatically detect the micro-movements of pedestrians as they make decisions about crossing the street. Using deep learning and computer vision methods, the system automatically converts the raw video footage into millisecond-level estimations of each pedestrians body position.The program has analyzedthe head, arm, feet and full-body movement of more than100,000 pedestrians.
Fridmans research also focuses on the world inside the car.
Just as interesting and complex is the integration of data inside the car to improve our understanding of automated systems and enhance their capability to support the driver,he says.This includes everything about the drivers face, head position, emotion, drowsiness, attentiveness, and body language.
With Toyota and other partners, the team is exploringthe use of cameras positioned to monitorthe driver, as well as methods toextract all those driver state factors from the raw video and turnthem into useable data which can to support future automotive industry needs.
Whats innovative about Lexs work is that it uses state-of-the-art methods in computer science and artificial intelligence to study the complexities of human intent grounded in large-scale real-world data, Reimer says.
Toyota CSRC DirectorChuck Gulash the researchleverages the AgeLabs expertise in computer vision, state detection, naturalistic data collection and deep learning to focus on the challenges and opportunities of autonomous vehicle technologies.
When asked how the research collaboration would affect the future of automotive technology, Gulash says it willcontribute to better computer-based perception of a vehicles environment as well as social interactions with other road users.
What is unique about the AgeLabs work is that it brings together advanced computer science with a human centered perspective on driver behavior,he says. As with all CSRC projects, output from the AgeLabs effort will be openly shared with industry, academia and government to contribute to future safe mobility.
MIT AgeLab DirectorJoe Coughlinsays theAgeLab is using all of these technologies to do two things: understand human behavior in the driving context, and to design future systems that result in greater safety and expansion of mobility options for all ages.
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AgeLab researching autonomous vehicle systems in ongoing collaboration with Toyota - MIT News
Whats the right way to respond if your boss makes an inappropriateor even unethicalrequest? Former FBI director James Comey says he found himself facing just such a dilemma in February, when US president Donald Trump reportedly asked him to drop a federal investigation into the recently-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.
[Flynn] is a good guy. I hope you can let this go, Trump said, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting. I agree he is a good guy, Comey said, opting not to address the implied request.
Some US senators seem to think Comeys response was pretty weak. Youre big. Youre strong. I know the Oval Office, and I know what happens to people when they walk in. There is a certain amount of intimidation. But why didnt you stop and say, Mr. President, this is wrong. I cannot discuss this with you.' Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked during Comeys June 8 testimony.
But management experts say its no surprise that Comey floundered in the moment. When bad bosses take us by surprise, few people respond in the way they might hope.
Its incredibly normal for people not to respond perfectly in the moment when theyre confronted with shocking behavior.Its incredibly normal for people not to respond perfectly in the moment when theyre confronted with shocking behavior, Alison Green, a management consultant and author of New York magazines popular column Ask a Manager, writes in an email. Very few of us have a perfectly polished response on the spot when we first encounter something inappropriate or unethical. And one of the most common reactions is to say something to try to normalize the situationand that is especially true when there are sticky power dynamics, as there are in this case. (As an example of this, look to all the women who deal with creeps at work by just trying to smooth over an inappropriate interactionand later realize, whoa, that was clear-cut sexual harassment.)
Indeed, Comey was clearly navigating uncharted territory. By his own admission, hed never dealt with a president like Trump before. During his testimony, he noted that he felt compelled to take notes on their one-on-one meetings, a step hed never taken with former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document, he said. Theres also reason to think Trump was trying to make Comey fear for his job security. Before firing Comey, Trump reportedly assured him that lots of people wanted the job. Comey saw this as an attempt to create a patronage relationshipComey could stay on as FBI director if he was loyal to Trump.
Such behavior will sound familiar to anyone whos had a boss that perpetuates a culture of fear, according to Stefanie Johnson, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado, Boulders Leeds School of Business. And when people face harassment or intimidation at work, they dont think as clearly.
Daniel Kahnemans book Thinking Fast and Slow (and many other theories) point to the fact that our brains have two mechanismsa logical side that requires slow conscious, data-driven thought and an emotional one that results in fast, not always logical, responses, Johnson writes in an email. If someone is afraid of their leader (their leader might fire them, for example) then theyre likely to engage in this emotional response.
Basically, when we feel threatened, the logical parts of our brain shut down, according to Johnson. The part of your brain in which you weigh the costs and benefits of making a decision (like standing up for what you think is right) is dismantled. Instead, you engage in fight-or-flight. Giving an answer like Hes a good guy seems to be a flight responsehe does not want to fight with Trump.
Comey himself expressed regret about his initial response to Trump. I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in, he told Sen. Feinstein. I remember saying, I agree he is a good guy, as a way of saying, Im not agreeing with what you asked me to do. Again, maybe other people would be stronger in that circumstanceI hope Ill never have another opportunity. Maybe if I did it again, Id do it better.
Chances are Comey will do better if he encounters a similar scenariosimply because hes now had practice dealing with a shocking request, and has devoted thought to what a suitable response might look like. But the truth is that its hard to prepare for unexpectedly alarming behavior at work. And so Johnson suggests that if you find yourself in a similarly sensitive moment, you ask for a moment to think.
You need to remove yourself from the situation, collect yourself, maybe go out on the balcony and think about what you need to do, she says. So just say, I really cant respond to that right now, I need to put some thought into that,' and leave the room.
Another option is to signal to your boss that you wont keep the request a secret. Say, Ah, I think we should probably loop some other people in on this and see what they think, Johnson suggests. If your boss is really making an inappropriate demand, this may help defuse the situation.
And if you dont heroically shut down your boss or another overstepping coworker, theres no reason to beat yourself up. Comey did exactly what anyone should do upon coming out of a shocking encounter like thathe documented it and he reported it, says Green. But youd have to be pretty oblivious to human behavior to criticize him for not taking the president to task in the shock of the moment.
Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
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James Comey proves it's basically impossible to give a perfect response to a bad boss - Quartz
A biology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle believes the stress caused by President Donald Trumps time in office will lead to a permanent change in human genetics.
Peter Ward, a professor who works in the earth and space sciences department of UWs College of the Environment, offered his bizarre prediction to Gizmodo earlier this weekwhen the publication asked a handful of evolutionary biologists, Can superhuman mutants be living among us?
Ward argued that significant traumas like abuse or military combat cancause permanent change to the human genome. He went on to suggest Trumps presidency is akin to those traumas and will have an evolutionary consequence on humanity.
Were finding more and more that, for instance, people who have gone through combat, or women who have been abused when you have these horrendous episodes in life, it causes permanent change, which is then passed on to your kids, he said. These are actual genetic shifts that are taking place within people.
Those shifts, Ward contended, can cause huge evolutionary change.
He added: On a larger scale, the amount of stress that Americans are going through now, because of Trump there is going to be an evolutionary consequence.
Earlier in his statement, the professor also predicted the U.S. military willmanipulate genetics to create some sort of superhuman soldiers.
A soldier whos much harder to bleed to death, or a soldier that doesnt need to drink as much water, or doesnt need to eat for five or six days, or doesnt need to sleep any one of these things would be an enormous advantage in warfare, he said.
This isnt the first time Ward has raised eyebrows for his ideas.
In his 2009 book The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? Wardargued that life on earth will cause its own destruction in order to save the planet.
He argued at the time, The Christian Science Monitor reported, that life will self-destruct prematurely, many years before the sun, which he believes will begin to expand in roughly one billion years, burns the biosphere away.
Excerpt from:
Biology professor: Trump's presidency will permanently alter human ... - TheBlaze.com
What happened
After a surprising decision by Roche Holding (NASDAQOTH:RHHBY) to exit its co-development deal on a new cancer drug, NewLink Genetics Corporation (NASDAQ:NLNK) shares were crashing 32% as of 1 p.m. EDT.
Hope that success for NewLink Genetics' IDO-inhibiting cancer drugs could get its share price back on track, following a disappointing trial failure last year, were dashed today when Roche announced it was returning rights to co-develop GDC-0919.
IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.
The news is a bit surprising given that Roche just presented data from a trial of GDC-0919 at the high-profile American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting this week.
However, it becomes a little less surprising when we dig into the data and discover that the benefit of adding GDC-0919 to Roche's PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor Tecentriq didn't move the needle much. The combination did improve response rates, but the improvement appears too slight for Roche to justify committing any more research to it. Specifically, the overall response rate in patients diagnosed with various solid tumor cancers was only 9%, and all responses were partial responses.
Further sealing GDC-0919's fate was that the response rate appears to trail that of Incyte's (NASDAQ:INCY) epacadostat, a drug that has the same IDO-inhibiting target as GDC-0919. At ASCO, Incyte reported that teaming epacadostat up with Merck & Co.'s (NYSE:MRK) PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda delivered overall response rates of 30% to 35% in various cancers, including kidney cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.
Roche's decision caps off a week of disappointing news at NewLink Genetics. On Jun. 2, it reported that another of its IDO-inhibitors, indoximod, failed a mid-stage breast cancer trial, casting doubt on its use in indications outside of melanoma, where results have been solid.
In April, management said that combining indoximod with Keytruda resulted in an objective response rate of 52%, and a disease control rate of 73%. Those are good numbers, but they don't appear to be much different from epacadostat, which delivered a 58% overall response rate in advanced melanoma patients when used alongside Keytruda, and a 74% disease-control rate.
Overall, IDO-inhibitors appear to work, but their efficacy might not be as strong across all cancers as hoped; undeniably, that puts peak sales forecasts for this class of drugs at risk. Only time will tell what NewLink Genetics does now that it has 100% rights to both indoximod and GDC-0919, but it may be a bit premature to assume that the company's IDO-inhibitors won't eventually make it to market.
Todd Campbell has no position in any stocks mentioned. His clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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Why Is NewLink Genetics Losing One-Third of Its Value Today? - Motley Fool
Emerging research suggests our DNA influences the ability to read a persons thoughts and emotions from looking at their eyes. And it appears that genetic capability is prevalent among women but not men.
A new study expands on work initiated twenty years ago when a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. developed a test of cognitive empathy called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (or the Eyes Test, for short).
They discovered that people can rapidly interpret what another person is thinking or feeling from looking at their eyes alone. It also showed that some of us are better at this than others, and that women on average score better on this test than men.
Now, the same team, working with the genetics company 23andMe along with scientists from France, Australia, and the Netherlands, report results from a new study of performance on this test in 89,000 people across the world.
The majority of these were 23andMe customers who consented to participate in research. The results confirmed that women on average do indeed score better on this test.
Study results appear in the journalMolecular Psychiatry.
The new study confirmed that genes influence performance on the Eyes Test. Investigators also discovered that in women, key genetic variants on chromosome 3 are associated with their ability to read the mind in the eyes.
The study was led by Varun Warrier, a Cambridge Ph.D. student, and Professors Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and Thomas Bourgeron, of the University Paris Diderot and the Institut Pasteur.
Interestingly, performance on the Eyes Test in males was not associated with genes in this particular region of chromosome 3.
Researchers also found the same pattern of results in an independent cohort of almost 1,500 people who were part of the Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study, suggesting the genetic association in females is a reliable finding.
The closest genes in this tiny stretch of chromosome 3 include LRRN1 (Leucine Rich Neuronal 1) which is highly active in a part of the human brain called the striatum, and which has been shown using brain scanning to play a role in cognitive empathy.
Consistent with this, genetic variants that contribute to higher scores on the Eyes Test also increase the volume of the striatum in humans, a finding that needs to be investigated further.
Previous studies have found that people with autism and anorexia tend to score lower on the Eyes Test.
The team found that genetic variants that contribute to higher scores on the Eyes Test also increase the risk for anorexia, but not autism. They speculate that this may be because autism involves both social and non-social traits, and this test only measures a social trait.
Warrier said, This is the largest ever study of this test of cognitive empathy in the world. This is also the first study to attempt to correlate performance on this test with variation in the human genome.
This is an important step forward for the field of social neuroscience and adds one more piece to the puzzle of what may cause variation in cognitive empathy.
Bourgeron added, This new study demonstrates that empathy is partly genetic, but we should not lose sight of other important social factors such as early upbringing and postnatal experience.
We are excited by this new discovery, Baron-Cohen said, and are now testing if the results replicate, and exploring precisely what these genetic variants do in the brain, to give rise to individual differences in cognitive empathy.
This new study takes us one step closer in understanding such variation in the population.
Source: University of Cambridge
APA Reference Nauert PhD, R. (2017). Genetics May Influence Ability to See Others Thoughts in Their Eyes. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 8, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/06/08/genetics-may-influence-ability-to-see-others-thoughts-in-their-eyes/121659.html
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Genetics May Influence Ability to See Others' Thoughts in Their Eyes - PsychCentral.com
The market was mixed on Thursday, with the Nasdaq Composite posting a modest gain while the Dow and S&P 500 stayed almost unchanged on the day. Events in Europe, including the U.K. election and a decision from the European Central Bank to keep interest rates stable, drew attention from international investors, but those in the U.S. didn't have a major response to those or other political events going on both domestically and across the globe.
Still, despite the quiet mood on Wall Street, some stocks suffered from bad news, and Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Eldorado Gold (NYSE:EGO), and NewLink Genetics (NASDAQ:NLNK) were among the worst performers on the day. Below, we'll look more closely at these stocks to tell you why they did so poorly.
Shares of Sina fell more than 4% after the Chinese online media company detailed its plans to distribute a portion of the shares of microblogging specialist Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) that it still owns. Sina said that it will distribute one Weibo share for every 10 shares of Sina that investors own, leading to the distribution of roughly 7.14 million shares of Weibo. The distribution will take place on July 10, and it will reduce Sina's stake in Weibo from about 49% to 46%. However, Sina will retain voting control of Weibo, with the microblogging company's multiple share classes giving the online media player about 72% in terms of voting power. Weibo has been a big part of Sina's success, and some likely don't want to see Sina's stake in Weibo decline. Some of Sina's weakness also likely stemmed from the recent success of a key rival in the Chinese internet and e-commerce space, as rising competition will force Sina to up its game in order to keep pace.
Image source: Eldorado Gold.
Eldorado Gold stock lost 9% in the wake of news that one of the company's projects will likely become the subject of arbitration proceedings. Reports from Greece indicated that the head of the Greek energy ministry will ask the nation's litigation specialists to make preparations for arbitration over a gold mining project that Eldorado is seeking to develop in the northern part of the country. The Skouries project is a high-grade gold and copper deposit on the Halkidiki Peninsula, and Eldorado is looking to operate the company as an open pit mine for the first nine years, followed by an additional 15 years of underground mining. The Greek government wants to ensure that Eldorado will make good on its contractual obligations, but Eldorado is still hopeful that development will allow for operations to start on the open pit portion of the project by 2019.
Finally, shares of NewLink Genetics plunged more than 40%. Roche Holdings said that it had decided to stop working with NewLink on the cancer drug GDC-0919, returning its rights to help co-develop the candidate treatment back to its smaller partner. Many investors were surprised by the move, but early study results seemed to indicate only marginal benefits from adding NewLink's treatment to existing drugs in Roche's stable. With competitors' drugs apparently providing greater benefits, Roche chose to pull the plug. For NewLink, the news comes only days after poor study results on another candidate treatment for breast cancer, and shareholders have to wonder when the bad news will turn around for the company. For now, investors seem downbeat on NewLink's prospects going forward.
Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Sina and Weibo. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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Why Sina, Eldorado Gold, and NewLink Genetics Slumped Today ... - Motley Fool
An upright shearing platform will be demonstrated at the MerinoLink field day.
INNOVATIONS in shearing, genetics, pasture growth and animal health prediction, and the latest research on feed supplements will be outlined at the MerinoLink conference on June 21.
The conference at Mercure Goulburn from 8am-5pm will be followed by a field day on June 22 at Gunning to demonstrate an upright shearing platform.
Keynote speaker, Meat & Livestock Australia managing director Richard Norton, will outline how levies are being invested in the Merino production supply chain.
Australian Wool Innovation trade consultant Scott Carmody will give an insight into the wool market and Riverina sheep producer and 2017 RIRDC Rural Women of the Year, Sandra Ireson, of Hay, will cover programs aimed at fostering agricultural careers for young people.
The newly unveiled ASKBILL web-based program developed by the Sheep Co-operative Research Centre will be explained by Lu Hogan. The tool predicts pasture growth, animal performance and risks of flystrike, worm infection and weather stress.
A joint project between MerinoLink and Charles Sturt University evaluating the cost and production benefits of vitamin and mineral supplements will be outlined, along with genetic technology and the use of genomics at a commercial level.
NSW DPI technical specialist livestock systems Phil Graham will round out the afternoon sessions with future Merino production system challenges. Elmore ewe trial consultant Kieran Ransom will discuss the best sheep type for a combination of prime lamb and wool production.
An upright shearing platform developed by southern New South Wales wool grower Grant Burbidge will be the highlight of the MerinoLink field day at Merrill, Gunning, from 9am to noon on June 22. The platform shearing system aimsto increase efficiency in the shed and streamline sheep and wool handling, with no dragging or bending of sheep.
There will also be trade displays of sheep handling equipment, wool broking, animal health and industry research, and demonstrations of ram selection for commercial breeders.
Conference co-ordinator and MerinoLink chief executive officer Sally Martin said all members of the wool and sheep meats supply chain were welcome at the conference and field day.
Ms Martin said commercial producers would hear how MerinoLink research project outcomes could be incorporated in their enterprise to lift profitability.
There will be plenty of tips and tricks on using the new technologies available in the market place, she said.
Speakers will be also looking at the additional profit and genetic gain to be made from using electronic identification.
And, pasture is not forgotten with trends in pasture genetic improvement to be covered.
Master Australian storyteller Murray Hartin will be guest speaker at the MerinoLink dinner to be held at the Mercure Goulburn on June 21 from 6.30pm.
To register for the MerinoLink conference go to the MerinoLink website http://www.merinolink.com or contact Sally Martin on 0400 782 477, Donna Cummins on 0407 273 225 or email [emailprotected]
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MerinoLink 2017 to feature latest in shearing, genetics and animal health - Sheep Central