Learning
How America Got Hooked on a Deadly Drug and How Rival Opioid Makers Sought To Cash In On Alarm Over OxyContin’s Dangers
Purdue’s 1996-2002 marketing plans for OxyContin, which Kaiser Health News made public this year for the first time, offer an unprecedented look at how that company spent millions of dollars to push opioids for growing legions of pain sufferers. Some of those drugmakers’ sales promotions downplayed or ignored the risks of taking opioids, or made false claims about their safety, federal regulators have asserted in warning letters to the companies. A wave of lawsuits demanding reimbursement and accountability for the opioid crisis now ravaging communities has heightened awareness about how and when drug makers realized the potential dangers of their products. more »
What Research Says About How Bad Information Spreads Online
"A 2017 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives examined the consumption of false news in the US during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. In a survey of 1,208 U.S. adults, 15 percent said they remembered seeing false news stories, and 8 percent acknowledged seeing one of these stories and believing it. The study’s authors — Hunt Allcott, an associate economics professor at New York University, and Matthew Gentzkow, an economics professor at Stanford University — estimated that US adults, on average, 'read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period.'" more »
Scout Report ... Pride and Prejudice On Open Bookshelf, Biological Macromolecules, Iranica, Volcanism, Phantom Islands, English Playbooks, Chemistry of Life, Logic Problems and Brain Teasers
On June 21, 2018, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) introduced Open Bookshelf, a one-stop shop for hundreds of e-books that are freely available online. This collection, which currently features over 1,000 books, includes titles that are in the public domain along with titles that are Creative Commons licensed. These titles are selected by the Curation Corps, a team of librarians from across the country that includes public, school, and academic librarians. The books available on Open Bookshelf reflect the diversity of the Curation Corps: the collection features classical literature (including Pride and Prejudice and Little Women), textbooks, academic titles, and children's books. more »
Retraction Watch: A Cancer Researcher Said She Collected Blood From 98 People; It Was All Her Own
A researcher collected her own blood and forged the labels so it would appear to be samples from nearly 100 people, according to a new finding of research misconduct released today by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The former researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center swapped her own blood samples for those taken from 98 human subjects. The misconduct affects two grant progress reports and two papers; one paper has already been retracted, and the former “research interviewer” — Maria Cristina Miron Elqutub — has agreed to correct or retract the other. more »