How Much Information is Enough? Understanding the Alabama Supreme Court's Expansion of the Causation Standard in Failure to Warn Claims

This RCD analyzes the Alabama Supreme Court's recent answer to two certified questions sent to the court from the Eleventh Circuit. The questions involved whether a pharmaceutical company's duty to warn included a duty to provide instructions about how to properly mitigate for warned of risks, and if the pharmaceutical company had such a duty could a plaintiff recover if their physician would have prescribed the same drug but just changed their monitoring scheme. The Alabama Supreme Court answered both questions in the affirmative, expanding the causation standard in failure to warn claims.

Puerto Rico's Attempts to Address a Public Health Crisis Struck Down by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit

This RCD discusses a recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit that struck down Puerto Rico's Act 90-2019, which aimed to regulate pay structures for Medicare Advantage insurers in Puerto Rico. The court found that the provision in Act 90, known as the "Mandated Price Provision," is preempted by federal law. However, the author argues that the court's decision did not adequately consider the congressional intent of the Medicare Advantage Act in weighing the public health crisis in Puerto Rico. The RCD provides background on the Medicare Advantage program and Act 90 and explains how Act 90 aimed to eliminate insurers' practice of paying providers at rates below the CMS's minimum reimbursement rates under the traditional Medicare program. The article concludes that the court's decision inadequately considered the larger purpose of the Medicare Advantage Act and the relevant public health crisis in Puerto Rico.

Instantaneous systems of communicative conventions through virtual bargaining

People can instantaneously create novel conventions that link individual communicative signals to meanings, both in experiments and everyday communication. Yet a basic principle of natural communication is that the meaning of a signal typically contrasts with the meanings of alternative signals that were available but not chosen. That is, communicative conventions typically form a system, rather than consisting of isolated signal-meaning pairs. Accordingly, creating a novel convention linking a specific signal and meaning seems to require creating a system of conventions linking possible signals to possible meanings, of which the signal-meaning pair to be communicated is merely a sub-case. If so, people will not link signals and meanings in isolation; signal-meaning pairings will depend on alternative signals and meanings. We outline and address theoretical challenges concerning how instantaneous conventions can be formed, building on prior work on "virtual bargaining," in which people simulate the results of a process of negotiation concerning which convention, or system of conventions, to choose. Moreover, we demonstrate empirically that instantaneous systems of conventions can flexibly be created in a 'minimal' experimental paradigm. Experimental evidence from 158 people playing a novel signaling game shows that modifying both the set of signals, and the set of meanings, can indeed systematically modify the signal-meaning mappings that people may instantaneously construct. While consistent with the virtual bargaining account, accounting for these results may be challenging for some accounts of pragmatic inference.

New Preemption as a Tool of Structural Racism: Implications for Racial Health Inequities

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

Future Protest Made Risky: Examining Social Media Based Civil Unrest Prediction Research and Products

Social media has both been hailed for enabling social movements and critiqued for its affordances as a surveillance infrastructure. In this work, I focus on the latter by analyzing research, products, and discourses around the recent history of civil unrest prediction based on social media data and other public data sources, thereby giving insights into current and often opaque protest surveillance and forecasting practices. Technologies to monitor individuals and groups online have been developed for instance to predict US protests following the election of President Trump in 2016 and labor strikes across global supply chains. These works are part of an emerging computer science research field focused on "civil unrest prediction" dedicated to forecasting protests across the globe (e.g., Indonesia, Brazil, and Australia). Foremost I focus on scholarly literature as my unit of analysis, but also other artifacts discussing or detailing applications for companies, organizations or governments are examined. I provide a conceptualization of civil unrest prediction technology by illustrating data sources, features and methods used, and how prediction and detection are necessarily entangled. Then I show how various kinds of unrest activity are framed as risks to be fixed or averted for various actors with differing interests such as the military, law enforcement, and various industries. Finally, I critically unpack justifications and ascribed benefits of the technology and point to how the perspectives of protestors are almost completely absent. My analysis shows a critical need for regulation centering activists and workers, and reflection within academia, particularly in the fields of computer and data science, on the ethics and politics of protest research and ensuing technological applications.

Effects of US state preemption laws on infant mortality

Studies show that raising the minimum wage in a US state above the federal minimum wage can reduce infant mortality rates in those states. Some states have raised their minimum wage in recent decades, while many others did not, and have prohibited local authorities from doing so by enacting preemption laws. This study investigates how the recent emergence of state preemption laws that remove local authority to raise the minimum wage has affected infant mortality rates. Using county- and state- level data spanning 2001 through 2018, this study models infant mortality rates as a function of minimum wage levels, controlling for confounders. The estimated model, combined with information on the timing, location, and level of preempted minimum wages, is then used to estimate the number of infant deaths that occurred in 2018 that could be attributed to state preemption of local minimum wage increases. In the 9 largest (pop. > 250,000) metro counties most directly affected by state preemption, we estimate that in 2018, 25 infant deaths were attributable to preemption. This equates to a 5.4% reduction in these counties' infant mortality rate. When considering all large metro counties in preemption states, as many as 605 infant deaths could be attributed to preemption. State preemption laws that remove local authority to enact health-promoting legislation, such as minimum wage increases, are a significant threat to population health. The growing tide of these laws, particularly since 2010, may be contributing to recent troubling trends in US life expectancy.

Legal Interventions to Counter COVID-19 Denialism

A series of denialist state laws thwart efficacious public health emergency response efforts despite escalating impacts of the spread of the Delta variant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh; Someone broke the truck; ?Someone made the truck break). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data.