Daily Business Report-Aug. 28, 2020
UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers found thousands of fake social media posts tied to COVID-19 and financial scams on Twitter and Instagram. (Photo credit: Pixabay)
Researchers see increase in fraudulent
COVID-19 posts on social media
By Jeanna Vazquez |SDSU
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, social media platforms have played a major role in conveying information from health care leaders and government officials to communities about how to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Yet as quickly as new and accurate information on the virus becomes available, so, too do counterfeit health products, such as illegal or unapproved testing kits, untested treatments and purported cures.
In a new study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Public Health and Surveillance on Aug. 25, 2020, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found thousands of social media posts on two popular platforms — Twitter and Instagram — tied to financial scams and possible counterfeit goods specific to COVID-19 products and unapproved treatments
“We started this work with the opioid crisis and have been performing research like this for many years in order to detect illicit drug dealers,” said Timothy Mackey, associate adjunct professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “We are now using some of those same techniques in this study to identify fake COVID-19 products for sale. From March to May 2020, we have identified nearly 2,000 fraudulent postings likely tied to fake COVID-19 health products, financial scams, and other consumer risk.”
According to Mackey, the fraudulent posts came in two waves focused on unproven marketing claims for prevention or cures and fake testing kits. He said a third wave of fake pharmaceutical treatments is now materializing and will worsen when public health officials announce development of an effective vaccine or other therapeutic treatments.
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San Diego company marketing people-counting
technology to universities to keep students,
faculties and staffs safe during pandemic
Occuspace, a San Diego company offering real-time people counting sensors and a corresponding consumer app, Waitz, say they are becoming increasingly valuable crowd monitoring tools for school administrations and students as campuses reopen during the pandemic.
Today, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, University of Oklahoma Libraries, University of Rochester, McGill University in Canada and others are using the Occuspace sensors, helping to keep over 300,000 students safer and more aware of the spaces they are planning to enter, according to the company.
The Occuspace sensor technology is plug and play and requires no infrastructure changes to start monitoring crowd density in large locations. The sensor monitors Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals in an area to estimate how many people are present with 90 percent accuracy.
Building staff can see immediately when the number of people in a given space is approaching its safe capacity limit. Additionally, the Occuspace Waitz app, free to download in the iOS and Android stores, shows live data to students letting them see how busy spaces are at any given time in order to make educated decisions about going places and feeling safe.
According to the Occuspace website, the annual price for the tools range from $15,000 to $25,600. The company charges based on the total devices used, which is based on the size and layout of a space.
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Scientists ‘turn back time’ on cancer using
new stem cell reprogramming technique
By Monica May |
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have reprogrammed cancer cells back into their pre-cancer identity—opening new doors for studying how cancer develops and how it might be prevented. The research, published in Stem Cell Reports, may lead to tests that identify cancer early on, when it can be more easily treated, and uncover preventive treatments that stop cancer before it starts.
“We believe we have been able to contribute to one of the major goals of modern cancer research: creating next-generation models for studying how cancer develops from its earliest state,” says Evan Snyder, M.D., professor and director of the Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine at Sanford Burnham Prebys and senior author of the study. “We essentially took an adult cancer that has accumulated many mutations and pushed it back to the earliest stages of development, allowing us to emulate a tumor’s premalignant state. Then we watched cancer emerge from normal cells before our eyes.”
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University of San Diego named
preferred provider of engineering talent
University of San Diego electrical engineering students will have the opportunity to apply for paid remote internships this fall at small San Diego businesses, thanks to a new designation by the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation’s Advancing San Diegoprogram. The program qualified the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering as a preferred provider of engineering talent.
The paid engineering internships will be remote in light of COVID-19 and will be offered at San Diego companies with fewer than 100 employees. Students can also receive up to $500 in flexible funds to use toward equipment or services that support the success of their internship.
There are a total of 24 internships available for all of the Preferred Providers Internship applications open Aug. 28 and close Sept. 1. Interviews and placements begin Sept. 15.
USD is one of five preferred providers of engineering talent in San Diego, recognized as providing the skills and training necessary for a diverse student body to pursue jobs or internships in engineering.
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County Board of Supervisors adopts
$6.5 billion budget for 2020-21
The County Board of Supervisors has adopted a $6.5 billion revised budget for fiscal year 2020-21 after public deliberations.
The adopted budget addresses the unexpected COVID-19 and economic crises, and also reflects calls for social justice and racial equality.
A $6.4 billion recommended budget was presented to the board on Aug. 10 and called for an increase of $159 million or 2.5 percent over last year and $100 million to fight the COVID-19 public health crisis.
Supervisors approved additional spending on Tuesday, adding $140.1 million to the budget.
As a result, the revised $6.5 billion budget calls for an increase of $299.2 million or 4.8 percent over last year, an additional 24 employees for a total of 17,953.5 staff years.
The pandemic coupled with the economic downturn are slashing revenue at a time when costs are rapidly rising. Despite these challenges, the county is required by law to balance the budget.
To make up the shortfalls, the county will be dipping into its reserves for $ 277.3 million, $138.8 million this year and $138.5 million for 2021-22.
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Ground leases of 3 parcels in Sorrento Mesa
sold to private investor for $41.5 million
The ground leases of three parcels totaling 12.5 acres in Sorrento Mesa have sold to a private investor for $41.5 million.
The first parcel is known as South Rim Business Park totaling 76,000 square feet, located at 5744, 5754 and 5764 Pacific Center Boulevard. The second parcel totals 115,000 squarefeet, located at 5732 and 5738 Pacific Center Boulevard. The third parcel is an 0.85-acre piece of open space that is adjacent to the other two properties.
CBRE’s Louay Alsadek, Hunter Rowe and Madison Mawby represented the seller, San Francisco-based real estate investment firm Stockbridge Capital Group, in the transaction. The buyer, a private investor, was represented by Bob Safai of Madison Partners.
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Cubic expands TouchPass system
to Montana’s MET Transit System
Cubic Corporation announced its Cubic Transportation Systems business division was awarded a contract to deliver its TouchPass electronic fare collection-as-a-service offering to MET Transit, the metropolitan transit system for Billings, Montana.
Montana is the ninth state in which the TouchPass system will be in operation. MET Transit, which will utilize Cubic’s TouchPass solution as its electronic fare system for its fixed-route and paratransit systems, will join more than two dozen other agencies that are also using TouchPass, making it the most popular and widely deployed account-based fare system in North America, according to Cubic Corp.
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Commentary:
Semi-secret ‘trailer bills’ pop up
By Dan Walters |CalMatters Columnist
Conceptually, writing legislation to implement the annual state budget makes perfect sense. In practice, so-called “trailer bills” have become vehicles to semi-secretly do things that might otherwise be difficult to do, often with little or no relationship to the budget. They are drafted behind closed doors and quickly enacted with minimal exposure to the public, the press and those affected by their provisions.
With the Legislature due to adjourn for the year in a few days, an array of 11th-hour trailer bills has popped up with major policy decrees buried in hundreds of pages of dense legalese. They include two major criminal justice changes, benefits for powerful public employee unions, punishment for cities that shun legal marijuana, and a new state agency with vast new powers to crack down on banks and other financial institutions.
The latter is contained in Senate Bill 819, which not only folds existing financial regulatory agencies into a new Department of Financial Protection and Innovation but would enact a California Consumer Financial Protection Law to “protect Californians from financial abuses in the marketplace for financial products and services.”
The newly empowered agency would, it’s said, fill the vacuum left by President Donald Trump’s pullback on federal financial regulation.
The most sweeping of the criminal justice changes, embodied in Senate Bill 823, would repeal a new law that shifts handling of juvenile offenders from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to a new department under the Health and Human Services Agency. Instead, under SB 823 the state would rid itself of all juvenile offenders and shift their care and confinement to counties.
The proposal originated with Gov. Gavin Newsom on the theory that keeping juvenile offenders close to their families would result in better rehabilitation outcomes, but counties have not yet agreed to accept the responsibility, even though they would receive state funds.
Another measure, Senate Bill 824, would eliminate 23 fees now imposed on those convicted of crimes on the rationale that forcing them to pay fees while facing fines and possible imprisonment amounts to taxes on the poor.
Provisions found in other late-blooming trailer bills:
—Senate Bill 820, a very long and detailed “omnibus education bill,” furthers the union-led drive to hamstring charter schools by putting a lid on payments to charters that offer remote learning, rather than through classrooms, even though most public schools are teaching remotely these days.
Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a San Diego Democrat who is the Capitol’s leading education reform advocate, is sharply critical of the limit, saying “It’s not a good idea not to fund the students.”
Also buried in SB 820 is language that would indirectly prohibit the University of California from contracting-out building maintenance work, a boost to the unions that represent many UC workers. It would prohibit UC from tapping state construction funds if they didn’t use staff workers for all maintenance.
—Senate Bill 815 would order the creation of a “tax voucher” program aimed at enticing personal and corporate taxpayers to pre-pay future taxes, thus providing the state with more money to deal with projections of multi-year deficits. In effect, the state would be borrowing money from taxpayers.
—Senate Bill 827 would deny cities that prohibit commercial marijuana cultivation and sales from receiving law enforcement grants from state taxes on legal pot.
All of these trailer bill provisions may have merit. But they should not be jammed into law in the final days of the session, bypassing the normal legislative processes. It’s bad governance.
CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.
