#Benefits of a Market Research Report:

[electronalytics]

Electronic Timers Market Emerging Trends and Forecast by 2017-2032

The global electronic timers market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period, 2018-2028.

The competitive analysis of the Electronic Timers Market offers a comprehensive examination of key market players. It encompasses detailed company profiles, insights into revenue distribution, innovations within their product portfolios, regional market presence, strategic development plans, pricing strategies, identified target markets, and immediate future initiatives of industry leaders. This section serves as a valuable resource for readers to understand the driving forces behind competition and what strategies can set them apart in capturing new target markets.

Market projections and forecasts are underpinned by extensive primary research, further validated through precise secondary research specific to the Electronic Timers Market. Our research analysts have dedicated substantial time and effort to curate essential industry insights from key industry participants, including Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), top-tier suppliers, distributors, and relevant government entities.

Benefits of a Market Research Report:

Informed Decision-Making: Market research reports provide critical data and insights that enable businesses to make informed decisions. This can include decisions related to product development, market entry, expansion, and investment.

Competitive Advantage: By staying up-to-date with market trends and competitor strategies, companies can gain a competitive advantage. Market research helps identify gaps and opportunities in the market.

Risk Mitigation: Understanding market dynamics and potential challenges allows companies to proactively address risks and uncertainties, reducing the likelihood of costly setbacks.

Targeted Marketing: Market research helps in identifying and understanding the target audience, enabling companies to tailor their marketing efforts for maximum effectiveness and customer engagement.

Product Development and Improvement: Research reports provide insights into consumer preferences and needs, aiding in the development and improvement of products or services that meet market demands.

Key Trends in Market Research Reports:

Digital Transformation: Market research is increasingly leveraging digital technologies, including AI and big data analytics, to gather, process, and analyze data more efficiently.

Globalization: With the globalization of markets, companies are relying on market research to assess opportunities in international markets and navigate cross-border complexities.

Sustainability and ESG: There's a growing focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and market research is often used to understand and align with sustainability trends and consumer preferences.

Data Privacy and Security: As data privacy regulations evolve, market research reports are adapting to address concerns related to data collection, handling, and protection.

Predictive Analytics: The use of predictive analytics in market research is on the rise, allowing businesses to anticipate market shifts and consumer behavior more accurately. This trend is particularly prominent in forecasting future market conditions.

Receive the FREE Sample Report of Electronic Timers Market Research Insights https://stringentdatalytics.com/sample-request/electronic-timers-market/3309/

Market Segmentations:

Global Electronic Timers Market: By Company • Honeywell • Legrand • OMRON • Leviton • Intermatic • Schneider Electric • Panasonic • Theben Group • Kubler Group • Eaton • Hager • Enerlites • Crouzet • Autonics Corporation • Ascon Tecnologic • Marsh Bellofram • Trumeter • SELEC Controls Pvt. Ltd. • Tempatron • Sisel Engineering Inc. • ANLY Electronics Co.,Ltd • Kübler Group • Dwyer Instruments • Pujing • Any Electronics Co.,Ltd

(This is a tentative list, the report on delivery will have additional companies profiled with potential/new entrants within the major shareholder market: Please subscribe to the latest sample report to know more)

Global Electronic Timers Market: By Type • Analogue Timers • Digital Timers Global Electronic Timers Market: By Application • Industrial Device • Lighting System • Others

Regional Analysis of Global Electronic Timers Market

All the regional segmentation has been studied based on recent and future trends, and the market is forecasted throughout the prediction period. The countries covered in the regional analysis of the Global Electronic Timers market report are U.S., Canada, and Mexico in North America, Germany, France, U.K., Russia, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and Rest of Europe in Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Rest of Asia-Pacific (APAC) in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East and Africa (MEA) as a part of Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Argentina, Brazil, and Rest of South America as part of South America.

Click to Purchase Electronic Timers Market Research Report @ https://stringentdatalytics.com/purchase/electronic-timers-market/3309/

Here are some key highlights you might find in a market research report:

Executive Summary: A brief summary of the report, including its purpose, methodology, key findings, and recommendations.

Market Overview: An introduction to the market, its size, and its growth potential.

Market Size and Growth: Information about the current market size and anticipated growth trends, including historical data and forecasts.

Market Segmentation: Details about how the market is divided into segments based on factors like product type, application, region, and more.

Competitive Landscape: Analysis of key players in the market, their market share, strategies, and competitive positioning.

Market Trends: Identification of current and emerging trends that are shaping the market, including technological advancements and shifts in consumer behavior.

Market Drivers: Factors that are fueling market growth, such as changing consumer preferences, regulatory changes, or technological innovation.

Market Challenges: Obstacles or issues that the market faces, such as regulatory hurdles, economic downturns, or supply chain disruptions.

Opportunities: Areas of growth and potential that can be harnessed by businesses and investors.

Consumer Behavior: Insights into consumer preferences, buying patterns, and the factors influencing purchasing decisions.

Regional Analysis: Information about the market's performance in different geographical regions, including factors specific to those regions.

Industry Best Practices: Recommendations and insights into best practices for businesses operating in the market.

Customization of the Report:

This report can be customized to meet the client’s requirements. Please connect with our sales team (sales@stringentdatalytics.com ), who will ensure that you get a report that suits your needs. You can also get in touch with our executives on +1 346 666 6655 to share your research requirements.

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About Stringent Datalytics

Stringent Datalytics offers both custom and syndicated market research reports. Custom market research reports are tailored to a specific client's needs and requirements. These reports provide unique insights into a particular industry or market segment and can help businesses make informed decisions about their strategies and operations.

Syndicated market research reports, on the other hand, are pre-existing reports that are available for purchase by multiple clients. These reports are often produced on a regular basis, such as annually or quarterly, and cover a broad range of industries and market segments. Syndicated reports provide clients with insights into industry trends, market sizes, and competitive landscapes. By offering both custom and syndicated reports, Stringent Datalytics can provide clients with a range of market research solutions that can be customized to their specific needs.

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[chloedecker0]

Optimizing Connectivity: The Role of Edge Colocation in Today’s Digital Landscape

Edge Colocation is a rising trend in the data centre industry, representing a shift towards decentralized infrastructure to meet the demands of emerging technologies. As the market evolves, companies are increasingly adopting edge colocation solutions to enhance their IT capabilities and address the challenges posed by latency-sensitive applications.

Edge colocation refers to the deployment of data centre facilities at the edge of the network, closer to end-users and devices. This approach aims to reduce latency, enhance performance, and accommodate the growing volume of data generated by IoT devices, 5G networks, and other edge computing applications.

The emergence of edge colocation is driven by the need for faster data processing and reduced latency, critical factors in industries like gaming, healthcare, and autonomous vehicles. Traditional centralized data centres face limitations in delivering real-time responses for these applications, making edge colocation an attractive solution.

Why Companies are Adopting Edge Colocation

Reduced Latency

Edge colocation minimizes data travel distances, leading to lower latency and improved application performance. This is crucial for applications requiring real-time interactions, such as online gaming and autonomous vehicles.

Scalability

Edge colocation allows companies to scale their IT infrastructure more efficiently by distributing resources across multiple edge locations. This flexibility is beneficial for businesses experiencing unpredictable growth or seasonal spikes in demand.

Enhanced Reliability

By decentralizing data centres, companies can enhance the reliability of their services. Redundant edge locations provide backup support, reducing the risk of downtime in the event of a localized failure.

Compliance and Data Sovereignty

Edge colocation helps address regulatory and compliance requirements by allowing companies to store and process data within specific geographic regions. This is particularly important in industries with strict data sovereignty regulations.

Download the sample report of Market Share: Edge Colocation

Market Intelligence Reports

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions provides valuable insights into the edge colocation market through two key reports:

Market Share: Edge Colocation, 2022, Worldwide

This report outlines the market landscape, identifying key players and their respective market shares. Understanding the competitive landscape is crucial for businesses looking to make informed decisions about their edge colocation providers.

Market Forecast: Edge Colocation, 2022–2027, Worldwide

The forecast report provides insights into the future trends and growth opportunities in the edge colocation market. This information is invaluable for companies planning their long-term IT strategies and investments in edge infrastructure.

The Significance of Market Research Reports for Edge Colocation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of edge computing, companies are increasingly turning to market research reports to navigate the complexities of edge colocation. Here’s why these reports are crucial:

Industry Insight and Trends

- Market research reports provide in-depth insights into the current state of the edge colocation market, offering a comprehensive overview of emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities.

- Understanding industry dynamics allows companies to make informed decisions about their edge computing strategies, ensuring they align with market trends.

Competitive Landscape

- Reports delve into the competitive landscape, identifying key players, their market share, and strategic initiatives.

- Companies can use this information to benchmark themselves against competitors, assess market saturation, and identify potential collaboration or differentiation opportunities.

Market Size and Forecast

- Accurate market sizing and forecasting enable businesses to gauge the growth potential of edge colocation services.

- These insights assist in strategic planning, resource allocation, and market positioning, ensuring companies are well-prepared for the future trajectory of the edge computing industry.

Risk Mitigation

- Market research reports highlight potential risks and challenges associated with edge colocation, allowing companies to proactively address issues and build resilient strategies.

- Understanding market risks helps organizations develop contingency plans, ensuring they can navigate uncertainties effectively.

Customer Insights

- Reports often include customer preferences, requirements, and satisfaction levels, providing valuable insights into the demands of end-users.

- This customer-centric data aids companies in tailoring their edge colocation services to meet the specific needs and expectations of their target audience.

Download the sample report of Market Forecast: Edge Colocation

Why Choose Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions stands out as a reliable source for market intelligence, and here’s why companies should turn to them for insights into edge colocation:

Expertise and Credibility

- Quadrant Knowledge Solutions is known for its industry expertise and credibility. Their reports are crafted by seasoned analysts who thoroughly understand the nuances of the market.

- The firm’s reputation for delivering accurate and insightful analyses enhances the reliability of the information presented in their reports.

Comprehensive Coverage

- Quadrant’s reports provide comprehensive coverage, offering a detailed examination of various aspects of the edge colocation market, including market share, growth drivers, challenges, and future forecasts.

- This comprehensive approach ensures that companies receive a holistic view of the market, enabling well-informed decision-making.

Timely and Relevant Information

- In the fast-paced tech industry, timeliness is crucial. Quadrant Knowledge Solutions delivers reports that are timely, ensuring that businesses receive the most up-to-date information to inform their strategies.

Customized Solutions

- Quadrant understands that one size doesn’t fit all. Their reports often include insights and recommendations tailored to different business sizes, industries, and geographies, providing companies with actionable intelligence aligned with their unique requirements.

Talk To Analyst: https://quadrant-solutions.com/talk-to-analyst

In conclusion, the rise of edge colocation signifies a paradigm shift in data centre strategies, driven by the need for low-latency, scalable, and reliable infrastructure. As companies increasingly recognize the benefits of edge computing, market intelligence reports play a pivotal role in guiding businesses toward optimal edge colocation solutions. Market research reports, particularly those offered by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, serve as indispensable tools for companies venturing into the edge colocation space. By leveraging these reports, businesses can gain a competitive edge, mitigate risks, and strategically position themselves in the dynamic landscape of edge computing.

[wishtree123]

Market Research and Its Benefits

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about a particular market or industry. It provides valuable insights into consumer behavior, market trends, and competition, which businesses can use to make informed decisions about their products and services. Re are some benefits of market research and how it can help businesses gain a competitive advantage.

Identifying customer needs and preferences: Market research helps businesses understand what customers want and need from their products or services. It can provide insight into customer preferences, pain points, and buying habits, which can be used to tailor products and services to better meet the needs of the target market. For example, a clothing retailer may use market research to determine which styles and colors are most popular among their target demographic, and adjust their inventory accordingly.

Analyzing the competition: Market research can help businesses gain a better understanding of their competitors, including their strengths and weaknesses. This can be used to identify areas where the business can differentiate itself and gain a competitive advantage. For example, a business may use market research to determine that their competitor's product lacks a particular feature, and use this knowledge to develop a similar product that includes that feature.

Assessing market potential: Market research can provide businesses with insights into the potential size and growth of a market. This information can be used to assess whether it is worth investing in a particular market and to develop strategies for capturing a share of that market. For example, a software company may use market research to determine that there is a growing demand for project management software in the healthcare industry, and use this knowledge to develop a new product specifically for that market.

Developing effective marketing strategies: Market research can help businesses develop effective marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience. By understanding what motivates customers to buy, businesses can develop messaging and branding that speaks directly to those motivations. For example, a coffee shop may use market research to determine that their target demographic values locally sourced, organic ingredients, and use this knowledge to develop a marketing campaign that emphasizes those values.

Improving customer satisfaction: Market research can help businesses improve customer satisfaction by identifying areas where customers may be dissatisfied or frustrated. By addressing these issues, businesses can improve their products and services, and increase customer loyalty. For example, a restaurant may use market research to determine that customers are unhappy with long wait times, and use this knowledge to implement a reservation system that reduces wait times and improves the overall dining experience.

Minimizing risk: Market research can help businesses minimize the risk of launching a new product or entering a new market. By gathering information about consumer demand, competition, and market trends, businesses can make informed decisions about whether to proceed with a particular initiative. For example, a technology company may use market research to determine that there is little demand for a new product they were planning to launch and use this knowledge to avoid wasting resources on a product that is unlikely to succeed.

In conclusion, market research is a critical tool for businesses that want to gain a competitive advantage in their industry. It provides valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, competition, market potential, marketing strategies, customer satisfaction, and risk. By leveraging these insights, businesses can make informed decisions that lead to greater success and growth.

[insightslicelive]

Sewer Sonde Market Growth Insights, Future Trends, Regional Outlook to 2032

Sewer Sonde Market Growth Insights, Future Trends, Regional Outlook to 2032

The Sewer Sonde Market report is an authentic source of insightful data for business strategists. It provides the industry overview with growth analysis and historical & futuristic cost, revenue, demand, and supply data (as applicable). The research analysts provide an elaborate description of the value chain and distribution network. This industry study provides comprehensive data that enhances…

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[probablyasocialecologist]

This is it. Generative AI, as a commercial tech phenomenon, has reached its apex. The hype is evaporating. The tech is too unreliable, too often. The vibes are terrible. The air is escaping from the bubble. To me, the question is more about whether the air will rush out all at once, sending the tech sector careening downward like a balloon that someone blew up, failed to tie off properly, and let go—or more slowly, shrinking down to size in gradual sputters, while emitting embarrassing fart sounds, like a balloon being deliberately pinched around the opening by a smirking teenager. But come on. The jig is up. The technology that was at this time last year being somberly touted as so powerful that it posed an existential threat to humanity is now worrying investors because it is apparently incapable of generating passable marketing emails reliably enough. We’ve had at least a year of companies shelling out for business-grade generative AI, and the results—painted as shinily as possible from a banking and investment sector that would love nothing more than a new technology that can automate office work and creative labor—are one big “meh.” As a Bloomberg story put it last week, “Big Tech Fails to Convince Wall Street That AI Is Paying Off.” From the piece: Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. had one job heading into this earnings season: show that the billions of dollars they’ve each sunk into the infrastructure propelling the artificial intelligence boom is translating into real sales. In the eyes of Wall Street, they disappointed. Shares in Google owner Alphabet have fallen 7.4% since it reported last week. Microsoft’s stock price has declined in the three days since the company’s own results. Shares of Amazon — the latest to drop its earnings on Thursday — plunged by the most since October 2022 on Friday. Silicon Valley hailed 2024 as the year that companies would begin to deploy generative AI, the type of technology that can create text, images and videos from simple prompts. This mass adoption is meant to finally bring about meaningful profits from the likes of Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The fact that those returns have yet to meaningfully materialize is stoking broader concerns about how worthwhile AI will really prove to be. Meanwhile, Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that soared to an absurd $3 trillion valuation, is losing that value with every passing day—26% over the last month or so, and some analysts believe that’s just the beginning. These declines are the result of less-than-stellar early results from corporations who’ve embraced enterprise-tier generative AI, the distinct lack of killer commercial products 18 months into the AI boom, and scathing financial analyses from Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, and Elliot Management, each of whom concluded that there was “too much spend, too little benefit” from generative AI, in the words of Goldman, and that it was “overhyped” and a “bubble” per Elliot. As CNN put it in its report on growing fears of an AI bubble, Some investors had even anticipated that this would be the quarter that tech giants would start to signal that they were backing off their AI infrastructure investments since “AI is not delivering the returns that they were expecting,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told CNN. The opposite happened — Google, Microsoft and Meta all signaled that they plan to spend even more as they lay the groundwork for what they hope is an AI future. This can, perhaps, explain some of the investor revolt. The tech giants have responded to mounting concerns by doubling, even tripling down, and planning on spending tens of billions of dollars on researching, developing, and deploying generative AI for the foreseeable future. All this as high profile clients are canceling their contracts. As surveys show that overwhelming majorities of workers say generative AI makes them less productive. As MIT economist and automation scholar Daron Acemoglu warns, “Don’t believe the AI hype.”

6 August 2024

[therobotmonster]

There's a nuance to the Amazon AI checkout story that gets missed.

Because AI-assisted checkouts on its own isn't a bad thing:

This was a big story in 2022, about a bread-checkout system in Japan that turned out to be applicable in checking for cancer cells in sample slides.

But that bonus anti-cancer discovery isn't the subject here, the actual bread-checkout system is. That checkout system worked, because it wasn't designed with the intent of making the checkout cashier obsolete, rather, it was there to solve a real problem: it's hard to tell pastry apart at a glance, and the customers didn't like their bread with a plastic-wrapping and they didn't like the cashiers handling the bread to count loaves.

So they trained the system intentionally, under controlled circumstances, before testing and launching the tech. The robot does what it's good at, and it doesn't need to be omniscient because it's a tool, not a replacement worker.

Amazon, however, wanted to offload its training not just on an underpaid overseas staff, but on the customers themselves. And they wanted it out NOW so they could brag to shareholders about this new tech before the tech even worked. And they wanted it to replace a person, but not just the cashier. There were dreams of a world where you can't shoplift because you'd get billed anyway dancing in the investor's heads.

Only, it's one thing to make a robot that helps cooperative humans count bread, and it's another to try and make one that can thwart the ingenuity of hungry people.

The foreign workers performing the checkouts are actually supposed to be training the models. A lot of reports gloss over this in an effort to present the efforts as an outsourcing Mechanical Turk but that's really a side-effect. These models all work on datasets, and the only place you get a dataset of "this visual/sensor input=this purchase" is if someone is cataloging a dataset correlating the two...

Which Amazon could have done by simply putting the sensor system in place and correlating the purchase data from the cashiers with the sensor tracking of the customer. Just do that for as long as you need to build the dataset and test it by having it predict and compare in the background until you reach your preferred ratio. If it fails, you have a ton of market research data as a consolation prize.

But that could take months or years and you don't get to pump your stock until it works, and you don't get to outsource your cashiers while pretending you've made Westworld work.

This way, even though Amazon takes a little bit of a PR bloody nose, they still have the benefit of any stock increase this already produced, the shareholders got their dividends.

Which I suppose is a lot of words to say:

[thesimblrofficedirectory]

Welcome to The Simblr Office Directory

This blog is an archive of the submissions for the office-centric OC prompt posted by the light of Simblr, @kashisun.

Here you can browse all the amazing creations submitted by your fellow simblrs. Feel free to scroll to your delight or click one of the links under the cut to see who's on roster under (or over) a particular bureau or delegation.

Want to be added to the directory or confirm that you've been queued? Just include a link to your post in an ask off anon and it will be queued within 48 hours. Until we get through the backlog and can queue at a more leisurely pace, all ask submissions will receive a confirmation. You can always mention us, but we won't be able to provided confirmation for that method.

Leaving the company? If you'd like your post removed, just include a link to the post in an ask off anon and it will be removed. Sideblogs may require additional verification. Please allow, at most, 48 hours for the request to be honored. Removal requests will not be confirmed, only acted upon.

Every company's hierarchy is a little different. Designations for this directory are based on some of the companies I've worked for, but especially on the multi-media marketing company I work for now.

Bureaus and Their Delegations

Delegations with an * currently have low or no headcount (posted and queued). Excludes leadership.

Bureau of Client Engagement

Leadership

Billing*

Escalations*

Product Support*

Quality Assurance*

Sales*

Bureau of Compliance (Bureau-specific Internal Affairs and Auditing)

Leadership

Client Engagement*

Facilities*

Finance*

Human Resources*

Information and Technology*

Legal (General)

Legal (Leadership)

Marketing*

Bureau of Facilities

Leadership

Catering*

Environmental (Janitorial, HVAC, and Plumbing)*

Mechanical (Electrical, Elevators, Equipment Maintenance)*

Premise* (Grounds Maintenance and Real Estate)

Purchasing* (From pushpins to pallet jacks)

Security

Warehousing* (Shipping, Receiving, Mail room, and Inventory)

Bureau of Finance

Leadership

Accounting

Asset Management*

Investments*

Travel and Accommodations*

Vendor Relations*

Bureau of Human Resources

Leadership

Career Development (Internships and Internal Role Transitions)

Dependent Care*

Employee Activities Committee (Members are volunteers)

Employee Benefits*

Floating Delegates (Administration) (For profiles that list a nondescript secretary/admin/receptionist/assistant role)

Floating Delegates (General) (For profiles that do not list a position)

Floating Delegates (Leadership) (For profiles that list a nondescript managerial role)

Health Services*

Payroll*

Recruiting*

Training*

Union Relations*

Bureau of Information & Technology

Leadership

Data Security*

Infrastructure*

Public Relations

Research and Development*

Systems and Devices*

Telecommunications*

Bureau of Marketing

Leadership

Copy

Design

Planning and Implementation*

Board of Directors

Chief Officers

CEO - Chief Executive Officer/President

COO - Chief Operations Officer/Vice President

CCO - Chief Compliance Officer/Vice President

CFO - Chief Finance Officer/Vice President

CITO - Chief Information and Technology Officer/Vice President

CMO - Chief Marketing Officer/Vice President

Executive Administration* (Admins that report to chief officers)

[ukrfeminism]

2 minute read

Men who are younger than 30 feel more “threatened” by progress on women’s rights, according to a major new study.

Researchers, who polled almost 32,500 people across 27 EU countries, noted while gender equality has increased in Western democracies in recent times, this has been coupled with a rise in “modern sexism” which is “working against women’s rights”.

The report, conducted at the University of Gothenburg, discovered younger men were more likely than older men to agree with the statement “promoting women’s and girls” rights has gone too far as it “threatens” the “opportunities” available for men and boys.

Gefjon Off, one of the report’s authors, noted the findings demonstrate young men aged between 18 and 29 “most often agree with this statement”.

Ms Off, a political science doctoral student, added: “The older the men are, the less they agree with this statement. Some women agree with the statement, but to a far lesser extent than men of all ages. 

“The results contradict previous research claiming that the older generation are the ones who are the most conservative and opposed to advances in women’s rights”.

She argued people think greater gender equality just advantages women - rather than seeing the “benefits” for wider society. 

“Some research suggests that this feeling of injustice can even motivate citizens to vote for right-wing radical parties who are against feminism and sexual freedom,” Ms Off added.

“Possibly, young men who believe that women are outcompeting them in the labour market experience advances in women’s rights as unjust and a threat. 

“We need to get better at communicating the benefits of gender equality. Fathers get to spend more time with their children and the burden of being the family’s breadwinner is lightened when mothers in families also advance in their careers”.

Rising levels of unemployment may provide an explanation of why younger men are more likely to be sexist, the study suggested.

Researchers said: "The proportion is highest in regions where unemployment has risen the most in recent years, and where citizens have a widespread distrust of social institutions for example, due to widespread corruption.”

Slovakia was found to be the EU country where the “highest proportion of young men are opposed to advances in women’s rights”, researchers added, saying in some parts of the country, unemployment has surged by 1.1 per cent in the past two years.

Nicholas Charron, a professor in political science involved in the study, said: “More than other EU citizens, Slovaks think that their own country’s public institutions are not impartial, that is, that their social institutions favour certain groups of people”.

He added: “The gap between young women’s and young men’s views on advancing women’s rights is great in Sweden, among the top 10 in the EU according to our measurements”.

Researchers discovered this also plays out in reverse contexts, noting in areas like Northern Italy where unemployment has decreased and people have greater trust in social institutions, young men are less opposed to women’s rights progressing.

In the UK, gender inequality persists, with women heading only five per cent of the top 350 companies. While women make up less than a third of the top jobs in the UK, according to a recent report by the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading gender equality charity, which also discovered women of colour are under-represented at the highest levels in a vast range of sectors.

Women are wholly absent from senior roles such as Supreme Court justices, FTSE 100 chief executives, metro mayors, and police and crime commissioners, researchers found.

[techramonic]

The Game of Common Interests: The Symbiotic Relationship of Terrorism and The Media

Mass media and terrorism have developed an interdependent relationship. The media is the terrorist’s breath of fresh air, and it is the lifeblood and sustenance of terrorism, where the media often capitalizes on the public's confusion, intrigue, and paranoia following terrorist attacks by producing sensationalized news that captures widespread attention. This dynamic, however, plays into the hands of terrorists, who exploit the extensive coverage to spread the agency of their extremist agendas and beliefs, particularly targeting and influencing vulnerable audiences, such as the youth. Professor Taha Najem of Naif Arab University had described this relationship as “symbiotic”.

In Najem's own words:

"As for the extremists, they precisely calculate the scope, location, and timing of their attacks to generate ample media attention,—or in other words, to generate advertisements for their messages on a global scale. The broader and more prolonged the media coverage of terrorism turns out to be, the greater the terrorists' feelings of accomplishment, influence, and power." (Najem, 2017).

Bruce Hoffman, the Director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University said:

"Only by spreading the terror and outrage to a much larger audience can the terrorists gain the maximum leverage potential."

Najem argues that the relationship between the two can be understood through the media's tendency to capitalize on horrific tragedies. It often uses these as newsworthy scoops that not only provide information but also serve as marketing opportunities and profitable publicity. In some instances, the media may unintentionally promote terrorist operations by offering excessive coverage, which is driven by their own incessant need for fame, power, money, and influence. This aligns with the perpetrator's likeness, where some stage attacks often with the sole purpose of gaining publicity and creating propaganda rather than resolving political demands.

Researchers have established that media coverage is pivotal to the success of terrorist attacks, with the scope and intensity of coverage often being more important to terrorist groups than the quality of the reporting. However, this perspective can also be overly simplistic, as it overlooks the complex relationship between media coverage and public reaction. It also fails to consider that not all terrorists prioritize publicity over their other tactical or political aims. Additionally, the complex interplay between the media and terrorism cannot be fully understood without considering the role of the state. 

Not only does this occur in mass media, but also creating trends within specific online communities. From this, we can see how there is a benefit in both parties: terrorists gain the publicity they desire, while the media profits from the heightened public interest, increasing the influx of coverage because of the heightened value. Furthermore, many individuals drawn into terrorism have been influenced by channels, websites, magazines, and other forms of media that promote bombings and suicide missions, highlighting the powerful role media can play in the recruitment and radicalization process. With this, here are some ways in which the media benefits terrorism, and vice-versa. Allowing media prevalence through marketability and terrorism through radicalization. 

World Trade Center Bombing, 2001.

On September 11, 19 terrorists from al-Qaeda hijacked and attacked the World Trade center, following four coordinated bombing-suicide attacks against the U.S. There were 2,996 deaths and approximately 6,000 injured. Over the past two decades after the attack, mainstream media audiences have witnessed a significant shift in how news was presented: the rise of dramatic and emotional storytelling, or what can be termed as "public drama."

This approach has increasingly dominated the media landscape, being a central focus on various platforms: lead stories on news programs, main broadcast discussions, and bold headlines on newspapers. This had become a prominent framework for delivering news, particularly in television, due to its entertainment-like qualities. By simplifying complex stories into easily-digestible and compelling narratives with vivid images, the audience is more engaged. News organizations and media professionals favor this dramatic approach because of the direct and cost-effective production. 

The 9/11 attack is a prime example of this trend. When news broke of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, broadcasters were initially unprepared for the unfolding catastrophe and the dramatic and chaotic nature of the events presented challenges in conveying the news. With initial coverage featuring footage of billowing flames and smoke from the collapsed towers, the explosion of the Pentagon, and the emergency response—all were easily committed into the viewer's memories. These images captured the raw scale of the disaster and its immediate aftermath. The people were confused, afraid, and intrigued—then they became invested. Thus, the sensationalization of news was adapted.

Oklahoma City Bombing, 1995.

On April 19th, just the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege, domestic terrorists Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh detonated a nitrate-fuel oil bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Building, claiming 168 lives and injuring  680 others.

Timothy McVeigh was one of America’s most notorious domestic terrorists, and with his involvement with the crime, he was then sentenced to death by lethal injection. In June 2001, the Federal Bureau of Prisons was responsible for the execution of McVeigh.  Linda Smith and John Roberts, in their journal article, delve into one significant instance where media demands placed a heavy burden on the Federal Agency. During this time of McVeigh's execution, the Bureau faced a difficult dilemma: balancing the need to facilitate media coverage of the execution while ensuring the safety and security of the maximum-security penitentiary where it was conducted.

This situation highlights a broader paradox faced by many federal agencies. They are tasked with providing information to the media while simultaneously navigating ethical, budgetary, and legal constraints that limit their engagement in traditional public relations activities, such as advertising and lobbying, common in the private sector. Public affairs officers are legally obligated to release non-sensitive information, yet they must carefully avoid disclosing material exempt under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act, as individual officers can be held criminally liable for such breaches. This tension between transparency and security underscores the complex challenges these agencies must navigate in their public communications.

Boston Marathon Bombing, 2013 and INSPIRE MAGAZINE.

On April 15th, exactly on America's Patriot's Day, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar (Jahar) Tsarnaev detonated two pressure cooker bombs at 2:49 p.m., just a few of hours after the winner completed the Boston Marathon, totaling to 6 deaths and 281 injuries.

Jahar had a fascination with fireworks and explosives, while Tamerlan exhibited early signs of radicalization.  Although there were no proper links of the two to terrorist groups, Jahar had revealed that the two obtained plans from Inspire, specifically its first issue revealing a step-by-step recipe on creating pressure cooker bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

Inspire is an English online magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), infamously known as the group that perpetrated the 9/11 and PAL 434 attacks. The magazine is one of the many ways AQAP spreads its online agenda. Both international and domestic extremists have been motivated by radical interpretations of Islam and, in some cases, used its bomb-making instructions in their attempts to carry out attacks. 

The insurgence of the 'Jihadi John Slideshow Trend'

During the period of 2014, youtube videos uploaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) started surfacing on the internet. This was characterized by a series of masked militants criticizing the American or British government and then tying in the statements by the gruesome beheadings of hostages, ransoms, and soldiers.

Terrorists had often used their media presence as a driving force to influence the youth into affiliating themselves with terrorist ties. One of these was Jihadi John, unveiled as British militant and Kuwaiti-born Mohamed Emwazi. In these videos, Emwazi is often seen looming over the camera holding a knife and standing next to a kneeled hostage. He ends every video by beheading his victims. One of his most famous videos was the beheading of American Journalist James Foley.

Around June 2010, Emwazi was detained and in the middle of 2020, the insurgence of the “Jihadi John Slideshow” trend had reached tiktok. While the origins of this trend still remains obscure, this has left a lasting impact on the youth. Often, the demographic consisted of teens, specifically young males, who romanticized and glorified the acts of violence portrayed by Emwazi and the aesthetic of militaristic weaponry. Many had credited this behavior to “edgy” standards and humor, however, this idealism was proven to be more unironic than it seemed. Eventually, in the proceeding years, the trend had died out, however, it had came back a few times during period intervals of 2022 to 2023.

This trend had also harmfully villainized harmless ideologies, distorting these ideas to the point where it is repulsing for the public’s perception. An example of this is the concept of Jihad, where it is essentially the Islamic philosophy of struggling to defend the religion and attaining peace within the community  and outside of it. It promotes the unity and solidarity of individuals where militaristic action is only done as a last resort of intervention. Often, Jihadi groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have spread distorted and extremist versions of this ideology, creating a brand new concept of utilizing violent militaristic resistance to protect Islam. With this dangerous approach, muslim communities are stigmatized, discriminated against, and stereotyped. This is especially harmful because it is a large problem that affects the community in various ways, especially when terrorists rebrand concepts initially striving to attain peace as acts of hatred and war, tainting a beautiful religion with images of violence.

Conclusion

Circling back to Prof. Najem’s analysis, without the media’s attention and focus, terrorists are unable to achieve any of the following four objectives: (1) recognition of the group name or ideology, (2) ability to communicate with supporters, (3) communicate with members of the local government, (4) and depict itself as a legitimate political alternative to the current governments. To conclude this essay, the relationship between mass media and terrorism is a complex and interdependent one, where the intricacies of both entities should be carefully observed and analyzed to unravel the deeper connections between the two.

While some researchers argue that media coverage is essential for the success of terrorist attacks, this view is sometimes overly simplistic and does not fully capture the intricate relationship between media portrayal and public reaction. Additionally, not all terrorist groups prioritize publicity over their other objectives. The symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorism is further complicated by the role of the state, which must balance transparency with security.

Several case studies, including the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the rise of figures like Jihadi John, highlight the ways in which media coverage can both shape and be shaped by terrorist actions. These examples demonstrate how terrorist groups leverage media to spread their message and recruit new members, while the media, in turn, benefits from the increased attention and revenue generated by such coverage.

Ultimately, this relationship underscores the powerful role that the media plays in both perpetuating and combating terrorism. The challenge lies in finding a balance between reporting news and preventing the unintentional promotion of extremist ideologies.

[covid-safer-hotties]

The Latest Research About Paxlovid: Effectiveness, Access, and Possible Long COVID Benefits - Published Sept 6, 2024

By: Rita Rubin, MA

As another COVID-19 summer surge hit the US this year, many infected people likely were prescribed the antivirals nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, better known as Paxlovid, for the first time. Or for the fourth time. Or somewhere in between.

Nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, the only approved oral therapy for COVID-19, is recommended for treating mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infections among people who are at high risk of progression to severe disease. This includes people aged 50 years or older, especially those 65 years or older, as well as younger individuals who have any of a long list of comorbidities that increase the risk of severe COVID-19.

The clinical trials leading to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorizing emergency use of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir in December 2021 and approving it in May 2023 were conducted with unvaccinated people who were infected with the now long-gone SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. This has led to questions about its effectiveness for people who have been vaccinated or have been infected with subvariants of Delta’s successor Omicron, which have been circulating for nearly 3 years.

But recent observational studies suggest nirmatrelvir-ritonavir still protects people at high risk against hospitalization and death from COVID-19. That is if they’re able to get a prescription for it—research has uncovered racial and ethnic disparities in which eligible patients get a prescription for the treatment.

And as the number of people with postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), or long COVID, grows, scientists have been investigating whether nirmatrelvir-ritonavir might be useful in protecting against or treating the condition.

Does It Still Prevent Severe COVID-19?

Because the nirmatrelvir-ritonavir phase 2 and 3 trial involved unvaccinated adults without prior COVID-19 infection when the Delta variant dominated, questions have remained about its relevance today.

Scientists from Pfizer, which markets nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, and coauthors recently published a systematic literature review examining that question. They searched for real-world studies reported from December 2021 through March 2023 and identified 18 that met their final selection criteria.

The evidence showed that nirmatrelvir-ritonavir was effective regardless of age, underlying high-risk conditions, or vaccination status. The treatment significantly reduced the postinfection risk of all-cause and COVID-19–related mortality both within the first 30 days and in the long-term. Treatment started within 5 days of symptom onset, as recommended on the label, was associated with the greatest reduction in postinfection risk.

“We remain very confident in Paxlovid’s clinical effectiveness at preventing severe outcomes, including hospitalization and death, from COVID-19 in patients at high risk of severe disease,” Pfizer spokesperson Kit Longley said in an early August email.

Another recently published study reached a somewhat different conclusion. That study, conducted by University of Manitoba researchers, analyzed results from 4 randomized trials and 16 real-world studies, some of which had not yet been peer-reviewed, with a total of nearly 2 million adults aged 18 years or older.

The evidence suggested nirmatrelvir-ritonavir has a small but significant efficacy in reducing COVID-19 hospitalization and all-cause mortality among people with laboratory-confirmed mild to moderate infections, but the evidence is weak, so more studies are needed, the authors concluded.

At Risk but No Script

COVID-19 laid bare health disparities in the US, and nirmatrelvir-ritonavir has been no exception, according to a study published in August.

Using National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) data, researchers studied individuals 18 years of age or older who were diagnosed with COVID-19 between January 2022 and December 2023; up until the end of that period, the US government covered the cost of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir for everyone who needed it.

About 1.26 million people in the N3C cohort were at high risk of progressing to severe disease, making them eligible for nirmatrelvir-ritonavir treatment. But overall, nearly two-thirds of those who were eligible weren’t prescribed the treatment, the authors observed. After accounting for age, sex, and clinical characteristics, the researchers found that non-Hispanic Black and Latino individuals were nearly a third less likely to have used nirmatrelvir-ritonavir than non-Hispanic White individuals.

Patients may not seek care or may not seek it out early enough for the treatment to be effective, coauthor Hemalkumar Mehta, PhD, a core member of the N3C, speculated in an interview with JAMA Medical News.

Another reason could be that patients don’t have a regular source of primary care whom they could ask for a prescription, noted Mehta, a pharmacist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They likely don’t know that the FDA has authorized state-licensed pharmacists to prescribe nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, he said.

Mehta acknowledged that until he conducted his study, even he didn’t realize that pharmacists could prescribe the COVID-19 treatment. Publicizing that fact by simply hanging a sign in pharmacies would help, he pointed out.

However, the FDA created an obstacle to quick prescribing of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir by pharmacists, a 2023 article noted. Prior to prescribing, pharmacists must assess patients’ liver and kidney function through health records from the previous 12 months or consultation with their clinician. Other prescribers can simply ask patients about their liver and kidney function and take their word for it, the authors explained. In addition, there is no standardized pathway for pharmacists to bill payors for assessing patients to see if they’re eligible for nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, which typically takes 15 to 30 minutes, according to the American Pharmacists Association.

When people do get a prescription for nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, most get it filled, a recently published study of Walgreens pharmacies nationwide data found. The retrospective study included people 12 years of age or older for whom a nirmatrelvir-ritonavir prescription was ordered from Walgreens pharmacies between December 2021 and August 2023.

A total of about 2.1 million nirmatrelvir-ritonavir prescriptions were ordered for about 2 million individuals. Among the 95% of people who were prescribed only 1 course of the treatment, 88% filled their prescription. Improving uptake of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir requires increasing patient and prescriber awareness, reducing prescribing disparities, and ensuring treatment initiation within 5 days of symptom onset, the authors concluded.

Treat Acute Infection, Prevent Long COVID?

Taking nirmatrelvir-ritonavir for acute COVID-19 might protect against long COVID, although research into that topic has had mixed results.

For example, 2 recent studies, neither of which had yet been peer-reviewed, reached different conclusions.

A preprint posted in June reported observational study results from the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study population included nearly 500 000 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between March 2022 and February 2023. Of those, about 165 000 were treated with nirmatrelvir-ritonavir within 5 days after becoming infected.

Compared with no treatment, nirmatrelvir-ritonavir therapy was associated with a 12% lower risk of developing long COVID within 180 days of infection, or an absolute risk reduction of about 3 cases per 100 people. However, no such risk reduction was seen in people at low risk of severe COVID-19 infection who received nirmatrelvir-ritonavir.

“There are quite a few patients who are not at risk but who received a Paxlovid prescription,” first author Fei Wang, PhD, explained in an interview with JAMA Medical News. “This provides us an opportunity to evaluate a low-risk population that got COVID.”

Another preprint, posted this summer, used N3C electronic health records. It found that nirmatrelvir-ritonavir treatment of acute COVID-19 was not significantly associated with reducing long COVID overall, although it was linked to fewer cognitive and fatigue symptoms.

The mixed findings between the 2 studies aren’t surprising, said Wang, an assistant professor of health care policy and research at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Some information, such as COVID-19 vaccination history and nirmatrelvir-ritonavir use, isn’t always encoded in electronic health records, Wang pointed out. Although he and his colleagues “spend a lot of effort” to make sure they have complete patient information, Wang explained, “there’s no way we can evaluate how complete that is.”

He added that not having a consensus definition of long COVID is another critical issue. The N3C’s definition isn’t the same as RECOVER’s, and the 2 cohorts have different patient populations. “All these can lead to different results,” he said.

For Wang, it makes sense that taking nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, an antiviral, for acute COVID-19 would protect against long COVID. The severity of acute SARS-CoV-2 infections is correlated with the risk of long COVID, he said, and one theory about the cause of PASC is the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in the body.

However, Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, pointed out that unidentified confounders, not nirmatrelvir-ritonavir itself, might be at play in the relationship between treating acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and long COVID risk. “People who take Paxlovid might be different in many other ways,” he noted.

A Long COVID Treatment?

Many individuals with long COVID didn’t have the opportunity to take nirmatrelvir-ritonavir when they first became ill with acute COVID-19. They might have been infected before the treatment became available, or they weren’t considered to be at high risk for severe disease, so they weren’t eligible for it.

Some case reports have suggested that it might not be too late for people who’ve had long COVID for months to benefit from nirmatrelvir-ritonavir. For example, in early 2023 internist Linda Geng, MD, PhD, codirector of Stanford’s PASC clinic, and coauthors reported the case of a patient who’d had long COVID for 7 months, around which time the symptoms of acute COVID-19 returned. Although rapid antigen test results were negative, the patient had been exposed to multiple people with COVID-19, so a primary care physician prescribed nirmatrelvir-ritonavir. Not only did the acute flu-like symptoms resolve, but so did the long COVID symptoms, which included severe fatigue and cognitive difficulties.

That patient spurred Geng and her colleagues to conduct what they say is the first published randomized trial of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir to treat PASC, which appeared in June in JAMA Internal Medicine. The trial enrolled 155 participants with long COVID, all but 2 of whom had received the primary COVID-19 vaccination series. On average, the time between their initial SARS-CoV-2 infection and randomization into the trial was about a year and a half.

The trial found that the longer 15-day course of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir it used was generally safe. However, the treatment didn’t significantly improve long COVID symptoms compared with the control group.

It’s far from the final answer about nirmatrelvir-ritonavir’s effectiveness against long COVID, though, Geng noted. “This is just the first step in many investigations that need to be done.”

The NIH is funding several clinical trials targeting long COVID under the RECOVER initiative umbrella. One, the Platform Protocol to Measure the Effects of Antiviral Therapies on Long COVID Symptoms (RECOVER-VITAL), is testing an even longer course of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir among an estimated 900 participants at centers throughout the US.

And Krumholz and colleagues at Yale University are in the process of analyzing data from their placebo-controlled randomized trial of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir in 100 patients with long COVID. (The trial received funding and design input from Pfizer.)

“We’re not sure it works,” said Krumholz, founder and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. “What I think we need are a lot more studies of 100 people or 200 people, trying a lot more things” to treat long COVID.

Participants in the Yale trial were all highly symptomatic and lived throughout the contiguous US. Instead of having them go to participating centers, the trial came to them. “Setting up centers is expensive,” Krumholz explained, noting that the trial’s decentralized design could help cut costs and could work for a variety of conditions and treatments.

Participants were shipped the medication. They gave blood and saliva samples at a local laboratory or at home and answered questions about their symptoms in a digital diary. Yale colleague Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, who studies antiviral immunity and viral disease pathogenesis, is looking at the blood and saliva samples for differences between people who appeared to respond to nirmatrelvir-ritonavir and those who didn’t.

Paxlovid 2.0?

Meanwhile, Pfizer is working to eliminate what one recent publication referred to as nirmatrelvir-ritonavir’s Achilles’ heel: the limited metabolic stability of nirmatrelvir, a protease inhibitor that requires ritonavir to boost it to the target therapeutic range.

The problem is that ritonavir boosts the plasma levels of a long list of other medications beyond the therapeutic range, so nirmatrelvir-ritonavir is contraindicated for people taking them, unless they can temporarily stop or reduce the dose of the concomitant drugs while taking the COVID-19 treatment. Ritonavir is also the source of the metallic taste many individuals who take Paxlovid experience.

Pfizer’s second-generation protease inhibitor for treating COVID-19 is called ibuzatrelvir. Although it’s structurally related to nirmatrelvir, ibuzatrelvir has greater bioavailability when taken orally, so it doesn’t require a ritonavir boost.

Pfizer has completed a phase 2B trial testing the safety and efficacy of a 5-day course of ibuzatrelvir treatment. Participants were nonhospitalized individuals aged 18 to 65 years with confirmed COVID-19 whose symptoms began within 5 days of randomization. Ibuzatrelvir showed robust antiviral activity in the trial, with statistically significant, dose-dependent decreases in viral load at days 3 and 5 compared with placebo, Pfizer researchers reported in April at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

“It is premature to speculate on potential timing of phase 3, but we are considering next steps and plan to share updates as they are available,” Pfizer spokesperson Longley said.

Meanwhile, SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve along with attitudes toward COVID-19, Krumholz said. Many people “are treating it like a head cold,” he explained. “They’ve obviously made the determination that it’s not dangerous, but it is dangerous.”

Published Online: September 6, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.16432

[fatliberation]

"I didn't give out any medical advice" lmao you were heavily implying that person's doctor was wrong and that they shouldn't listen to their doctor's advice. that's irresponsible. you're going to get somebody killed with this bs

If their doctor's advice is to lose weight through dieting, it is wrong and I can say that in full confidence because it. (x) doesn't. (x) work. (x) Here! (x) Take (x) these! I am (x) chucking (x) peer reviewed sources (x) at you. (x)

Anti-fat bias is at work here. And so is a weight-loss market worth $90 BILLION as of 2024.

In 2013, UCLA researchers Traci Mann, Janet Tomiyama, and Britt Ahlstrom conducted the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis of diet studies, analyzing 31 long-term studies.

“What happens to people on diets in the long run?” Mann asked. “Would they have been better off to not go on a diet at all? We decided to dig up and analyze every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.” (x)

Certain factors biased the diet studies to make them appear more effective than they really were. For one, many participants self-reported their weight by phone or mail rather than having their weight measured on a scale by an impartial source. Also, the studies have very low follow-up rates — eight of the studies had follow-up rates lower than 50 percent, and those who responded may not have been representative of the entire group, since people who gain back large amounts of weight are generally unlikely to show up for follow-up tests, Mann said.

Evidence suggests that repeatedly losing and gaining weight is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function. Mann and Tomiyama recommend that more research be conducted on the health effects of losing and gaining weight, noting that scientists do not fully understand how such weight cycling leads to adverse health effects.

“We asked what evidence is there that dieting works in the long term, and found that the evidence shows the opposite” Tomiyama said.

Here are some quotes I pulled directly from the study.

It is implicit in this definition that losing weight will lead to improved health, and yet, health outcomes are not routinely included in studies of diets.

Overall, there were only slight improvements in most health outcomes studied. Changes in diastolic and systolic blood pressure, fasting blood glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels were small, and none of these correlated with weight change. There were also very small effects of these diets on lipid-lowering medication use and coronary morbidity and mortality. There were a few larger positive effects for hypertension and diabetes medication use, as well as diabetes and stroke incidence. In correlational analyses, however, we uncovered no clear relationship between weight loss and health outcomes related to hypertension, diabetes, or cholesterol, calling into question whether weight change per se had any causal role in the few effects of the diets. Increased exercise, healthier eating, engagement with the health care system, and social support may have played a role instead. Our findings are in line with a recent meta-analysis (Flegal, Kit, Orpana, & Graubard, 2013) that found that overweight and class I obesity were not associated with higher all-cause mortality. Moreover, Ortega and colleagues (2013) have documented metabolically healthy but obese individuals, and an emerging literature on the “obesity paradox”, whereby obesity appears to confer health benefits in certain diseases (Amundson, Djurkovic, & Matwiyoff, 2010), suggests that a disconnect between weight loss and health outcomes should not be surprising.

We believe the ultimate goal of diets is to improve people’s long-term health, rather than to reduce their weight. Our review of randomized controlled trials of the effects of dieting on health finds very little evidence of success in achieving this goal. If diets do not lead to longterm weight loss or long-term health benefits, it is difficult to justify encouraging individuals to endure them.

See for yourself.

[crossdreamers]

Finland, a country where a transphobe runs transgender healthcare for youth

Evan Urquhart and Esa Kalliomäki have written a shocking article about the extremely conservative and transphobic health care Finland has established for transgender youth.

They focus on the controversial policies and practices implemented under the leadership of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala (photo).

Here are the key points:

In 2011, Finland established its first program for treating transgender youth, led by Dr. Kaltiala, a skeptic of gender transition for minors.

Kaltiala claims that young transgender people in Finland do not benefit from transition, contradicting the stance of major medical organizations in other countries.

Finland's approach to treating gender dysphoria differs significantly from the gender-affirming care model used in countries like the US, with a high rate of patients being turned away without treatment.

Transgender youth in Finland report negative experiences with the gender clinics, including invasive questioning, mockery, misgendering, and lack of support.

The assessment process for transgender youth in Finland is described as lengthy, often taking years, with repeated questioning and little actual support or counseling provided.

Mental health issues are often used as a reason to deny transition-related care, even when these issues are not diagnosed or treated by the gender clinics themselves.

Some transgender youth in Finland, frustrated with the lack of access to care, resort to seeking hormone treatments on the black market.

Finland's approach does not match research from other countries showing clear benefits of transition for both young people and adults, suggesting that Finland's poor outcomes may be due to its restrictive policies rather than the ineffectiveness of transition itself.

Read the whole article here.

See also Riittakerttu Kaltiala presenting her transphobic views over at The Free Press, a site owned by the anti-trans activist Bari Weiss.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

According to a new analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), more than $100 billion of developing countries’ debt could be made available to spend on nature restoration, protecting ecosystems like rainforests and coral reefs and climate change adaptation.

The research is part of IIED’s “hidden handbrakes” campaign, designed to reveal and explain unseen obstacles to climate action.

“Many of the countries most threatened by rising temperatures have huge debt burdens, and are forever paying interest to wealthier nations that have contributed much more to the climate crisis,” said Laura Kelly, IIED’s director of research group Shaping Sustainable Markets, in a press release from IIED.

Kelly explained that enormous amounts of money are going to fund big polluters in a way that is fundamentally unfair.

“Money that could help restore damaged ecosystems and protect vulnerable communities from floods or drought is instead flowing to banks and polluters in the rich world,” Kelly said. “The IMF and World Bank should recognise that the current way of lending just doesn’t work for people or the planet. Our broken financial system must move on from colonialist, 20th-century thinking if it’s going to serve everyone fairly.”

IIED, a nonprofit based in the United Kingdom, looked at the likelihood of debt-for-nature exchanges in some of the 49 developing countries most vulnerable to defaulting on external debts, according to available data.

Estimates from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were used as the basis for the analysis, reported Reuters. The figures showed that the countries owed a total of $431 billion to the IMF, wealthier nations and hedge and pension funds.

Countries that could benefit from the debt-for-nature exchanges included Sri Lanka, Pakistan and The Gambia, which Kelly said was at “huge risk” of rising sea levels and needed to invest in wetland preservation and flood prevention.

When an agreement is reached between a nation and its creditors, part of the debt owed can be forgiven in exchange for reaching “specific, measurable and traceable” results in nature or climate projects, IIED said.

[insightslicelive]

Food Grade Fucoxanthin Market Sales Statistics, Key Players, Growth Projection Outlook to 2032

Food Grade Fucoxanthin Market Sales Statistics, Key Players, Growth Projection Outlook to 2032

The Food Grade Fucoxanthin Market report is an authentic source of insightful data for business strategists. It provides the industry overview with growth analysis and historical & futuristic cost, revenue, demand, and supply data (as applicable). The research analysts provide an elaborate description of the value chain and distribution network. This industry study provides comprehensive data…

[mariacallous]

This story is part of a joint investigation between Lighthouse Reports and WIRED. To read other stories from the series, click here.

Mitch Daniels is a numbers guy, a cost-cutter. In the early 2000s, he tried and failed to rein in congressional spending under then-US president George W. Bush. So when he took office as Indiana governor in 2005, Daniels was ready to argue once again for fiscal discipline. He wanted to straighten out Indiana’s state government, which he deemed rife with dysfunction. And he started with its welfare system. “That department had been rocked by a series of criminal indictments, with cheats and caseworkers colluding to steal money meant for poor people,” he later said.

Daniels’ solution took the form of a $1.3 billion, 10-year contract with IBM. He had lofty ambitions for the project, which started in 2006, claiming it would improve the benefits service for Indiana residents while cracking down on fraud, ultimately saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

But the contract was a disaster. It was canceled after three years, and IBM and Indiana spent a decade locked in a legal battle about who was to blame. Daniels described IBM’s sweeping redesign and automation of the system—responsible for deciding who was eligible for everything from food stamps to medical cover—as deficient. He was adamant, though, that outsourcing a technical project to a company with expertise was the right call. “It was over-designed,” he said. “Great on paper but too complicated to work in practice.” IBM declined a request for comment. 

In July 2012, Judge David Dryer of the Marion County Superior Court ruled that Indiana had failed to prove IBM had breached its contract. But he also delivered a damning verdict on the system itself, describing it as an untested experiment that replaced caseworkers with computers and phone calls. “Neither party deserves to win this case,” he said. “This story represents a ‘perfect storm’ of misguided government policy and overzealous corporate ambition.” 

That might have been an early death knell for the burgeoning business of welfare state automation. Instead, the industry exploded. Today, such fraud systems form a significant part of the nebulous “govtech” industry, which revolves around companies selling governments new technologies with the promise that new IT will make public administration easier-to-use and more efficient. In 2021, that market was estimated to be worth €116 billion ($120 billion) in Europe and $440 billion globally. And it’s not only companies that expect to profit from this wave of tech. Governments also believe modernizing IT systems can deliver big savings. Back in 2014, the consultancy firm McKinsey estimated that if government digitization reached its “full potential,” it could free up $1 trillion every year. 

Contractors around the world are selling governments on the promise that fraud-hunting algorithms can help them recoup public funds. But researchers who track the spread of these systems argue that these companies are often overpaid and under-supervised. The key issue, researchers say, is accountability. When complex machine learning models or simpler algorithms are developed by the private sector, the computer code that gets to define who is and isn’t accused of fraud is often classed as intellectual property. As a result, the way such systems make decisions is opaque and shielded from interrogation. And even when these algorithmic black holes are embroiled in high-stakes legal battles over alleged bias, the people demanding answers struggle to get them. 

In the UK, a community group called the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People is trying to determine whether a pattern of disabled people being investigated for fraud is linked to government automation projects. In France, the digital rights group La Quadrature du Net has been trying for four months to find out whether a fraud system is discriminating against people born in other countries. And in Serbia, lawyers want to understand why the introduction of a new system has resulted in hundreds of Roma families losing their benefits. “The models are always secret,” says Victoria Adelmant, director of New York University’s digital welfare state project. “If you don’t have transparency, it’s very difficult to even challenge and assess these systems.” 

The rollout of automated bureaucracy has happened quickly and quietly, but it has left a trail of scandals in its wake. In Michigan, a computer system used between 2013 and 2015 falsely accused 34,000 people of welfare fraud. A similar thing happened in Australia between 2015 and 2019, but on a larger scale: The government accused 400,000 people of welfare fraud or error after its social security department started using a so-called robodebt algorithm to automatically issue fines.

Another scandal emerged in the Netherlands in 2019 when tens of thousands of families—many of them from the country’s Ghanaian community—were falsely accused of defrauding the child benefits system. These systems didn’t just contribute to agencies accusing innocent people of welfare fraud; benefits recipients were ordered to repay the money they had supposedly stolen. As a result, many of the accused were left with spiraling debt, destroyed credit ratings, and even bankruptcy. 

Not all government fraud systems linked to scandals were developed with consultancies or technology companies. But civil servants are increasingly turning to the private sector to plug knowledge and personnel gaps. Companies involved in fraud detection systems range from giant consultancies—Accenture, Cap Gemini, PWC—to small tech firms like Totta Data Lab in the Netherlands and Saga in Serbia.

Experts in automation and AI are expensive to hire and less likely to be wooed by public sector salaries. When the UK surveyed its civil servants last year, confidence in the government’s ability to use technology was low, with around half of respondents blaming an inability to hire top talent. More than a third said they had few or no skills in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or automation. But it’s not just industry experience that makes the private sector so alluring to government officials. For welfare departments squeezed by budget cuts, “efficiency” has become a familiar buzzword. “Quite often, a public sector entity will say it is more efficient for us to go and bring in a group of consultants,” says Dan Sheils, head of European public service at Accenture.

The public sector lacks the expertise to create these systems and also to oversee them, says Matthias Spielkamp, cofounder of German nonprofit Algorithm Watch, which has been tracking automated decision-making in social welfare programs across Europe since 2017. In an ideal world, civil servants would be able to develop these systems themselves and have an in-depth understanding of how they work, he says. “That would be a huge difference to working with private companies, because they will sell you black-box systems—black boxes to everyone, including the public sector.” 

In February 2020, a crisis broke out in the Dutch region of Walcheren as officials realized they were in the dark about how their own fraud detection system worked. At the time, a Dutch court had halted the use of another algorithm used to detect welfare fraud, known as SyRI, after finding it violated people’s right to privacy. Officials in Walcheren were not using SyRI, but in emails obtained by Lighthouse Reports and WIRED through freedom-of-information requests, government employees had raised concerns that their algorithm bore striking similarities to the one just condemned by the court.

Walcheren’s system was developed by Totta Data Lab. After signing a contract in March 2017, the Dutch startup developed an algorithm to sort through pseudonymous information, according to details obtained through a freedom-of-information request. The system analyzed details of local people claiming welfare benefits and then sent human investigators a list of those it classified as most likely to be fraudsters. 

The redacted emails show local officials agonizing over whether their algorithm would be dragged into the SyRI scandal. “I don’t think it is possible to explain why our algorithm should be allowed while everyone is reading about SyRI,” one official wrote the week after the court ruling. Another wrote back with similar concerns. “We also do not get insight from Totta Data Lab into what exactly the algorithm does, and we do not have the expertise to check this.” Neither Totta nor officials in Walcheren replied to requests for comment. 

When the Netherlands’ Organization for Applied Scientific Research, an independent research institute, later carried out an audit of a Totta algorithm used in South Holland, the auditors struggled to understand it. “The results of the algorithm do not appear to be reproducible,” their 2021 report reads, referring to attempts to re-create the algorithm’s risk scores. “The risks indicated by the AI algorithm are largely randomly determined,” the researchers found. 

With little transparency, it often takes years—and thousands of victims—to expose technical shortcomings. But a case in Serbia provides a notable exception. In March 2022, a new law came into force which gave the government the green light to use data processing to assess individuals’ financial status and automate parts of its social protection programs. The new socijalna karta, or social card system, would help the government detect fraud while making sure welfare payments were reaching society’s most marginalized, claimed Zoran Đorđević, Serbia’s minister of social affairs in 2020. 

But within months of the system’s introduction, lawyers in the capital Belgrade had started documenting how it was discriminating against the country’s Roma community, an already disenfranchised ethnic minority group. 

Mr. ​​Ahmetović, a welfare recipient who declined to share his first name out of concern that his statement could affect his ability to claim benefits in the future, says he hadn’t heard of the social card system until November 2022, when his wife and four children were turned away from a soup kitchen on the outskirts of the Serbian capital. It wasn’t unusual for the Roma family to be there, as their welfare payments entitled them to a daily meal provided by the government. But on that day, a social worker told them their welfare status had changed and that they would no longer be getting a daily meal.

The family was in shock, and Ahmetović rushed to the nearest welfare office to find out what had happened. He says he was told the new social card system had flagged him after detecting income amounting to 110,000 Serbian dinars ($1,000) in his bank account, which meant he was no longer eligible for a large chunk of the welfare he had been receiving. Ahmetović was confused. He didn’t know anything about this payment. He didn’t even have his own bank account—his wife received the family’s welfare payments into hers. 

With no warning, their welfare payments were slashed by 30 percent, from around 70,000 dinars ($630) per month to 40,000 dinars ($360). The family had been claiming a range of benefits since 2012, including financial social assistance, as their son’s epilepsy and unilateral paralysis means neither parent is able to work. The drop in support meant the Ahmetovićs had to cut back on groceries and couldn’t afford to pay all their bills. Their debt ballooned to over 1 million dinars ($9,000). 

The algorithm’s impact on Serbia’s Roma community has been dramatic. ​​Ahmetović says his sister has also had her welfare payments cut since the system was introduced, as have several of his neighbors. “Almost all people living in Roma settlements in some municipalities lost their benefits,” says Danilo Ćurčić, program coordinator of A11, a Serbian nonprofit that provides legal aid. A11 is trying to help the Ahmetovićs and more than 100 other Roma families reclaim their benefits.

But first, Ćurčić needs to know how the system works. So far, the government has denied his requests to share the source code on intellectual property grounds, claiming it would violate the contract they signed with the company who actually built the system, he says. According to Ćurčić and a government contract, a Serbian company called Saga, which specializes in automation, was involved in building the social card system. Neither Saga nor Serbia’s Ministry of Social Affairs responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

As the govtech sector has grown, so has the number of companies selling systems to detect fraud. And not all of them are local startups like Saga. Accenture—Ireland’s biggest public company, which employs more than half a million people worldwide—has worked on fraud systems across Europe. In 2017, Accenture helped the Dutch city of Rotterdam develop a system that calculates risk scores for every welfare recipient. A company document describing the original project, obtained by Lighthouse Reports and WIRED, references an Accenture-built machine learning system that combed through data on thousands of people to judge how likely each of them was to commit welfare fraud. “The city could then sort welfare recipients in order of risk of illegitimacy, so that highest risk individuals can be investigated first,” the document says. 

Officials in Rotterdam have said Accenture’s system was used until 2018, when a team at Rotterdam’s Research and Business Intelligence Department took over the algorithm’s development. When Lighthouse Reports and WIRED analyzed a 2021 version of Rotterdam’s fraud algorithm, it became clear that the system discriminates on the basis of race and gender. And around 70 percent of the variables in the 2021 system—information categories such as gender, spoken language, and mental health history that the algorithm used to calculate how likely a person was to commit welfare fraud—appeared to be the same as those in Accenture’s version.

When asked about the similarities, Accenture spokesperson Chinedu Udezue said the company’s “start-up model” was transferred to the city in 2018 when the contract ended. Rotterdam stopped using the algorithm in 2021, after auditors found that the data it used risked creating biased results.

Consultancies generally implement predictive analytics models and then leave after six or eight months, says Sheils, Accenture’s European head of public service. He says his team helps governments avoid what he describes as the industry’s curse: “false positives,” Sheils’ term for life-ruining occurrences of an algorithm incorrectly flagging an innocent person for investigation. “That may seem like a very clinical way of looking at it, but technically speaking, that's all they are.” Sheils claims that Accenture mitigates this by encouraging clients to use AI or machine learning to improve, rather than replace, decision-making humans. “That means ensuring that citizens don’t experience significantly adverse consequences purely on the basis of an AI decision.” 

However, social workers who are asked to investigate people flagged by these systems before making a final decision aren’t necessarily exercising independent judgment, says Eva Blum-Dumontet, a tech policy consultant who researched algorithms in the UK welfare system for campaign group Privacy International. “This human is still going to be influenced by the decision of the AI,” she says. “Having a human in the loop doesn’t mean that the human has the time, the training, or the capacity to question the decision.” 

Despite the scandals and repeated allegations of bias, the industry building these systems shows no sign of slowing. And neither does government appetite for buying or building such systems. Last summer, Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance adopted a decree authorizing the launch of an algorithm that searches for discrepancies in tax filings, earnings, property records, and bank accounts to identify people at risk of not paying their taxes. 

But as more governments adopt these systems, the number of people erroneously flagged for fraud is growing. And once someone is caught up in the tangle of data, it can take years to break free. In the Netherlands’ child benefits scandal, people lost their cars and homes, and couples described how the stress drove them to divorce. “The financial misery is huge,” says Orlando Kadir, a lawyer representing more than 1,000 affected families. After a public inquiry, the Dutch government agreed in 2020 to pay the families around €30,000 ($32,000) in compensation. But debt balloons over time. And that amount is not enough, says Kadir, who claims some families are now €250,000 in debt. 

In Belgrade, ​​Ahmetović is still fighting to get his family’s full benefits reinstated. “I don’t understand what happened or why,” he says. “It’s hard to compete against the computer and prove this was a mistake.” But he says he’s also wondering whether he’ll ever be compensated for the financial damage the social card system has caused him. He’s yet another person caught up in an opaque system whose inner workings are guarded by the companies and governments who make and operate them. Ćurčić, though, is clear on what needs to change. “We don’t care who made the algorithm,” he says. “The algorithm just has to be made public.”

Additional reporting by Gabriel Geiger and Justin-Casimir Braun.