In the latest permutation of social networking, you are what you buy.

Sachin spent $4.98 at Starbucks. Jenna bought earrings for$3.19 from Target (“They dangle/match my new dress”). AllieJ purchased Kind of Blue from iTunes for $8.89 (“’So What’ is such a classic!”)

Twitter-like feeds like this are appearing on these new social networking sites, which include Blippy and Swipeley. The feeds permit—indeed, encourage—users to automatically broadcast purchases they make to the world. And that lets people reveal their personalities through their purchases. Some people think is a good thing.

Are you a Levis guy or a Polo jeans guy? McDonald’s or Taco Bell? Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks? Here’s your chance to let everyone, and I mean everyone know!

According to Philip Kaplan, the co-founder of Blippy, users share $1.5 million worth of their purchases each week on his site, and that number is growing rapidly. Users give the company access to their credit and debit card accounts, along with other online accounts like Netflix and iTunes. Blippy compiles and posts their purchases.

Users can block certain purchases from their profiles, but Blippy’s default settings are set to “share all.”

Blippy has focused on user acquisition rather than monetization so far, but it hopes that the data it’s collecting can be eventually sold to marketers looking to understand purchasing behaviors in various demographics.

Privacy experts wonder whether users fully understand what’s happening when they sign-up for the service (even though it’s explained completely in the Terms of Service). “It’s not just about a private exchange between friends. The business is basically about providing access to you to advertisers and marketers,” Jeff Chester told the Washington Post. “There are little strangers listening in,” added Chester, who works for the Center for Digital Democracy.

Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project added that “people often fail to remember who is in their network, even though you’ve created it yourself.”

Tens of thousands of people use computer-based brain-training exercises to boost memory and mental fitness. These people will be disappointed to learn that a recently published study suggests the tools may not work.

In the 6-week study, Jessica Grahn and colleagues at the Medical and Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England randomized 11,430 healthy participants to one of 3 groups. The first engaged in online games designed to improve general intelligence skills like problem-solving and reasoning. The second group performed exercises aimed at increasing attention, short-term memory and mathematical skills—the focus of commercial brain-training programs. The control group browsed the Internet in search of answers to general knowledge questions.

Participants performed these activities for at least 10 minutes, 3-times each day.

Grahn’s team found that participants in the brain-training (second) group improved in the tasks that they practiced, but their improvement was about the same as that made by the control group. No groups showed improved cognitive skills that weren’t specifically targeted in their tasks.

The brain training industry is focused for the moment on software offerings and online programs. It generated $265 million in North American revenues last year, up from $225 in 2008. About 40% of these revenues came from consumers. The remaining came from schools and retirement communities.

Industry spokespeople said the study was flawed. “It’s not brain training,” Alvaro Fernandez, CEO of SharpBrains told the Wall Street Journal. Cognitive improvements can only be expected, he said, “after more than 15 hours of training and where each session lasts at least 30 minutes.”

Steven Aldrich, CEO of Posit Science, a brain-training vendor, added that the “study overreaches in generalizing that since their methods did not work, all methods would not work.”

Last week, Google released a list of governments that had requested various forms of private information from the search giant’s own data bases, and demands made by these governments to censor its applications or remove certain content.

Google said it disclosed the information in order to reveal an increasing trend by governments to block information on the Web. More than 40 governments censored Google-associated information in 2009, compared with just 4 in 2002.

“We at Google believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship online,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer told the Washington Post.

According to Google, Brazil and the US made the most requests. During the second half of 2009, these countries made more than 3,000 requests, particularly concerning YouTube and Orkut (a social networking site that is popular in Brazil). 

Germany was also near the top of the list. Most of that government’s requests concerned removing pro-Nazi material, according to the company.

Google’s figures are a bit difficult to interpret since Google counts a request to take down one Web address the same way as a request to remove hundreds of sites.

Google stated that many requests by governments seemed legitimate. Law enforcement agencies, for example, often request the removal of child porn sites or videos promoting violence or racial hatred.

Of note, Google’s disclosure included no information about China because, it said, China looks at “censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.” China is known to have erected firewalls that  prevent its citizens from accessing certain information, and other technological barricades that prevent certain users from communicating with others.

Google’s report was not obviously related to its decision last month to pull its search business out of China.

Last week, Twitter announced plans to derive revenue through advertising. The plan calls for ads on the popular micro-blogging site to look just like actual tweets. Thus, rather than seeing a banner ad for a Big Mac, users will see a sponsored McDonald’s tweet promoting a greasy delight.

According to the Washington Post’s Chadwick Matlin, this strategy is well-crafted because it is highly consistent with the formula that has made Twitter popular in the first place.  Twitter’s ads (the ones companies pay for) will appear right in your feed  of unsponsored tweets.

What makes this strategy so well aligned with the essence of Twitter? According to Matlin, self-promotion is what Twitter is, and has always been all about. Businesses and casual users alike load-up their tweets and their feeds with links to their own work. Regardless of the number of followers you have, every tweet amounts to a shill.

The new, sponsored ads will appear at the top of your feed, along with a “Sponsored by . . .” alert at the bottom, to avoid the perception that McDonalds has hacked your feed. They can be retweeted, replied to, and linked to, just like normal tweets.

Twitter is convinced the way it can make sure its ads work is by making sure they’re “resonant.” That word was all over Twitter’s ad announcement, and it’s sure to become a new buzzword for the Web.

Twitter’s general principle is that it’s going to display only ads that users like — the ones that resonate. It’s great in theory, impossible to do in practice. If Starbucks is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Twitter ads but its Twitter ads are lousy, is Twitter really going to tell Starbucks to take back its money?

This post originally appeared on EHRbloggers.com.

These days it’s a given that anyone you meet, from prospective employers to next Friday night’s date is probably Googling you. But how would you feel if you knew that practice extended to your psychiatrist?

If anecdotal observations by Brian Clinton, Benjamin Silverman and David Brendel are generalizable, the behavior is common.

Writing the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, the psychiatrists say they have not carried out research on the practice, but they admit having carried out such searches themselves. They claim to have witnessed other physicians conducting patient searches and to have spoken with many colleagues who had done likewise.

“Most patients would probably be shocked that their doctor had the time or the interest to conduct a search,” Brendel told the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. “A good number of people would feel like their privacy had been breached, although a number might be happy the doctor was thinking about them outside of the 15-30 minutes they were spending together.”

In some instances, the practice can save a life, such as when a patient blogs about suicide, but in other cases, doctors appear to be motivated by “curiosity, voyeurism and habit.”

In the absence of ethical guidelines on the matter, the psychiatrists recommend that physicians think through why they are conducting a search beforehand, and consider whether the result will interfere with their relationship with that patient. They should consider asking the patient for consent.

“Some people say absolutely it should never be done; it’s a breach of privacy,” Brendel said. “But many say it should be done as a matter of routine. It’s information that is in the public domain, and it may be information that is clinically relevant.”

The Obama administration has taken a baby step forward in its effort to simplify communication with the US government by clarifying how the Paperwork Reduction Act applies when new media like tweets, blogs and wikis are used in communication between federal agencies and the public.

The PRA was enacted in 1995, just before American life made a wholesale migration to the Internet. It requires that federal officials file an 83-I form with the Office of Management and Budget whenever they collect information from the public, to justify the effort.

That process routinely took months, but a new document appearing on the White House Web site lists a number of instances in which information collected using social media need not trigger the PRA process.

Among them:
– Federal wiki pages can support communication between federal agencies and the public without violating any law. 
– Webinars, blogs, discussion boards, forums, message boards, chat sessions, social networks and online communities can all go forward without triggering a PRA review.

On the other hand, “If an agency takes the opportunity of a public meeting to distribute a survey, or to ask identical questions of 10 or more attendees, the questions count as information collection,” that should trigger the PRA process, according to the document.

At the same time this document was released, several federal agencies released plans to expose more data and other federal information to the public.

For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it will post new information about homelessness. In addition, the Energy Department said it created a wiki to share information about clean energy, and HHS plans to post additional data about community health services.

Cancer is always in the news. Yet although nearly half of all US cancer patients die of their disease or related complications, no one seemed to know whether news reports reflected this reality.

Jessica Fishman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania decided to look into the matter by reviewing the content of cancer news stories in 8 high-circulation newspapers and 5 popular magazines.

The scientists identified 2,228 cancer-related articles appearing between 2005 and 2007, and focused on a randomly selected sample of 436 of them. They found that in general, the stories were overly optimistic about survival, more likely to focus on aggressive treatments and rarely covered negative things like death, treatment failure and adverse events. Almost none of the stories covered end-of-life issues.
 
In particular, 140 stories focused on people who survived or were cured of the disease, while 33 focused on people who were dying or had died of cancer. Just 57 articles mentioned that aggressive cancer treatments can fail. A majority of articles (249) discussed aggressive treatment exclusively, but only 57 reported that such treatments can fail to extend life or cure the disease, or that some cancers are incurable. Just 131 mentioned adverse events associated with treatment, and a grand total of 2 articles focused on palliative or hospice care exclusively.

“These portrayals of cancer care in the news media may give patients an inappropriately optimistic view of cancer treatment, outcomes, and prognosis,” the authors write in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“For many patients with cancer, it is important to know about palliative and hospice care because this information can help them make decisions that realistically reflect their prognosis and the risks and potential benefits of treatment.”

Voxiva, a Washington DC-based mobile technology firm, has launched a government-sponsored program that uses standard text messaging to educate and encourage healthy habits in pregnant women.

The “Text4baby” program sends tips to expectant mothers who sign up using their cell phones. To participate, women text the word, “baby” (or “bebe” for Spanish speakers) to the number 511411. 

Enrollees receive 3 text messages per week, timed to correspond with the woman’s delivery date. The messages cover nutrition, health maintenance and pregnancy management.

The service is entirely free to end-users thanks to government subsidies and the largesse of the wireless carriers. Launched last month, the service had 6,500 sign-ups in the first day. Before this program, Voxiva offered similar text-based services in the US, but they were not free.

Voxiva has launched more than 150 mobile health campaigns in Africa, India and Latin America, areas characterized by developing economies and/or a scarce supply of physicians. These projects are usually underwritten by governments or pharmaceutical firms. They provide news and treatment tips for people with AIDS, obesity, diabetes and smoking.

One of main goals of Text4baby is to discourage alcohol and tobacco use, habits that increase the risk of premature birth. In the US, one out of 8 babies, or about 500,000 births per year, is born prematurely each year. 

Despite the buzz about health-related apps for the iPhone and other smart phones, text messages are ideal for reaching Text4baby’s most important target group, which includes women that can’t afford smart phones. About 90% of US adults carry a cell phone, and nearly all of them support text messaging.

People who look younger than their actual age have a longer life expectancy than those who look their age, according to Danish scientists.

To reach this conclusion, Kaare Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark and colleagues asked nurses, teachers-in-training and peers to guess the age of 1,826 pairs of twins from their photos.

The twins were at least 70 years old when they were photographed.
 
For all 3 assessor groups, perceived age of the twins was associated with their survival, even after adjustment for chronological age, gender, pre-existing medical conditions, cognitive abilities and socioeconomic status.

Furthermore, the bigger the difference in perceived age within the pair, the more likely it became that the older looking twin died first.

The authors even provided a possible physiological explanation for their finding: key pieces of cellular DNA known as telomeres, which predict the ability of cells to replicate, were also linked to perceived age, the group found.

Shorter telomeres are associated with more rapid ageing, and the scientists found that people who looked younger had longer telomeres.

Christensen suggested to the BBC that people who have had a tougher life are more likely to die early – and that their life is reflected in their face.

“It’s probably a combination of genes plus environment over a lifetime that are important,” said UK professor Tim Spector, who has been doing similar research on twins. “We are also finding this in our study.”

The write-up is in the British Medical Journal.

Executives from Google, the Washington Post and New York Times have announced a new partnership to create living story pages, tools which they believe might revolutionize the way people find news on line.

The concept is to group developing stories about a particular subject on one Web page which automatically updates when new content is added.

“So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers,” Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News told Post media critic Howard Kurtz. “They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news in a different way.”

The Post and Times could conceivably boost their rankings on Google by grouping stories in this manner. This could increase the likelihood that people will click on their stories, and that might translate into increased revenue for the beleaguered print giants.

The Times has established 5 living story pages covering Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, health care and swine flu. Meanwhile, The Post has launched 3, devoted to DC schools, health-care reform, and the moribund Washington Redskins.

The experimental story pages currently reside at Google Labs as the parties work out the kinks. The goal is to transfer the pages to the Web sites of the newspapers themselves.

“Over the coming months, we’ll refine Living Stories based on your feedback,” Google says in a blog posting. If the format gains traction, Google plans to offer it to any interested newspaper, magazine or Web site, at no charge.

Kurtz reports that the living story page concept grew from discussions last spring involving Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Co. Later, Google began separate conversations with executives at the Times.

Most people have assumed that direct-to-consumer advertising has helped drive up the cost of drugs, but there really hadn’t been much proof of that. Until now, that is.

The proof comes in the form of a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

In the study, Michael Law of the University of British Columbia and others looked at US sales of Plavix, the $4 billion clot-busting blockbuster co-marketed by BMS and Sanofi-Aventis for the prevention of recurrent heart attacks and strokes, and thrombotic complications following stent placement.

Plavix was introduced to the US market in 1998. DTC advertising for the drug began 3 years later, and exceeded $350 million dollars over the next 4 years.

Law’s group queried pharmacy data from 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005 to analyze changes in Plavix prescription volume, the cost per unit dispensed, and total pharmacy expenditures before and after DTC advertising was introduced.

The scientists detected no change in the preexisting trend in the number of Plavix prescriptions written after DTC advertising was introduced.

They did, however, detect a sudden, sustained increase in cost per unit of the drug, of $0.40 per unit dispensed which coincided with the introduction of DTC advertising.

This resulted in an incremental cost of $40.58 per 1000 Medicaid enrollees per quarter, or an additional $207 million in total pharmacy expenditures.

“The key issue is whether advertising to consumers, which has risen 330% in the last 10 years in the US, contributes to the significant cost increases in publicly funded health insurance programs such as Medicaid,” Stephen Soumerai told BurrillReport.

When Thai and US Army scientists announced last month that their experimental HIV vaccine reduced the risk of contracting the disease by 31%, it caused quite a stir. After all, every one of the 100 or so previous HIV vaccine trials over the last 20 years had failed completely.

Alas, a second analysis of the $105 million study that was released weeks after the announcement suggests the apparent, moderate benefit may have been caused by a statistical fluke.

Worse yet, it turns out that the results of the second analysis were available to the scientists when they announced their original findings.

“We thought very hard about how to provide the clearest, most honest message,” said Jerome Kim, an Army scientist involved with the study. “We stand by the fact that this is a vaccine with a modest protective effect.”

Kim’s team based its initial announcement on a “modified intent to treat analysis,” which includes all volunteers that enrolled in the study, whether they received the full course of the vaccine or not. Such analyses reflect real world situations in which some people don’t show up for all shots in the vaccine sequence.

Using this analysis, the scientists determined that there was only a 3.9% chance that the observed 31% reduction in HIV among the vaccine-treated group was caused by a simple statistical fluke…in scientific parlance, this is considered to be a borderline significant result.

The second, so-called “per protocol” analysis included just the study participants that received all vaccines in the regimen at the right time.

Such analyses normally corroborate intent to treat findings, but for unknown reasons, it did just the opposite in this study. It suggested there was a 16% chance the results could have been due to chance alone—far too high to support claims that the vaccine was efficacious.

Some AIDS activists and scientists believe the vaccine merits further study, but worry that the botched announcement might undermine support for the vaccine and HIV vaccine trials generally.

“I would have preferred to have seen both results straight up. It might spring back on (the scientists), and that would be unfortunate,” Mitchell Warren, director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition said.

Are you reading this while checking email, chatting on IM, waiting for your purchase to clear PayPal and signing your mum’s birthday card?

If so, please set all that aside for a moment and take note.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that people who tend to involve themselves in multiple media-oriented activities at the same time perform relatively poorly on tests requiring them to shift attention from one task to another.

To reach these conclusions, Clifford Nass and colleagues at Stanford administered a survey to 262 college students which elicited a history of media utilization and whether or not they tendened to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously.

They collected information regarding the use of computer games, online video and audio, TV, cell phones, text and instant messaging, and computer software like word processors.

After completing the survey, the students underwent a battery of tests in which they had to evaluate certain colored triangles while ignoring other ones, categorize words, alternate between classifying numbers and letters, and press a certain button when they saw a match between 2 symbols presented at different times.

The scientists found that heavy multitaskers executed these functions more slowly than with those who rarely used more than one medium at a time. The multitaskers, it turned out, were more easily distracted by irrelevant information because they retained it in their short-term memories for a longer period of time.

The difference amounted to about a half-second delay on most tests, a difference large enough to cause noticeable problems in everyday life. (more…)

Chinese news Web sites have been given secret orders by the government to require that new users log on using their true identities if they want to post comments, reversing existing policies allowing them to weigh in on stories anonymously.

News portals like Sina, Sohu and Netease began implementing the change about a month ago after receiving a confidential order from the State Council Information Office, a Chinese government agency that supervises the Internet.

Chinese authorities said the directive was part of an initiative to foster “social responsibility” and “civility” among users, according to the New York Times.

The chief editor of one portal, who requested anonymity, said the reason for the so-called real-name system was that, “the influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.”

China’s online community includes 340 million people and is the world’s largest.

The new initiative is the just the latest effort to squelch freedom of speech in China. Earlier this year, Chinese officials shut down more than a thousand sites in a supposed war on “vulgarity,” shuttered liberal Web sites on grounds they spread “harmful information,” and temporarily blocked access to popular social media outlets like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

They also blocked Internet service to the Xinjiang region after deadly clashes erupted there between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese this summer.

In addition, China’s government had also attempted to require all computer makers to install “pornography-filtering software” that could be controlled centrally, but were forced to back off when various trade organizations protested and hackers revealed the software could also be used to interdict politically offensive material as well.

The State Council Information Office’s edict does not impact previously registered users. It also does not appear to impact most blogs or government news outlets like Xinhua and People’s Daily.

The news cycle, a process by which information becomes news, gains attention, and then fades from the public eye has been impacted by technology ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Radio and TV had dramatic effects, and to the surprise of no one, Cornell scientists have concluded the Internet has as well.

Yet even in the Internet era, the scientists found that most of the time, traditional news outlets are out first with news stories, followed approximately 2.5 hours later by blogs.

To reach these conclusions, John Kleinberg and colleagues used computerized meme-tracking software to scan 1.6 million media sites and blogs during the final 3 months of last year’s presidential campaign. In all, they scrutinized nearly 90 million articles and blog posts.

The research is “a step toward understanding why certain points of view and story lines win out, and others don’t,” Kleinberg told the New York Times.

The most widely captured phrase was “lipstick on a pig,” which many will remember was the Big O’s response to claims by Top Gun that he represented the real voice for change in the campaign.

At the time, Republicans felt the comment represented a jab at McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. 

Only 3.5% of the story lines originated in the blogosphere, with the most memorable one being Obama’s response to a question about when life begins after conception. That’s “above my pay grade,” he said.  Blogs ran first with that story.

The blogs found to be quickest to identify stories that subsequently gained wide attention were Hot Air and Talking Points Memo.

But Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School said that the findings may already be outdated due to the rise of Twitter as a news recommendation and distribution network.

“Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter,” Sreenivasan told the Times.

A version of this post initially appeared on the Practice Fusion blog.

In the last 2 years alone, Big Pharma has cut its sales force by 10% to 92,000 and some experts predict the number could drop by another 15,000 in the next 2 years.

That will save $3.6 billion for the pharmaceutical companies, who know all too well that results from the investment it has made in its sales force are way down.

In fact, just 37% of drug reps who visit physician offices are able to place drug products in the sample drawer, and a only 20% speak directly with a physician.

Nearly a quarter of all physicians practice within a group that bans reps altogether.

That one reason why Big Pharma has become so excited about ePromotion, a term encompassing 3 relatively new techniques by which drug manufacturers can doctors about their products, even in the absence of Sid the Drug Rep.

The ePromotion troika includes virtual details, which include video and audiotapes, text messages and email (but no live communication), video details, which include live chat or telephone-assisted Internet sessions in which physicians can speak directly with a representative, and virtual events which include CME events, webinars, conference calls and panel discussions.

Big Pharma’s enthusiasm will likely grow as it digests the results of a new survey showing that doctors’ attitudes toward ePromotion are becoming increasingly positive.

SDIHealth concluded this after completing its Annual Study of ePromotion, the 8th such iteration of the poll.

The Study revealed that 67% of physicians expressed a positive attitude toward ePromotion, up 5% from the previous year.

73% of the surveyed physicians felt ePromotion was at least as effective as face-to-face promotion by drug reps, a jump from 68% the year before.

 The average time spent per doctor, per ePromotion activity was a robust 18 minutes.

With each year, “we have seen acceptance toward ePromotion among physicians increase,” said Jason Fox, Associate Director at SDI.

“The results of this survey underscore a growing opportunity for the two groups to interact more regularly.”