Doctors who accept pharma industry gifts (which can range from free coffees to lavish dinners to six-figure speaking fees) claim that they're not influenced by these bribes/gifts, which is possibly why doctors are taking more pharma bribes than ever.

Now, an empirical study by Propublica draws on mandatory disclosure data on pharma gifts as well as prescribing data to show that "Doctors who receive money from drugmakers related to a specific drug prescribe that drug more heavily than doctors without such financial ties."

The sample size is large. The effect size is large. The effects are consistent across multiple drugs. The size of the gift needed to change prescribing behavior is bewilderingly small.

It's not the first such study, but it's an important, empirical addition to our understanding of the problems with this practice. Obviously, the pharma industry wouldn't spend all that money if they didn't think it made a good return on their investment, but industries often spend lavishly on useless things for long periods (for example, think of all the firms that entrust hedge funds with large sums of money, despite the fact that hedge funds generally underperform relative to a simple index-tracker). It's nice to have some outside validation.

For some drugs that are household names, it was more common for prescribers to receive a payment than not to. More than half of doctors who prescribed Breo, an expensive asthma drug, to Medicare patients received payments involving the drug in 2016. This was also true for Invokana and Victoza, both of which are diabetes medications.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/m7nmyGOWSx0/duh-but-good.html

In 2017, a string of reports revealed that data-brokers were acquiring and linking titanic sets of location data from apps and mobile carriers and mining that data (and sometimes selling it outright). The carriers promised they'd end the practice, but they were lying. A year later, fresh reports surfaced of both app- and carrier-derived location data being sold, often by companies whose lack of elementary security meant that the data was effectively available to anyone. Then we learned that carriers were supplying fine-grained, realtime location data that was ending up in the hands of bounty hunters, skip tracers, and crooks and stalkers (naturally Ajit Pai's FCC had helped them get away with it0.

Now, the New York Times has obtained a file of app-derived location data of the sort amassed by brokers, composed of 50b location "pings" from 50m Americans' devices.

In an extraordinary piece of journalism, the Times shows just how easy it is to positively identify people in the data-set and then follow them: whether that's senior political officials, celebrities, protesters, cops, or the families and friends of all of the above. The writers describe how they were able to identify overnight visitors to the Playboy mansion, follow journalists as they talked with sources, and watch who came and went from massage parlors, methadone clinics, the White House, and more. They followed a tech exec as he left his employer's campus and interviewed for a job at its major rival, and tracked the children of police officers as they went to school and to friends' houses. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_zDT-LsZS2o/pocket-snitch-2.html

Until recently, Jackie Fielder was living in her van. At 25, the Stanford sociology grad couldn't afford rent in San Francisco.

Now Fielder -- who is of Hidatsa, Lakota and Mandan heritage -- is primarying an establishment Democrat to represent District 11 in the California Senate. District 11 is a very safe seat, so winning the primary nomination is effectively the same thing as winning the seat.

Fielder is running as a Democratic Socialist. Her opponent, Scott Weiner, has offered a string of solidly progressive initiatives while in office but whose record is marred by his support of pro-gentrification policies.

Fielder backs transformative, left-wing policies, especially the creation of a public bank (previously) and with it, divestiture of public finance from institutions complicit in crimes against humanity, notably Wells Fargo, a major funder of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Fielder volunteered as a water protector at Standing Rock, and is also a #BlackLivesMatter activist. I donated to her campaign. I am a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

In February 2017, just as the last water protectors were forced from the camps at Standing Rock, Remle and the Seattle Defund DAPL movement succeeded in convincing the city of Seattle to divest $3 billion of the city’s funds from Wells Fargo due to their funding of the pipeline.

The victory was short lived, however, when a little over a year later the city renewed its contract with Wells Fargo. It could find no other large bank willing to take on the high volume of depository services required by the city.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/4a6GGSJpWio/public-banks.html

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, police say they collected DNA from the spot where a suspect face-planted into a door while trying to escape.

Police swabbed the door for possible DNA evidence, collected it, sent it to the New Mexico forensic laboratory in Santa Fe, where DNA was confirmed.

That DNA profile was entered into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) where it matched a known sample belonging to one Markell Deshaun Barnes, 19.

The young man is now identified as the suspect responsible for two New Mexico armed robberies committed on the same day in June.

Markell Deshaun Barnes, 19, of the 1800 block of Ash Avenue, is charged with one third-degree felony count of attempted armed robbery and one fourth-degree felony count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Both charges are for the attempted armed robbery June 25, 2019, at the Pizza Hut at 2205 Missouri Ave.

Barnes is also the prime suspect in another armed robbery earlier that day.

The first robbery, police say, was about 12:15 a.m. at the Giant gas station, 1865 University Ave. The second robbery was reported that evening, about 10:30 p.m., at the Pizza Hut restaurant. No injuries were reported in either case.

In the Pizza Hut case, police reviewed surveillance images and noticed the suspect tried running out a door that had already been locked for the evening. The suspect face-planted into the door, police say, before reversing direction and running out another exit.

More on CODIS — the Combined DNA Index System: FBI.gov Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/284lUUszi-c/armed-robber-who-face-planted.html

In New Mexico, Joseph Allen, 40, is facing charges after authorities say he stole a car without realizing that another guy was still sleeping inside the vehicle at the time.

Joseph Allen of Las Cruces, New Mexico, was arrested and charged with stealing the running car in Vado, New Mexico, on Wednesday, reports the Las Cruces Sun-News.

The Do~na Ana County Sheriff’s Office says the sleeping guy, Ignacio Baca of Las Cruces NM, said it all started after he fell asleep in the back seat of his girlfriend’s 2006 Toyota Corolla, as one does.

Mr. Baca said he'd dropped off his lady friend for her shift working at a truck stop, and decided to park the car and fell asleep instead of venturing further home.

From AP:

Baca told Do~na Ana County Sheriff’s Detective Ileana Adame that he’d left the vehicle running while he was sleeping, and later woke up and realized the car was traveling east on Interstate 10. Baca said he asked the man who the was, and proceeded to punch and choke the stranger.

Court documents allege Allen regained control of the vehicle and pulled over.

Allen then pulled out a knife and slashed Baca on the left side of his rib, and upper right arm, deputies said.

Baca eventually took the triple-edged knife from Allen, who then fled.

More: Deputies: Man stole car while another man slept inside [apnews.com] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/b3mg6LNF9Ts/thief-busted-for-stealing-car.html

A 3-year-old boy shot his father in his rear end with a gun the toddler found in their Erie, Pennsylvania home, say police. The father survived.

Erie police say the shooting took place at 6:30 PM Thursday.

The boy encountered a loaded, small-caliber handgun, and fired it at his father, who was 26 years old. Neither name has been released.

The dad is expected to survive, and is being treated at a hospital for wounds not considered life-threatening.

More: Police: 3-year-old boy shoots sleeping father in buttocks [apnews.com] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/D6ngXRGwQBA/child-3-shot-dad-in-the-butt.html

UPS driver Bruce Slette found a goat in the back of his UPS delivery truck, and the images he snapped and sent to his daughter have now gone very viral.

They're really quite funny.

My dad is a UPS driver in rural North Dakota & today he sent me these photos with no context pic.twitter.com/DkwwHM0vpG

 Maria Helen (@maria_helen13) December 19, 2019

“My dad is a UPS driver in rural North Dakota & today he sent me these photos with no context,” wrote Maria Helen.

Oh yes there's video.

But wait there’s more pic.twitter.com/jaeTXDm8jj

 Maria Helen (@maria_helen13) December 20, 2019

Business Insider has some funny related content about animals sneaking on to delivery vehicles:

A goat snuck onto a UPS truck in North Dakota, and photos of the encounter are going viral as delivery workers share their own hilarious animal sightings

[Twitter/@maria_helen13 ] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vDFUeu12Veo/goat-snuck-onto-ups-truck.html

One Georgia family's viral owl Christmas saga started began on December 12, with this Facebook post: “No joke, we just found a live owl roosting in our Christmas tree.”

In the photo, an owl tucked in to the tree branches among lights and ornaments.

The local paper identified the critter as an Eastern screech owl, and the family says the bird was discovered when Katie McBride Newman's daughter was trimming the tree with owl ornaments. The girl “was both terrified and delighted,” the newspaper wrote.

From the Associated Press:

Katie McBride Newman said Friday that she and her daughter spotted the bird on Dec. 12. They had bought the 10-foot (3-meter) tall tree from a Home Depot, brought it back to their Atlanta area home and decorated it with lights and, coincidentally, owl ornaments.

“It was surreal, but we weren’t really freaked out about it,” McBride Newman said. “We’re really outdoorsy people. We love the wilderness.”

The family opened windows and doors near the tree hoping the owl would fly away, but it didn’t.

“The owl seemed to be pretty comfortable, and I thought, ‘Hey buddy, it’s not going to go well if you just stay here. There’s no food, I’m sorry,’” said McBride Newman’s husband, Billy Newman. So the family called a nonprofit nature center for help. The Chattahoochee Nature Center caught the bird and helped the family release it.

More: Family finds live owl while decorating indoor Christmas tree with owl ornaments in GA [star-telegram.com] Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/HSQ2wdEQErQ/no-joke-we-just-found-a-liv.html

“We are glad to be able to better accommodate the gender preferences of our travelers and team members.” - AA

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/n8zQ6K1Kjps/american-airlines-now-offers.html

The passage -- through MEPs erroneously pushing the wrong buttons! -- of the new EU Copyright Directive last March means that online platforms operating in the EU will have to implement filters that allow anyone, anywhere, to claim anything as their copyright, whereupon the platforms will have to detect any attempt by anyone else to upload those claimed works and block them.

Julia Reda (previously) was an MEP during the passage of the Copyright Directive and she led the charge to reform it to remove its most odious and absurd passage. Thanks to her and other organizers, 200,000 Europeans marched in 50+ cities, and 5,000,000 Europeans signed the largest petition in continental history, opposing the inclusion of the filter mandate in the Directive. Despite this unprecedented public opposition and the near-unanimous verdict of security experts, economists, technologists, and scholars that this would not work, MEPs voted in favor of this proposal (notwithstanding that 10 of them got confused and pressed the wrong buttons, and that the proposal only passed by five votes) (no, really).

Writing for Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, Reda explains why Americans should be alarmed at this turn of events: it will cement the dominance of both large platforms and large entertainment conglomerates, at the expense of upstart competitors, like EU-based online platforms that differentiate themselves through promises of better privacy or better moderation; and like small, independent labels and publishers that offer more equitable deals to creators.

Moreover, the filters will perform in ways that are familiar to anyone who pays attention to Google's Content ID (for Youtube) or the filters used on Facebook and other platforms: they will both overblock legitimate creative or critical media, and underblock material that actually infringes copyright. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8596BxrKInk/fat-fingered-disaster.html

They had 'American' faces, but these pro-Trump social media accounts all had algorithmically generated faces that only appeared 'American.'

Facebook and Twitter have banned a pro-Trump network that reached 55 million accounts and is said to be linked to a US-based media company called The BL which has ties to Epoch Media Group and the Chinese Falun Gong cult.

I know, that's a lot to digest.

Facebook says it nixed 610 accounts, 89 Facebook pages, 156 groups, and 72 accounts on Instagram, all of which were linked to BL and Epoch Media Group.

“The BL is now banned from Facebook,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said Friday in a statement. “We are continuing to investigate all linked networks, and will take action as appropriate if we determine they are engaged in deceptive behavior.”

Roughly 55 million accounts followed one of the network's Facebook pages, and 92,000 followed one or more of its Instagram accounts, Facebook says, adding that the organization spent about $9.5 million on Facebook ads.

By the way, if you removed all the foreign influence operation income, what does Facebook's income look like?

From reporting today by Makena Kelly at The Verge:

On Friday, Facebook and Twitter shut down a network of fake accounts that pushed pro-Trump messages all while “masquerading” as Americans with AI-generated faces as profile photos.

In a blog post, Facebook connected the accounts to a US-based media company called The BL that has ties to Epoch Media Group. In August, NBC News first reported that Epoch Media Group was pushing messages in support of President Donald Trump across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/yi02w8Q_4MU/facebook-twitter-kill-55-mil.html

If you smoke, you know there's nothing like the hit you get from a waterpipe. You also know that smooth hit gets balanced out a little by the refilling you have to do - not to mention the cleaning.

Finally, somebody's taken the basic design of the old reliable water smoker and added some much-needed tweaks. Enter the Heir Waterpipe.

Nothing has really changed in the mechanics of the thing, which is hard to improve on. Each hit still travels through a reservoir of water, which cools off the smoke before it enters your lungs.

The difference is in the details with the Heir. The glass water chamber removes with a simple screw, taking a lot of the work out of the act of getting it ready. Just pour and pack.

The bowl also has a wide, saucer-like rim to catch all the stray bits you might sprinkle in when loading up your smokeables. The smoking chamber is elongated, allowing the smoke to travel longer and therefore cooling it down even more than usual. Finally, the tilted design ensures that you won't need to bend your neck while taking a hit.

Know somebody who could use a good smoke this year? The Heir Waterpipe is over 20% off the MSRP, and you can take an extra 15% off that final price by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15.

  Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/ZIUVkbZEFVU/the-heir-is-everything-a-water.html

It's not just the CBC and the Wall Street Journal -- I was delighted to see this morning that Radicalized, my 2019 book of four science fiction novellas made the LA Public Library's list of the top books of 2019! "As always his writing is sharp and clear, covering the absurdities that surround and infiltrate our lives, and predicts new ones waiting for us just around the corner. A compelling, thought provoking, macabre funny read." Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/3SHz8Unj3Ks/hometown-accolade.html

Last month, Propublica published a characteristically blockbuster piece on the use of "quiet rooms" in Illinois schools, especially in special ed programs: these are a euphemism for solitary confinement, and their use is so cruel and grotesque that Propublica's reporting prompted state level action to ban quiet rooms in schools and reform the policy on their use.

It's predictable, I suppose, that schools that would subject young children to this kind of cruelty wouldn't stop there.

Illinois teachers and other educational personnel are trained in "restraint" -- that is pinning them down, putting them in painful compliance holds, etc. Teachers are only supposed to use this techniques to address urgent safety issues, but Propublica found that a quarter of the time, students are restrained for no documented safety reason.

Students in restraint aren't just tackled -- they might be held, pinned to the ground, for half an hour or longer until they stop trying to move. In at least two dozen incidents, this resulted in injuries to children that were so severe that an ambulance was summoned. (Propublica only audited records related to a subset of schools, so these problems might be more widespread than is documented -- these incidents are not closely tracked by the state or individual school districts).

The students who were put in restraint without a safety reason were instead punished for infractions like running in the hallway, doing headstands. Students who had medical conditions that made it unsafe to restrain them were nevertheless subjected to restraint. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/DIG43ka8i_8/pinned-unable-to-breathe.html

Gretchen McCulloch is the internet's favorite linguist, whose outstanding 2019 book Because Internet explores how statistical methods can, for the first time, be applied to large amounts of informal communications, because for the first time, a huge volume of those communications are a) written and b) digital.

In a new op-ed for Wired, McCulloch discusses the 2019 man-bites-dog phenomenon of young people making fun of how old people talk (normally, the quirks of younger peoples' speech are relentlessly mocked, stereotyped and weaponized by their elders -- this is especially true of the speech of young women, see also: vocal fry, nasal talking, and upspeak).

A central tenet of McCulloch's work is that your written discourse is largely determined by when you got on the internet (and this is strongly correlated with how old you are), and there are several characteristic (or, possibly, stereotypical) elements of "Boomerspeak" that form the basis of several online communities in which young people mock their elders.

The three most obvious Boomerspeak markers are "the dot dot dot, repeated commas, and the period at the end of a text message," which are joined by "random mid-sentence capitalization, typing in all caps, double-spacing after a period, signing your name at the end of a text message, and confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji." I'm a Gen Xer, but I sometimes sign my text messages, but only because I frequently end up texting with near-strangers (I fucking hate texting, so when I do, it's because there's someone I need to communicate with who prefers it, and those people are generally not in my age cohort), so I don't assume I'm in their address book. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Kbmd3j31IAk/dot-dot-dot.html

When Americans get their paycheck every month, there are a ton of deductions from it -- some represent money taken by state governments, some by the feds, but one of the largest line-items is the amount taken to pay a private insurance company for some of the most expensive, least comprehensive medical insurance offered in any country on the planet.

The fact that this isn't a government-levied fee means that formally, it's not a "tax" -- but it is money that gets creamed off of your pay, and you don't really have a choice in the matter. Buying "cheap insurance" isn't an option, because there isn't "cheap health care" to step in when you have a heart attack.

Other rich countries pay half as much per-capita on healthcare (10% of GDP rather than 20%), making America's health system the least efficient in the world. The good news is that this means that are tons of savings to be realized by eliminating the useless intermediaries -- health insurers -- and the useless work they create (administrators) and the worse-than-useless asshole profiteers (the private-equity backed medical services and pharma companies) that gouge the sick and injured.

As economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (previously) explains in The Guardian, replacing America's failing, expensive, lethal boondoggle with a publicly administered system would result in nearly all Americans having more money at the end of the month, not less -- and in addition, we'd halt medical bankruptcies and ensure that every American would have access to world-quality care.

As one illustration, it’s possible to see how the tax plans of the leading Democratic primary candidates would affect tax rates for each group of the population.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_o-XC4L9Q9E/sick-america.html

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/iemGD8MOlWA/tories-vs-reality.html

I must have this Baby Yoda!

I want to see what happens when an incredibly powerful force user is raised by a person who disintegrates car thieves.

Star Wars The Black Series The Child Toy 1.1-Inch The Mandalorian Collectible Action Figure, Toys for Kids Ages 4 and Up via Amazon Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/4P0ePcjt0_Q/darling-hasbro-the-child-w.html

Every year, I record a short podcast with my daughter, Poesy. Originally, we'd just sing Christmas carols, but with Poesy being nearly 12, we've had a moratorium on singing. This year, I interviewed Poe about her favorite Youtubers, books, apps, and pass-times, as well as her feelings on data-retention (meh) and horses (love 'em). And we even manage to squeeze in a song! Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/UmH-KXQZcCg/nearly-12.html

Every year, the nonprofit Neural Correlate Society, an organization "that promotes scientific research into the neural correlates of perception and cognition," holds a competition for the Best Illusion of the Year. This year's winner is the above "Dual Axis Illusion" created by Frank Force (USA).

"This spinning shape appears to defy logic by rotating around both the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time!" reads the description. "To make things even more confusing, the direction of rotation is also ambiguous. Some visual cues in the video will help viewers change their perception."

Below, second prize winner "Change the Color" by Haruaki Fukuda (Japan) and third prize winner "The Rotating Circles Illusion" by Ryan E.B. Mruczek and Gideon Paul Caplovitz (USA).

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/0DxreqAPXGE/see-the-winners-of-the-best-op.html