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Deep inside the friendly confines of fantasy & dreams at Disney World in Orlando Florida, there’s a bubble. Kids blow bubbles and Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck live inside this bubble. These days NBA stars like Lebron James & James Harden are guests inside this bubble. They’re not on vacation with family & friends and going on rides at the theme park. They’re living there along with members of their teams, training, getting in game-shape and practicing their craft as the NBA gears up to for the reboot of the 2020 season, which was on pause, since the pandemic started back in mid-March.
If you think about it, we’ve all been living inside some sort of bubble as the United States continues its efforts to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. Some haven’t left their homes or neighborhoods in nearly 5 months. Others have gone on with their lives as if there’s no pandemic and no COVID-19 to be concerned about.
The NBA was very concerned back in March, when they were the first professional sports league to stop playing and postponed the remaining 8 games of their regular season and perhaps cancellation of the playoffs & championship.
After careful & strategic planning and safety protocols, the NBA is gearing up to restart the 2020 season inside their own bubble. It won’t be the entire NBA league. It’ll be 16 of the top teams playing out their remaining games and proceeding with the playoffs.
The 2020 season resumes tomorrow as the Los Angeles Lakers & Los Angeles Clippers face-off for the first time outside the Staples Center in California. Before the Los Angeles rivals take center-court, the Utah Jazz & New Orleans Pelicans will compete in the first matchup on Thursday. Then Friday, the remaining 12-teams will play 6 games in an action-packed day that’s sure to please NBA fans.
Since the NBA shifted their league & focus to the Orlando Bubble, there hasn’t been one single player test positive for the Coronavirus.
That’s an amazing achievement since Major League Baseball has had their fair share of COVID-19 cases and just within the past week, the Miami Marlins have dealt with a major outbreak within their clubhouse and 15 players & 2 coaches have been infected by the Coronavirus which led to cancellation of all their games for this week as the team quarantines at a hotel in Philadelphia.
It’s not yet known how & where the Miami Marlins were exposed to the virus but let’s hope it wasn’t in Florida, which has become a hot-spot for COVID-19. MLB isn’t playing in a bubble. They’re scattered across the United States which further exposes themselves. The way the NBA chose its handing & reopening of their league seems to be a better & safer concept of playing their games inside one location in Orlando Florida and it seems to be effective and working so far.
NBA legend Michael Jordan and his company donate $1 million each to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and the Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM), and $500,000 to Black Voters Matter.
Michael Jordan and his company have pledged to donate $100 million over the next decade to organizations supporting the fight for racial equality and social justice.
Nike, the parent company of Jordan Brands is donating $40 million over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.
In a statement, the Michael Jordan Brand said: “Black lives matter. This isn’t a controversial statement. Until the ingrained racism that allows our country’s institutions to fail is completely eradicated, we will remain committed to protecting and improving the lives of Black people. “Today, we are announcing that Michael Jordan and the Jordan Brand will be donating 100 million over the next 10 years to organizations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education.
NFL Football Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a Twitter statement “We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people. “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. “We, the National Football League, believe Black Lives Matter. I personally protest with you and want to be part of the much-needed change in this country. “Without black players, there would be no National Football League. And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches, fans, and staff. We are listening. I am listening, and I will be reaching out to players who have raised their voices and others on how we can improve and go forward for a better and more united NFL family.”
NBA’s greatest all-time player, Michael Jordan won six titles with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan sold his minority stake in the Hornets in September 2019 valuing the team at $1.5 billion.
Jordan is one of the most marketed sports figures in history. He has been a major spokesman for such brands as Nike, Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Gatorade, McDonald’s, Ball Park Franks, Rayovac, Wheaties, Hanes, and MCI. Jordan has had a long relationship with Gatorade. Source: Wikipedia
In June 2010, Jordan was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 20th-most powerful celebrity in the world with $55 million earned between June 2009 and June 2010. According to the Forbes article, Jordan Brand generates $1 billion in sales for Nike.
Imagine you’re on your daily commute to work, driving along a crowded highway while trying to resist looking at your phone. You’re already a little stressed out because you didn’t sleep well, woke up late, and have an important meeting in a couple hours, but you just don’t feel like your best self.
Suddenly another car cuts you off, coming way too close to your front bumper as it changes lanes. Your already-simmering emotions leap into overdrive, and you lay on the horn and shout curses no one can hear.
Except someone–or, rather, something–can hear: your car. Hearing your angry words, aggressive tone, and raised voice, and seeing your furrowed brow, the onboard computer goes into “soothe” mode, as it’s been programmed to do when it detects that you’re angry. It plays relaxing music at just the right volume, releases a puff of light lavender-scented essential oil, and maybe even says some meditative quotes to calm you down.
What do you think–creepy? Helpful? Awesome? Weird? Would you actually calm down, or get even more angry that a car is telling you what to do?
Scenarios like this (maybe without the lavender oil part) may not be imaginary for much longer, especially if companies working to integrate emotion-reading artificial intelligence into new cars have their way. And it wouldn’t just be a matter of your car soothing you when you’re upset–depending what sort of regulations are enacted, the car’s sensors, camera, and microphone could collect all kinds of data about you and sell it to third parties.
Computers and Feelings
Just as AI systems can be trained to tell the difference between a picture of a dog and one of a cat, they can learn to differentiate between an angry tone of voice or facial expression and a happy one. In fact, there’s a whole branch of machine intelligence devoted to creating systems that can recognize and react to human emotions; it’s called affective computing.
Emotion-reading AIs learn what different emotions look and sound like from large sets of labeled data; “smile = happy,” “tears = sad,” “shouting = angry,” and so on. The most sophisticated systems can likely even pick up on the micro-expressions that flash across our faces before we consciously have a chance to control them, as detailed by Daniel Goleman in his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence.
Affective computing company Affectiva, a spinoff from MIT Media Lab, says its algorithms are trained on 5,313,751 face videos (videos of people’s faces as they do an activity, have a conversation, or react to stimuli) representing about 2 billion facial frames. Fascinatingly, Affectiva claims its software can even account for cultural differences in emotional expression (for example, it’s more normalized in Western cultures to be very emotionally expressive, whereas Asian cultures tend to favor stoicism and politeness), as well as gender differences.
But Why?
As reported in Motherboard, companies like Affectiva, Cerence, Xperi, and Eyeris have plans in the works to partner with automakers and install emotion-reading AI systems in new cars. Regulations passed last year in Europe and a bill just introduced this month in the US senate are helping make the idea of “driver monitoring” less weird, mainly by emphasizing the safety benefits of preemptive warning systems for tired or distracted drivers (remember that part in the beginning about sneaking glances at your phone? Yeah, that).
Drowsiness and distraction can’t really be called emotions, though–so why are they being lumped under an umbrella that has a lot of other implications, including what many may consider an eerily Big Brother-esque violation of privacy?
Our emotions, in fact, are among the most private things about us, since we are the only ones who know their true nature. We’ve developed the ability to hide and disguise our emotions, and this can be a useful skill at work, in relationships, and in scenarios that require negotiation or putting on a game face.
And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had more than one good cry in my car. It’s kind of the perfect place for it; private, secluded, soundproof.
Putting systems into cars that can recognize and collect data about our emotions under the guise of preventing accidents due to the state of mind of being distracted or the physical state of being sleepy, then, seems a bit like a bait and switch.
A Highway to Privacy Invasion?
European regulations will help keep driver data from being used for any purpose other than ensuring a safer ride. But the US is lagging behind on the privacy front, with car companies largely free from any enforceable laws that would keep them from using driver data as they please.
Affectiva lists the following as use cases for occupant monitoring in cars: personalizing content recommendations, providing alternate route recommendations, adapting environmental conditions like lighting and heating, and understanding user frustration with virtual assistants and designing those assistants to be emotion-aware so that they’re less frustrating.
Our phones already do the first two (though, granted, we’re not supposed to look at them while we drive–but most cars now let you use bluetooth to display your phone’s content on the dashboard), and the third is simply a matter of reaching a hand out to turn a dial or press a button. The last seems like a solution for a problem that wouldn’t exist without said… solution.
Despite how unnecessary and unsettling it may seem, though, emotion-reading AI isn’t going away, in cars or other products and services where it might provide value.
Besides automotive AI, Affectiva also makes software for clients in the advertising space. With consent, the built-in camera on users’ laptops records them while they watch ads, gauging their emotional response, what kind of marketing is most likely to engage them, and how likely they are to buy a given product. Emotion-recognition tech is also being used or considered for use in mental health applications, call centers, fraud monitoring, and education, among others.
What If Cars Could Read and React to Your Emotions? Soon, They Will
Imagine you’re on your daily commute to work, driving along a crowded highway while trying to resist looking at your phone. You’re already a little stressed out because you didn’t sleep well, woke up late, and have an important meeting in a couple hours, but you just don’t feel like your best self.
Suddenly another car cuts you off, coming way too close to your front bumper as it changes lanes. Your already-simmering emotions leap into overdrive, and you lay on the horn and shout curses no one can hear.
Except someone–or, rather, something–can hear: your car. Hearing your angry words, aggressive tone, and raised voice, and seeing your furrowed brow, the onboard computer goes into “soothe” mode, as it’s been programmed to do when it detects that you’re angry. It plays relaxing music at just the right volume, releases a puff of light lavender-scented essential oil, and maybe even says some meditative quotes to calm you down.
What do you think–creepy? Helpful? Awesome? Weird? Would you actually calm down, or get even more angry that a car is telling you what to do?
Scenarios like this (maybe without the lavender oil part) may not be imaginary for much longer, especially if companies working to integrate emotion-reading artificial intelligence into new cars have their way. And it wouldn’t just be a matter of your car soothing you when you’re upset–depending what sort of regulations are enacted, the car’s sensors, camera, and microphone could collect all kinds of data about you and sell it to third parties.
Computers and Feelings
Just as AI systems can be trained to tell the difference between a picture of a dog and one of a cat, they can learn to differentiate between an angry tone of voice or facial expression and a happy one. In fact, there’s a whole branch of machine intelligence devoted to creating systems that can recognize and react to human emotions; it’s called affective computing.
Emotion-reading AIs learn what different emotions look and sound like from large sets of labeled data; “smile = happy,” “tears = sad,” “shouting = angry,” and so on. The most sophisticated systems can likely even pick up on the micro-expressions that flash across our faces before we consciously have a chance to control them, as detailed by Daniel Goleman in his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence.
Affective computing company Affectiva, a spinoff from MIT Media Lab, says its algorithms are trained on 5,313,751 face videos (videos of people’s faces as they do an activity, have a conversation, or react to stimuli) representing about 2 billion facial frames. Fascinatingly, Affectiva claims its software can even account for cultural differences in emotional expression (for example, it’s more normalized in Western cultures to be very emotionally expressive, whereas Asian cultures tend to favor stoicism and politeness), as well as gender differences.
But Why?
As reported in Motherboard, companies like Affectiva, Cerence, Xperi, and Eyeris have plans in the works to partner with automakers and install emotion-reading AI systems in new cars. Regulations passed last year in Europe and a bill just introduced this month in the US senate are helping make the idea of “driver monitoring” less weird, mainly by emphasizing the safety benefits of preemptive warning systems for tired or distracted drivers (remember that part in the beginning about sneaking glances at your phone? Yeah, that).
Drowsiness and distraction can’t really be called emotions, though–so why are they being lumped under an umbrella that has a lot of other implications, including what many may consider an eerily Big Brother-esque violation of privacy?
Our emotions, in fact, are among the most private things about us, since we are the only ones who know their true nature. We’ve developed the ability to hide and disguise our emotions, and this can be a useful skill at work, in relationships, and in scenarios that require negotiation or putting on a game face.
And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had more than one good cry in my car. It’s kind of the perfect place for it; private, secluded, soundproof.
Putting systems into cars that can recognize and collect data about our emotions under the guise of preventing accidents due to the state of mind of being distracted or the physical state of being sleepy, then, seems a bit like a bait and switch.
A Highway to Privacy Invasion?
European regulations will help keep driver data from being used for any purpose other than ensuring a safer ride. But the US is lagging behind on the privacy front, with car companies largely free from any enforceable laws that would keep them from using driver data as they please.
Affectiva lists the following as use cases for occupant monitoring in cars: personalizing content recommendations, providing alternate route recommendations, adapting environmental conditions like lighting and heating, and understanding user frustration with virtual assistants and designing those assistants to be emotion-aware so that they’re less frustrating.
Our phones already do the first two (though, granted, we’re not supposed to look at them while we drive–but most cars now let you use bluetooth to display your phone’s content on the dashboard), and the third is simply a matter of reaching a hand out to turn a dial or press a button. The last seems like a solution for a problem that wouldn’t exist without said… solution.
Despite how unnecessary and unsettling it may seem, though, emotion-reading AI isn’t going away, in cars or other products and services where it might provide value.
Besides automotive AI, Affectiva also makes software for clients in the advertising space. With consent, the built-in camera on users’ laptops records them while they watch ads, gauging their emotional response, what kind of marketing is most likely to engage them, and how likely they are to buy a given product. Emotion-recognition tech is also being used or considered for use in mental health applications, call centers, fraud monitoring, and education, among others.
In a 2015 TED talk, Affectiva co-founder Rana El-Kaliouby told her audience that we’re living in a world increasingly devoid of emotion, and her goal was to bring emotions back into our digital experiences. Soon they’ll be in our cars, too; whether the benefits will outweigh the costs remains to be seen.
Tsetse flies are bloodthirsty. Natives of sub-Saharan Africa, tsetse flies can transmit the microbe Trypanosoma when they take a blood meal. That’s the protozoan that causes African sleeping sickness in people; without treatment, it’s fatal, and millions of people are at risk due to the bite of a tsetse fly.
My entomology research focuses on insects that feed on the blood of people and animals. From a human health standpoint, understanding what makes all these bugs tick is key to developing ways to control them and prevent transmission of the diseases they carry, such as malaria, dengue, Lyme disease, West Nile virus and many others.
Tsetse flies stand out from their blood-feeding cousins the mosquitoes and ticks because of their unique reproductive biology. They give birth to live young and, even more unusual, the mother lactates and provides milk for her offspring. Here’s how it all works — and why their unusual reproduction strategy might be a key to controlling tsetse flies and the parasite they carry once and for all.
From egg to larva
Scientists know of other flies that hold onto their eggs in their reproductive tract until they hatch into young larvae, with each brood consisting of dozens of offspring. The mother then tries to find a suitable source of nutrition in the environment, deposits the larvae and leaves them to survive on their own. The mother does not provide any nutrition for her young.
A pregnant tsetse fly with a larva visible in her uterus. Geoffrey M. Attardo, University of California, Davis, CC BY-ND
Female tsetse flies develop just one single egg at a time. When the egg is complete, the mother moves it from her ovaries into her uterus in a process called ovulation. Once in the uterus, the egg is fertilized with sperm the female has stored in an organ called the spermatheca. While females can mate multiple times, they obtain all the sperm they need for their lifetime from a male fly during a single mating event.
Here’s where tsetse flies dramatically diverge from most other insects.
Attached to the mother’s uterus is a specialized gland that makes a milk-like substance. The organ is called the milk gland, and it produces a rich mixture of fats and particular proteins that provide the larva with all the nutrition it needs to develop into an adult.
Tsetse larva surrounded by the milk gland (stained pink in this image) and fat storage tissues. Geoffrey M. Attardo, University of California, Davis, CC BY-ND
After five or six days of developing and feeding on milk, the larva is fully grown and ready to enter the world. The mother finds a safe spot and gives birth. The larva immediately burrows underground to avoid predators and parasites.
Once buried, the outer surface of the larva’s skin hardens and turns black, forming a protective shell. This is called the pupal stage and it lasts for around three weeks. During this time, the pupa transforms into an adult fly.
A new adult fly emerges from the pupa in sandy earth. Adult flies are about equivalent in size to the common housefly. Patrick Robert/Sygma via Getty Images
It then emerges from the pupa, climbs out of the ground, and begins its life as an adult tsetse fly looking for hosts to blood-feed on and other tsetse flies to mate with.
Why live birth?
Why would an insect evolve this slow and resource-intensive way to reproduce?
One idea is that this method provides a defensive advantage relative to free-living larvae against parasites and predation. Larvae on their own have few (if any) ways to defend against these threats. But keeping larvae in the mother’s uterus provides shelter and a guaranteed food source. While this strategy is much slower, scientists think the extra maternal care results in higher larval survival rates. It’s a matter of quality over quantity.
A result of this reproductive strategy is that tsetse fly populations are small and slow to recover from control efforts, relative to more prolific insects like mosquitoes.
My colleagues and I hope that we can parlay our understanding of the molecular processes that regulate tsetses’ milk production and mating behavior into new environmentally friendly, cost-effective and tsetse-specific control strategies for these insects.
The sleeping sickness tsetse flies spread is a potential issue for millions of people in 36 sub-Saharan countries, though the number of annual cases has decreased drastically thanks to major control efforts — including trapping flies, applying insecticides and releasing sterile males to the environment where they mate with wild females but don’t produce offspring. Ultimately, we’d like to contribute to the World Health Organization’s goal of eliminating African sleeping sickness by 2030 with a new way to prevent the transmission of disease-causing trypanosomes to people and animals.
Geoff Attardo, Assistant Professor of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
In a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., engineers observed the first driving test for the Mars rover, Perseverance. Perseverance will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize Mars’ climate and geology, and collect samples for a future return to Earth. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Briony Horgan, Purdue University and Melissa Rice, Western Washington University
This summer, NASA is taking the next giant leap in the search for signs of life beyond Earth.
On July 30, if the weather in Florida holds, NASA will launch its most sophisticated and ambitious spacecraft to Mars: the aptly named Perseverance rover. This will be the third launch to Mars this month, following the UAE’s Hope and China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft. Perseverance will look for signatures of ancient life preserved in Mars rocks. And, for the first time, this rover will collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth, where they can be scrutinized in laboratories for decades to come.
Mars is one the few destinations in the Solar System that has had conditions suitable for life as we know it. There is a chance that Perseverance will collect the sample from Mars that answers the question: “Are we alone in the universe?” This question is especially relevant right now. During the coronavirus pandemic, the mission has remarkably stayed on track for launch in spite of disruptions and delays, and we have been reminded that life on Earth is vulnerable and precious.
As twoexperts in planetary science and members of the Perseverance science team, we expect that this mission will be the best chance — within our own lifetimes at least — to create a scientific revolution in astrobiology.
NASA’s Mars 2020 will land in Jezero Crater, pictured here. On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Green colors indicate detections of carbonate minerals that may have formed in the ancient lake. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Searching for life in Jezero crater
On Feb. 18, 2021, if all goes according to plan, Perseverance will enter the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph, and seven nerve-racking minutes later, will be lowered gently onto the surface by a jetpack. The rover will land in Jezero crater, a site that NASA hopes will provide a window to a time when rain fell and rivers flowed on ancient Mars.
Over the past 30 years, a fleet of rovers and orbiters have built a picture of an Earth-like ancient Mars. Between 3 and 4 billion years ago, Mars hosted vast river networks as long as the Mississippi, deep lakes that contained the building blocks of life, and hot springs that bubbled with potential for life. These watery environments were able to exist because ancient Mars had a thick atmosphere. However, that atmosphere has been leaking away, leaving the surface today cold, dry and inhospitable.
After five years of debate, Jezero crater was selected as the site on Mars that is most likely to preserve signs of life that might have inhabited Mars billions of years ago, when microbial life was first starting on Earth. Satellite images of Jezero show a river leading into the crater and ending in a large delta, which must have formed in a long-lived ancient lake. A bathtub ring of carbonate minerals around the edge of the crater might have formed along ancient beaches, and may preserve rocks with microbial textures known as stromatolites. Stromatolites record some of the earliest signs of life on Earth, and Perseverance will search for similar signs of life on Mars.
Advanced exploration technology
Perseverance will have many new capabilities that will transform how we explore Mars. The rover carries Ingenuity, a small helicopter that will be the first aircraft to fly on another planet. Because Mars’ atmosphere today is so thin — only 1% of the Earth’s — Ingenuity has to be extremely lightweight (4 lbs) with very large blades (4 feet tip-to-tip) to get off the ground. Ingenuity will take images of the distant landscape and help us scout the rover’s traverse; future Mars missions could adopt this model of rovers and aircraft working in tandem.
Looking even further ahead, Perseverance will help prepare for future human missions to Mars. One of many challenges for astronauts will be the packing list for a two-year roundtrip journey, which includes air, water and rocket fuel to get home. If these resources could be harvested on Mars, human missions would be much more feasible. Perseverance will test a process for creating oxygen from Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere. In the future, similar instruments could be sent ahead of astronauts, so that breathable air and liquid oxygen rocket propellant are waiting when they arrive.
In this illustration, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover uses its drill to core a rock sample on Mars.
The rover will collect and store rock and soil samples on the planet’s surface that future missions will retrieve and return to Earth. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Getting the samples back to Earth
The most immediate goal of the mission is to search for evidence of past life, and Perseverance’s science payload will allow the rover to search for organic materials and microbial textures at the scale of a grain of salt. However, finding definitive evidence of microbial life is extremely difficult. Ultimately, we will need to look at samples from Jezero with advanced instruments on Earth. This is why Perseverance will also collect pencil-sized rock cores that will be returned to Earth by a series of missions in the late 2020s.
By laying the groundwork for sample return with Perseverance, NASA is taking the next giant leap in its exploration of Mars. The rocks collected by Perseverance may be our only shot in the foreseeable future to search for signs of life with samples from another planet. This mission, therefore, is not just “go big or go home” — it is “go big and go home.”
Briony Horgan, Associate Professor of Planetary Science, Purdue University and Melissa Rice, Associate Professor of Planetary Science, Western Washington University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Six former National Football League (NFL) players have been charged in a superseding indictment in the Eastern District of Kentucky for their alleged roles in a nationwide fraud on a health care benefit program for retired NFL players.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Robert M. Duncan, Jr. for the Eastern District of Kentucky, and FBI Special Agent in Charge George L. Piro of the Miami Field Office made the announcement.
Darrell Reid, 38, of Farmingdale New Jersey, Antwan Odom, 38, of Irvington, Alabama, Anthony Montgomery, 36, of Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton Portis, 38, of Fort Mill, South Carolina, Tamarick Vanover, 46, of Tallahassee, Florida, and Robert McCune, 41, of Riverdale, Georgia, were charged in the superseding indictment. Each of the defendants was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. Reid, Odom, Montgomery, and Portis were also each charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of health care fraud. Vanover was also charged with two counts of wire fraud and two counts of health care fraud. And McCune was also charged with 10 counts of wire fraud, 12 counts of health care fraud, and three counts of aggravated identity theft.
McCune and 11 other former NFL players, including Portis and Vanover, were previously charged in the Eastern District of Kentucky in December 2019 for their alleged roles in the fraud. The alleged fraud targeted the Gene Upshaw NFL Player Health Reimbursement Account Plan (the Plan), which was established pursuant to the 2006 collective bargaining agreement and provided for tax-free reimbursement of out-of-pocket medical care expenses that were not covered by insurance and that were incurred by former players, their wives and their dependents — up to a maximum of $350,000 per player. According to the charging documents, over $3.9 million in false and fraudulent claims were submitted to the Plan, and the Plan paid out over $3.4 million on those claims between June 2017 and December 2018.
Since the initial charges were announced, seven of the defendants have entered guilty pleas. Correll Buckhalter, James Butler, Joseph Horn, Etric Pruitt, Ceandris Brown, John Eubanks and Donald “Reche” Caldwell, who passed away in June, each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud. On June 22, 2020, Brown was sentenced for his role in the scheme to a term of incarceration of 12 months and one day. Sentencing for the remaining defendants is pending.
The superseding indictment adds Reid, Odom, and Montgomery as defendants for their roles in the scheme, and it adds additional charges against McCune: three counts of aggravated identity theft for McCune’s unlawful use of the identity of other persons as part of this scheme; and two counts of health care fraud for a scheme whereby McCune allegedly submitted or caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to the Plan on his own behalf.
The superseding indictment alleges that the scheme to defraud involved the submission of false and fraudulent claims to the Plan for expensive medical equipment — typically between $40,000 and $50,000 for each claim — that was never purchased or received. The expensive medical equipment described on the false and fraudulent claims included hyperbaric oxygen chambers, cryotherapy machines, ultrasound machines designed for use by a doctor’s office to conduct women’s health examinations and electromagnetic therapy devices designed for use on horses.
The superseding indictment further alleges that McCune, Vanover, and others recruited other players into the scheme by offering to submit or cause the submission of these false and fraudulent claims in exchange for kickbacks and bribes that ranged from a few thousand dollars to $10,000 or more per claim submitted. As part of the scheme, the defendants allegedly fabricated supporting documentation for the claims, including invoices, prescriptions and letters of medical necessity.
This case was investigated by the FBI and is being prosecuted by the Health Care Fraud Unit of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky. The investigation included efforts by various FBI Field Offices and Resident Agencies, including: Augusta, Georgia; Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama; Cleveland, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Columbia, South Carolina; Dallas and Houston, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Jackson, Mississippi; Lexington, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; Miami, Jacksonville and Tampa, Florida; Newark, New Jersey; Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and Newport Beach, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Salt Lake City, Utah and Washington, D.C.
Trial Attorneys John (Fritz) Scanlon, Alexander J. Kramer and Thomas J. Tynan of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul C. McCaffrey and Andrew E. Smith of the Eastern District of Kentucky are prosecuting the cases.
The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the Department of Justice. Learn more about the history of our agency at www.Justice.gov/Celebrating150Years.
Alex Horenstein, University of Miami and Konrad Grabiszewski, Prince Mohammad Bin Salman College (MBSC) of Business & Entrepreneurship
Governments all around the world are trying to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Making it mandatory for people to wear face masks is a policy that has gained favor among many national governments and state authorities in the United States.
Yet any policy that attempts to modify people’s behavior — in this case, making mask-wearing a new norm — needs to take into account undesired behavioral adjustments that the policy may bring about. As behavioraleconomists, we know that without such consideration, the policy is bound to be less efficient than expected.
Here are two behavior alterations to look out for as mask-wearing becomes more commonplace.
The mechanism is always the same: A safety measure (a seat belt in the case of driving or a government bailout in the case of investing) allows the recipient to take more risk (driving faster or investing in more risky instruments). In the end, the behavior becomes less responsible. In fact, a safety measure can make the activity more dangerous.
It’s easy to imagine how this could be the case with COVID-19 and face masks. Here, going into public spaces is an activity with an associated risk of getting infected. A face mask is a safety measure that is meant to decrease the probability of infection.
But the Peltzman effect will have a detrimental effect on that probability: When people feel safer with a face mask, they ease off on other forms of prevention, such as carefully washing their hands or keeping social distance. In the worst case, the risk of infection could actually increase.
Behaviorial science suggests, then, that making face masks mandatory must be accompanied by policies that maintain, if not increase, other forms of prevention. In particular, it’s important to educate the public that, on its own, a face mask is not going to prevent COVID-19 if people forget about practices like social distancing and washing hands.
One could imagine a policy that makes not only face masks but also portable hand sanitizer mandatory. Public health education could work on turning mandatory face masks into visual reminders to wash hands frequently.
Wearing masks, not staying home
The Peltzman effect does not paint a complete story of how safety measures change individuals’ behavior.
In our research, we discovered another phenomenon: Safety measures encourage the participation of those who, without these measures, would sit out the activity as too risky for them.
For example, most people would not dare to join a NASCAR race or put their money in complex financial investments. These activities are just too risky. However, you might change your mind if accompanied by a professional NASCAR driver, making the race less dangerous, or if assured of a government bailout, making investing less risky. The safety measure becomes an invitation to participate.
In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this phenomenon translates into the following problem. Equipped with face masks and a misleading feeling of safety, those who otherwise should stay home — especially older folks and those with underlying illness — head out and about. Compared to the safety of home, they’d be exposed to a higher risk of infection.
The solution here requires public health messaging to walk a fine line. Making face masks mandatory must be accompanied by education that face masks are imperfect protection against COVID-19. Masks vary greatly in their filtration efficiency. Leaving home in a face mask does not mean that the probability of infection has been reduced to zero. It is of paramount importance to educate those at higher risk of coronavirus infection.
Whether governments should make face masks mandatory is a question of medical science and political will — and not one we even try to answer. But research in behavioral economics does anticipate the complex ways people may respond to such a policy and we suggest some ways to address them.
Alex Horenstein, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Miami and Konrad Grabiszewski, Associate Professor of Economics, Prince Mohammad Bin Salman College (MBSC) of Business & Entrepreneurship
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The institution of management is bad. Bad because it causes too much stress and harms human health. Bad because it allocates too many resources to non-productive activity and hampers human progress.
We tend to focus on the large scandals that make headlines, blame individuals and then dismiss it as “a few bad apples” (despite the alarming frequency of such apples). What if it were not the apples that were bad, but the orchard? Maybe these scandals are just the visible symptoms of an underlying disease?
The more pedestrian “business as usual” institution of management, so consequential to the livelihood and well-being of hundreds of millions of people every day, produces mostly bad results for stakeholders. For instance, in a widely cited Gallup study, only 13 per cent of employees are “engaged” at work. Why is it that management is not better at managing?
It’s not like there are no other options. From the Scientific Management movement in the 1880s to Lean and Agile in the last 30 years, there have always been more progressive management philosophies for as long as there have been big companies.
Few companies embrace change
And this is not just theory. A small percentage of companies have embraced alternative management systems and have thrived, the largest and most famous being Toyota. But even though there’s empirical evidence showing it’s possible, when a complete enterprise transformation takes place, to better satisfy the interests of customers, employees and even shareholders concurrently, the vast majority of executives have taken only a superficial interest in these transformative philosophies. Why?
Toyota has adopted a non-traditional management style that is cited by experts as a reason behind the company’s success. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
I’ve discovered some compelling answers from a voice in the wilderness of management thinking by the name of Bob Emiliani. In his 2018 book The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean Management, and in shorter, related works he’s published more recently, he argues that the prevailing ideology of “Classical Management” does not endure simply because of greed and profit motive.
While admitting that “pecuniary self-interest” is certainly a driver of executive behaviour, Emiliani marshals persuasive arguments that it’s due far more to sociological factors, like the maintenance of one’s honour, rights and privileges within a peer group.
This is why, for instance, executives will almost always prefer to spend tens of millions on new IT systems (that rarely improve company performance) rather than spend 15 minutes a month speaking to front-line employees directly, trying to understand their work and the problems they actually face while trying to serve customers every day. There is too much dishonour in the latter and much greater privilege and status in the former.
Managing for the 19th century
The institution of management has, over the past 150 years, created, upheld and reinforced such social norms of leadership behaviour, causing good people to manage badly. We’re still basically managing as if it were the 19th century.
Emiliani, a professor in the school of engineering, science and technology at Central Connecticut State University, ignores the boosterism and wishful thinking of the currently popular management books and delves instead into the classics of the social sciences – a somewhat remarkable move for someone with a PhD in chemical engineering. He weaves together an incisive and inter-disciplinary analysis of why contemporary executives behave and think the way they do.
Many CEOs are more worried about their own status rather than creating a more co-operative work culture. (Shutterstock)
Emiliani uses the metaphors of war (aggression and conflict), hunting (predation), sport (competition) and devout observances (rituals and decorum) to describe and explain contemporary management culture.
What emerges is a view of a powerful trinity of sociological forces that act upon mostly well-intentioned executives, keeping them firmly attached to the status quo: firstly, a culture that requires them to maintain their honour and status in the eyes of their peers; secondly, politics and economics, which privileges power-seeking and territorial dominance above egalitarianism and co-operation; and thirdly, metaphysical habits of thought, which give licence to executives to forgo the need to use scientific rigour or rational logic in their thinking, and instead allows them to indulge in more mystical and supernatural explanations of cause and effect.
Emiliani’s prose has a certain delightful vitriol to it, using strong contrasts and the somewhat bombastic language of 19th-century socioeconomics to make his point. He writes with great candour, in part, because he can.
He is not subservient to vested interests: he self-publishes all his books and is not a big-name Ivy League business school professor with binding sponsorships, lucrative publishing contracts or viral TED talks. Nor is he a consultant (like me) benefiting from the multi-billion-dollar “leadership industry,” as Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer calls it.
Respectful approach is needed
His writing is a dispassionate and well-reasoned plea for a better, more respectful, humanistic system of management that creates more value for employees, consumers, shareholders and, ultimately, society. It provokes the reader to think deeply about the chronic nature of bad management and its widespread consequences, both economic and social.
While he spends most of his time illustrating how bad management has deep roots, Emiliani also offers some practical proposals for improving it. He recognizes and accepts that leaders are not likely going to change, or change very much, and so proposes two alternatives that do not require wholesale transformation of an enterprise.
One proposes that leaders obey only two rules: don’t disrupt the flow of operations and provide above-average compensation to employees.
The other proposes that leadership is seen as a set of flawed processes that can, with a little ingenuity, be improved. If leaders blame errors on the process and not their own character, Emiliani speculates that they might just be willing to improve.
These low-effort, low-cost options have yet to be thoroughly tested, but at least they offer reason for some hope.
Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) ’s $2.1 billion Fitbit Acquisition Request Faces Challenges from the EU
EU regulators are concerned how this will affect the digital healthcare space; and if other fitness tracking apps in the play store will be at a disadvantage. Regulators are also concerned how Google will use the data to profile users for its own efforts for their search and advertising business.
Reported by Euronews “Privacy International is calling on EU regulators to block the merger,” it said in a statement. “If the EU approves the deal, then it will be giving a green light to our most intimate data being used for the profit of a tech giant which, in 2018 only, generated more than $80 billion (€71 billion) in revenue from delivering targeted advertisements to users,” it added.
In a report by the European Consumer Organization “The acquisition of Fitbit could expand Google’s immense power in digital markets into the $8.7 trillion global healthcare market1 through its strength in data and data analytics. Google has already made significant inroads into healthcare. Regulators must carefully assess the proposed deal’s implications for innovation and its potential to undermine the ability of companies to bring new products to consumers in the area of digital healthcare.
The results of unfortunate merger control decisions in the past have likely contributed to the rise of tech giants. Subsequent concerns now have to be addressed through more costly and lengthy ex-post antitrust enforcement proceedings and other competition interventions. Such harms to consumers are far better prevented than cured. Therefore, before deciding whether this takeover can proceed or not, regulators must carefully analyse its full implications for consumers and consider its potential for far-reaching and dynamic effects on digital and health markets.” Source: European Consumer Organization
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission also has concerns.
We believe that Google will be able to overcome these concerns as they stated, “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.” Still, data privacy concerns remain at the forefront of a Fitbit acquisition.
In other news Google announced that most of all its staff will work from home until mid 2020 due to concerns about the COVID-19 Pandemic. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook CEOs to appear at antitrust hearing on July 27, 2020.
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Under Armour, Inc. (UA) NYSE – founder Kevin Plank and other executives of the company have been names in a federal probe regarding its accounting practices. Furthermore, investigations allege management may have provided misleading business information to the investing public. The stock is down today in early trading.
Wells Notices were sent to Chief Financial Officer David Bergman informing them that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to “allege certain violations of the federal securities laws.”
IBD reports” Under Armour stock has an abysmal IBD Composite Rating of 4. This puts it in the bottom 4% of stocks tracked by IBD. Both earnings and stock market performance are weak.” Source:IBD
14 analysts at Tip Ranks rate the stock a hold- “Based on 14 analysts offering 12-month price targets for Under Armour in the last 3 months. The average price target is $9.00 with a high forecast of $15.00 and a low forecast of $4.00. The average price target represents a -8.91% decrease from the last price of $9.88.”Source: Tip Ranks
“A Wells notice is a letter that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sends to people or firms when it is planning to bring an enforcement action against them. It is issued at the conclusion of an SEC Investigation notifying the people or firm in question that the SEC has concluded that they should be charged with violation of the securities laws. The notice indicates that the SEC staff has determined it may bring a civil action against a person or firm, and provides the person or firm with the opportunity to provide information as to why the enforcement action should not be brought. The person or firm is generally given 30 days to file this response in the form of a legal brief considering legal and factual arguments as to why no charges should be brought against them. Although investigation is conducted on a confidential basis, this notice, as well as its response, is public information that can be used in later public hearings among other things.
Regulators are not legally required to provide a notice; however, it is the practice of the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to provide such notice. In addition, 80% of people who were sent a Wells Notice from 2011-2013 ended up facing charges for allegedly violating securities law.” Source: Wikipedia
Mr. Plank became Under Armour’s Executive Chairman and Brand Chief in January 2020, following his role as Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors from 1996 to 2019, and President from 1996 to July 2008 and August 2010 to July 2017. Founded in 1996 out of frustration that cotton T-shirts were unable to keep him dry and comfortable while playing football at the University of Maryland, Mr. Plank designed and created a new apparel innovation that efficiently wicked sweat to optimize athletic performance. Nearly a quarter of a century later and Under Armour has grown into one of the world’s leading developer, marketer, and distributor of branded performance apparel, footwear, and accessories. Mr. Plank also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame, Inc., and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Maryland College Park Foundation. Source:Under Armour
