NPR : Part 1, NPR : Part 2, NPR : Medical Schools and Drug Firm Dollars

Over the past few months, it has emerged that the company was aware for years that Vioxx might be dangerous. Now, new documents obtained by NPR suggest that even as Merck was making Vioxx into a bestseller, the company was putting pressure on independent doctors. The company’s apparent aim: to keep them from discussing evidence of Vioxx’s potential safety problems. The documents show that Merck exerted pressure not only on individual doctors, but also on several of the nation’s top medical schools.

Evidently NPR has dug up a bunch of documents that paint a pretty damning case against Merck in its systematic attempt to shut up doctors, academics, and researchers. Moreover, this series paints an awfully telling picture of how all Pharma Companies inject their dogma into Medical Universities to, in many cases, the detriment of society. As always, NPR sets the bar for journalism.

Google

The Summer of Code is Google’s program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development.

This summer, don’t let your programming skills lie fallow. Use them for the greater good of open source software and computer science. Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes a project by the end of the summer. (Payment details can be found in the FAQ)

By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations (listed below), we hope to make great software happen. If you can’t come up with a great idea to submit, a number of our organizations have made idea lists available.

What a brilliant idea! I would have loved to have had this opportunity while I was in school! I am so stoked about this!

NY Daily News

Ready for a real relationship? Ditch the
pretty boys and grab yourself a geek.

“A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first,” says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine’s love and sex advice columnist. “He’ll turn out to be a great father and a great husband.”

And, she insists that a woman who is willing to stick it out with a nerd and get past his quirks will be handsomely rewarded. “Don’t give up on him too fast,” she said. “If you stick with him, he’s going to turn out to be really great.”

wooOOOooo

BBC NEWS

A leg, with a shoe, and part of the torso fell into a woman’s garden, making “a very loud bang”.

…

More human remains were found in the aircraft’s wheel-well, which is not heated or pressurized, so chances of surviving a long flight are negligible.

Egads, talk about an uncomfortable flight. Didn’t he see the movie “ConAir.” I’d say he was pretty damn motivated to get out of town. This is horrible.

BOO – Home

“A wrist friendly language for the CLI”

Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility.

This is pretty slick. A simple ‘scripting’ language that can interface Mono.

I noticed Pete did this over at /dev/null/ and I thought it was a cool idea; so, here are the top search terms from the month of May that steered folks to this site:

MPR

A bill establishing an official poet laureate in Minnesota met a tragic fate.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty penned the fatal verse when he vetoed the bill. The Republican governor took the action Friday but didn’t announce it until Tuesday.

“Even though we have a state ‘folklorist,’ I also have concern this will lead to calls for other similar positions,” Pawlenty wrote in letter accompanying the veto. “We could also see requests for a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter.”

Pawlenty is so cultured. Comparing poetry to street mimes. That is awesome! Yes, poetry really serves no purpose other to fill the coffers of pan-handlers. Who needs poetry? Blah! Poetry is lame. What has poetry ever accomplished anyway? It’s not like poetry has ever had any meaningful impact on society. Like in affecting public policy, or opinion. If anything, I would say mimes have contributed more to society.

Wired News

The game is simple. Once players get within about 30 feet of each other, they can shock other players by pressing buttons located in their headband. Those around them get a jolt of between 80 and 120 volts, depending on their distance from the button-presser.

Suhweet! I can’t wait to sign up at my local Parks and Rec.

“It gets, like, really painful,” said [the creator] … who admits he’s been shaking a lot more since he started experimenting with the game.

Miguel de Icaza’s web log

As of last Friday, Wikipedia started using Mono for indexing and searching the Wikipedia, it was tested first on one server and it is now being used on all three servers.

Wikipedia’s search backend uses Mono and dotLucense, the same search backend that is used by Beagle Desktop Search. Previously, Wikipedia had been using GCJ and Lucene to do the searches but after some tuning, Mono became the new engine.

Mono 1.1.6 which was the originally tested configuration was slow, but version 1.1.7 introduced our simplified IO layer which improved IO performance significantly (2x-3x) and upcoming versions will an extra boost on IO, but most importantly the regular expression library (which MediaWiki uses) will also get a performance boost.
Mono: Debian and Ubuntu.

Mono is now on Debian/Unstable.

Popular Science

What makes a city cutting-edge? And which American metropolis can rightly claim the title of top tech city? More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at Popular Science launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with … Minneapolis.