Day: June 5, 2002

Lets Talk Traffic

The past couple weeks there has been an ongoing debate among many of the prominent warbloggers and some of their media critics over weblog traffic. Unfortunately most of that debate has centered around hits and unique visitors, both of which are completely bogus methods of tracking traffic.

Using hits as a metric has obvious flaws, since every graphic viewed or stylesheet accessed counts as a hit. Two sites with similar levels of hits might have very large differences in the number of people visiting a site.

Unique visitors is also a bogus statistic, though one that is very popular with advertisers and web site operators. The folks who make the free web log analyzer I use, analog, succinctly summarize the problem with unique visitors,

You can’t tell how many visitors you’ve had. You can guess by looking at the number of distinct hosts that have requested things from you. Indeed this is what many programs mean when they report “visitors”. But this is not always a good estimate for three reasons. First, if users get your pages from a local cache server, you will never know about it. Secondly, sometimes many users appear to connect from the same host: either users from the same company or ISP, or users using the same cache server. Finally, sometimes one user appears to connect from many different hosts. AOL now allocates users a different hostname for every request. So if your home page has 10 graphics on, and an AOL user visits it, most programs will count that as 11 different visitors!

The only thing you reliable measure of traffic is page views, and even there the issue of pages cached at ISPs is a problem. Of course page views do not actually tell you a lot.

For example, I know that in May 2002, my web server displayed slightly more than 415,000 page views. I have no idea how many different users that represented and, frankly, I don’t care. Total page views is the best metric to compare relative traffic among web sites.

Mice Share 97.5 Percent of Genes with Human Beings

A comparison of the mouse genome to the human genome by researchers at Celera Genomics suggests that the genome of mice is nearly identical to that of human beings.

Comparing mouse chromosome 16 with human DNA, the researchers found that 97.5 percent of the mouse genes were also present in human beings. This contradicts longstanding estimates that the mouse genome may vary from humans by as much as 15 percent.

The major lesson here is that genes are important, obviously, but it is how those genes are expressed and regulated that appears to be what is most important in differentiating between relatively closely related species (mice and human beings are believed to share a common ancestor as little as 100 million years ago).

Arguments that rely on the apparent similarity of genomes between two different species (such as, say, chimpanzees and human beings) are far less compelling than they appear.

Source:

Just 2.5% of DNA turns mice into men. NewScientist.Com, May 30, 2002.

FDA Approves Rules for Some Drugs to Receive Approval Based Only on Animal Studies

In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a rule to allow the approval of drugs based solely on animal studies where human efficacy studies would be unethical. The proposal went nowhere until the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, and the FDA announced recently that the rule would go into effect this summer.

The rules are designed to overcome an obvious problem with drugs designed as antidotes to anthrax, nerve gas, small pox and other potentially lethal or disabling agents. Who would test such drugs? Few people are likely to volunteer to be exposed to nerve gas or anthrax to test such drugs, and even if they were, such research would be widely considered unethical.

The anthrax drug Cipro was approved by the FDA based solely on animal efficacy studies for this reason, and the new FDA rules will formalize the procedures for future such drugs.

Although companies can base efficacy solely on animal studies, they will still need to show that the drug itself is safe by testing it in both animals and in human clinical trials. Such drugs will also carry warning labels noting that their efficacy has not been tested in human beings.

Sources:

FDA to OK Drugs Using Animal Data. The Associated Press, May 31, 2002.

FDA: Animal Studies ALone OK for Some Drugs. Adam Marcus, HealthScoutNews, May 30, 2002.

In Search of Antiterror Drugs. The New York Times, June 3, 2002.

PETA Sues Feld Entertainment, Accusing It of Illegal Spying

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit in May accusing Feld Entertainment, Inc. of hiring former CIA deputy director Clair E. George to illegally spy on the organization. Feld Entertainment owns the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Circus.

In 2001 PETA sued Feld Entertainment for the return of documents that PETA claimed were stolen from the animal rights organization. PETA attorney Phil Hirschkop told The New York Times that, without admitting wrongdoing, Feld and others handed over about two dozen documents. Those documents may have been obtained from a former employee of PETA’s, but under Virginia law they are protected trade secrets according to PETA.

PETA’s lawsuit turns into unintentional parody when it accuses Feld entertainment of planting volunteers and employees within PETA in order to gather information on the group. What was Michelle Rokke doing at Huntingdon Life Sciences again? Apparently PETA does not appreciate being a target of its own tactics.

PETA’s lawsuit seeks up to $1.8 million in damages for the alleged spying.

Source:

Animal rights group PETA alleges spying in lawsuit against circus owner. Bob Lewis, Associated Press, June 2, 2002.

Rights group says circus spied on it. The New York Times, May 31, 2002.