natural medicine

Monday, January 31, 2011

Gluten-free January Participants: Take the Survey!

Matt Lentzner, Janine Jagger and I have designed a survey for participants of Gluten-free January, using the online application StatCrunch. Janine is an epidemiologist who studies healthcare worker safety at the University of Virginia; she has experience designing surveys for data collection so we're glad to have her on board. The survey will allow us to systematically gather and analyze data on the results of Gluten-free January. It will be 100 percent anonymous-- none of your answers will be connected to your identity in any way.

This survey has the potential to be really informative, but it will only work if you respond! The more people who take the survey, the more informative it will be, even if you didn't avoid gluten for a single day. If not very many people respond, it will be highly susceptible to "selection bias", where perhaps the only people who responded are people who improved the most, skewing the results.

Matt will be sending the survey out to everyone on his mailing list. Please complete it, even if you didn't end up avoiding gluten at all! There's no shame in it. The survey has responses built in for people who didn't avoid gluten. Your survey will still be useful!

We have potential data from over 500 people. After we crunch the numbers, I'll share them on the blog.

Gluten-free January Participants: Take the Survey!

Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Would you call Gary Becker for marital advice?

Here is someone who did.

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Government alleges overcharging by Oracle - San Francisco Chronicle

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that Oracle Corp. defrauded the government in a software deal that involved hundreds of millions of dollars.

The contract with the General Services Administration, in effect from 1998 to 2006, required the Redwood City software giant to disclose and extend any commercial discounts to government customers, the government said Thursday. The suit claims that Oracle misrepresented its sales practices in several ways, forcing the government - and by extension taxpayers - to overpay.

"We take seriously allegations that a government contractor has dealt dishonestly with the United States," Tony West, assistant attorney general for the department's civil division, said in a statement. "When contractors misrepresent their business practices to the government, taxpayers suffer."

The lawsuit against Oracle was originally brought in 2007 by whistle-blower Paul Frascella, a former senior director of contract services at Oracle, under the False Claims Act. The law provides financial incentives for private citizens with knowledge of fraud to file suits on behalf of the government. The Justice Department joined the suit Thursday.

Under the act, Frascella can seek between 15 and 25 percent of any damages awarded in the case. The government, which filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, didn't specify the amount it was seeking.

Big award possible

The fact that the contract was worth hundreds of millions of dollars could propel potential damages toward the upper range seen in these cases, said Eric Talley, professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law. Similar False Claims Act suits, under which damages can be tripled from the amount of the fraud, have recently been settled for about $100 million.

The General Services Agency sealed an agreement with Oracle that allowed it to buy products and services at the same discounted prices granted to a vendor's most favored customers around the time of the purchase. The department often strikes such deals to avoid the considerable cost of continually negotiating numerous contracts for multiple agencies.

Winning record

David Kwok, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, is writing his dissertation on whistle-blower cases under the False Claims Act. When the Justice Department participates in the lawsuit, which happens in about one fourth of the cases, companies end up paying the government in 96 percent of those cases, he said.

The Justice Department said it collected $2.4 billion from False Claims Act suits during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Settlements total more than $24 billion since 1986, when Congress strengthened the law.

The vast majority of cases involve health care companies accused of Medicare fraud, followed by defense contractors charged with bilking the military, Kwok said.

Oracle isn't alone among accused technology companies, however. In May, EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., handed the government $87.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it overcharged the General Services Agency. NetApp Inc., the Sunnyvale storage company, paid a record $128.7 million to settle a similar case last year.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO BRING TO A VIRGINIA NURSING HOME

I like to make lists.
If I could plan for someone having to get treatment at a nursing home, even short term rehab after a surgery, I would write the following list of things to do / bring to the nursing home:

1. A Power of Attorney - appointing someone to make decisions on my behalf.

2. A Will - even people without assets should decide where their few prize possessions go

3. Family, friends, neighbors and ministers that know to visit frequently - more visitors, the better

4. A list of medications you have been on - and when the nursing home doctor prescribes new ones, call your Primary Care Physician and make sure there isn't a problem (after all - your PCP has known you for years, the nursing home just met you)

5. Whatever makes you happy - books, music, movies, the daily paper. Bring it. You wouldn't stay in hotel for 30 days without these things, would you?

6. A calender to help count the days until your loved one gets to go home!

7. Names of home health agencies in case your loved one is able to return home with some daily assistance

Be organized. Be an advocate and be ready to engage in the decisions that are being made at the nursing home.