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Free weekday coverage on current issues
February 19, 2007
Headlines - New on LLRX.com for February 2007, Part 2
- CBO Testimony on Future Medical Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs
- Prison Growth Could Cost Up to $27.5 Billion Over Next 5 Years
- Pew Research: How Reliable Are the Early Presidential Polls?
- New Campaign Champions Changes In Medical Prescribing To End Conflicts Of Interest
- Google Publishes Study on Failure Rates of Hard Disk Drives
- Congresswoman DeLauro and Sen. Durbin Reintroduce Safe Food Act
- Pew Research Center Survey: War Support Slips, Fewer Expect a Successful Outcome
 CBO Testimony on Future Medical Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs CBO Testimony - Statement of Allison Percy, Principal Analyst, Future Medical Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs before the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, February 15, 2007.
Prison Growth Could Cost Up to $27.5 Billion Over Next 5 Years "By 2011 one in every 178 U.S. residents will live in prison, according to a new report released [February 13, 2007] by the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America's Prison Population 2007-2011 [52 pages, PDF] projects that by 2011 America will have more than 1.7 million men and women in prison, an increase of more than 192,000 from 2006. That increase could cost taxpayers as much as $27.5 billion over the next five years beyond what they currently spend on prisons."
Pew Research: How Reliable Are the Early Presidential Polls? How Reliable Are the Early Presidential Polls? Poll Analysis - Pew Research Center for People and the Press, by Nilanthi Samaranayake and Scott Keeter: "The flurry of candidate announcements in an open race has spurred media attention to the 2008 presidential contest even earlier in the electoral cycle than usual. But followers of early poll readings on the relative viability of declared candidates should bear in mind some caveats. Early frontrunners for the Republican nomination in most of the past seven open contests have gone on to win the nomination, but this year there is not one but two GOP frontrunners. On the Democratic side, even when there is a clear frontrunner as there is this year with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the early polls have been less reliable in predicting who will capture the nomination."
New Campaign Champions Changes In Medical Prescribing To End Conflicts Of Interest Press release, February 12, 2007: "The Prescription Project...called on academic medical centers, professional medical societies and public and private payers to end conflicts of interest resulting from the $12 billion spent annually on pharmaceutical marketing. Building on a series of reforms recommended last year in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the project will conduct and publicize research on conflicts of interest, advocate for policy reforms that will eliminate such conflicts, and promote prescription practices that are based on scientific evidence." About the Prescription Project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts
Google Publishes Study on Failure Rates of Hard Disk Drives Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso, 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007), 2007 "We have built an infrastructure that collects vital information about all Google's systems every few minutes, and a repository that stores these data in timeseries format (essentially forever) for further analysis. The information collected includes environmental factors (such as temperatures), activity levels and many of the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) parameters that are believed to be good indicators of disk drive health. We mine through these data and attempt to find evidence that corroborates or contradicts many of the commonly held beliefs about how various factors can affect disk drive lifetime. Our paper is unique in that it is based on data from a disk population size that is typically only available from vendor warranty databases, but has the depth of deployment visibility and detailed lifetime follow-up that only an end-user study can provide."
Congresswoman DeLauro and Sen. Durbin Reintroduce Safe Food Act Press release: On February 14, 2007, "Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.-3) renewed their effort to consolidate food safety oversight in this country by reintroducing their Safe Food Act – legislation that calls for the development of a single food safety agency and the implementation of a food safety program to standardize American food safety activities. The lawmakers have worked on this effort for over a decade in the Congress and have gained momentum from recent events. Two weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) deemed federal oversight of food safety as “high risk” to the economy and public health and safety." Center for Science in the Public Interest Supports Effort to Modernize Food Safety Laws: "The Safe Food Act would consolidate the activities of various federal agencies responsible for the nation's food supply including USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service; the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition; and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The bill also includes a traceback provision, gives the new agency recall authority, and requires more frequent inspections to help prevent future E. coli outbreaks."
Pew Research Center Survey: War Support Slips, Fewer Expect a Successful Outcome Pew Research Center for the People and the Press - War Support Slips, Fewer Expect a Successful Outcome - Country is 'Losing Ground' On Deficit, Rich-Poor Gap, Released: February 15, 2007 "Public support for the war in Iraq continues to decline, as a growing number of political independents are turning against the war. Overall, a 53% majority of Americans believe the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible - up five points in the past month and the highest percentage favoring a troop pullout since the war began nearly four years ago...Fewer than one-in-three Americans (31%) currently rate the country's economic conditions as excellent or good, while 68% say the state of the economy is either fair or poor."
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