Consumerist
medicine
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medicine
surveys
ConsumerSay Wants All Your Data, Will Give You $20 For It
Pssst, wanna make an easy $20? Just give all your bank account and personal data over to ConsumerSay, a consumer opinion and behavior tracking firm owned by Lightspeed Research. Jen, who sometimes fills out surveys for freebies and cash, got an email from them offering her $20 for only 5 to 10 minutes of her time. Oh, and all of her financial transaction data. More »
conflict of interest
Liggett Cigarette Company Paid For 2006 Lung Cancer Study
CT scanning, a promising approach to detecting lung cancer at early, treatable stages, has been dealt a setback with the revelation that the most prominent study so far in support of it was funded almost entirely by a cigarette company—with the funds funneled through a foundation set up by the study's author, Dr. Claudia Henschke, reports the New York Times. Although the funding revelation doesn't negate the results of the study, it raises huge conflict of interest flags and reveals how a tobacco company secretly influenced professional opinion by funneling $3.6 million into the foundation over a three year period. More »
customer service
Top 10 Complaints Keeping Shoppers From Returning (It's The Sales Staff)
Smartypants at the Wharton School of Business surveyed shoppers to find out what pissed them off most about the in-store experience, and it turns out it's mainly the sales staff. Here's the top 10 problems that shoppers said bothered them to the point that they wouldn't go back to the store.
10. Sales Associate (SA) A ignored you - did not say hello, smile, make eye contact 21
9. SA didn't listen when explaining what you wanted 22
8. Product/item was out of stock 22
7. SA not very polite, courteous 24
6. SA not interested in helping you find what looking for 27
5. SA insensitive to long check-out lines 27
4. SA acted like you were intruding on their time/conversations 29
3. SA followed, pestered when you wanted to browse on own 30
2. Could not find anyone when needed help 31
1. SA had 'that's not my department' attitude 32
Does this hold true for you? What most turns you off when you go out shopping?
Shopper Research Pinpoints Loyalty, Problems [ifoAppleStore] (Thanks to Jgodsey!)
What Customers Expect Sales Associates To Contribute Toward The In-Store Experience (Powerpoint)
(Photo: Getty)
health
Rise In Gout Blamed On Fructose In Soft Drinks
Gout sounds like something characters in Dickens novels get, but apparently it's a modern affliction as well—at least in the U.S. where the number of cases has doubled in the past few decades. Now researchers are saying that "Men who consume two or more sugary soft drinks a day have an 85% higher risk of gout compared with those who drink less than one a month." More »
research
Docs Who Praised Prodisc Revealed To Have Financial Ties To Product
Several of the doctors who were involved in clinical research trials of a new back injury treatment, Prodisc, were also early investors in the product and had a financial incentive to see it succeed, reports the New York Times. This may have led to its success as a treatment being overstated. One doctor who participated in the FDA study but failed to disclose his investor status explained, ""There were a lot of people who invested, so my small number was not a significant number."More »
auctions
Study Says Shoppers "Save" Money On eBay
EBay doesn't share data on bidders' maximum bid amounts, so it's always been difficult to quantify whether or not buyers are actually saving money, but a new study has attempted to put hard numbers behind the transactions. The study's authors use data from bidders who used a specific sniping agent—by measuring what those bidders were willing to pay versus actual winning amounts, they've determined that the average winning bid comes in about 30% lower than the maximum amount the buyer was willing to spend. More »
survey says
U.S. News: It's Your Own Damn Fault You Can't Redeem Rebates
U.S. News & World Report hates our inability to redeem rebates. If we only tried harder, they say, we might be able to conquer our "tendency to procrastinate and inability to follow multistep directions." Yes, that must be the problem. More »
your health
National Institutes Of Health: Cola Causes Kidney Problems
Do you like kidney stones? Great! Coke and Pepsi are the drinks for you. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that drinking just two cans of cola per day doubles the risk of chronic kidney disease. More »
survey says
Put down the credit card, you unstoppable spending machine. Groundbreaking research shows that shopping leads to more shopping; not, as some predicted, happiness. Once you start buying, you build up what researchers call "shopping momentum," and then you can't stop.
More »
Shopping Begets Shopping
Put down the credit card, you unstoppable spending machine. Groundbreaking research shows that shopping leads to more shopping; not, as some predicted, happiness. Once you start buying, you build up what researchers call "shopping momentum," and then you can't stop.
More »
weird
People Care More About Status Than Money
The LATimes has an interesting article about the strange things people think about money. Chief among the odd behavior was the average person's answer to the following question:Would you rather be A or B? More »
treatments
Minorities Not Prescribed Opioids As Frequently As Whites
If you're black, Hispanic, or "Asian/other," you might want to make sure your voice is heard loud and clear the next time you have to make a trip to the ER. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that over the past 13 years, white patients were prescribed powerful opioid painkillers 31% of the time, versus 23% for blacks, 24% for Hisanics, and 28% for Asians and "others." More »
health care
Federal Agency Kills Lifesaving Hospital Checklist Program
The Office for Human Research Protections recently shut down a Johns Hopkins University program that had intensive care units across Michigan following "a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections." The program resulted in dramatic improvements to patient infection rates, but the federal agency said it was unethical, because a checklist interferes with medical care in the same way an experimental drug does—and because a checklist may put doctors at risk by revealing which ones don't "follow basic infection-prevention procedures."More »
housing
Build An "Upgradeable" Home
Wired has a short article subtitled, "How our technolust helped bring down the housing market." The article is more sensible than the headline, however—it really focuses on new developments in the housing market, and how expensive it is to retrofit even newly built homes with new (or future) technology: "'[Remodeling] can be done, but you really need to want it,' says Kermit Baker, a Harvard economist who studies the remodeling market." What's needed, the author argues, is an approach to new home construction that treats homes as dynamic spaces that can be more easily reconfigured to meet the requirements of new owners. Not that anyone is building a home right now, but it's an interesting thing to keep in mind when you're ready to leave your shantytown and re-settle in the suburbs. More »
Don't buy a house near an airport: a Swedish study has found a correlation between living near noisy airports and "an elevated risk of high blood pressure due to noise pollution." [Reuters]
unintended consequences
Health Record Privacy Law Is Messing Up Research
Just days after a deputy director of national intelligence told Americans that we need to rethink our concepts of privacy, comes news that it may, in fact, be harming us in the long run. In a recent national survey, nearly 70% of research scientists said the 2003 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is "impeding scientific research, stalling clinical studies and halting others altogether." More »
health
Red Bull Gives Your Blood Pressure Wings
People who have high blood pressure might want to avoid energy drinks, because a new study suggests that they might interfere directly with blood pressure or hamper the effectiveness of medications. The drinks, which have high levels of caffeine and taurine ("an amino acid found in protein-rich foods like meat and fish that can affect heart function and blood pressure"), raise blood pressure and heart rates in healthy individuals, but not to dangerous levels. However, for people who have cardiovascular disease or are taking heart rate or blood pressure medication, the increase could be "significant." More »
food
