More on the Misleading Promotion of Seroquel

Previous posts (<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/02/buried-data-smoke-and-mirrors-job-and.html">here</a> and <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-documents-about-selling-of.html">here</a>) noted internal documents from AstraZeneca made public during litigation about its blockbuster atypical antipsychotic drug Seroquel (quetiapine) suggesting that the company's marketers manipulated clinical research results to make them appear more favorable to the product, and suppress studies with unfavorable results that could not be easily manipulated.<br /><br />This week, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aplfa8pUrUsM">Bloomberg News reported </a>testimony from one trial about other aspects of Seroquel's marketing. The marketers' claims were at odds with the company's own research results:<br /><blockquote><br /><em>AstraZeneca Plc advised its sales force to promote the antipsychotic drug Seroquel as 'weight neutral' four years after company research found 'clinically significant' weight gains in users</em>, internal documents show.<br /><br />AstraZeneca’s 'global strategy is to demonstrate to consumers that Seroquel has a weight-neutral profile,' Debbie Holdsworth, a marketing official, wrote in a 'dear colleague' letter dated May 14, 2001. The document was produced during a pretrial examination of former executive John Patterson.<br /><br />'If 45 percent of patients gained significant weight in a year, how could that be weight-neutral?' patient attorney Ed Blizzard asked Patterson, citing a internal 1997 e-mail written by an AstraZeneca doctor, at a hearing in Orlando Oct. 5. </blockquote>Also, evidence was presented that suggested that company marketers consciously promoted the drug for off-label indications over several years:<br /><blockquote><br />Patterson was asked about a 'Seroquel Strategy Summary' issued in December 2000, which <em>described the broadening of Seroquel use 'on and off label' as a sales goal.</em> While doctors are free to prescribe any medicine to treat a given condition, it is illegal for drug companies to promote medicines for uses not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.<br /><br />'The company has standards and procedures to ensure its sales representatives do not promote off label,' Patterson testified. Still, <em>the goal of off-label promotion remained in strategy summaries for the years 2001 or 2002, he acknowledged</em>.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Coupled with previous revelations (see posts noted above), it looks like the marketers were employing an integrated strategy combining a variety of deceptions, the sort of broad based <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/stealth%20marketing">stealth marketing </a>approach we have seen employed to promote other health care products.<br /><br />Such strategies undoubtedly have lead to the prescribing of expensive drugs when other treatments, or no treatment would be better, and have helped support the high prices charged for products that are not necessarily so good for the many patients who have ended up getting them. Of course, the money thus generated has let many executives of the companies that employ such marketing strategies become rich. As Bloomberg reported:<br /><blockquote><br />Patterson, who reported directly to AstraZeneca’s chief executive officer, <em>was paid more than $1 million at one point during his tenure at the company</em>. He retired April 1 as executive director of product development, and is the highest- ranking AstraZeneca executive to testify in open court in lawsuits claiming the company withheld information about the risks of Seroquel.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />In my humble opinion, if we really want to reform health care in the US (and around the globe), we need to challenge how health care organizations have used their ability to sponsor medical research to manipulate its design, implementation, analysis and dissemination, and when necessary, to suppress its results to favor their vested interests. We also need to challenge systematically deceptive marketing practices designed to make products and services appear more useful than they really are, thus supporting exaggerated prices and prompting overuse. Unless we challenge these and some other causes of excess prices and excess use, attempts to provide universal health insurance and access will bankrupt us all.<br /><br />(And to preempt anyone in the audience who may recoil from anything that restricts the freedom of action of health care corporations - tell me how manipulation of research, suppression of research, and deceptive marketing is necessary for innovation or for adequate revenues to support good products? I am not arguing for hamstrung companies. I am arguing for honest business practices.)<br /><br />Hat tip to <a href="http://pharmagossip.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrazeneca-seroquel-weight-of-evidence.html">PharmaGossip</a>.

More on the Misleading Promotion of Seroquel

Previous posts ( here and here ) noted internal documents from AstraZeneca made public during litigation about its blockbuster atypical ant...

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New in Google Squared: quality improvements, sorting and exporting

Today we're launching a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information you can find with <a href="http://www.google.com/squared">Google Squared</a>, as well as new tools to sort and export the data.<br /><br />As we explained when we <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/square-your-search-results-with-google.html">first launched</a> Squared in Labs this summer, the product takes on a difficult technical challenge. It's a first step towards automatically extracting useful facts from all over the web and presenting them in meaningful way. It has the potential to be particularly useful for research questions where the answers may not live on a single website, but instead must be combined from many different pages.<br /><br />Rather than return a list of the most relevant websites, Squared returns a "square" (or table) of facts, sourced from across the Internet. For example, if you search Squared for [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=US%20presidents&suggest=1">us presidents</a>], each row on the resulting table represents a particular United States President, and the columns include relevant facts about him, such as date of birth, a picture and a short description.<br /><br />At launch, your first square could include at most 30 facts. With today's update, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five presidents and three categories, now you'll see a table with 20 presidents and up to six attributes.<div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj43p4qLo3xGbb2vX4_X0_og7ZWct4QER25xqO787dysLLWT05cxrj-52QgG9uohQd83nwdwZ4A0bnfZrLvOV2icpv1M7WLXjQBwSxtIDTXK7v4mE5FLUZcaeQwz-YuEP1HxamdPjt-FgyL/s1600-h/dg6t87s8_9hqhzc3d4_b.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390658315368360290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj43p4qLo3xGbb2vX4_X0_og7ZWct4QER25xqO787dysLLWT05cxrj-52QgG9uohQd83nwdwZ4A0bnfZrLvOV2icpv1M7WLXjQBwSxtIDTXK7v4mE5FLUZcaeQwz-YuEP1HxamdPjt-FgyL/s400/dg6t87s8_9hqhzc3d4_b.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 354px; height: 400px;" /></a><br />The quality of the information is also better, because we're ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. For example, in the past we would show you a column for "First Lady" even if the column only included a couple accurate names. Now we're actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven't found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.<br /><br />In addition to improving the information in Squared results, we've also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly. For example:<br /><ul><li>Sort to find the largest [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=european+countries+">european countries</a>] by population or area.</li><li>See which mountains from the [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=colorado+14ers">colorado 14ers</a>] are the tallest.</li><li>Make a list of [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=new+york+city+thai+restaurants">new york city thai restaurants</a>] to try, grouped by neighborhood. </li><li>Find the newest [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=baseball+stadiums+">baseball stadiums</a>]. </li></ul>We've also added the ability to export data from Squared to a <a href="http://docs.google.com/">Google Spreadsheet</a> or a CSV file, which should make it easier to do interesting things with the data. For example, you can build a square for [<a href="http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=african+countries">african countries</a>], add more items and columns, and examine the relationship between the literacy rate and GDP per capita. Once you've built your square to contain all the information you need, you can export the square to Google Spreadsheets and <a href="http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=63728">create a rough scatter plot</a>:</div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2fqUFRMU1tCgvznIrSsXLSOGOK82tPsRkdaa5c6b7MA8s5AlaOWEjsn8Y85B2gYmo39DLvYht_VPe_qyCYhmN4uF_vSWsJ76lUdkQak8BBf1Ycto8EZRs57ThdNqiP-83jjsBXfsy1Yl/s1600-h/dg6t87s8_12ckzbm2fk_b.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390658329472565970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2fqUFRMU1tCgvznIrSsXLSOGOK82tPsRkdaa5c6b7MA8s5AlaOWEjsn8Y85B2gYmo39DLvYht_VPe_qyCYhmN4uF_vSWsJ76lUdkQak8BBf1Ycto8EZRs57ThdNqiP-83jjsBXfsy1Yl/s400/dg6t87s8_12ckzbm2fk_b.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 192px;" /></a><br />There's a lot left to do before Squared is ready to leave Labs — we're still working on improving quality as well as the user interface — but we hope that our recent improvements make it more useful. In its experimental stage, Squared demonstrates an important future direction in search: understanding structured data from across the web to build new tools for organizing and presenting information. Try it out, and <a href="https://survey.googleratings.com/wix/p3187618.aspx">let us know</a> what you think.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Noah Weiss, Associate Product Manager, and Randy Brown, Software Engineer</span></div>

New in Google Squared: quality improvements, sorting and exporting

Today we're launching a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information you can find with Google Squared , as well as ne...

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A tale of 10,000,000 books

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><blockquote>The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist.</blockquote></span>This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles. But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced, and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=SKkvAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA1236&dq=electric+vehicle&as_brr=4&ei=aDmvSpelIo3YkQTdsJz1Ag#v=onepage&q=electric%20vehicle&f=false">1916 issue of the journal Electrical World</a>, which I found in <a href="http://books.google.com/">Google Books</a>, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky — electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.<div><br />But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.<div><br />Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/1998/april1/flood41.html">floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books</a>. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=D_v-HAAACAAJ">The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report</a>, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.</div><div><br />Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.</div><div><br />The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a <a href="http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/">settlement</a> that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.</div><div><br />There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.</div><div><br />Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">at any time</span> set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.</div><div><br />Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.</div><div><br />I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred.</div><div><br />If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support.</div><div><br />Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our products, we are working hard to address them — improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy. And if we don’t get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.</div><div><br />In the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=SJbPAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA232&dq=alexandria+library+fire&as_brr=4&ei=bxW3Su2hLIHUlATWxsHrDw#v=onepage&q=alexandria%20library%20fire&f=false">Insurance Year Book 1880-1881</a>, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">something</span> being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.</div><div><br />I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology</span></div><br />(This first appeared in the New York Times, available <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html">here</a>.)<br /></div>

A tale of 10,000,000 books

The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properl...

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Healthcare Renewal Named a Forbes "Must Read" Health Blog

Healthcare Renewal has been named a Forbes "must read" health blog, one of three under the category "physician blogs."<br /><br />"<span style="font-style: italic;">These Web sites cover the many facets of health with integrity and authority--in a more useful, personal way</span>" writes Forbes journalist and health reporter Rebecca Ruiz on Oct. 7 (link to article, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/07/best-health-blogs-lifestyle-health-blogs-health-information.html">page 1</a> and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/07/best-health-blogs-lifestyle-health-blogs-health-information_2.html">page 2</a>).<br /><br />-- SS<a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/07/best-health-blogs-lifestyle-health-blogs-health-information_2.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>

Healthcare Renewal Named a Forbes "Must Read" Health Blog

Healthcare Renewal has been named a Forbes "must read" health blog, one of three under the category "physician blogs." ...

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Google Flu Trends expands to 16 additional countries

If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at <a href="http://www.google.org/">Google.org</a> are excited to announce the expansion of <a href="http://www.google.org/flutrends/">Google Flu Trends</a> to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We've also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we're pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages.<br /><br /><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/tracking-flu-trends.html">Last November</a>, we launched Google Flu Trends in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we are able to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time. While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season.<br /><br />In the past year, we've expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data.<br /><br />An important aspect of Google Flu Trends is that we filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news. What we do not use in the models is a term like [swine flu] since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it, given the news headlines, and not because they actually have H1N1 or swine flu. For more information about how we built this model, take a peek at this video:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6111nS66Dpk&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6111nS66Dpk&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br /><br />If you visit Google Flu Trends for the U.S., you'll notice that the flu season is starting early this year. For tips on how to stay healthy this season, please visit our friends at the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/preventing.htm">U.S. CDC</a> and <a href="http://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/healthtopics/Pages/Influenza_A%28H1N1%29_Outbreak.aspx">the ECDC</a>.<br /><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Matt Mohebbi and Dan Vanderkam, Software Engineers</span>

Google Flu Trends expands to 16 additional countries

If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help ...

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Pfizer (in the Guise of Pharmacia) Pfound to Violate Pfraud Law, While Pfizer CEO Made Pfederal Reserve Advisor

It was only a month ago that Pfizer Inc, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, submitted to a gargantuan $2.3 billion settlement and yet another corporate integrity agreement. As we posted <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/09/pfour-legal-settlements-for-pfizer-why.html">here</a>, this was the company's fourth major settlement of charges of unethical marketing behavior since 2002.<br /><br />Now Pfizer is in trouble again. As reported <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gKN6h5RGezwol5GiqLvvTxaVAYUQD9B1VSL00">by the AP</a>,<br /><br /><blockquote><br /><em>A judge on Tuesday imposed $4.5 million in forfeitures on prescription drug company Pharmacia Inc.[a Pfizer Inc subsidiary] for misrepresenting prices and defrauding Wisconsin's Medicaid system.<br /></em><br />A jury in February found that Pharmacia violated the state's Medicaid fraud law 1.44 million times over a decade. State Justice Department attorneys had demanded about $212 million in forfeitures, but Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess said jurors grossly overcalculated the number of violations.<br /><br />After reviewing the evidence, the judge found the actual tally was 4,578.<br /><br />He elected to set the forfeiture level at $1,000 per violation. The judge said he was concerned that if he ordered the maximum $68.6 million Pharmacia would pass the expense to consumers and nothing showed any of the fraudulent $7 million went directly to Pharmacia's profits.<br /><br />On the other hand, the judge said, a $100 per violation forfeiture totaling $457,800 would 'not register so much as blip on Pharmacia's multibillion-dollar annual fiscal radar screen' and a higher amount would draw attention to the need to reform pharmaceutical reimbursement scales.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />I must say that I do not understand the reasoning the judge used to set the penalties. If he thought that Pfizer would merely pass along a large penalty to patients, why would the company not pass along a smaller penalty to them.<br /><br />In any case, this is just the latest in a long string of cases in which a health care corporation was found to have committed unethical or illegal acts, but the only the corporation itself, but not the people who actually performed, directed or authorized the acts, paid a penalty. And when the penalty is paid by the corporation, its impact can be spread over all stock-holders, all employees, and all patients, clients, or customers, thus diluting its effect, and protecting those who authorized, directed, or performed the acts in question.<br /><br />I submit again that only when the people in health care leadership who perform, direct or authorize bad behavior pay penalties will bad behavior be deterred.<br /><br />Note that while Pfizer may be the world's largest pharmaceutical corporation, it seems to be the corporation most often cited for, convicted of, or having to make settlements for bad behavior (see some recent examples <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/Pfizer">here</a>). (Although in the current case, you would have to read the news report very carefully to realize that Pfizer was involved. The fact that Pharmacia is a Pfizer subsidiary was only mentioned in passing.) <br /><br />Nonetheless, one would think Pfizer's leadership would be ashamed, and their reputation would suffer. But no. At about the same time this latest settlement was announced, this <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUSN0160921020091001">report from Reuters </a>appeared:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Thursday that Pfizer (PFE.N) chief executive Jeffrey Kindler and Loews Corp (L.N) chief executive James Tisch will fill the two vacancies on its board of directors.<br /><br />Kindler was elected to finish a three-year term ending Dec. 31, taking the seat PepsiCo (PEP.N) chief executive Indra Nooyi resigned from in February.<br /><br />Regional Federal Reserve banks' boards of directors offer recommendations on Fed policy, but have no policy-making powers. They also provide anecdotal information about the business conditions that help inform the central bank.<br /><br />Regional Fed banks have three classes of directors: Class A, elected by member banks to represent banks; Class B, elected by member banks but representing the public; and Class C, which represent the public but are chosen by the Board of Governors in Washington.<br /><br />Kindler and Tisch join Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric (GE.N) as Class B directors.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />I suppose Kindler could offer quite a bit of "anecdotal information" about bad behavior in the pharmaceutical industry. But it seems rather comic to think about the CEO of the world's biggest, and lately baddest pharmaceutical company as "representing the public." Rather, and more seriously, this is just the latest example of how leaders of health care organizations have joined the superclass, and how the superclass protects its own.

Pfizer (in the Guise of Pharmacia) Pfound to Violate Pfraud Law, While Pfizer CEO Made Pfederal Reserve Advisor

It was only a month ago that Pfizer Inc, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, submitted to a gargantuan $2.3 billion settlement a...

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Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results

Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application. To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily <a href="http://www.google.com/help/faq_filetypes.html#application">view these files</a> as HTML right in a web browser by clicking "View as HTML." This was an improvement, but unfortunately the "View as HTML" option loses some of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements.<br /><br />Today, we've added new links to "Quick View" PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that's available <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/fast-pdf-viewing-right-in-your-browser.html">in Google Docs and Gmail</a>, as well as to <a href="http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/09/view-online-files-using-google-docs.html">webmasters</a> through the Google Docs viewer. We've been rolling this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today we've added "Quick View" links to more than 50% of the PDFs in our index. The new links appear at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.<br /><br />For example, here is a search result for the IRS 1099 form:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9NzrJjCLno5SAtBtYXYLiDXN-i4_zb1EDnt4pBI1ZmWL0yd2jnKwegBMVVt4ymG7TAiiRaFfRlErpmfD9lF5QcRuYL0KNzt3Oy09imZiCzUcBxGuwxDimnrQiI0F2B3zIO36y15QbCg-k/s1600-h/cgqmq8g4_53cc65rwgd_b.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389906586994960562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9NzrJjCLno5SAtBtYXYLiDXN-i4_zb1EDnt4pBI1ZmWL0yd2jnKwegBMVVt4ymG7TAiiRaFfRlErpmfD9lF5QcRuYL0KNzt3Oy09imZiCzUcBxGuwxDimnrQiI0F2B3zIO36y15QbCg-k/s400/cgqmq8g4_53cc65rwgd_b.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 249px;" /></a><br />Clicking "Quick View" will open up the PDF right in your browser with graphics, formatting and tables preserved. This is what it looks like after opening:<div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qAXokwtt6oBVUy5Kx7v1ZZFz4U72zrvriQzU_pnE_koAASBanE8p7oATM3yZMe95Wo2qzwFBdSjsKMZJtpIhdq-q1FAeNUuRMU11kHpp8FzS9t_CuyvzjdikQxv6ZnkDR972-Y2Jj4pO/s1600-h/cgqmq8g4_22qzzc26f9_b.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389906594005416786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qAXokwtt6oBVUy5Kx7v1ZZFz4U72zrvriQzU_pnE_koAASBanE8p7oATM3yZMe95Wo2qzwFBdSjsKMZJtpIhdq-q1FAeNUuRMU11kHpp8FzS9t_CuyvzjdikQxv6ZnkDR972-Y2Jj4pO/s400/cgqmq8g4_22qzzc26f9_b.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 265px;" /></a><br />Over time we'll be rolling out the viewer for more documents and file types. In the meantime, in some cases you'll see the "View as HTML" link, which allows you to see a basic HTML-only version.<br /><br />Viewing PDF documents in your browser might not make paying taxes any more fun — but hopefully this feature will make it a little bit faster!<div><br /><span class="byline-author">Posted by Krista Davis, Software Engineer, and Raj Krishnan, Product Manager</span></div></div>

Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results

Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the pas...

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