This from Today’s Financial News:

Maryland-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:VNDA) has high hopes for its drug VEC-162. This treatment mimics the action of melatonin — the hormone that that regulates the body’s internal clock.

Vanda is testing the effectiveness of VEC-162 to treat sleep disorders.

Over 60 million adults in the U.S. alone suffering from some form of insomnia. Yet only about 15% seek treatment. Some fear side effects like grogginess and dry mouth.

Others are afraid of becoming reliant on a sleep aid. In fact, many such treatments, including Lunesta and Ambien, are categorized as Schedule IV controlled substances. This indicates that abuse of these drug could lead to physical or psychological dependence.

So far, all indications are that VEC-162 has no significant side effects.

How’s your circadian rythym?

In clinical trials, participants were asked to initiate sleep five hours prior to their usual bedtines.

Those who took the drug experienced improvements in overall sleep efficiency, and a greater ability to both initiate and to maintain sleep as compared to participant given a placebo.

The drug, in effect, resets the body’s circadian clock that governs the sleep-wake cycle.

Circadian rythym sleep disorders are experienced by shift workers and suffers of jet-lag and this drug could hold the key to relief.

Insiders are buying and so should you!

I recommend you buy shares of Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:VNDA) at or under 75 cents and hold on for double-digit gains.

Source: Rest Easy With Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (VNDA)

The one thing you notice about Silicon Valley is the meetings. They multiply like a fungus. Once inside, you become intoxicated from the heady fumes of whiteboard markers, since the entire culture seems incapable of explaining anything without standing in front of the room to draw organizational charts. Ditto for PowerPoint.

And so the Myth of Empowerment came into being after years of sitting in conference rooms listening to these pretentious windbags. As the Myth of Empowerment goes: The more computing power you give to incompetent people, their incompetence rises commensurate with their reliance on that computing power.

Of course, now that computers are becoming more powerful more quickly, the rise to incompetence is meteoric in some organizations.

It seems that as an analytical tool, The Myth of Empowerment could have predicted why the bottom fell out of Yahoo’s stock price long before the current economic malaise.

Reporter Om Malik, writing for Fortune online, nailed the Yahoo culture in his piece of Nov. 17th. This excerpt could have come directly out of the text of The Myth of Empowerment.

“What hasn’t been discussed is that the company isn’t really facing up to the fact that its layers of management have resulted in a state of masterful inactivity, masked perhaps as a culture of consensus. This starts at the top – from the company’s board and senior management down to VP level where people are prone to organizing and attending twenty meetings before deciding the fate of a project. Some senior managers including the ones who are deserting the company are skillful players in this game of hiding ennui behind grandiose plans and a great future that never happens.”

Malik’s observation was part of a story he wrote regarding the resignation of current CEO and Yahoo Founder, Jerry Yang. This is the guy, along with his board, who fought off a bid by Microsoft earlier this year at $31 per share, because they believed the price undervalued the company. Today, Yahoo is at $11.67.

After he resigns as CEO, Yang will remain on the board and take on the title of Chief Yahoo (seriously) as the company seeks a replacement.

Given the current shortage of cash in the market, everyone now expects Microsoft to make another pass at Yahoo for the lack of other potential suitors. In fact, some wags conjecture that the #1 job of the new Yahoo CEO will be to broker a Microsoft deal.

The someone else part, however, gets real tricky. Private equity has just reached a stand-still. There may have been a Chinese taker earlier in the year, but that market is also under siege. And if the Yahoo board thinks that AOL is a bailout scenario, then more power to them.

A Google deal may have been possible at one point, but the Feds were already making noise that they would kill a prospective alignment with Yahoo as part of joint-marketing and technology-sharing agreement that got shelved in reaction to hostile Feds. And that wasn’t even a full-blown merger.

In the end, it all comes back to Microsoft. Over the past two days, Microsoft’s shares have slipped 9%. This is consistent with the long-term trend of the stock’s price surrounding a takeover of Yahoo.

Whether or not Microsoft approaches Yahoo again largely depends on Yang’s successor. Our expectation is that if Microsoft does manage to buy Yahoo, Microsoft shares will drop. If word leaks of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Microsoft will drop. And until the fate of Yahoo becomes definitive, Microsoft shares will continue to drop.