organization:northeastern university

How E-Commerce Sites Manipulate You Into Buying Things You May Not Want The New York Times, 24 juin 2019, par Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/technology/e-commerce-dark-patterns-psychology.html

[F]ake messages are an example of “dark patterns,” devious online techniques that manipulate users into doing things they might not otherwise choose to. They are the digital version of timeworn tactics used to influence consumer behavior, like impulse purchases placed near cash registers, or bait-and-switch ads for used cars.

“The important question as a policy matter is what separates a dark pattern from good old-fashioned advertising,” [Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University] said. “It’s a notoriously difficult line to find — what’s permissible persuasion vs wrongful manipulation.”

Most sites identified by the researchers used messages that indicated that products were popular, that there were few items in stock or that products would only be available for a limited time. Some were demonstrably false, while others were unclear.

Le « maximum 3 articles par personne » affiché dans les supermarchés, c’est du même acabit.
Et ça s’appelle du neuro-marketting, si mes souvenirs sont tangibles.

Aux Etats-Unis, victoire judiciaire majeure contre les fabricants d’opioïdes
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/03/27/etats-unis-premiere-victoire-judiciaire-contre-les-fabricants-d-opiaces_5441

Le laboratoire pharmaceutique, Purdue, et sa famille propriétaire, les Sackler, ont accepté de payer 270 millions de dollars (environ 240 millions d’euros) pour mettre fin à une plainte de l’Etat de l’Oklahoma liée à la crise des opioïdes. Il s’agit d’une victoire majeure contre les industriels accusés d’avoir favorisé la dépendance aux drogues qui ravage les Etats-Unis.

Le procureur général de cet Etat du Midwest, qui a vu comme d’autres exploser le nombre d’overdoses mortelles ces dernières années, a annoncé mardi 26 mars, ce paiement dans le cadre d’un accord à l’amiable passé avec le producteur de l’OxyContin, un antidouleur au premier rang des accusés dans cette crise.

Ce sont les pratiques marketing des compagnies pharmaceutiques qui sont visées : en encourageant les médecins à prescrire, voire à surprescrire, ces analgésiques hautement addictifs, elles sont accusées d’avoir précipité des millions d’Américains dans l’addiction aux médicaments ou aux drogues dures, comme l’héroïne, ou de synthèse, comme le fentanyl.
Article réservé à nos abonnés Lire aussi Les Etats-Unis tentent de réagir face à la crise des opioïdes
Deux autres laboratoires attaqués

Les 270 millions de dollars serviront en grande partie à financer le centre de recherche sur les dépendances de l’université publique de Tulsa, qui va recevoir de Purdue Pharma 102,5 millions de dollars dès maintenant, plus 75 millions de dollars sur cinq ans de la famille Sackler, et 20 millions de dollars en médicaments destinés à traiter les personnes dépendantes, a annoncé le procureur Mike Hunter.

« C’est une victoire monumentale » dans la bataille contre la crise « cauchemardesque » des opioïdes qui ravage les Etats-Unis, même si ce n’est qu’« un premier pas », a-t-il fait valoir.

L’accord à l’amiable ne met pas fin à la plainte déposée en 2017 par l’Oklahoma contre les fabricants d’opioïdes, qui attaquait non seulement Purdue, mais aussi Johnson & Johnson et Teva. Ces derniers restent attendus au tribunal le 28 mai, pour se défendre d’avoir promu ces médicaments alors même qu’ils connaissaient leurs effets néfastes.

Ce devrait être le premier grand procès contre les laboratoires dans cette crise des opioïdes déclarée « urgence de santé publique » par le gouvernement Trump fin 2017. A moins qu’eux aussi négocient d’ici là un accord avec l’Oklahoma, ce que n’a pas complètement exclu M. Hunter.
Lire le reportage : Aux Etats-Unis, la ville de Manchester face au fléau des overdoses d’opiacées
Au moins 1 600 plaintes au niveau fédéral

D’autres accords à l’amiable pourraient suivre dans d’autres juridictions où Purdue Pharma a été attaqué pour des faits similaires : au moins 1 600 plaintes ont été enregistrées au niveau fédéral, supervisées par un juge de Cleveland (Ohio), et des centaines au niveau des Etats, dont New York et le Massachusetts. Face à cette avalanche de plaintes, la direction du laboratoire avait évoqué la possibilité de se déclarer en faillite.

Le procureur Hunter a cependant fait savoir qu’il avait tout fait pour s’assurer que la société ne se mettrait pas « en faillite à court terme », pour pouvoir honorer le paiement promis. Le président de Purdue, le docteur Craig Landau, a assuré que l’accord trouvé reflétait « la détermination [de la firme] à jouer un rôle moteur pour résoudre la crise des opioïdes ». Un porte-parole de la famille Sackler a lui aussi affirmé « sa détermination à contribuer substantiellement à sauver des vies ».
Regarder le reportage : Opiacés, portrait d’une Amérique à la dérive
70 000 Américains morts d’overdoses en 2017
Jérôme Sessini/Magnum Photos

Si d’autres fabricants de médicaments opioïdes sont sur la sellette, Purdue Pharma et la famille Sackler – de grands philanthropes dont le nom orne de nombreux musées aux Etats-Unis et en Europe – ont été la première cible des critiques. Les Sackler ont amassé des milliards de dollars grâce à l’OxyContin.

Or, on sait aujourd’hui que l’OxyContin et d’autres opioïdes contre la douleur ont été surprescrits par le milieu médical pendant des années, entraînant une dépendance croissante aux opioïdes et poussant les consommateurs vers des drogues plus fortes comme le fentanyl et l’héroïne, avec pour effet de multiplier les overdoses.

Les plaintes accusent les fabricants d’avoir promu agressivement ces médicaments auprès du corps médical alors qu’ils connaissaient leurs effets addictifs et qu’ils auraient dû limiter leurs ordonnances à des maladies bien précises.
Selon les derniers chiffres des Centres pour la prévention des maladies (CDC), quelque 70 000 Américains sont morts d’overdoses aux Etats-Unis, 10 % de plus qu’en 2016. Dans des métropoles comme New York, les opioïdes font désormais davantage de victimes qu’accidents de la route et homicides réunis. Cette explosion d’overdoses a contribué à faire baisser l’espérance de vie aux Etats-Unis en 2017, pour la troisième année consécutive.

Call For Papers: Distributed & Heterogeneous Programming in C/C++
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

The call for papers is now open for DHPCC++19 and closes on 27th January.

DHPCC++, 13 May 2019, Northeastern University, Boston, USA by the DHPCC++

From the article:

This will be the 3rd DHPCC++ event in partnership with IWOCL, the international OpenCL workshop with a focus on heterogeneous programming models for C and C++, covering all the programming models that have been designed to support heterogeneous programming in C and C++. Many C++ programming models exist including SYCL, HPX, KoKKos, Raja, C++AMP, HCC, Boost.Compute, and CUDA. This conference aims to address the needs of both HPC and the consumer/embedded community where a number of C++ parallel programming frameworks have been developed to address the needs of multi-threaded and distributed applications. (...)

#News,_Events,

Facebook a permis aux annonceurs d’utiliser des informations sur vous que vous n’aviez pas données
▻https://www.numerama.com/business/423712-facebook-a-permis-aux-annonceurs-dutiliser-des-informations-sur-vou

Une étude de chercheurs américains révèle que Facebook ne se contente pas des données que vous lui avez communiquées. Une équipe de chercheurs en informatique et science de l’information de la Northeastern University de Boston révèle dans un article comment Facebook laisse les publicitaires atteindre des informations collectées indirectement. La journaliste Kashmir Hill, senior reporter d’une cellule d’investigation de gizmodo.com, a elle-même travaillé avec l’un des chercheurs, Adam Mislove. Elle (...)

#Facebook #données #[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données_(RGPD)[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR)[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR) #BigData #marketing (...)

##[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données__RGPD_[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_ ##publicité

https://www.numerama.com/content/uploads/2018/07/facebook.jpg

Opinion | The Federal Agency That Fuels the Opioid Crisis - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/opinion/drugs-dea-defund-heroin.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/09/17/opinion/17beletsky/17beletsky-facebookJumbo.jpg

Every day, nearly 200 people across the country die from drug overdoses. Opioids have been the primary driver of this calamity: first as prescription painkillers, then heroin and, more recently, illicitly manufactured fentanyl. The death toll has risen steadily over the past two decades.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency that most directly oversees access to opioids, deserves much of the blame for these deaths. Because of its incompetence, the opioid crisis has gone from bad to worse. The solution: overhauling the agency, or even getting rid of it entirely.

A decade into the crisis, more and more prescription drug users turned to the black market. Even though the D.E.A. had tried to “eradicate” illicit drugs for nearly 50 years, users could easily buy stolen and counterfeit pills, along with a cheaper option, heroin. Soon, some began injecting. Outbreaks of H.I.V. and hepatitis C followed. Meanwhile, people who sought evidence-based treatment were rarely able to access it because of the agency’s evolving regulatory and enforcement strategies, like blocking the expansion of mobile methadone clinics and shutting down addiction treatment providers without arranging alternatives for affected patients.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has had over 40 years to win the war on drugs. Instead its tactics have fueled the opioid crisis. To finally make a dent in this national emergency, we need to rethink the agency from the bottom up.

Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, is the faculty director of the Health in Justice Action Lab, where Jeremiah Goulka is a senior fellow.

#Opioides #DEA #War_on_drug

Amazon Knows Why Alexa Was Laughing at Its Customers - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/business/alexa-laugh-amazon-echo.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/03/09/autossell/09xp-alexa-01/merlin_135204786_f1ed9839-f9e1-4729-b60c-ce6f5edd1546-facebookJumbo.jpg

“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’” when other words are spoken, Amazon said in an emailed statement. “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’”

The episode underscored the concerns swirling around Echo and other smart speakers, like Google Home, which often sit in intimate spaces, awaiting a call to action.
Critics have argued that the always-on devices pose a threat to privacy and security. There have been reports of children ordering items through the devices without parental consent, and last year Burger King took advantage of the devices by incorporating a command into a commercial.

Despite those concerns, the technology has been widely embraced. Reports vary on just how many Americans use such devices, but all suggest that adoption is relatively high.

On Tuesday, for example, the polling organization Gallup and Northeastern University reported that about one in five American adults use an intelligent home device such as Alexa, Google Home or other competing devices.

#Amazon #Alexa #Vie_privée

▻http://www.salon.com/2016/05/09/media_really_got_isis_wrong_its_brutality_helped_al_qaeda_terrorism_expert_sa

“The media really got ISIS wrong for a long time,” argues scholar Max Abrahms, a prominent terrorism expert.

Many Western media outlets “made it seem as if ISIS has a big advantage over al-Qaeda because it is even more radical; that because the group uses violence in such a brutal fashion, it will be able to out-recruit al-Qaeda, have a larger membership size, more staying power and greater capabilities.”

Yet actually, in the long term, Abrahms says, al-Qaeda is the group that has benefited the most from ISIS’ extremism, because it allows al-Qaeda to present itself as the more “moderate” alternative.

ISIS’ brutality, and the attention much of the world has paid to the extremist group, has allowed al-Qaeda to grow with much less opposition, and even with support of U.S. allies in some areas, particularly in Syria.

Max Abrahms is an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University who has closely studied terrorism for more than a decade.

How the Heroin Epidemic Differs in Communities of Color | Chasing Heroin | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-heroin-epidemic-differs-in-communities-of-color

http://i2.wp.com/www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Arrest_4.jpg?resize=1200%2C630 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XKR5jlI7tts/VuBV3D1JWnI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/mA8r3HMk3tw/w426-h304/HeroinRace.gif

ost of the media attention in the current nationwide heroin epidemic has focused on the uptick in overdose deaths among suburban, white, middle-class users — many of whom turned to the drug after experimenting with prescription painkillers.

And it’s among whites where the most dramatic effect has been seen — a rise of more than 260 percent in the last five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control."

But the epidemic has also been seeping into communities of color, where heroin overdose death rates have more than doubled among African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, but gone largely overlooked by the media.

People develop addictions for a variety of reasons, which makes it difficult to gather concrete data on what’s happening in each community, said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director at the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “To a certain extent, these are hidden behaviors, and we only notice people at the end of their lives sometimes,” he said. “So we don’t always know all of the pathways that lead to this.”

Are State-Sanctioned Heroin Shooting Galleries a Good Idea?
▻http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/03/11/are-state-sanctioned-heroin-shooting-galleries-a-good-idea

http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/Post-Launch-Images/2016/03/sln_march11/sln_march11_1x1.jpg

Studies of safe injection sites, largely in Canada and Australia, have found that they help reduce overdoses and don’t increase drug use or trafficking in the communities where they’re located.

Sites in the United States could violate the federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits possession of drugs such as heroin or cocaine or operating a place where people use them. But Congress could change the law or the U.S. Justice Department could make exceptions for the sites, said Leo Beletsky, a law and health sciences professor at Northeastern University.

Most state laws mirror the federal act and would also need to be amended to allow injection sites to operate legally, he said. Though if states begin legalizing them, the federal government could choose not to prosecute people who run and use them — just as the Justice Department has decided not to enforce federal laws for possessing, processing or selling marijuana in states that have legalized it.

From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html

The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.

Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.

Teixobactin has not yet been tested in humans, so its safety and effectiveness are not known. Studies in people will not begin for about two years, according to Kim Lewis, the senior author of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. Those studies will take several years, so even if the drug passes all the required tests, it still will not be available for five or six years, he said during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. If it is approved, he said, it will probably have to be injected, not taken by mouth.

(...)

The new research is based on the premise that everything on earth — plants, soil, people, animals — is teeming with microbes that compete fiercely to survive. Trying to keep one another in check, the microbes secrete biological weapons: antibiotics.

“The way bacteria multiply, if there weren’t natural mechanisms to limit their growth, they would have covered the planet and eaten us all eons ago,” Dr. Schaffner said.

Scientists and drug companies have for decades exploited the microbes’ natural arsenal, often by mining soil samples, and discovered lifesaving antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin and tetracycline, as well as some powerful chemotherapy drugs for cancer. But disease-causing organisms have become resistant to many existing drugs, and there has been a major obstacle to finding replacements, Dr. Lewis said: About 99 percent of the microbial species in the environment are bacteria that do not grow under usual laboratory conditions.

Dr. Lewis and his colleagues found a way to grow them. The process involves diluting a soil sample — the one that yielded teixobactin came from “a grassy field in Maine” — and placing it on specialized equipment. Then, the secret to success is putting the equipment into a box full of the same soil that the sample came from.

“Essentially, we’re tricking the bacteria,” Dr. Lewis said. Back in their native dirt, they divide and grow into colonies. Once the colonies form, Dr. Lewis said, the bacteria are “domesticated,” and researchers can scoop them up and start growing them in petri dishes in the laboratory.

The research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the German government (some co-authors work at the University of Bonn). Northeastern University holds a patent on the method of producing drugs and licensed the patent to a private company, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Mass., which owns the rights to any compounds produced. Dr. Lewis is a paid consultant to the company.

#santé #antibiotiques #bactéries #cancer #argent #public #privé

Two maps that show the evolution of global shipping

http://img.qz.com/2014/03/1980-to-1997-shipping-routes-web.png http://img.qz.com/2014/03/shipping-routes-1860.png

An assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, Ben Schmidt, has put together a few rather cool-looking maps that display the world’s modern shipping routes. What’s interesting is that, viewed together, the routes create an inverted map of the world—a reminder of the broad reach of global trade.
The map above displays shipping routes from 1980 to 1997, based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By contrast, the map below is based on shipping routes from the 19th century. It shows routes principally around North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Just a few routes, depicted by faint lines, run to Asia.

▻http://qz.com/193847/two-maps-that-show-the-evolution-of-global-shipping

#cartographie #visualisation #carte #mer #transport_maritime #commerce

Chris Hedges on “Israel’s War on American Universities”
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/chris-hedges-on-israels-war-on-american-universities

Raw Footage: Chris Hedges Speaks in Support of the Now Banned Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter at Northeastern University. Full Event.

Suède, Pays-Bas... ils ferment des #prisons par manque de détenus
▻http://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/justice/suede-pays-bas-ils-ferment-des-prisons-par-manque-de-detenus_456120.htm

Pour la troisième année consécutive, la population carcérale a baissé aux Etats-Unis en 2012, notait The New York Times (en anglais), en juillet. « C’est le début de la fin de l’incarcération de masse », indiquait même une chercheuse de la Northeastern University. En 2011 et 2012, dix-sept Etats ont ainsi fermé ou envisagé la fermeture de prisons - parfois pour des raisons économiques.

Can Meditation Make You a More Compassionate Person ? | Northeastern University – College of Science
▻http://www.northeastern.edu/cos/2013/04/release-can-meditation-make-you-a-more-compassionate-person

These results appear to prove what the Buddhist theologians have long believed—that meditation is supposed to lead you to experience more compassion and love for all sentient beings.

« Extrémistes » mis à part,

▻http://qz.com/69832/violent-anti-muslim-riots-in-myanmar-prove-that-militant-buddhist-isnt-an-oxymor

▻http://www.france24.com/fr/20130403-bouddhisme-musulmans-sri-lanka-cible-integristes-islam-violences

Téléchargement : plus on censure, plus il y a de sites | Rue89
►http://www.rue89.com/2013/01/09/inutile-de-censurer-les-sites-de-telechargement-selon-une-etude-238453

L’exemple de Megaupload est le plus parlant : loin d’être vertueuse, la fermeture du plus gros site de téléchargement en ligne en janvier 2012 (qui devrait renaître de ses cendres ce mois-ci) a été contre-productive, entraînant une diversification et une complexification du paysage des hébergeurs de fichiers. Les utilisateurs se sont rapidement tournés vers des sites alternatifs tels Uploaded, Wupload, RapidShare ou encore Mediafire pour télécharger leurs films et séries favorites en toute illégalité.

Bon, une étude pour confirmer ce qu’on savait déjà, ça fait toujours plaisir #téléchargement