Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

An important category of open data that boosts transparency concerns basic drug safety information. Last month, Techdirt wrote about the AllTrials initiative that seeks to have key information about clinical trials placed in the public domain. As part of a wider move towards greater openness, the European Medicines Agency, the main body that licenses drugs in Europe, is starting to make available information that has hitherto been withheld.

Although doctors and patients are rejoicing at this greater transparency, not everyone is pleased by the move. AbbVie, the pharma company spun out of the Abbott Laboratories at the beginning of this year, for example, is taking legal action to stop it:

AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company has sought an injunction to block Europe's medicines regulator from releasing "confidential" and "commercially-sensitive" information on its blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug, a spokeswoman for the U.S. drugmaker confirmed on Sunday.

The Chicago-based company had taken legal action against the European Medicines Agency to stop it from releasing data on the effects in individual patients in clinical trials for its drug Humira, the Financial Times reported earlier on Sunday.

Another EU body, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is also opening up:

The project is part of EFSA's continuing commitment to openness and addresses recommendations made by an independent evaluation report of the Authority's performance to further enhance transparency in its decision-making processes. EFSA's Science Strategy also highlights the importance of the Authority playing a leading role in making relevant scientific data more accessible to all interested parties.

What makes this a little confusing is that the company is quoted in that article as saying that it "firmly supports transparency" -- and yet here it is fighting tooth and nail against precisely that. Apparently, Monsanto also wants the regulatory environment in Europe to be "science-based". Modern science requires experimental data to be made available so that anyone can check the validity of the conclusions that have been drawn from it. If it can't be scrutinized, the conclusions can't be confirmed, and it's not science. So, given its call for "science-based" regulation, why does the company want to keep that data hidden? A cynic might almost suspect that Monsanto and AbbVie have something to hide.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Compare the dangers of air travel to those of driving. To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in "toll and physical damage," while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion. Mueller and Stewart estimate that government spending on homeland security over the 2002-11 period accounted for around $580 billion of that total.

Jarschke didn't bother to patent his invention. There are other things more important than money.

"When we get safety for this hospital, that's going to be way better than money for me," he said.

C. Mobile phones, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, Wikispaces, Google, and whatever other technologies you’re blocking are not inherently evil. Stop demonizing them and focus on people’s behavior, not the tools, particularly when it comes to making policy.

F. You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.

G. The ‘online predators will prey on your schoolchildren’ argument is a false bogeyman, a scare tactic that is fed to us by the media, politicians, law enforcement, and computer security vendors. The number of reported incidents in the news of this occurring is zero.

H. Federal laws do not require your draconian filtering. You can’t point the finger somewhere else. You have to own it yourself.

K. There’s a difference between a teachable moment and a punishable moment. Lean toward the former as much as possible.

N. If you’re prohibiting teachers from being ‘friends’ with students online, are you also prohibiting them from being ‘friends’ with students in neighborhoods, at church, in volunteer organizations, at the mall, and in other non-school settings?

S. Unless you like losing lawsuits, remember that students and staff have speech and privacy rights, particularly off-campus. Remember that any dumb decision you make is Internet fodder and has a good chance of going viral online. Do you really want to be the next stupid administrator story on The Huffington Post?

Z. Educating is always, always more powerful than blocking.

The study involved 108 people, equally divided into three age groups: 20s, 40s, and 60s. For each person, the researchers correlated answers on a questionnaire with data collected from on-board sensors during a 40-minute test drive up Interstate 93 north of Boston. The drivers commanded a black Volvo SUV tricked out with an eye tracker, heart and skin monitors, video cameras facing out the front and back windows, on-board sensors, and other research gear.

"These are not 'oh-my-god' differences," says study leader Bryan Reimer, a human factors engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "They are subtle clues indicative of more aggressive driving." What's more, he says, other studies have linked these behaviors to an increased rate of crashes. "It's clear [from the scientific literature] that cell phones in and of themselves impair the ability to manage the demands of driving," Reimer says. But "the fundamental problem may be the behavior of the individuals willing to pick up the technology."

Looks like the satnav manufacturer TomTom has just provided us with an answer (found via Slashdot):

Despite the positives, recent studies have highlighted some major drawbacks of open source mapping, specifically with regard to safety, accuracy and reliability. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included 'a high number of fields and forest trails' classified as roads.

The fact that TomTom has chosen to highlight this current deficiency in OpenStreetMap shows two things. First, that it is watching the open source alternative very closely, and secondly, that it is sufficiently worried by what it sees to start sowing some FUD in people's minds. But as history has shown with both open source server software and open source encyclopaedias, once vendors of proprietary systems adopt such a tactic against up-and-coming free rivals, it's a clear sign that it's already too late to do anything about it, and that their days of undisputed dominance are numbered.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

We must ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators. That means doing everything possible to block sex offenders from using gaming networks as a vehicle to prey on underage victims.

While the intent here is admirable, schemes like this one do very little to keep children safe and trample on the right to free speech and expression.

And the problem this initiative is trying to solve is almost non-existent. Children are almost always abused by people they know – a friend or family member – not by people they interact with while playing video games online.

At Microsoft, we continually evaluate ways to manage safety for our 40 million Xbox Live members and particularly for children on our service. Our partnership with the Office of the New York Attorney General helps further this cause.

Section V.5.b of the document titled Visual-Manual NHTSA Driver Distraction Guidelines for In-Vehicle Electronic Devices says that "Dynamic, continuously moving maps are not recommended."

The section, which deals with photographs or videos, says that static or near-static maps for the purpose of driving directions are acceptable. Near static is defined as being updated every few seconds.

Every current installed navigation system uses the car as a fixed point, and shows the map moving around it. NHTSA wants that changed so as to keep the map fixed. Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image. The recommendation seems to suggest that the position of the car could only be updated every couple of seconds. Likewise, the map could be refreshed once the car has left the currently displayed area.

[A]lthough NHTSA includes the results of driver distraction studies in the guidelines, it has no testing directly related to using a navigation system. Instead there are more general conclusions against any tasks that require looking at a device for periods of more than 2 seconds, or a series of glances that amount to more than 12 seconds at at time.

I would think that looking at a static map, and trying to find the particular street which you are on, would by much more time-consuming than seeing your exact position on a dynamic map.

The NHTSA guidelines also conclude that drivers can not comprehend more than 30 characters of text with a quick glance. Here is an example of 30 characters of text: "The new NHTSA guidelines make navig".

Along with recommending that in-vehicle electronics display no more than 30 text characters at a time, the guidelines also take a position against scrolling text, so you could not read the rest of that sentence by having it roll on by.

Most people might merely glance down to read the current song title off the screen as they drive, but the NHTSA guidelines assume that when text is displayed, we drivers will be compelled to read all of it.

The NHTSA document offers some figures that do not necessarily support the hours of work that must have been put in to come up with the guidelines. The document shows the number of accident reports for 2006 to 2010.

In 2010, the number of police-reported accidents amounted to 5,409,000. Of those, 17 percent were reportedly caused by driver distraction, an ample amount. However, only about half of one percent of the total crashes were caused by distraction from an in-vehicle system.

• The return of the accordioned road map, unfolded across the lap/passenger seat, scanned quickly between swerves and curses by the not-distracted-at-all driver who only occasionally has to drag the whole works across the steering wheel to pinpoint the difference between 1st Street and 1st Ave. at 45 mph.
• People turn to their smartphones, most of which have built-in GPS apps or have any number of them available to download. Instead of quickly glancing at a large screen at dashboard level, they'll be glancing furtively downward towards their non-driving hand in order to avoid being ticketed for Distracted Driving via Cellphone Usage.

My recommendation to NHTSA would be to spend its work hours drawing up a good driver training curriculum. Good, well-trained drivers are the best way to minimize the number of accidents.

There is still a small safety argument that resonates. ... If something goes wrong—which is admittedly rare, but not unheard of—it is probably to the advantage of all involved that they're paying at least some attention to what is going on around them. As safety measures go, they don't get much cheaper or more inoffensive.

But the more important reason to preserve the current rules is a spiritual one. There is something to be said for not being transfixed by an electronic gizmo. These devices have encroached on almost every aspect of modern life. Even in places that should be sacrosanct—at the cinema or theater, for example—sporadic buzzing, bleeping, and illumination courtesy of pocket-sized gizmos is abundant. I freely admit, I'm no angel here. Many's the time that I've interrupted a romantic meal at Buffalo Wild Wings to investigate a surprising Buzztime answer.

Those brief stints in which we must turn off our machines—the few minutes between push back from the gate and the extinguishing of the seatbelt sign, and the corresponding blackout at landing time—are something almost unique in modern life. Those rare moments in which our entertainment must come from within, not without. This is a perfect time to reflect on the journey ahead or the trip just taken. An all-too infrequent opportunity to quietly contemplate the world we live in and our place in the universe. A brief calm juncture in our otherwise hectic lives.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that the 0.5 seconds it takes to drop a Kindle and start screaming is going to cost anyone their life in a plane crash, but at least Bright admits that's the "small" argument. Unfortunately the only thing that's "big" about his other argument is the ego it must have taken to make it. I too think there's "something to be said" for switching off your gadgets once in awhile, but I'm not about to tell anyone it's necessary for their spiritual health, and I fear declaring cinemas to be "sacrosanct" is a bit much.

But even if you subscribe to this school of thought in full—and are the type of person who isn't satisfied with turning off your own gadgets, instead needing to tell other people to turn theirs off too—what does any of this have to do with airplanes? Every time a new technological tool is adopted into a new part of the average person's routine, someone is out there complaining that it "encroaches" on our lives, and those people have yet to accomplish anything except making themselves look increasingly foolish as time goes on. Many of us still know at least one holdout who bizarrely refuses to even own a cellphone (but will gladly borrow them from others when the need arises), and regardless of whatever "spiritual" benefits they think they are reaping, it generally hasn't delivered them to nirvana. Just because airplanes happen, randomly, to be one of the places that people are forced to tear themselves away from their gadgets, it doesn't make them temples of the Luddite religion. Philosophical questions didn't enter into the inception of the FAA's ban, and they shouldn't enter into the debate about its future.

Dear Google,

I am David Janeson, President of Jan Drugs. Jandrugs.com, based in Winnipeg, Canada, is a brick-and -mortar regulated and licensed pharmacy and fills prescriptions for Americans from Canada and other countries. We advertised with Google Adwords, and some small percentage of the money that you are now forfeiting to the U.S. Department of Justice is due to the money we spent to advertise with you. We provide a valuable service to our patients, and Google by allowing us to advertise, helped many Americans obtain the prescriptions they require at prices they can better afford.

Many of our customers first found us through a Google ad. Jan Drugs is blessed to have had over 100,000 American customers order from us over the years. Our customers universally have ordered medicines from us because they were prescribed a prescription drug that they found prohibitively expensive in the US. Jan Drugs is proud that we have helped many peoples lives by helping them find the prescription drugs they need at prices they can afford. Jan Drugs sells medications for conditions including depression, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer and epilepsy. Jan Drugs and it's customers take the position that it is ridiculous to accept that uninsured or underinsured Americans should be expected to pay higher prices than everywhere else in the world.

When Google first cancelled our advertising account we were disappointed. We believed that Google's existing pharmacy verification program should have been strengthened rather than cancelled and that the end of the verification program made the internet a more dangerous place for Americans to find their needed medications. Our pharmacy willingly participated in Google’s chosen certification program, PharmacyChecker, which was required for Jan Drugs to advertise the sale of non-controlled prescription drugs through AdWords to U.S. consumers. Now that we see that Google has paid a very large forfeiture, partly for accepting advertising for companies like Jan Drugs, we understand why you took the position you did.

Jan Drugs believes that access to reliable and affordable medication is a right. We and companies like Jan Drugs have helped millions of Americans save on their prescription medications over the internet in the same way as if they had personally visited us in Canada. Google should be proud of its' previous efforts to make the internet a safer place to purchase medications as millions have benefited and Jan Drugs believes that Google being fined is against the interests of Americans and morally wrong.

Thank you and kind regards,

David Janeson and the Jan Drugs team
250-530 Kenaston Blvd.
Winnipeg MB R3N 1Z4
Canada

• NIST does not do product testing
• NIST did not test AIT machines for safety
• NIST measured the dose of a single machine and compared it against the standard

The library came up with the rule so that customers can't hide their faces, said Toni Grasso, the libraries' administrative manager in the office of programs and partnerships.

"We have security cameras in place, so like banks and courthouses, we're asking people to remove sunglasses and anything that hides the face, for the security of staff and customers," Grasso said.

With the new law, the state would get a cut of the local governments' newfound revenue source, leaving the local governments with a smaller share of the fines to pay private camera companies.

The state estimates that its revenues would increase by about $38 million in 2010-11, compared with $12 million for local governments. By 2013-14, the state would take in about $125 million under the law, compared with approximately $78 million for local governments.

That's because the law sends $70 to $100 of each $158 fine to the state, while requiring local governments to pay camera vendors in lump sums, not a per-violation trickle.

The irony here is that, while we're accustomed to talking about the tension between privacy and security--to the point where it sometimes seems like people think greater invasion of privacy ipso facto yields greater security--one of the most serious and least discussed problems with built-in surveillance is the security risk it creates.

Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a daily basis, which causes the system to be "clogged" -- overloaded -- with information having nothing to do with Terrorism. As a result, actually relevant information ends up obscured or ignored.