#data manipulation

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Overcast, some bullshit.

Thanks Trent.

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LMAO. When Grok got too woke, Elon had his minions at Twitter alter the algorithm to make it not include Musk and Trump.

Twitter is a propaganda + disinformation machine owned by an authoritarian, Nazi-saluting, Apartheid-loving snowflake.

Elon Musks latest AI, Grok 3, has stirred debate by listing its own creator among the top three individuals causing harm to America. Users o

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Person of Interest (2011-2016)

[cyberneticslut]

quick datamoshing for fun for my gf @swannofswords for gf day... a little late but i tried. I LOVE YOU!!!

[moontyger]

Texas is Fabricating Abortion Data

Doctors are being forced to report fake abortion ‘complications’ under threat of losing their jobs

Sue sobbed as she entered her patient’s personal information into the state website: Date of birth, county of residence, last menstrual period. The Texas Department of Health and Human Services even wanted to know whether the woman was married, and how many children she had.

“Reporting every detail of that woman’s information, the fact that I was putting any of it in...it was devastating to me as a physician,” she says.

Sue, a pseudonym, is an emergency medicine physician at a major Texas city hospital. Ever since Roe was overturned and the state’s trigger law went into effect, Sue and other Texas doctors have been required to submit patients’ private medical information into a state-run website without their knowledge or consent—adhering to a mandate that forces them to report women as suffering from abortion complications even when they’re not.

This rarely reported on section of Texas law lists 28 medical issues as abortion complications—conditions that reproductive health experts point out often have nothing to do with abortion. Still, doctors are required to tell the state about any woman who develops one of these issues if she happens to have had an abortion at any point in her life. 

Doctors who don’t make these reports can be fined for each ‘violation’; after three violations, they could lose their license. Sue, who got conflicting and often confusing guidance from the large health system that runs her hospital and dozens of others in the state, was terrified not to comply. “For all I knew, I could be one that [Attorney General] Ken Paxton made an example of,” she says. 

This reporting mandate is a central and insidious part of Republicans’ strategy to paint abortion as dangerous despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It’s a policy that forces doctors, under threat of losing their license, to lend their name and medical credibility to the collection of false data—‘research’ that will be used by the state to claim abortion is unsafe.

“They want to force us to report a complication so they can submit and advertise bad data,” Sue says. 

The list of ‘complications’ that Texas doctors are forced to attribute to abortion are vague and nonsensical. Some, like “adverse reactions to anesthesia,” are risks associated with having any medical procedure. (As Sue points out, it’s not as if there’s a state commission on adverse reactions to colonoscopies.) 

Others, like “infection,” could develop in a patient for a reason completely unrelated to abortion or predate the procedure, yet would still be counted as a complication. The law also lists complications like “pelvic inflammatory disease,” which is a type of infection and therefore could be double-counted.

Other ‘complications’ would require reports to the state yearsafter a patient had an abortion. I’ll use myself as an example: My daughter was born three months early after I developed severe preeclampsia. If I delivered her in Texas tomorrow, and happened to mention that I ended a pregnancy a few years previous, my doctor would be required toreport my daughter’s early birth as a complication of abortion. Never mind that there’s no link between preeclampsia and abortion; because “preterm delivery in subsequent pregnancies” is on the law’s list of reportable conditions, my physician would have no choice. 

What’s more, it wouldn’t be just one doctor reporting my supposed complication to the state. Texas law requires that every single physician involved in a patient’s care fill out the state’s abortion complication form. Even the hospital itself, as an entity, has to file a report. It’s a policy that encourages double, triple, even quadruple duplicate reports for a single person. (Again, a patient who may not have an abortion complication at all!)

So in this hypothetical where I’ve given birth in Texas, I’d be under the impression that I’m at the hospital to deliver a baby and get treatment for preeclampsia. But something very different is happening behind the scenes: The birth of my daughter is being recorded, reported, and counted three or four times as proof that abortion is dangerous—‘data’ that will be published in Texas’ annual abortion complication report.

And though Texas’ law on abortion reporting says that the annual report “may not include any duplicative data,” Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, professor and public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells me there’s no real way to prevent such a thing. “There’s no guidance or standards,” she says. 

The state’s abortion complication form doesn’t include a patient’s name, or any unique identifier, for officials to cross reference. Even if the health department managed to match another piece of information, like date of birth, with multiple reports coming in on the same day from the same hospital, there’s another issue: That same patient’s data will be counted again if she sees another doctor down the line, months or even years later.

...

Carrie (a pseudonym), an emergency medicine physician at a large academic training center in the state, has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. “I don’t ask any of my patients if they’ve had an abortion, and I make sure to tell my medical students and residents not to ask,” she says. 

Carrie tells me that abortion is so safe, she has never felt the need to know if a patient had one in order to give proper treatment. “When you look at the legislation, it was clearly not written by a physician or someone in healthcare,” she says.

And she’s right. The list of abortion ‘complications’ in Texas’ law wasn’t created by doctors or experts, but by Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group that drafts model legislation for Republican politicians. Arguably the most powerful legislative organization in the movement, AUL insists that abortion complications are vastly underreported—so they’ve created laws that churn out false reports to be used as evidence that abortion should be banned.

Most states, even those that protect abortion rights, have some kind of abortion complication reporting law. But the reporting mandate by AUL was deliberately crafted to create bogus data—and it’s gaining traction beyond Texas. Idaho, Indiana, South Carolina and Mississippi all have laws with identical or similar language, as does legislation introduced in Georgia and Tennessee last session. And just yesterday, North Carolina Republicans proposed a bill that uses the AUL complications list—including “psychological complications.”

It’s a brilliant move, really. The anti-abortion movement wants to prove that abortion is harmful, but they don’t have the statistics to back it up. Laws like this allow states to simply make them up.

Most importantly, the policy forces doctors to attach their names and reputations to these supposed complications, giving anti-choice activists and politicians something they’re absolutely desperate for: medical and scientific credibility.

After all, it’s difficult to claim that abortion is harmful to women when all evidence proves otherwise: Decades of research shows that abortion is safe; 1 in 4 women will have one in her lifetime; and you’re more likely to have a serious complication getting a wisdom tooth pulled.

Unable to use legitimate research to argue for the end of abortion, activists have resorted to creating their own science. They’ve opened up anti-abortion centers modeled to look like health clinics, despite having no medical staff on site. They’ve founded organizations posing as independent research groups—like the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which is actually an arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. And they’ve cultivated a group of activists pretending to be researchers. These are people who testify in support of anti-choice legislation, publish bad data, and present themselves as experts despite having questionable qualifications. (The man behind much of the movement’s research on abortion complications, for example, David Reardon, has a degree from an unaccredited online university that was shut down as a diploma mill.)

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Mandala designed with footfall data

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

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Exploratory Analysis of Google Search Trends for 'microclots' from 2015-2023: Part 1

Tracking a reported increase in Google searches for "microclots", part 1 of an exploratory analysis of public interest in COVID-19 over time

Tweet about this Analysis Tracking #Covid19: #Google searches for #microclots were up 23% for the last week of April 2023 👀 Interested? Learn more in this brief #article by Dr. Heather Sue M. Rosen discussing part 1 of her #ExploratoryAnalysis of search trends for microclots! #TeamClotsTweet View the Analysis on RPubs Take me to RPubs by hsuemrosen Submit Content for Feature on…

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