Recent quotes:

Are FDA Panel Votes on Psych Drugs Tainted by Speakers' COIs?

Members of the public who receive travel and other expenses from pharmaceutical study sponsors to attend US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel meetings and provide testimony about the efficacy of a new psychiatric drug are highly likely to deliver a positive opinion, new research shows. Such individuals, investigators say, have the potential to skew outcomes of FDA advisory panel votes, potentially leading to psychiatric drug approvals that are not exclusively based on objective scientific evidence. "The implications of these findings are concerning since COIs have the potential to skew public speakers' testimonies at these meetings and persuade committee members to look beyond the evidence and approve a drug through the acquisition of non–evidence-based information," study investigator William Roberts, a medical student at Oklahoma State University (OSU) College of Osteopathic Medicine in Tulsa, told Medscape Medical News.

Greed

At private companies with sales like Gravity’s total revenue, salary and bonus for the top quartile of CEOs is $710,000, according to Chief Executive magazine’s annual compensation survey. At companies with sales like Gravity’s net revenue, the top quartile pay falls to about $373,000. At companies with a similar number of employees as Gravity, the top quartile of CEOs makes $470,000 in salary and bonus. The CEO of JetPay, a publicly traded competitor that processes a similar volume as Gravity, received $355,000 in 2014.

Here's How Sprite Tries to Buy Off Reporters With Free Tickets

Here's the thing: Because the approximate value of these tickets is so high and they are not conventional media passes, our legal counsel has made us aware we must create a formal agreement with any outlet to which we are providing the tickets. So, we propose an agreement with very minimal asks.

Hungary leveraging its EU membership to raise money?

how do tiny, tiny little countries, like little islands in the South Pacific that have only 10,000 people but they’re members of the United Nations… they have nothing to sell, no natural resources… how do they support themselves? He went off and he interviewed members of those parliaments, people in the governments, and what he discovered is that these little countries joined every single international organization that they can.  And then they sell their votes in these international organizations to the states that will pay to keep their governments going. I read this thesis and thought what an interesting model for government finance! I can’t prove that this is what Hungary is doing, but then what does Hungary have that it can sell? I mean, pálinka is great, Tokaji is divine, I mean there are a number of things that Hungary has that it can sell, but not enough to hold up the whole government.
As dozens of Fluence success stories on the site’s blog will testify, there is also the chance that influencers will Tweet, Facebook, or write a blog post about the song you submit. Just this week, for example, an “indie music curator” named Robert Duffy supported “emerging indie artist group” CMBSTN—a quartet of Swedish alt-rockers with a penchant for slick production, emotive vocals and lipstick—by selecting it as an “emerging candy pick” on a website called Bitcandy. Truth be told, the write-up included the disclaimer that the writer had found it on Fluence[…] if CMBSTN hadn’t posted their music to Fluence, would Robert Duffy have ever found out about CMBSTN?