ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Janis Ian on music downloads, the RIAA, and how this affects musicians. She points out that, in many cities, the only way to hear new music, or new acts, is to go to the Internet: radio is all Top-40. [Thanks to McTavish]
The LA Times has obtained documents showing how Warner-Lambert falsified safety data to get the FDA to approve, and doctors to prescribe, Rezulin for Type II diabetes.
The newly acquired materials show that company management rebuffed employees who questioned liver-injury totals from clinical studies that excluded 38% of the cases. At the time, Warner-Lambert was assuring doctors nationwide that the drug was as safe as a placebo, the harmless pill used as a control in medical testing....One of the central figures in the documents is Dr. Randall W. Whitcomb, Warner-Lambert's vice president for diabetes research. Without telling the FDA, Whitcomb used an unorthodox method to count the number of liver injuries among patients who used Rezulin while using different criteria to count liver injuries among patients taking a placebo. The result trimmed the number of cases the company reported to the regulators and to doctors nationwide, giving a markedly more benign view of the drug's risks....
When an Arcadia woman, Rosa Delia Valenzuela, suffered liver failure and died in December 1998 while taking the drug in a Warner-Lambert study, company representatives argued against promptly alerting the hundreds of doctors nationwide who continued to conduct the research on more than 2,000 other patients.
As the deaths of U.S. patients mounted, Warner-Lambert offered to--and did--reimburse doctors if they got sued for prescribing Rezulin. The American Medical Assn. has warned doctors against such reimbursements, terming them "unacceptable gifts."
These documents are from civil lawsuits; the plaintiffs have won in four of the six that have reached a jury. Whitcomb, and possibly Pfizer (which bought Warner-Lambert after these events) could be criminally liable for deliberately concealing an important fact about the safety of this drug. It's extremely unlikely, however, that they'll be tried, let alone convicted, for homicide in any of the 66 deaths of people who took Rezulin based on the false belief in its safety.
Not all medical errors are crimes--but deliberately hiding evidence of the dangers of a drug from doctors and their patients is (in my opinion--I Am Not A Lawyer) both criminal negligence and, in Whitcomb's case, malpractice.
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A new fossil from Namibia is the oldest hard-shelled specimen yet, by 15 million years.
The creature's hard, shelly parts are far more complex than anything else found from this time.It gives researchers an insight into a period of Earth history just before lifeforms on our planet are thought to have gone through many rapid changes....
"It's when multi-celled animals started to get hard skeletons. This [organism] has a much more complex biomineralised shell than we've seen before. It's also very big - it can reach up to a metre."
The fossil is primitive enough that it could be either a coral or a sponge:
"It's a characteristic of a lot of the Precambrian organisms that they share features of many groups," Dr Wood told BBC News Online. "They are what are known as stem groups. In other words, they haven't diverged into all the groups we know today."
The good news for Edison Schools is that the Supremes just voted, 5-4, in favor of school vouchers. The bad news is that their CEO owes them $9.2 million dollars, a loan whose collateral--company stock--is now essentially worthless.
That stock is now worth maybe a tenth of what it was back in the day. In the real world, Whittle would now be facing the dreaded margin call. The company would at least demand some other collateral to secure the loan.But are they? That's not clear....
Today I chatted with a stock analyst who covers Edison and he told me that the company has been less than clear about what it has done or plans to do about this problem. When I called Edison's Chief Financial Officer Adam Field, one of his assistants told me that everyone at the company was busy today and that no one was available to answer the question. Tomorrow? She told me that everyone would probably be busy tomorrow as well.
When the SEC calls, they'll have to answer the phone.
Magnetic wood is actually two layers of wood with a thin layer of nickel-zinc ferrite sandwiched between them. The idea is to block cell phone transmissions, for theatres, restaurants, or anyplace else where the conversations would be a distraction.
Panels that absorb radio waves could also help with a problem emerging in Japanese cities, where many homes are being fitted with wireless computing networks. If several networks are set up close together, they can interfere with each other.I doubt that the people who want in-home wireless computing would want to block mobile phone signals, but they might use this stuff on the wall that adjoins the neighbor's separate network.
Two new species of monkey have been found in Brazil.
The US Supreme Court has just struck a small blow for the Constitution, with regard to the death penalty: the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury applies to the decision whether to impose a death sentence after conviction. This retroactively overturns the death sentences of about 150 people currently on Death Row.
Referencing Apprendi v. New Jersey, a ruling from 2000 about hate crime sentencing:
``The right to trial by jury guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment would be senselessly diminished if it encompassed the factfinding necessary to increase a defendant's sentence by two years, but not the factfinding necessary to put him to death,'' Ginsburg wrote. ``We hold that the Sixth Amendment applies to both.''
The current Iraqi government, as a matter of policy, tortures children whose parents offend it. Meanwhile, for foreign consumption, Saddam Hussein inflates the numbers of dead infants in Iraq. The mass funerals broadcast for the Western media are arranged by storing corpses for months, and shipping them all over the country.
The dead babies are blamed by Saddam's regime on cancers and birth defects which first appeared in 1991 and were, it says, caused by depleted uranium weapons. While no one should underestimate the lethality of these weapons and the stupidity of the US military machine, the claim does not make radiological sense.
Note: the Observer is not a right-wing paper, or a supporter of the Shrub's policies.
Polio has officially been eradicated in Europe.
If Pat Buchanan is Deep Throat, it's the best thing he's ever done.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star: a young star called HD150 "winks", eclipsed on a 48-day cycle, for 18 days at a time, by a cloud of dust, rocks, and/or asteroids.
Humans have been infested by tapeworms since before we became human--and we gave them to pigs, not the other way around.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wonders why the US would announce "secret" plans to assassinate Saddam Hussein:
I recall during my time as a chief inspector in Iraq the dozens of extremely fit "missile experts" and "logistics specialists" who frequented my inspection teams and others. Drawn from U.S. units such as Delta Force or from CIA paramilitary teams such as the Special Activities Staff (both of which have an ongoing role in the conflict in Afghanistan), these specialists had a legitimate part to play in the difficult cat-and-mouse effort to disarm Iraq. So did the teams of British radio intercept operators I ran in Iraq from 1996 to 1998--which listened in on the conversations of Hussein's inner circle--and the various other intelligence specialists who were part of the inspection effort.The presence of such personnel on inspection teams was, and is, viewed by the Iraqi government as an unacceptable risk to its nation's security....
Absent any return of weapons inspectors, no one seems willing to challenge the Bush administration's assertions of an Iraqi threat. If Bush has a factual case against Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction, he hasn't made it yet.
He's speculating, but it makes an eerie sort of sense: a gambit to get Iraq to refuse inspections, which then becomes an excuse for war. Or maybe someone in the US government has decided that press conferences are cheaper than an actual invasion, and will play at least as well in the mid-term elections: they get to act tough, without having to deal with US casualties.
Feeding zoo animals properly is a complicated task, involving full-time nutritionists who sort out vitamin supplements, calcium for newly hatched adjutant storks, and some decidedly clever tricks:
Then there are the highly endangered San Clemente Island loggerhead shrikes, whose hand-raised chicks require lots of water. But since the tiny chicks can easily aspirate liquid, here at the San Diego Zoo they are fed honeybee larvae, a food that is 80 percent water enclosed in capsules that the tiny chicks can swallow safely.
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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