Links 3/3/08 « naked capitalism

Monday, March 3, 2008

Links 3/3/08

Doctors `Repeatedly or Deliberately’ Break FDA Drug-Trial Rules Bloomberg

Government records incorrectly kill off thousands, and there’s no easy fix MSNBC. Proving you are alive when, say, the Social Security Administration has deemed you to be dead is no trivial matter.

Rationality Quotes 10 Overcoming Bias

What debt collectors can’t do to you MarketWatch. Another sign of the times.

Fine-tuning the placebo effect Clive Cookson, Financial Times. More on the antidepressant debate.

Antidote du jour:

4 Comments:

Anonymous says:

March 3, 2008 at 2:15 am

Nice kitty pixs!!

However, back to harsh reality:
Rising prices threaten millions with starvation, despite bumper crops

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/rising-prices-threaten-millions-with-starvation-despite-bumper-crops-790319.html

Now cars, as well as cows, are out-competing hungry people, through the increasing use of corn for biofuels. By next year, predicts Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, almost a third of the US corn crop – which has traditionally helped to feed 100 nations – will go for fuel. Mr Brown points out that, in an increasingly fuel-scarce world, the price of corn will henceforth be tied to the mounting price of oil.
Already, 25 million people in India are believed to have cut their meals from two to one a day. The calorie intake from an average meal in El Salvador has fallen by half in less than two years. Riots have broken out from Mexico to Mauritania.

Anonymous says:

March 3, 2008 at 2:31 am

Some pix of bears in this one:

Expert: Arctic polar cap may disappear this summer
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/01/content_7696460.htm

The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.
    The shrinking of the Arctic ice cap has been astonishing, Orheim said in an interview with Xinhua.
    ”Ice sheet hit the historical low of 3 million square km duringthe hottest weeks last summer, while it covered 7.5 million squarekm on average before the year 2000, ” he said.
    ”If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007,the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions,” Orheim said.

Anonymous says:

March 3, 2008 at 2:37 am

ritish lawmakers, criticizing bankers and financial supervisors over their handling of the global credit crisis, warned investment banks to make their financial products more transparent or face extra regulation.

Lawmakers want to avoid “detailed regulation,” although such an approach may be needed unless banks address the “problem of overly complex products,” the House of Commons Treasury Committee said in a report today.

Anonymous says:

March 3, 2008 at 1:08 pm

Add this to your drunk kitty photos:

According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House is proposing a six billion dollar secretive system that would monitor Internet traffic and collect personal data.
The proposal from President George Bush would be designed to protect US communications networks from attacks by terrorists, spies and hackers but is stirring controversy and could prove a hard sell to Congress and the American public amid divisiveness about other Government-run surveillance programs.

In addition, the newspaper quotes officials familiar with the initiative as stating that protecting private computer systems would likely require the Government to install sensors on private and company networks. This would require the placement of millions of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which would allow the Government, retailers and others to closely monitor consumer behavior and activity.

The Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association (iMEGA) lobby group is critical of the Bush plan and has also scrutinized the European Union’s desire to have IP numbers considered as personal data.

“That policy puts the European Union on a collision course with web giants like Google and Yahoo as well as a growing number of popular web 2.0 services that utilize IP addresses to personalize and improve the relevance of their offerings to web users,” read a statement from iMEGA.

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