Misleading Reports Research Articles

BH3 profiling discriminates on-target small molecule BH3 mimetics from putative mimetics.

Inhibition of the anti-apoptotic machinery of cancer cells is a promising therapeutic approach that has driven the development of an important class of compounds termed "BH3 mimetics". These novel small molecules mimic BH3-only proteins by antagonizing the pro-survival function of anti-apoptotic proteins, thereby inducing apoptosis in cancer cells. To qualify as an authentic BH3 mimetic, a compound must function directly on the mitochondria of a cell of known anti-apoptotic dependence, must directly and selectively inhibit the anti-apoptotic protein with high-affinity binding, and must induce mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP) and apoptosis in a BAX/BAK-dependent manner. While many BH3 mimetics have entered clinical trials, the lack of a reliable validation assay to directly test the mitochondrial activity of new BH3 mimetic candidates has resulted in many misleading reports of agents touted as BH3 mimetics despite their off-target mechanisms of action. BH3 profiling probes the activity of a compound at the mitochondrial level by measuring cytochrome c release as a surrogate marker for MOMP. We propose a comprehensive biochemical toolkit consisting of BH3 profiling in parallel with high-throughput Annexin V/Hoechst viability testing to validate BH3 mimetic candidates. We tested our toolkit on eighteen different putative BH3 mimetics using a set of standardized cell lines of known anti-apoptotic dependence. Included in this set of cell lines is an apoptosis refractory BAX/BAK DKO control line to detect compounds that function independently of the BCL-2 family. Taken together, this rapid, efficient means of testing will prove advantageous as the demand for BH3 mimetics increases, particularly in the quest to identify and develop more potent MCL-1 inhibitors for use in the clinic. We strongly urge researchers utilizing BH3 mimetics in their work to use the potent and selective compounds identified with this validation toolkit instead of those lacking such potency and selectivity.

Earnings Management and Performance of IPO Firms: Evidence from India

Disclosure through corporate annual reports is intended to enhance transparency and reduce information asymmetry during public issues. Ritter (1991) revealed that there is something fishy in the financial reports of the companies coming out with public issues. Earnings management has been recognised as a foremost contributor to such misleading financial reports. The short term overperformance of initial public offerings (IPO) of companies increases the expectations of potential investors and leads to a subsequent decline of performance in long run leaving the investors in distraught. The observed phenomenon is omnipresent and thus affects the investors across the globe. The present article empirically investigates the presence of earnings management in IPOs in India. The study is based on Modified Jones Model, the best known model to measure accruals earnings management. Preliminary results exhibit that earnings management in Indian IPOs is much higher than in developed countries. The study further discovers that the earnings performance of IPO companies is abnormally higher in IPO year as compared with post-offer period. Both the results taken together reinforce that post-issue earnings performance is a derivation of issue year earnings management in India.

Accounting Fraud at Japanese Companies

Japanese companies in the 1980s were looked upon as the models for business innovation. Admired by the rest of the world for manufacturing efficiency and business strategy, Japanese companies were renowned for pioneering management techniques such as kaizen, target costing, and flexible manufacturing. Yet in recent years, the Japanese economy has experienced a spate of corporate scandals. Facing business setbacks, companies altered product data, hid losses, and even resorted to issuing misleading financial reports. Shareholder value was damaged, and consumers were outraged. What changed, and how could these scandals have been avoided?

The Failure to Measure Dietary Intake Engendered a Fictional Discourse on Diet-Disease Relations.

Controversies regarding the putative health effects of dietary sugar, salt, fat, and cholesterol are not driven by legitimate differences in scientific inference from valid evidence, but by a fictional discourse on diet-disease relations driven by decades of deeply flawed and demonstrably misleading epidemiologic research. Over the past 60 years, epidemiologists published tens of thousands of reports asserting that dietary intake was a major contributing factor to chronic non-communicable diseases despite the fact that epidemiologic methods do not measure dietary intake. In lieu of measuring actual dietary intake, epidemiologists collected millions of unverified verbal and textual reports of memories of perceptions of dietary intake. Given that actual dietary intake and reported memories of perceptions of intake are not in the same ontological category, epidemiologists committed the logical fallacy of “Misplaced Concreteness.” This error was exacerbated when the anecdotal (self-reported) data were impermissibly transformed (i.e., pseudo-quantified) into proxy-estimates of nutrient and caloric consumption via the assignment of “reference” values from databases of questionable validity and comprehensiveness. These errors were further compounded when statistical analyses of diet-disease relations were performed using the pseudo-quantified anecdotal data. These fatal measurement, analytic, and inferential flaws were obscured when epidemiologists failed to cite decades of research demonstrating that the proxy-estimates they created were often physiologically implausible (i.e., meaningless) and had no verifiable quantitative relation to the actual nutrient or caloric consumption of participants. In this critical analysis, we present substantial evidence to support our contention that current controversies and public confusion regarding diet-disease relations were generated by tens of thousands of deeply flawed, demonstrably misleading, and pseudoscientific epidemiologic reports. We challenge the field of nutrition to regain lost credibility by acknowledging the empirical and theoretical refutations of their memory-based methods and ensure that rigorous (objective) scientific methods are used to study the role of diet in chronic disease.

The Effect of Vaccine Literacy on Parental Trust and Intention to Vaccinate after a Major Vaccine Scandal

Health literacy, and more specifically vaccine literacy, might be an important factor in reducing the negative effects of exposure to misleading reports on vaccination. This study explores the association between vaccine literacy and vaccination-related outcomes after misleading reports on a scandal concerning locally produced childhood vaccines had emerged in 2016 in China. Data for this study came from a cross-sectional survey, which was conducted in April 2016 in Hangzhou, China. Data were collected in kindergartens and community health centers among parents of children up to 6 years of age. Data were analyzed for 1864 participants. Binary logistic regression models showed that, after controlling for socio-demographics and children’s age, parents who had better vaccine literacy (<0.05) were more likely to trust and choose domestically produced vaccines, which account for about 95% of the total vaccinations in China. This study provides evidence on a still largely understudied relationship between vaccine literacy and vaccination-related outcomes. Findings might suggest that higher literacy levels could reduce some of the negative effects of being exposed to misleading information on vaccination, eventually leading to less vaccination hesitancy.

Information Disorder in Asia: Overview of Misinformation Ecosystem in Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines

This research paper is the first of a series of short articles that provide an overview of what is known about the scale and impact of disinformation in different Asian countries. While concerns over fake have prompted rigorous investigations into the related areas in the United States and Europe recently, little is known about the way misinformation and disinformation is spread in many Asian countries where economic and digital development, especially smartphones, have transformed people's lifestyles including their patterns of news consumption and distribution. On which platforms do falsehoods spread? Who are the actors? What motivates them? Why do specific topics, issues, and individuals become targets for information disorder? What is the scale and impact of false or misleading news reports? Of course, Asia is comprised of many countries; we speak different languages, have different cultures and religious beliefs, and live under various political systems. Naturally, the matters at the heart of the misinformation ecosystem in each country vary considerably. In this research project, we aim to map the landscape of each country's own fake problems. Many intertwined factors affect the situation, including culture, history, politics, economy, education, digital adoption, technology trends, media law, and press systems. Our goal is not to encompass all such aspects, but rather to highlight salient characteristics that will inform academics, media professionals, tech companies, non-government organizations, and government organizations of critical issues and their impact on the community. We believe these case studies would also inform the broader global discussion and research on misinformation already in progress; in some areas, Asian countries lead the rest of the world in technology use. Mobile-only internet usage, heavy reliance on chat apps, the popularity of emojis and messaging app stickers—these are some of the phenomena we observed in the Asia-Pacific region a few years before they caught on internationally. We don’t know how long the overall investigation will take in the end, but as a start, we are releasing an overview research article on information disorder in different Asian countries in this document.

Origin and Prevention of Workplace Violence in Health Care in China

Origin and Prevention of Workplace Violence in Health Care in China

Greater right of reply on CQC draft inspection reports

Current CQC policy leaves little room for service providers to contest factual errors in draft inspection reports. Rachel Adamson describes a recent court case that offers care homes a second chance to correct inaccurate or misleading reports before they are published

Current Public Knowledge Pertaining to Traumatic Brain Injury: Influence of Demographic Factors, Social Trends, and Sport Concussion Experience on the Understanding of Traumatic Brain Injury Sequelae.

The current study aimed to assess current broad traumatic brain injury (TBI)-related knowledge in the general public, as well as understanding regarding specific TBI-related conditions including post-concussive syndrome (PCS) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Data were collected from 307 domestic and 73 international individuals via online researcher-developed survey instrumentation utilizing the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace, a recently developed website that allows for a streamlined process of survey-based participant recruitment and data collection. Participants completed background demographics questions, a 31-item true/false questionnaire pertaining to TBI-related knowledge, and an inquiry related to willingness to allow (future) child(ren) to participate in several popular U.S. sports. The overall accuracy rate of our U.S. sample was 61%. No accuracy differences were present for gender or geographic region (p's>.05). Participants who self-reported a prior concussion diagnosis, who reported receiving formal concussion training, and who endorsed participation in collegiate, semi-professional, or professional athletic competition, all exhibited lower accuracy rates than the respective comparison groups (p's<.001). Finally, individual item analysis revealed the presence of significant misconceptions pertaining to PCS and CTE. Misconceptions regarding TBI remain highly prevalent within the general public and may be explained, to some extent, by inefficiencies in current TBI-education practices. Moreover, misconceptions regarding PCS and CTE are also prevalent and likely reflect inconsistencies in the scientific literature, coupled with misleading media reports. To combat these trends, greater emphasis must be placed on construct definition within the field and streamlined, efficient communication with the general public.

Understanding the rise of Yinao in China: A commentary on the little known phenomenon of healthcare violence.

Yinao (healthcare disturbance) refers to violent incidents directed against healthcare staff and facilities for financial benefit. In China, incidences of Yinao are widespread and increasing, but little is known of this phenomenon in the wider global community. This commentary investigates the factors behind Yinao to achieve a deeper understanding. Causes include a lack of trust in medical staff, fueled by costly medical expenses; difficulties in accessing treatment; poor treatment outcomes; high patient expectations; a misunderstanding or rejection of medical ethics; misleading media reports; and a complex appeals process. Both doctors and nurses have been the targets of violent and distressing Yinao events, resulting in emotional pain, physical injury, and even death. In response, hospitals have established a series of preventative measures and and the government has increased the penalties for perpetrators of acts of Yinao. The situation is a salient reminder to policymakers worldwide of the importance of an accessible, affordable, and equitable health system.

Concept originalism, reference-shift and belief reports

Concept originalism, recently introduced and defended by Sainsbury and Tye (S&T) (Proc Aristotelian Soc Suppl Vol 85:101–124, 2011, Seven puzzles of thought and how to solve them: an originalist theory of concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012), Tye (in Brogaard, Does perception have content? Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), and Sainsbury (Erkenntnis 80:195–214, 2015), holds that “atomic concepts are to be individuated by their historical origins, as opposed to their semantic or epistemic properties” (S&T 2012, p. 40). The view is immune to Gareth Evans’s “Madagascar” objection to the Causal Theory of Reference since it allows a concept (and thus a name) to change its reference over time without losing its identity. The possibility of (inadvertent) reference-shift, however, raises the problem of misleading belief reports. S&T try to tackle the problem by strengthening the sufficient condition for a truthful belief report. We will argue that, first, their solution fails, second, and more importantly, their diagnosis of the root of the problem is misguided, third, two initially appealing ways out of the problem fail, and fourth, the prospect of finding a solution to the problem within CO is dim. The view opens the Pandora’s box of reference-shift, in a wide range of cases, without providing the necessary semantic means to take care of them.

How to trust a few among many

The presence of numerous and disparate information sources available to support decision-making calls for efficient methods of harnessing their potential. Information sources may be unreliable, and misleading reports can affect decisions. Existing trust and reputation mechanisms typically rely on reports from as many sources as possible to mitigate the influence of misleading reports on decisions. In the real world, however, it is often the case that querying information sources can be costly in terms of energy, bandwidth, delay overheads, and other constraints. We present a model of source selection and fusion in resource-constrained environments, where there is uncertainty regarding the trustworthiness of sources. We exploit diversity among sources to stratify them into homogeneous subgroups to both minimise redundant sampling and mitigate the effect of certain biases. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that a diversity-based approach is robust to biases introduced due to dependencies among source reports, performs significantly better than existing approaches when sampling budget is limited and equally as good with an unlimited budget.

The Relationship Between Accounting Practices and Effects of Financial Crisis in Turkey: A Case Study on an Oil Company

Many reasons lie at the base of all financial crises from the past to the present. If we take into consideration the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the only reason cannot be mortgage loans. But the mortgage issue continued to advance and created several other problems. Definitely, the source of mortgage loans problem also had many roots. One of the reasons was the lack of correct use of accounting principles and auditing. This is a strong proof and indicator that, there are many accounting based reasons behind the occurrence of the financial crises. Many examples can be given showing moving away from the basic principles of accounting rules and the general accounting concepts. Moreover, institutions being not fully independent, running creative accounting practices, having problems with fair valuation and transparency issues, presenting unreal financial reports, and sharing misleading audit reports are all related to financial crises.Furthermore, specific businesses and people abuse accounting rules, standards and related legislation for the sake of their own interests. Accounting and finance history has shown us that, even audit institutions, credit institutions and rating agencies are getting unfair advantages and generating unethical cash by making intentional accounting and finance errors, which is actually categorized as fraud.The aim of this study is to analyze financial crises and to determine if accounting practices have any relationship with financial crises. The research investigated an oil company’s financial and operational indicators before and after the 2008 financial crises with related tables and figures. Also, an interview was run with the company’s accounting officer. Based on the statements of firm’s accounting officer, correct accounting practices defended firm from several negative effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

Caught in the Trap: The Allure of Deceptive Publishers

Caught in the Trap: The Allure of Deceptive Publishers

Pitfalls in Erythrocyte Protoporphyrin Measurement for Diagnosis and Monitoring of Protoporphyrias.

Laboratory diagnosis of erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP) requires a marked increase in total erythrocyte protoporphyrin (300-5000 μg/dL erythrocytes, reference interval <80 μg/dL) and a predominance (85%-100%) of metal-free protoporphyrin [normal, mostly zinc protoporphyrin (reference intervals for the zinc protoporphyrin proportion have not been established)]; plasma porphyrins are not always increased. X-linked protoporphyria (XLP) causes a similar increase in total erythrocyte protoporphyrin with a lower fraction of metal-free protoporphyrin (50%-85% of the total). In studying more than 180 patients with EPP and XLP, the Porphyrias Consortium found that erythrocyte protoporphyrin concentrations for some patients were much higher (4.3- to 46.7-fold) than indicated by previous reports provided by these patients. The discrepant earlier reports, which sometimes caused the diagnosis to be missed initially, were from laboratories that measure protoporphyrin only by hematofluorometry, which is intended primarily to screen for lead poisoning. However, the instrument can calculate results on the basis of assumed hematocrits and reports results as "free" and "zinc" protoporphyrin (with different reference intervals), implying separate measurements of metal-free and zinc protoporphyrin. Such misleading reports impair diagnosis and monitoring of patients with protoporphyria. We suggest that laboratories should prioritize testing for EPP and XLP, because accurate measurement of erythrocyte total and metal-free protoporphyrin is essential for diagnosis and monitoring of these conditions, but less important for other disorders. Terms and abbreviations used in reporting erythrocyte protoporphyrin results should be accurately defined.

Was the Global Settlement Effective in Mitigating Systematic Bias in Affiliated Analyst Recommendations?

Regulators have recently relaxed some provisions of the Global Research Analyst Settlement of 2003 (the “Global Settlement”) and associated reforms, which arose from charges that conflicts of interest within investment banks had induced the issuance of fraudulent or otherwise misleading analyst research reports. We examine the effectiveness of the Global Settlement in reducing the systematic optimism observed in stock recommendations of analysts whose employer is a merger and acquisition (“M&A”) advisor for the covered firm (“affiliated analysts”), by comparing the optimism exhibited in stock recommendations issued by these analysts and by unaffiliated analysts before and after the Global Settlement. To control for the impact on analyst optimism of other time varying factors, our sample includes cases from the US and from other countries in which the Global Settlement had no direct impact. We argue that if the Global Settlement was effective, there should be a reduction in the relative optimism of affiliated analysts following this reform, and that reduction in the relative optimism should be greater for affiliated US analysts, than for affiliated analysts from non-US countries. When optimism is measured over a 180-day period surrounding the M&A announcement, we find a significantly greater reduction in US affiliated analysts’ optimism than occurs outside the US. However, evidence regarding analysts’ optimism in the 90-day period prior to the announcement of an M&A deal is mixed.

Probabilistic Trust Evaluation with Inaccurate Reputation Reports

We are concerned with the problem of trust evaluation in the generic context of large scale open-ended systems. In such systems the truster agents have to interact with other trustee peers to achieve their goals, while the trustees may not behave as required in practice. The truster therefore has to predict the behaviors of potential trustees to identify reliable ones, based on past interaction experience. Due to the size of the system, often there is little or no past interaction between the truster and the trustee, that is, the case wherein the truster should resort to the third party agents, termed advisors here, inquiring about the reputation of the trustee. The problem is complicated by the possibility that the advisors may deliberately provide inaccurate and even misleading reputation reports to the truster. To this end, we develop techniques to take account of inaccurate reputations in modeling the behaviors of the trustee based on the Bayesian formalism. The core of the techniques is a proposed notion, termed Advisor-to-Truster relevance measure, based on which the incorrect reputation reports are rectified for use in the trust evaluation process. The benefit induced by the proposed techniques is verified by simulated experiments.

How Many Jobs Does Intellectual Property Create?

In the past two years, a spate of misleading reports on intellectual property has sought to convince policymakers and the public that implausibly high proportions of US output and employment depend on expansive intellectual property (IP) rights. These reports provide no theoretical or empirical evidence to support such a claim, but instead simply assume that the existence of intellectual property in an industry creates the jobs in that industry. We dispute the assumption that jobs in IP-intensive industries are necessarily IP-created jobs. We first explore issues regarding job creation and the economic efficiency of IP that cut across all kinds of intellectual property. We then take a closer look at these issues across three major forms of intellectual property: trademarks, patents, and copyrights.

Lazarus Recounts Year as AMA President

The AMA's voice helped secure an important victory in Sutter v. Oxford Health Plans, allowing individual physicians to come together as a group to fight the unfair business practices of large health insurance companies.

Public risk perception of food additives and food scares. The case in Suzhou, China

This study examined the factors affecting public risk perception of food additive safety and possible resulting food scares using a survey conducted in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. The model was proposed based on literature relating to the role of risk perception and information perception of public purchase intention under food scares. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for data analysis. The results showed that attitude towards behavior, subjective norm and information perception exerted moderate to high effect on food scares, and the effects were also mediated by risk perceptions of additive safety. Significant covariance was observed between attitudes toward behavior, subjective norm and information perception. Establishing an effective mechanism of food safety risk communication, releasing information of government supervision on food safety in a timely manner, curbing misleading media reports on public food safety risk, and enhancing public knowledge of the food additives are key to the development and implementation of food safety risk management policies by the Chinese government.