FBI Wants Tech to Track Social Media for Criminals and Terrorists Before They Act

The Federal Bureau of Investigations aims to acquire access to a “social media early alerting tool” that will help insiders proactively and reactively monitor how terrorist groups, foreign intelligence services, criminal organizations and other domestic threats use networking platforms to further their illegal efforts, according to a request for proposalamended this week.

“With increased use of social media platforms by subjects of current FBI investigations and individuals that pose a threat to the United States, it is critical to obtain a service which will allow the FBI to identify relevant information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other Social media platforms in a timely fashion,” the agency said in the RFP. “Consequently, the FBI needs near real-time access to a full range of social media exchanges in order to obtain the most current information available in furtherance of its law enforcement and intelligence missions.”

Though the request was initially released on July 8, the FBI amended it this week to extend the relevant dates: The agency’s answers to vendors moved from July 25 to Aug. 7, and the proposal due date shifted from Aug. 8 to Aug. 27. Though the original proposal listed the anticipated award date as Aug. 30, it could be pushed back due to these changes.

Still, the proposal comes at a time when society is growing accustomed to the painful reality of the weaponization of social media outlets to cause harm. Earlier this year, a mass shooter in New Zealand opened fire at two mosques killing 50 people and injuring many more—he posted a 74-page manifesto and images of his weapons online ahead of the attack and livestreamed the shooting directly on Facebook Live. And the shooter who killed three people at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California Sunday also previously posted online about an 1890 racist manifesto, which has been deemed a “staple among neo-Nazis and white supremacists on extremist sites.”

“It is an acknowledged fact that virtually every incident and subject of FBI investigative interest has a presence online,” the bureau said in the project’s statement of objectives. “The mission critical exploitation of social media enables the Bureau to proactively detect, disrupt, and investigate an ever growing diverse range of threats.”

The FBI ultimately wants an interactive tool that can be accessed by all headquarters division and field office personnel via web browsers and through multiple devices. Interested vendors should have the capabilities to offer the agency the ability to set filters around the specific content they see, send immediate and custom alerts and notifications around “mission-relevant” incidents, have broad international reach and a strong language translation capability and allow for real-time geolocation-based monitoring that can be refined as events develop.

And when it comes to specific persons-of-interest and suspects already involved in open investigations, the bureau wants the ability to obtain their full-scope social media profiles from across the various platforms and insights into their affiliations with various groups across the world wide web.

“Items of interest in this context are social networks, user IDs, emails, IP addresses and telephone numbers, along with likely additional account with similar IDs or aliases,” the agency said.

The firm-fixed-price contract will be awarded on a best-value basis and will include one base year and four one-year option periods.

https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2019/07/fbi-wants-tech-track-social-media-criminals-and-terrorists-they-act/158843/

Self-sterilizing polymer proves effective against drug-resistant pathogens

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that an elastic polymer possesses broad-spectrum antimicrobial properties, allowing it to kill a range of viruses and drug-resistant bacteria in just minutes – including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

“We were exploring a different approach for creating antimicrobial materials when we observed some interesting behavior from this polymer and decided to explore its potential in greater depth,” says Rich Spontak, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State. “And what we found is extremely promising as an alternate weapon to existing materials-related approaches in the fight against drug-resistant pathogens. This could be particularly useful in clinical settings – such as hospitals or doctor’s offices – as well as senior-living facilities, where pathogen transmission can have dire consequences.”

The polymer’s antimicrobial properties stem from its unique molecular architecture, which attracts water to a sequence of repeat units that are chemically modified (or functionalized) with sulfonic acid groups.

“When microbes come into contact with the polymer, water on the surface of the microbes interacts with the sulfonic acid functional groups in the polymer – creating an acidic solution that quickly kills the bacteria,” says Reza Ghiladi, an associate professor of chemistry at NC State and co-corresponding author of the paper. “These acidic solutions can be made more or less powerful by controlling the number of sulfonic acid functional groups in the polymer.”

The researchers tested the polymer against six types of bacteria, including three antibiotic-resistant strains: MRSA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, and carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. When 40% or more of the relevant polymer units contain sulfonic acid groups, the polymer killed 99.9999% of each strain of bacteria within five minutes.

The researchers also tested the polymer against three viruses: an analog virus for rabies, a strain of influenza and a strain of human adenovirus.

“The polymer was able to fully destroy the influenza and the rabies analog within five minutes,” says Frank Scholle, an associate professor of biological sciences at NC State and co-author of the paper. “While the polymer with lower concentrations of the sulfonic acid groups had no practical effect against human adenovirus, it could destroy 99.997% of that virus at higher sulfonic acid levels.”

One concern of the researchers was that the polymer’s antimicrobial effect could progressively worsen over time, as sulfonic acid groups were neutralized when they interacted with positively charged ions (cations) in water. However, they found that the polymer could be fully “recharged” by exposing it to an acid solution.

“In laboratory settings, you could do this by dipping the polymer into a strong acid,” Ghiladi says. “But in other settings – such as a hospital room – you could simply spray the polymer surface with vinegar.”

This “recharging” process works because every time one of the negatively charged sulfonic acid groups combines with a cation in water – which can happen when the polymer comes into contact with microbes – the sulfonic acid group becomes electrically neutral. That makes the acid group ineffective against microbes. But when the neutralized polymer is subjected to acid, those functional groups can exchange bound cations with protons from the acid, making the sulfonic acid groups active again – and ready to kill microbial pathogens.

“The work we’ve done here highlights a promising new approach to creating antimicrobial surfaces for use in the fight against drug-resistant pathogens – and hospital-acquired infections in particular,” Ghiladi says.

“Functional block polymers like this are highly versatile – usable as water-treatment media, soft actuators, solar cells and gas-separation membranes – and environmentally benign since they can be readily recycled and re-used,” Spontak adds. “These features make them particularly attractive for widespread use.

“And this work focused on only one polymer series manufactured by Kraton Polymers,” Spontak says. “We are very eager to see how we can further modify this and other polymers to retain such effective and fast-acting antimicrobial properties while improving other attributes that would be attractive for other applications.”

###

The paper, “Inherently self-sterilizing charged multiblock polymers that kill drug-resistant microbes in minutes,” appears in the journal Materials Horizons. First author of the paper is Bharadwaja S. T. Peddinti, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The paper was co-authored by Mariana Vargas, an undergraduate at NC State; and Steven Smith of The Procter & Gamble Company.

The work was supported by The Nonwovens Institute at NC State. The researchers also received imaging assistance from the NC State Cellular and Molecular Imaging Facility, which is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DBI-1624613.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/ncsu-spp080119.php

Study casts doubt on evidence for ‘gold standard’ psychological treatments

A paper appearing today in a special edition of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology questions much of the statistical evidence underpinning therapies designated as “Empirically Supported Treatments,” or ESTs, by Division 12 of the American Psychological Association.

For years, ESTs have represented a “gold standard” in research-supported psychotherapies for conditions like depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders, substance abuse, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. But recent concerns about the replicability of research findings in clinical psychology prompted the re-examination of their evidence.

The new study, led by researchers at the University of Kansas and University of Victoria, concluded that while underlying evidence for a small number of empirically supported treatments is strong, “power and replicability estimates were concerningly low across almost all ESTs, and individually, some ESTs scored poorly across multiple metrics.”

“By some accounts, there are over 600 approaches to psychotherapy, and some are going to be more effective than others,” said co-lead author Alexander Williams, program director of psychology and director of the Psychological Clinic for KU’s Edwards Campus. “Since the 1970s, people have been trying to figure out which are most effective using clinical trials just like in medicine, where some subjects are assigned to a therapy and some to a control group. Division 12 of the APA has a list of therapies with strong scientific evidence from these trials, called ESTs. Ours is the first attempt anyone has made using this broad suite of statistical tools to evaluate the EST literature.”

The researchers analyzed 78 ESTs with “strong” or “modest” research support, as determined by the APA’s Society of Clinical Psychology Division 12, from more than 450 published articles. Four types of evidential value were assessed — rates of misreported statistics, power, R-index and Bayes factors. Among the key conclusions:

• 56% (44 of 78) of ESTs fared poorly across most metric scores.
• 19% (15 of 78) of ESTs fared strongly across most metric scores.
• 52% (26 of 50) of ESTs deemed by Division 12 of the APA as having Strong Research Support fared poorly across most metric scores.
• 22% (11 of 50) of ESTs deemed by Division 12 of the APA as having Strong Research Support fared strongly across most metric scores.
• 64% (18 of 28) of ESTs deemed by Division 12 of the APA as having Modest Research Support fared poorly across most metric scores.
• 14% (4 of 28) of ESTs deemed by Division 12 of the APA as having Modest Research Support fared strongly across most metric scores.

“Our findings don’t mean that therapy doesn’t work, they don’t mean that anything goes or everything is the same,” said co-lead author John Sakaluk, assistant professor in the University of Victoria’s Department of Psychology, who earned his doctorate at KU. “But based on this evidence, we don’t know if most therapies designated as ESTs do actually have better science on their side compared to alternative, research-supported forms of therapy.”

According to Williams, the field of clinical psychology may be ripe for a broad-scale reassessment of therapies that were thought to be supported by rigorous scientific evidence until now.

“Medical researchers coined a term called ‘medical reversal,'” the KU researcher said. “Sometimes these are medical practices that doctors use across the country, but they are discontinued after it’s found they don’t work or aren’t more effective than less-costly alternatives — or they’re actually harmful. Pending replications of our results, we may need broad systems-level psychotherapy reversals. Some of these ESTs are widely implemented in big systems like the Veterans Health Administration. If we find evidence for them isn’t as strong as believed, it may be worth looking at. Let’s say, hypothetically, there are two therapies for depression, and people have said, ‘Well, Therapy A has stronger evidence for it than Therapy B.’ But we know Therapy B works, too, and it’s less costly. Today, if we find the evidence for Therapy A isn’t actually stronger, it may be time to promote Therapy B.”

Further, Williams advised clinicians and patients to continually evaluate progress in therapy and adjust therapeutic approaches based more on patient progress than research evidence of a given therapy’s effectiveness.

“For clinicians and clients, this speaks to the importance of frequently assessing how well a client is doing in therapy,” he said. “Routine outcome monitoring is always a good thing to be doing, but it may be a particularly good idea based on new evidence that we don’t know if some therapies are effective. So, if I’m a patient, I want to assess how I’m doing — and there are different measures for doing that. This study suggests it’s even more important than previously believed.”

For the research community, the authors recommended a reassessment of the size and power of clinical trials and more collaborations between labs to increase the precision of analyses, along with fresh approaches to how research is appraised, published and evaluated.

“One of the things that becomes really obvious when you look at the literature is researchers are collecting and analyzing their data in ways that are extremely flexible,” Sakaluk said. “If you don’t follow certain rules of statistical inference, you can inadvertently trick yourself into claiming effects that aren’t really there. For EST research, it may become important to define in advance what researchers are going to do — like how they’ll analyze data — and go on record in a way that restricts what they’re going to do. This would coincide with a movement to encourage researchers to propose what they’d like to do and get reviewers and journal editors to weigh in before — not after — scientists do research, and to publish it irrespective of what they find.”

Williams said studies supporting the power of clinical treatments should improve over time with more exacting approaches to statistical data.

“This is a system-level issue that will get better as our field begins to grapple with replication,” he said. “We think you’ll see improvement in study design going forward. There wasn’t a fieldwide appreciation for these problems until a decade ago. It takes time for the field to improve. We think our results will complement ongoing efforts by Division 12 to increase the quality of EST research and evaluation.”

###

Williams and Sakaluk’s co-authors were Robyn Kilshaw of the University of Utah and Kathleen Teresa Rhyner of the Canandaigua VA Medical Center, the latter of whom also earned her doctorate at KU.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/uok-scd080119.php

Early Clinical Markers Point to Aggressive MS

Patients who will develop aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS) can be identified with early clinical markers, a retrospective study suggested.

Age older than 35 at MS onset, moderate disability in the first year, and the presence of motor signs in the first year were associated with higher risk of aggressive MS in the international MSBase cohort, reported Tomas Kalincik, MD, PhD, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, and coauthors, in a manuscript published on the preprint server medRxiv.

In this study, approximately 6% of patients developed an aggressive form of MS, an accelerated accrual of disability defined as an Expanded Disability Status Scale(EDSS) score greater than 6 within 10 years of first clinical presentation, Kalincik said.

Aggressive MS eventually was diagnosed in 32% of patients who presented with all three risk factors, but only in 1.4% of patients with none of these signs. An EDSS score of 3 defined moderate disability.

“While several clinical and demographic factors have shown general associations with disability in MS, our knowledge of clinically accessible predictors of aggressive MS course which can be detected in the first year from symptom onset is limited,” he told MedPage Today. “Such information is necessary to assist clinicians in identifying patients with aggressive MS early, before they have accumulated significant irreversible neurological disability.”

“With the complex array of therapies we have for MS, it’s very prudent for us to choose wisely as a physician, to start patients on a drug that’s more likely to make a difference for them,” noted Mark Freedman, MD, MSc, of the University of Ottawa in Canada, who was not involved with the paper.

“Is there some way of looking at an MS patient early on in the disease and saying ‘this is someone destined to have a poor prognosis’? And if that’s the case, why waste time on a drug we know is modestly effective? We don’t have time to falter,” Freedman told MedPage Today. “We don’t have 5 years to play with. Those 5 years could make a difference to this particular patient.”

In this analysis, Kalincik and colleagues looked at 2,403 patients with relapsing-remitting MS with at least 10 years of follow-up from the international MSBase registry. They used Bayesian statistical models “to evaluate a range of clinical and demographic predictors that might be realistically available to clinicians in the first year following symptom onset,” Kalincik said.

The results were confirmed in an independent cohort of patients from the Swedish MS Registry. “The diversity of the studied cohorts ensures good generalizability of our conclusions: MSBase includes patients from 137 centers in 35 countries, whereas the Swedish MS Registry is a population-based national registry with greater than 80% coverage of the Swedish MS population,” Kalincik said.

The study is limited by its retrospective nature, including possible reporting bias. Treatments MS patients used also may have affected outcomes.

Last Updated August 02, 2019

Kalincik reported relationships with Roche, Genzyme-Sanofi, Novartis, Merck, Biogen, Genzyme, WebMD Global, Novartis, Biogen, Teva, and BioCSL. Other researchers reported multiple relationships with industry.

Note that medRxiv is a preprint server for posting manuscripts prior to undergoing formal peer review. As such, the data and conclusions should be regarded as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Primary Source

medRxiv

Source Reference: Malpas CB, et al “Early clinical markers of aggressive multiple sclerosis” medRxiv 2019; DOI: 10.1101/19002063.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/multiplesclerosis/81400

How Jaywalking Could Jam Up the Era of Self-Driving Cars

Imagine Manhattan without jaywalking.

Or Los Angeles freeways without speeding, or Moscow without grinding traffic.

If self-driving cars are going to move forward, these are among the many possibilities that the people dreaming up the future of cities will have to consider.

In New York, the unwritten rule is plain: Cross the street whenever and wherever — just don’t get hit. It’s a practice that separates New Yorkers from tourists, who innocently wait at the corner for the walk symbol. But if pedestrians know they’ll never be run over, jaywalking could explode, grinding traffic to a halt.

One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross.

That prospect seems as likely as never-late subways. But it’s an example of the thinking by those who worry about planning for the future.

“With autonomous vehicles, the technical stuff will get worked out. It’s the societal part that’s the most challenging,” said Mark Rosekind, a head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Barack Obama and now the chief safety innovation officer for Zoox, an autonomous vehicle developer.

[Despite high hopes, self-driving cars are “way in the future.”]

The variables are almost limitless. While Manhattan poses a pedestrian problem, California’s highways raise another.

The solution may be to program vehicles based on the local customs. In California, keeping up with the flow of freeway traffic typically means driving 10 to 15 miles an hour over the posted limit, whereas drivers in some parts of the East stay much closer to the legal speed (emphasis on some).

Self-driving cars represent “the single-most transformative societal change in decades,” Mr. Rosekind said. “We have to be ready for it.”

Unfortunately, we’re not.

How society will adjust, or what we can do to mitigate cultural upheavals, is just beginning to be discussed. Today, there are few answers.

Autonomous vehicles are classified by six levels, from zero to five. Fully autonomous, Level 5, vehicles will not be available for 10 years or longer, Mr. Rosekind believes, and only after they’ve been tested for billions, not the current millions, of miles.

But a Level 4 autonomous car that can completely drive itself under certain circumstances will come to market in five years or less, experts say. And that makes the formulation of new rules for cities and citizens imperative.

Those rules are being contemplated by such organizations as the Society for Automotive Engineers, university transportation departments and Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, a recently formed industry and academic coalition that is conducting autonomous vehicle demo days, workshops and other activities.

The federal government, while supporting the effort, is not leading the charge. An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said local officials should tailor any guidelines.

While news media attention has recently focused on the handful of deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, education is needed to convince people that the self-driving cars will be much safer than today’s cars and trucks, which kill more than 30,000 people every year in the United States, Mr. Rosekind said.

The Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Traffic and speeding are two big issues for self-driving cars.CreditJenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

“It’s going to be a mosh pit for the next 30 years,” said Gregory Winfree, director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and a former assistant secretary at the Transportation Department.

“The question is how we operate collaboratively when we have a mix of self-driving and manually driven vehicles,” he said. “What will happen when both approach a yellow light and the A.V. slows down but the driver of the regular vehicle wants to speed up? From Day 1, we have the potential for conflict.”

Autonomous vehicles could be designed to never exceed the speed limit except in emergencies, resulting in a sharp drop in traffic tickets — and revenue. Or local governments could mandate that such a car’s software be programmed to stay within certain speed limits, or stay off residential streets that are now used as freeway-avoiding shortcuts.

Cars could be programmed to drive aggressively as well as conservatively, depending on the owner. But if two “conservative” vehicles meet at an intersection, which one will finally decide to cross the roadway?

The problems will be worst when autonomous and manually driven vehicles occupy the same roads; will a driver try to outwit a self-driving vehicle, or will that car always have the advantage?

Given that vehicles are typically kept for close to 12 years, it will be decades before the majority of the 278 million standard vehicles — and their independent and unpredictable drivers — are off American roads.

Until then, it’s possible that self-driving cars will need their own lanes, to avoid mixing it up with cars driven by humans, whose errors now account for 94 percent of vehicle crashes.

Other potential changes include a reduction in the need for parking lots, once autonomous cars can simply park themselves anywhere, or circle around until they’re needed. Architects are working on parking lot designs that can be repurposed into offices.

And cities will need to find new sources of revenue if an autonomous vehicle can drive away from a parking meter once it expires, or never park at all.

Some of the safety issues are expected to be mitigated by the inclusion of vehicle-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure, communications, technology that will allow one vehicle or traffic light to tell another vehicle where it is and what it is about to do. This so-called V2X technology is beginning to appear in some models, but the federal government will not mandate its use.

The administration official said the government would not force the issue.

How an autonomous vehicle behaves will be of concern not just to drivers but to manufacturers and insurance companies. “If the automaker is ultimately responsible for an autonomous vehicle’s behavior, then they will want it to act conservatively,” Mr. Winfree said.

Within the next several months, the Society of Automotive Engineers expects to have formulated a list of autonomous-vehicle standards. They include autonomous testing protocols for drivers, as well as the standardization of the placement of emergency stop buttons, the action that should be taken in case of an emergency, and the type of warning that pedestrians should receive when an autonomous vehicle is approaching.

Industry executives expect that in the next few years, the public will begin to see self-driving vehicles operating in limited environments, such as people movers and delivery vehicles. (Lyft is testing self-driving vehicles in Las Vegas and Phoenix, with a human backup ready to take the wheel.) Their hope is that public sentiment toward autonomous cars will become more positive thanks to education efforts, and once people can buy them.

And as more old-school cars fade off the roads in favor of the self-driven ones, it’s possible that vehicle flow could be adjusted more dynamically, based on the number of pedestrians present, said Chris Gerdes, the director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University and a former chief innovation officer for the Transportation Department.

“We may be able to locate crosswalks at different locations,” he said. “A.V.s may be able to sense the presence of pedestrians and slow down when needed.”

At the same time, it’s important that as communities change, possibly physically, they don’t become sterile 1960s “Jetsons”-like environments that favor vehicles.

“We need students educated in art and design to get involved in the future so we don’t get antiseptic cities,” said Frank Menchaca, the S.A.E.’s chief product officer. “We need things to be aesthetically pleasing. We have to bring people along.”

White House weighs Sept. rollout of health plan to contrast with Dems’ ideas

The Trump administration is considering releasing its long-promised health-care plan in the fall as part of a campaign strategy to offer an alternative to Democratic candidates who back Medicare for All, according to people familiar with the discussions.

White House officials are discussing unveiling the proposal during a September speech in which President Trump would seek to draw a contrast with Democrats while reassuring voters the administration is prepared if the courts abolish the Affordable Care Act. The timing of the speech could shift, officials said.

Elements of the plan could include providing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, the people said, and spurring the sale of insurance across state lines. Other provisions being discussed include giving states more flexibility, expanding health savings accounts, linking price transparency to quality metrics, and more insurance options for consumers, they said. The plan would include a number of new elements that haven’t yet been released, one person familiar with the work said.

White House officials stressed that the plans haven’t been completed, and some close to the president have privately expressed skepticism. One former White House official raised the possibility that the plan may not materialize this fall if Trump second-guesses the effort. The administration is also still weighing how specific the plan should be, the people familiar with the plan said, and the ideas have yet to get Mr. Trump’s sign off.

The administration is backing a lawsuit from GOP-led states to strike down the ACA, a stance that leaves Trump open to attacks from Democratic presidential candidates who say he is a threat to coverage.

Parts of the plan would probably require congressional action, which is unlikely because the House and Senate remain divided.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/white-house-weighs-sept-rollout-of-health-plan-to-contrast-with-democrats-ideas-2019-08-03

IPO Week Ahead: Summer’s last wave

The summer IPO market is wrapping up. While we could see a few more launches, this coming week’s deals should be some of the last IPOs before the August break.

An Israeli medical device maker is among the most notable IPOs. Another is a micro-cap biotech.

Israel-based InMode (INMD) plans to raise $75 million at a market cap of $611 million. While sales have moderated in recent quarters, the company is still experiencing fast growth (+46% in the MRQ) with positive cash flow (29% margin). Strong trading from recent medical device IPOs (e.g. SWAV, SILK) could also be a tailwind.

In addition, early-stage cirrhosis biotech BioVie (BIVI) plans to uplist from the OTC to the Nasdaq in a $15 million offering.

U.S. IPO CALENDAR
ISSUER BUSINESS	DEAL SIZE MARKET CAP	PRICE RANGE SHARES FILED	TOP BOOKRUNNERS
BioVie (BIVI) Los Angeles, CA	$15M $64M	$11.88 1,262,626	ThinkEquity
Early stage biotech developing therapies for cirrhosis.
InMode (INMD) Yokneam, Israel	$75M $611M	$14 – $16 5,000,000	Barclays UBS
Israeli maker of minimally-invasive medical aesthetic systems.

https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/64486/US-IPO-Week-Ahead-Summers-last-wave-with-5-IPOs