Covert Marketing Unmasked: A Legal and Regulatory Guide for Practices that Mask Marketing Messages

Masked marketing—one form of covert marketing—involves marketing communications that appear to be from independent third parties rather than from product marketers. This article presents a typology of masked marketing practices, illustrating whether they may be deceptive to consumers. To accomplish this, the authors apply the Federal Trade Commission’s three-part definition of deception (i.e., misleadingness, reasonable consumer, and materiality) in the evaluation of such practices. The article concludes with policy recommendations including areas for further research

Statistical Evaluation of Utilization of the ISS

PayLoad Utilization Modeler (PLUM) is a statistical-modeling computer program used to evaluate the effectiveness of utilization of the International Space Station (ISS) in terms of the number of research facilities that can be operated within a specified interval of time. PLUM is designed to balance the requirements of research facilities aboard the ISS against the resources available on the ISS. PLUM comprises three parts: an interface for the entry of data on constraints and on required and available resources, a database that stores these data as well as the program output, and a modeler. The modeler comprises two subparts: one that generates tens of thousands of random combinations of research facilities and another that calculates the usage of resources for each of those combinations. The results of these calculations are used to generate graphical and tabular reports to determine which facilities are most likely to be operable on the ISS, to identify which ISS resources are inadequate to satisfy the demands upon them, and to generate other data useful in allocation of and planning of resources

The t-improper chromatic number of random graphs

We consider the $t$-improper chromatic number of the Erd{\H o}s-R{\'e}nyi random graph $G(n,p)$. The t-improper chromatic number $\chi^t(G)$ of $G$ is the smallest number of colours needed in a colouring of the vertices in which each colour class induces a subgraph of maximum degree at most $t$. If $t = 0$, then this is the usual notion of proper colouring. When the edge probability $p$ is constant, we provide a detailed description of the asymptotic behaviour of $\chi^t(G(n,p))$ over the range of choices for the growth of $t = t(n)$.Comment: 12 page

A more critical role for silicon in the catalytic Staudinger amidation: silanes as non-innocent reductants

Amides are ubiquitous in organic chemistry and occur in some of the most important natural and non-natural molecules such as peptides, pharmaceuticals and polymers.1 For this reason, amidation reactions are some of the most frequently carried out procedures in chemical synthesis.2 Amidation reactions between azides and carboxylic acid derivatives have found widespread application owing to the fact that they can be deployed in varied and complex reaction media.3,4,5 While many of these methods use carboxylic acid-derived activated esters, the phosphine-mediated amidation reaction between free acids and azides was reported in 1983 by Garcia and co-workers (Scheme 1A).6 The utility of the process is undermined somewhat by the production of triphenylphosphine oxide as a stoichiometric by-product. However, this problem was overcome in 2012 by Ashfeld and co-workers who reported a catalytic, traceless Staudinger ligation reaction (Scheme 1B).7 This process represents a combination of Garcia’s amidation with the work of O’Brien,8 who was the first to demonstrate chemoselective phosphine oxide reduction with phenylsilane in the context of a catalytic Wittig reaction.9–14 Given that the catalytic reaction was constructed on this basis, the authors proposed a catalytic cycle (Scheme 1C) involving two key steps: (a) phosphorus-mediated amidation via an aminophosphonium carboxylate and the reactive N,O-phosphorane; and (b) chemoselective silane-mediated phosphine oxide reduction to return the phosphine catalyst. While these two steps are established as discrete processes, their conflation into a catalytic cycle presents an intriguing chemoselectivity issue, namely the reduction of triphenylphosphine oxide in the presence of reductively labile iminophosphorane, aminophosphonium and N,O-phosphorane intermediates.1

Availability of Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives for Adolescents in Urban vs Rural West Virginia Counties

The study objective was to evaluate long acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) method availability and access for adolescents in rural and urban counties in West Virginia (WV). A cross-sectional survey of Title X family planning providers throughout WV was conducted from January 2016-July 2017. This survey was sent to 226 family planning providers in WV to assess patterns of LARC availability. The survey assessed provider training level, LARC services provided and frequency, clinical practice, referral patterns, and comfort level providing adolescent LARC services. Survey results were analyzed by providers’ rural vs urban status, based on US census county codes. Survey responses yielded 127 total responders, 65 (51.2%) were urban, and the remaining 62 (48.8%), were rural. Urban providers had a larger representation of medical doctors, while rural providers were primarily nurse practitioners (p This survey showed significant differences in practice between urban and rural settings, including training, experience, contraceptive options, barriers to care, and practice guidelines

Measles: how many hospitalised cases are we missing?

We aimed to determine whether the Victorian measles surveillance system had missed hospitalised cases of measles during an inter-epidemic period. We searched the Victorian Inpatient Minimum Dataset (VIMD) for the period 1 January 1997 to 30 June 1998 to identify patients with ICD-9 discharge codes for measles (055). The data were compared with that held in the Victorian measles surveillance dataset. The hospital case notes of patients identified in the VIMD but not in the measles surveillance dataset were reviewed systematically to determine whether the patients met case definitions for laboratory-confirmed or clinically compatible measles. Sixteen admissions (15 patients) were identified with a measles ICD-9 code. Eight patients were not identified in the measles surveillance dataset. Of these, one was a laboratory confirmed case of measles and two met a clinical case definition but all should have been notified to the Department of Human Services as suspected cases. While the small number of missed notifications is encouraging in terms of overall measles surveillance, it highlights important deficiencies in the awareness of hospital staff of their role in the control of measles, particularly as Australia moves towards the elimination of measles