The Prescription Opioid Epidemic: an Evidence-Based Approach

A group of experts, led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, issued this report aimed at stemming the prescription opioid epidemic, a crisis that kills an average of 44 people a day in the U.S. The report calls for changes to the way medical students and physicians are trained, prescriptions are dispensed and monitored, first responders are equipped to treat overdoses, and those with addiction are identified and treated. The report grew out of discussions that began last year at a town hall co-hosted by the Bloomberg School and the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation. The recommendations were developed by professionals from medicine, pharmacy, injury prevention and law. Patient representatives, insurers and drug manufacturers also participated in developing the recommendations. The report breaks its recommendations into seven categories:Prescribing GuidelinesPrescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs)Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) and PharmaciesEngineering Strategies (i.e., packaging)Overdose Education and Naloxone Distribution ProgramsAddiction TreatmentCommunity-Based Prevention Strategie

Proliferation and detection of blog spam

The ease of posting comments and links in blogs has attracted spammers as an alternative venue to conventional email. An experimental study investigates the nature and prevalence of blog spam. Using Defensio logs, the authors collected and analyzed more than one million blog comments during the last two weeks of June 2009. They used a support vector machine (SVM) classifier combined with heuristics to identify spam posters' IP addresses, autonomous system numbers (ASN), and IP blocks. Experimental results show that more than 75 percent of blog comments during the reporting period are spam. In addition, the results show that blog spammers likely operate from a few colocation facilities. © 2006 IEEE

An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources

Web developers can (and do) include subresources such as scripts, stylesheets and images in their webpages. Such subresources might be stored on remote servers such as content delivery networks (CDNs). This practice creates security and privacy risks, should a subresource be corrupted, as was recently the case for the British Airways websites. The subresource integrity (SRI) recommendation, released in mid-2016 by the W3C, enables developers to include digests in their webpages in order for web browsers to verify the integrity of subresources before loading them. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale longitudinal study of the use of SRI on the Web by analyzing massive crawls (3B unique URLs) of the Web over the last 3.5 years. Our results show that the adoption of SRI is modest (3.40%), but grows at an increasing rate and is highly influenced by the practices of popular library developers (e.g., Bootstrap) and CDN operators (e.g., jsDelivr). We complement our analysis about SRI with a survey of web developers (N =227): It shows that a substantial proportion of developers know SRI and understand its basic functioning, but most of them ignore important aspects of the specication, such as the case of malformed digests. The results of the survey also show that the integration of SRI by developers is mostly manual-hence not scalable and error prone. This calls for a better integration of SRI in build tools

Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity in content quality and variety, the degree of success will depend on incentives to contribute a desirable mix of quality and variety ("getting \emph{good} stuff in"). Third, because UCC systems generally function as open-access publishing platforms, there is a need to prevent or reduce the amount of negative value (polluting or manipulating) content. The work to date on incentives problems facing UCC is limited and uneven in coverage. Much of the empirical research concerns specific settings and does not provide readily generalizable results. And, although there are well-developed theoretical literatures on, for example, the private provision of public goods (the "getting stuff in" problem), this literature is only applicable to UCC in a limited way because it focuses on contributions of (homogeneous) money, and thus does not address the many problems associated with heterogeneous information content contributions (the "getting \emph{good} stuff in" problem). We believe that our review of the literature has identified more open questions for research than it has pointed to known results.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100229/1/icd4ucc.pdf7

Network Traffic Measurements, Applications to Internet Services and Security

The Internet has become along the years a pervasive network interconnecting billions of users and is now playing the role of collector for a multitude of tasks, ranging from professional activities to personal interactions. From a technical standpoint, novel architectures, e.g., cloud-based services and content delivery networks, innovative devices, e.g., smartphones and connected wearables, and security threats, e.g., DDoS attacks, are posing new challenges in understanding network dynamics. In such complex scenario, network measurements play a central role to guide traffic management, improve network design, and evaluate application requirements. In addition, increasing importance is devoted to the quality of experience provided to final users, which requires thorough investigations on both the transport network and the design of Internet services. In this thesis, we stress the importance of users’ centrality by focusing on the traffic they exchange with the network. To do so, we design methodologies complementing passive and active measurements, as well as post-processing techniques belonging to the machine learning and statistics domains. Traffic exchanged by Internet users can be classified in three macro-groups: (i) Outbound, produced by users’ devices and pushed to the network; (ii) unsolicited, part of malicious attacks threatening users’ security; and (iii) inbound, directed to users’ devices and retrieved from remote servers. For each of the above categories, we address specific research topics consisting in the benchmarking of personal cloud storage services, the automatic identification of Internet threats, and the assessment of quality of experience in the Web domain, respectively. Results comprise several contributions in the scope of each research topic. In short, they shed light on (i) the interplay among design choices of cloud storage services, which severely impact the performance provided to end users; (ii) the feasibility of designing a general purpose classifier to detect malicious attacks, without chasing threat specificities; and (iii) the relevance of appropriate means to evaluate the perceived quality of Web pages delivery, strengthening the need of users’ feedbacks for a factual assessment

A systematic review of crime facilitated by the consumer Internet of Things

The nature of crime is changing — estimates suggest that at least half of all crime is now committed online. Once everyday objects (e.g. televisions, baby monitors, door locks) that are now internet connected, collectively referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), have the potential to transform society, but this increase in connectivity may generate new crime opportunities. Here, we conducted a systematic review to inform understanding of these risks. We identify a number of high-level mechanisms through which offenders may exploit the consumer IoT including profiling, physical access control and the control of device audio/visual outputs. The types of crimes identified that could be facilitated by the IoT were wide ranging and included burglary, stalking, and sex crimes through to state level crimes including political subjugation. Our review suggests that the IoT presents substantial new opportunities for offending and intervention is needed now to prevent an IoT crime harvest

Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs: Evidence-based Practices to Optimize Prescriber Use

As the opioid crisis continues to ravage communities across the United States, policymakers and public health officials are increasingly using new tools such as prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs)—state-based electronic databases that track the dispensing of certain controlled substances—to stem the misuse of prescription opioids and reduce overdose deaths.   PDMPs can be used to monitor patient use of these drugs and inform prescribing decisions. However, the number of prescribers actually using these databases in clinical care remains low.A new report from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Institute for Behavioral Health, Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University finds that states can increase prescriber use of PDMPs by adopting one or more of eight evidence-based practices:  Prescriber use mandates, or state laws and regulations that require prescribers to view a patient's PDMP data under certain circumstances. Mandates can rapidly increase PDMP utilization and immediately affect prescriber behavior, which can help prevent "doctor shopping"—when patients seek the same or similar drugs from multiple prescribers and pharmacies in a short period.Delegate access, which allows prescribers to authorize someone on staff, such as a nurse or other member of the health care team, to access the PDMP data on their behalf. The majority of states allow delegate access; evidence suggests such access addresses workflow barriers and increases PDMP use.Unsolicited reports, where prescribers are proactively notified about patients who may be at risk for harm based on their controlled substance prescription history. These alerts can help increase prescriber use in two ways: by motivating them to review patient data and informing unenrolled prescribers about the existence of the PDMP.Improving data timeliness, or increasing the frequency at which data are uploaded into PDMP databases. Many states now require dispensers to upload new data on a daily basis, which increases the timeliness of information and encourages PDMP use.Streamlining enrollment by making it easier for prescribers and delegates to register with their state PDMPs. Enrollment is required before clinicians can check PDMP data, so making this process faster and easier can increase use.Educational and promotional initiatives that help prescribers understand how PDMPs work and encourage their use. Such activities can spur enrolled prescribers and delegates to check PDMP data and inform unenrolled clinicians about the value of these databases. Integrating PDMP data with health information technology, which helps prescribers seamlessly access PDMPs through electronic health records or other IT systems. Pilot projects across the country found that prescribers reported PDMP data were easier to access when the system was integrated into daily workflows. Enhancing PDMP user interfaces, or redesigning how data are presented, to help prescribers more quickly analyze prescribing information and make better-informed decisions.Of the eight practices, mandates are the single most effective way to increase prescriber use. But a mandate alone does not mean that prescribers will use the PDMP effectively in clinical decision-making. Therefore, state officials should explore the other seven strategies and adopt a combination of practices that works best for their program. PDMPs can play a critical role in curbing prescription opioid misuse, but only if states take steps to ensure that the data are easy to access and understand.

The Sticking Out Parts: A Content Analysis of Print and Website Advertisements on Breast and Penis Augmentation

Breast and penis augmentations are century old processes of body modification continuing in development and practice today. This Masters thesis is a content analysis of breast and penis augmentation print and internet advertisements to explore one facet of augmentation discourse presented in public space. Relevant theoretical literature includes fetish discourse and medical discourse as existing frameworks that conceptualize augmentation predominantly as a process of body fragmentation. After reviewing this literature, I expand to blend together perspectives from three body theorists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as an alternate framework for embodiment. I then use content analysis to examine the data collected from 21 print sources and 27 internet sources. The data indicates fetish discourse, focusing on body fragmentation, is the dominant content in breast and penis augmentation advertisements; however, I argue in the conclusion that incorporating elements of embodiment into fetish discourse is a better perspective for future research