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The article focuses on James B. Helmer, Jr. and his contributions to the legal profession, particularly in relation to the development and application of the False Claims Act (FCA).

Firms sometimes make selective or deceptive claims, which can have negative consequences for consumers, especially if consumers are not fully informed and the claims are hard to verify. This study aims to measure the decline in demand that a firm making such claims faces when caught. In addition, it seeks to understand which type of consumer these claims primarily affect. Using a panel data set of consumer purchases and firm advertising, the authors measure this impact by exploiting the fact that four popular products settled charges raised by the Federal Trade Commission. They further control for and document firm responses in terms of price and advertisement changes around the date of the settlement. Findings indicate a significant decline in demand following the termination of the claims, resulting in a 12%–67% monthly loss in revenue across the four products, which amounts to a $.40 million–$3.82 million loss in monthly revenue. They also find that these claims primarily affect consumers who are newcomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pu-erh tea's quality and price are inextricably intertwined with age, but false claims about production year can harm both consumers and producers. While tea quality is currently assessed subjectively by experts, developing a scientific method to determine storage time is crucial for the tea industry's growth and integrity. In the present study, analysis of Pu-erh tea (PT) with different storage times showed that the storage process enhanced the complexity of the metabolite networks of extracts and flocs, but the metabolic network characteristics of tea flocs did not exhibit significant changes with the progression of storage time. It is noteworthy that the 41 storage-related core metabolites are important to the storage process; the storage score based on these metabolites was related to the biochemical indicators of the extract and the storage time. Our findings were validated in another independent metabolic data set of green tea (GT), oolong tea (OT), Assam black tea (ABT) and PT. Finally, our regression model based on the storage score could accurately predict the storage time of different teas (R2 = 95.70%). Overall, the findings of our have important guiding significance for expanding the methods for predicting tea storage duration. • The Pu-erh tea storage process enhanced the complexity of the metabolite network. • Metabolite network analysis of Pu-erh tea identified 41 storage-related core metabolites. • Storage score model was established based on 41 storage-related core metabolites. • The storage score model could predict the storage time of tea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fact-checks have been shown to be effective in correcting specific false beliefs, but do they also cause people to update their broader views about the phenomenon in question? We consider this question in the context of the 2022 Arizona governor’s race, testing the effect of debunking false claims of fraud on specific beliefs about that election as well as general confidence in the 2022 and 2020 U.S. elections and beliefs about the prevalence of fraud. Our results indicate that fact-checks reduce false beliefs about the election in Arizona, but we find no evidence that participants extrapolate these findings to their general beliefs about fraud or their confidence in the 2022 or 2020 elections. These results suggest that methods of combating misinformation that rely on case-by-case corrections of specific falsehoods may not be effective in changing broader false beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While deepfake has emerged as a severe issue in the multimedia environment, most studies examined text-based false claims, leaving the question of what unique features of video-based deepfake news deceives recipients and how it can be corrected. By conducting two online experiments, we study perceived source vividness as a psychological mechanism of the effect of AI-enabled deepfake news on news credibility and engagement intentions. Furthermore, we test how an inserted false-tag onto the fake news can reduce the impact of source vividness experienced by seeing multimodal disinformation on news credibility and engagement intentions. The results suggest that participants who saw deepfake news had higher source vividness than those who saw fake news with other modalities (i.e., text-only and text-photo), and such source vividness increased credibility and engagement intentions of fake news. The false-tag successfully reduced engagement intentions of deepfake news for those who perceived a high vividness of the superimposed interviewee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British False Memory Society (BFMS) is a registered charity founded in 1993 in response to an epidemic of false claims of past childhood sexual abuse by adults in therapy. The accusers believe they have recovered unconscious memories of a hidden past, but scientific and other evidence raise the possibility of false memories or retrospective reappraisal. The BFMS aims to raise awareness about false memory and to reduce the impact of the resulting false accusations. Dr James Ost was an active member of the BFMS's Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. Three lines of his research were particularly relevant to the work of the BFMS. The first of these was his investigations of retractors. His insights provided a deeper understanding of processes involved in the formation and subsequent rejection of false memories and beliefs relating to such allegations. He also carried out experimental studies providing empirical proof that false memories can be implanted under well controlled conditions. Finally, he carried out, and produced reviews of, surveys of misconceptions about the nature of memory, thus highlighting issues that have major implications for the working of the legal system. Dr Ost also served as an expert defence witness on a number of occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taxpayers could be criminally and civilly liable under state False Claims Acts for underreporting income linked to virtual currency. While the federal False Claims Act explicitly excludes tax cases, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice are utilizing tools aimed specifically at addressing tax fraud and tax avoidance. The Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement has similarly launched coordinated information sharing efforts to target taxpayers who skirt global tax laws and is considering adopting a whistleblower program to boost its own cryptocurrency enforcement efforts. The authors review the current regulatory landscape and next steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It should be obvious that the knowing submission of a false claim to the government does not result in FCA liability unless it is shown that this actually caused the government to make payment. The False Claims Act (FCA), 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729-3733, stands today as the federal government's primary anti-fraud weapon. Broadly, the FCA imposes liability upon anyone who causes the government to pay money on a claim that is knowingly false in some material respect or who knowingly deprives the government of money or property, or conspires to do the same. The calculation is logically stated as the amount of money the government actually paid less the amount it would have paid had the claim not been false.54 Damages in cases where the government is charged incorrectly for services or products provided -- either billed for something not provided or overcharged -- are relatively easy to determine. [Extracted from the article]

In the present digital scenario, false ownership claims and tampering with digital data have become serious concerns for users. There have been a very few schemes proposed in the past that can provide solutions for the three major requirements (ownership proof, tamper detection and self-recovery) in an efficient way. This paper presents a blind multipurpose image watermarking scheme for copyright/ownership protection, image authentication, and image restoration. Two different watermarking strategies (robust and fragile) are used to achieve the multipurpose nature. For Robust watermark insertion, an encrypted watermark is inserted into the host image using IWT (Integer wavelet transform). Afterward, a 9-base notation-based least significant bit replacement approach is used to embed the fragile sequence along with recovery information in a controlled randomized manner. During the testing phase, high imperceptibility, decent robustness, and good self-recovery are noticed against different types of attack. The scheme provides nearly 99.8% accurate tamper localization and can significantly recover even a severely tampered (up to 80%) image. The performance comparison with other existing watermarking schemes confirms the superiority of the proposed scheme. The multipurpose nature of the scheme makes it versatile and practical for the current scenario of digital technologies and era of internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deceptive advertising, or advertising that intends to mislead consumers by false claims or incomplete disclosure, is ubiquitous in the marketplace. Though prior research has shown that consumers generally view companies' deceptive communication as unethical and react to it negatively, anecdotal evidence suggests that some consumers are more accepting of such misleading tactics than others. Delving deeper into this phenomenon, this research examines the role of self-construal on consumers' responses toward deceptive advertising. Three studies provide converging evidence that interdependent (vs. independent) consumers are more tolerant of deceptive advertising, which is mediated by their attribution styles. Moreover, we further demonstrate the self-construal effect on lie acceptability decreases as the firm becomes smaller, when it is easier for consumers to pinpoint who should be responsible for the misconduct and thus are more likely to make internal attribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the Asymmetric Information Management (AIM) technique's ability to detect fraudulent insurance claims submitted online. The AIM instructions inform claimants that, inter alia, more detailed statements are easier to accurately classify as genuine or fabricated. To test this, truth tellers (n = 55) provided an honest statement about a lost or stolen item, while liars (n = 53) provided a false claim. All claimants were randomly assigned to either receive the control or AIM instructions. We found that truth tellers provided more information in the AIM condition (compared to the control condition), and discriminant analysis classificatory performance was improved slightly. Unfortunately, the AIM instructions had little effect on the amount of information liars provided. Thus, the AIM technique is useful for supporting truth tellers to be more detailed, but more work needs to be conducted to assess why liars in this study did not adapt a withholding strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a four-stage, multi-price buying mechanism which can be used by a (big) buyer to separate low-quality sellers – called "lemon" owners – from high-quality sellers – called "peach" owners. With a partition of sellers into several groups, the buyer obtains the commodities from a desired number of "peach" owners at a price that matches their willingness to sell. For their part, "lemon" owners are trapped into selling their items at a low, or even negligible, price. We discuss several variants of this mechanism – generically called a Devil's Menu – and show how the degree of surplus extraction by the buyer is related to the number of prices used and to the extent to which items can be bought sequentially. The common feature of all the variants is that they allow the buyer to neglect those partition groups with the highest number of false claims made by sellers who own lemons. This, in turn, yields equilibria in which no false claims are made. Our results are robust for several extensions of our baseline setup. Finally, we offer applications of our insights for market regulators, political interest groups, and decoy ballots. • We introduce a family of mechanisms to separate low-quality sellers from high-quality sellers. • The mechanisms use a seller partition to induce truth-telling. • We show the robustness of our results for several extensions of our baseline setup. • We offer applications of our insights for market regulators, political interest groups, and decoy ballots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated pandemic denial in the general public in Germany after the first wave of COVID-19 in May 2020. Using latent class analysis, we compared patterns of disagreement with claims about (a) the origin, spread, or infectiousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and (b) the personal risk from COVID-19 between scientific laypersons (N = 1,575) and scientific experts (N = 128). Two groups in the general public differed distinctively from expert evaluations. The Dismissive (8%) are characterized by low-risk assessment, low compliance with containment measures, and mistrust in politicians. The Doubtful (19%) are characterized by low cognitive reflection, high uncertainty in the distinction between true and false claims, and high social media intake. Our research indicates that pandemic denial cannot be linked to a single and distinct pattern of psychological dispositions but involves different subgroups within the general population that share high COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and low beliefs in epistemic complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has for decades sought to encourage four compliant behaviors in corporate actors: maintenance of an effective preexisting compliance program, post-enforcement adoption of an effective compliance program, cooperation with a government investigation, and selfdisclosure of misconduct. While DOJ's public statements reflect a claimed commitment to all four behaviors, analysis of DOJ policy and resolved cases makes clear that as DOJ has increasingly prioritized and incentivized the latter three behaviors, the first--maintenance of an effective preexisting compliance program, the only one aimed toward stopping fraud before it occurs--has been cast aside in one of DOJ's highest-profile enforcement areas. In criminal prosecutions, both DOJ policy and the United States Sentencing Guidelines (USSG) consider preexisting compliance programs in determining whether a business entity should be prosecuted and the amount of a fine if a prosecution does occur. DOJ's Criminal Division has hired compliance experts and enthusiastically publicized internal training aimed at improving prosecutors' ability to evaluate corporate compliance programs. For the health care industry, however, the civil False Claims Act (FCA) is DOJ's primary enforcement tool, and neither that DOJ policy nor the USSG applies. Instead, DOJ guidance in civil cases has been opaque or non-existent, offering little clarity as to how, if at all, DOJ will consider preexisting compliance programs when resolving FCA cases. This is particularly surprising given that health care compliance has evolved over decades into a major industry not only with sophisticated and expensive corporate programs, but also as the subject of increasingly frequent and hands-on DOJ public statements and guidance. This Article is the third in a series analyzing civil FCA resolutions, looking not only at DOJ's stated policies but also at actual outcomes through review of a data set of resolved cases against health care entities. Until now, those analyzing the extent of benefits for corporate compliance programs have focused on criminal cases, particularly those under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and have focused primarily on the potential for a compliance defense to criminal liability. Surprisingly, the literature has to date failed to analyze this question in the context of the FCA, and thus the health care industry, despite its supremacy as a DOJ enforcement target and despite the fact that the FCA's mens rea standard is more likely to sweep in cases in which applying a compliance benefit would further DOJ's enforcement goals. With health care enforcement gaining increased attention in the wake of government spending relating to COVID-19 and additional visibility into DOJ settlement policy now possible due to a change in the tax code, DOJ's current failure to reward preexisting compliance programs in FCA resolutions puts DOJ's enforcement goals at risk, potentially demotivating corporate actors and adding to skepticism about DOJ's motivations and the legitimacy of the enforcement regime, as it prevents DOJ from separating the most culpable corporate actors from those less worthy of condemnation. It is also a missed opportunity, as the large quantity of health care resolutions provides the potential for industry to learn from others' compliance successes and failures and for DOJ to encourage advancements as it claims to desire to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The latest trend in scientific literature review is to scrutinise the practices of false or biased reporting of findings, which is rightly termed as 'spin'. In recent years, accelerated tooth movement has gained attention from the orthodontic community, but the findings still remain unclear and controversial. Objectives: To estimate the frequency of distorted claims and over-interpretation of abstracts of systematic reviews related to accelerated orthodontic tooth movement. The objective was to differentiate the type of claim and to determine its prevalence. Methods: A literature search was performed using the Cochrane library and the top five most prominent orthodontic journals for systematic reviews on accelerated orthodontics were identified by applying appropriate key words. According to pre-set selection criteria, only systematic reviews published between January 2010 and September 2021 were included. The selected articles were scrutinised for the assigned exclusion criteria. The articles were finally scanned for false claims by two independent reviewers. The identified claims fell into either the categories of misleading interpretation, misleading reporting or misleading extrapolation. The obtained data were tabulated and analysed using the one-way ANOVA statistical test to indicate the difference between the different types of reported claims. Results: There were 98 systematic reviews identified in total, of which 59 articles met the selection criteria and 39 articles were excluded. Of the 59 included articles, 38 systematic reviews had exaggerated claims. Twenty-two of the reported claims came under the misleading reporting category, 10 fell under the misleading interpretation category and 6 came under the misleading extrapolation category. The difference noted between the reporting prevalence of different types of claim was statistically significant (P < 0.001). In misleading reporting, it was noted that most of the systematic reviews refrained from reporting the adverse effects of treatment. Conclusion: The prevalence of exaggerated claims is high in the abstracts of systematic reviews related to accelerated orthodontic tooth movement. It is recommended that a clinician critically assess the claims presented in systematic reviews which are considered to be the hallmark articles of evidence-based practice. Orthodontists should be careful when applying the findings in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predatory publishers, also known as counterfeit, deceptive, or fraudulent, are organisations that exploit the open-access scholarly model by charging hefty article processing charges (APCs), often without the scientific rigour and ethical processes offered by legitimate journals. Their rising prevalence is of concern to the scientific community, as the consequences of falling victim to them can negatively impact academic integrity and reputation, and render an author's work worthless and untrustworthy. Common characteristics include inappropriate marketing and misrepresentation of services by targeting individuals with solicitation emails, inadequate peer-review processes, lack of editorial services and transparency about APCs, and false claims about citation metrics and indexing that cannot be verified. Given the infiltration of predatory publishers, authors are advised to proceed with caution when receiving solicitation emails and if in doubt, to follow the Think, Check, Submit checklist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on the ethical and social difficulties young Muslims face in the West. It aims to help Young Muslims fit socially without sacrificing the principles of their religion, to acquire Qur’anic teachings and guidance, and assimilate Islamic principles and moral values that help them lead a righteous life. It attempts to achieve that through exposing young Muslims to the Qur’anic educational significances and lessons as well as the moral values and Islamic principles derived from two types of Qur’anic dialogue: the exchange dialogue and the speech dialogue. It seeks to develop a plan that enhances acquisition of ample Qur’anic knowledge and guidance, assimilation of Qur’anic ethical conducts, Islamic codes and social morals. It also seeks to provide Young Muslims with Qur’anic teachings that strengthen their faith and immunity against non-Muslim passive social influences. As well, it helps Young Muslims refute the false claims about Islam. Moreover, this study recommends educationalists to help young Muslims eliminate indifference toward their religion, foster trust in themselves toward their Islamic identity and transfer this study into educational programs, and conduct further study from another perspective. Finally, this study concludes the abolition of young Muslims' ignorance of their religion and fostering the pure Islamic doctrine in their hearts . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 6 January 2021, the world watched as Donald Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol. However, in this paper, I argue that social scientists should not simply focus on Trump or the Republicans who have supported his false claims that the presidency was stolen from him. Instead, researchers need to leverage the insights provided by sociology, political science and information studies and communication to unpack the increasingly dysfunctional movement-party dynamics in the US, which not only made the 6 January riots possible but continue to erode democratic processes. Here, I outline four developments over the last thirty years that help account for the contemporary political moment and underscore the role of digital technologies in these developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of protecting former employees against retaliation in the effective implementation of the False Claims Act (FCA), which aims to protect the U.S. government against fraudulent activities. Other topics include the government losses due to fraud in government contracts and federal health care programs like Medicaid and Medicare, and the key role played by whistleblowers in fighting fraud under FCA.

The notion of living in a post-truth world compels many who speak of truth in a commonsense way to use the term "objective truth." In various theoretical psychologies, by contrast, favor continues to be given to the affordances alleged to inhere in locally relativized psychological truths, over the epistemic violence observed in claims to objective psychological knowledge. Despite this sanguine view of epistemic relativity, it, too, has conduced to epistemic violence throughout history, resulting in the further oppression of othered peoples, by way of objectively false assertions cunningly disguised as objective truth. I analyze ways in which such typical relativist assertions as "Proposition X is true for some but not for all" creates epistemic muddles obscured by "prepositional attitudes." Particular attention is given to ways in which (a) the "true-for" relativist/nonobjectivist epistemology that many theorists advocate depends on the non(true-for)relativist knowledge they reject, and (b) objectively false claims about othered peoples may have mislead progressively-minded scholars into believing that the cause of epistemic violence lies in an objectivist epistemology, a belief that keeps hidden from them the social-justice affordances that inhere in that very epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Perspektive Mediation is the property of Verlag Oesterreich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Concerns over misinformation have inspired research on how people are influenced by, and form perceptions of, media messages that aim to correct false claims. We juxtapose two seemingly incongruent expectations from the theories of motivated reasoning and hostile media perceptions, uncovering the unique effects of presenting a political news story with corrective information as a "fact-check." We test our theoretical expectations through two online survey experiments. We find that compared to a conventional style of news reporting, a news story presented in a fact-checking genre significantly increases how accurately people are able to evaluate factual information, but it also comes with an important counterproductive effect: people will be more likely to perceive the journalist and the story as biased. We discuss the implications of our findings in theorizing the persuasion effects of corrective information in the contemporary media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twentieth century, the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") rose to prominence as a respected scientific agency. By the middle of the century, it transformed the U.S. medical marketplace from an unregulated haven for dangerous products and false claims to a respected exemplar of public health. More recently, the FDA's objectivity has increasingly been questioned. Critics argue the agency has become overly political and too accommodating to industry while lowering its standards for safety and efficacy. The FDA's accelerated pathways for product testing and approval are partly to blame. They require lower-quality evidence, such as surrogate endpoints, and shift the FDA's focus from premarket clinical trials toward postmarket surveillance, requiring less evidence up front while promising enhanced scrutiny on the back end. To further streamline product testing and approval, the FDA is adopting outputs from computer models, enhanced by artificial intelligence ("AI"), as surrogates for direct evidence of safety and efficacy. This Article analyzes how the FDA uses computer models and simulations to save resources, reduce costs, infer product safety and efficacy, and make regulatory decisions. To test medical products, the FDA assembles cohorts of virtual humans and conducts digital clinical trials. Using molecular modeling, it simulates how substances interact with cellular targets to predict adverse effects and determine how drugs should be regulated. Though legal scholars have commented on the role of AI as a medical product that is regulated by the FDA, they have largely overlooked the role of AI as a medical product regulator. Modeling and simulation could eventually reduce the exposure of volunteers to risks and help protect the public. However, these technologies lower safety and efficacy standards and may erode public trust in the FDA while undermining its transparency, accountability, objectivity, and legitimacy. Bias in computer models and simulations may prioritize efficiency and speed over other values such as maximizing safety, equity, and public health. By analyzing FDA guidance documents and industry and agency simulation standards, this Article offers recommendations for safer and more equitable automation of FDA regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fact checking is an essential challenge when combating fake news. Identifying documents that agree or disagree with a particular statement (claim) is a core task in this process. In this context, stance detection aims at identifying the position (stance) of a document towards a claim. Most approaches address this task through classification models that do not consider the highly imbalanced class distribution. Therefore, they are particularly ineffective in detecting the minority classes (for instance, 'disagree'), even though such instances are crucial for tasks such as fact-checking by providing evidence for detecting false claims. In this paper, we exploit the hierarchical nature of stance classes which allows us to propose a modular pipeline of cascading binary classifiers, enabling performance tuning on a per step and class basis. We implement our approach through a combination of neural and traditional classification models that highlight the misclassification costs of minority classes. Evaluation results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our approach and its ability to significantly improve the classification performance of the important 'disagree' class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The progress of science has sometimes been unjustifiably delayed by the premature rejection of a hypothesis for which substantial evidence existed and which later achieved consensus. Continental drift, meteorite impact cratering, and anthropogenic global warming are examples from the first half of the twentieth century. This article presents evidence that the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) is a twenty-first century case. The hypothesis proposes that the airburst or impact of a comet ∼12,850 years ago caused the ensuing ∼1200-year-long Younger Dryas (YD) cool period and contributed to the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna in the Western Hemisphere and the disappearance of the Clovis Paleo-Indian culture. Soon after publication, a few scientists reported that they were unable to replicate the critical evidence and the scientific community at large came to reject the hypothesis. By today, however, many independent studies have reproduced that evidence at dozens of YD sites. This article examines why scientists so readily accepted the early false claims of irreproducibility and what lessons the premature rejection of the YDIH holds for science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "China is close. On Chinese thinking and its contemporary Western reception" discusses the book by Hermes Spiegel with the same title. The book criticizes Western sinologists who have written about Chinese thinking and argues that Chinese thinking is similar to Western thinking. Spiegel criticizes sinologists who project Western philosophies onto China and claims that their interpretations do not do justice to the Chinese texts. The text criticizes Spiegel's perspectivism and skepticism and questions his statements about China and sinology. It is also pointed out that Spiegel makes false claims about the author himself. It is about a dispute between the author Heiner Roetz and the critic Hermes Spiegel about the interpretation of Daoism. Roetz accuses Spiegel of misrepresenting and misunderstanding his statements. He also criticizes Spiegel for discrediting other authors and attacking sinologists. [Extracted from the article]

Corporate Environmental Responsibility places an obligation on companies to consider the environment when making executive decisions. However, with consumer demands for environmentally friendly products increasing, companies are not being honest about their environmental claims. A company's environmental performance and reputation has become a key factor for a consumer's purchasing decision. However, some companies are unable to meet consumer demands for environmentally friendly products. In response, companies are using false green claims. Such claims are used by companies to mislead consumers into believing a product or service has environmentally beneficial qualities or characteristics. This is also known as greenwashing. There is no specific legislation that prohibits greenwashing. Therefore, this article will analyse current UK legislation and regulating authorities that help prevent corporate greenwashing and evaluates if the current enforcement measures are satisfactory. The article then identifies developing enforcement measures and suggested reform for corporate greenwashing in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, the Supreme Court altered the landscape of the False Claims Act by recognizing implied certification as a viable theory of liability. Before the Court decided Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar, courts disagreed over the scope and legitimacy of the theory, arguing that it could create runaway liability if not held in check. The Court, although recognizing that implied certification expanded the reach of the False Claims Act, reassured itself and government contractors by reinforcing the common law antecedents of fraud, namely, that misrepresentations and omissions must be material to the government’s decision to pay a claim. Moreover, Justice Thomas, writing for the unanimous Court, characterized the law’s materiality standard as “demanding.” In Escobar, the Court sought to provide clarity for highly complex False Claims Act litigation. Instead, the decision created even more confusion as courts have attempted to apply the “demanding” standard for materiality. Specifically, some courts across the country have applied the new materiality standard to other theories of liability, including the express false certification theory which was not at issue in Escobar. Others have limited Escobar strictly to cases arising under implied certification. The two theories of liability, although similar, have vastly different implications for what constitutes fraud under the False Claims Act. Courts that apply Escobar to express certifications overlook this crucial, albeit subtle, difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prawne Problemy Górnictwa i Ochrony Środowiska is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Well-known for his work on absolutism, divine right theory, and his contextual reading of Hobbes' ideas, Sommerville also published successful critical editions of Sir Robert Filmer and King James VI and I's political writing. Sommerville's engagement in key historiographical debates on early- modern British history, involving "opposing camps" of revisionists and post-revisionists, is less explored. Here, I focus on the question whether pre-Civil War England was immune to ideological conflict or, instead, featured a confrontation between King and Parliament based on ideas of power, liberty and obedience. I also highlight the continued relevance of Sommerville's innovative account of English political thought as deeply shaped by European theories. His work reminds us of the role of the history of political thought in rectifying false claims and unchecked opinions, so commonly expounded in our divided world. In conclusion, I advance my own critical interpretation of Sommerville's views on absolutism and patriarchalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, misleading healthcare information and deceptions with false claims, conspiracy theories (CTs) and consumer fraud have endangered public health on a global scale. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a substantial flow of false information and unceasing attempts by conspirators to influence debates in the official discourses, breeding on the fertile ground of people's most basic anxieties and the present-day social and economic uncertainty. This paper investigates the discourse of the European Commission on disinformation in order to achieve institutional legitimation through the linguistic and discursive construction of 'trustworthiness', 'credibility', and 'transparency'. The analysis considers the documents produced by the European Commission over the last few years (2018-2021), to tackle the discourse that supports alternative views on official science. The results of the analysis reveal the EU discursive process of conceptualising 'verifiably false or misleading information' as 'public harm', while distancing it from the EU's fight against disinformation' that is discursively constructed as 'the protection of the EU values'. In particular, the investigation will show how the lexical and phraseological interaction discursively removes the harmful potential of conspiracy theories activists, legitimises massive control measures as the most effective way to guarantee freedom of expression and pluralistic democratic debate, and empowers the EU's image as the shield protecting the European citizens' awareness and societal resilience (Flowerdew, Richardson 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When one litigant in a contentious custody or visitation case makes an intentional or malicious false claim of child maltreatment against another, the children and families involved suffer. Children are exposed to unnecessary and invasive child protective service investigations and may be subjected to needless physical examinations, interviews, and even removal from their homes. Falsely accused litigants may be scrutinized by the criminal justice system or lose employment. These experiences cause lasting trauma to children and families, particularly in low-income communities of color, while also complicating legal proceedings and delaying case conclusions. To better understand the impact of false child maltreatment allegations in custody and visitation cases, we interviewed attorneys and social workers at The Children's Law Center (CLC), a not-for-profit law firm in New York City that represents children in custody, visitation, family offense, and other Family Court proceedings. We asked participants about the impact of intentionally false reports of child abuse and neglect on their clients and cases and analyzed their responses for common themes and insights. In order to avoid unnecessary interventions, we propose including the false reporting of child abuse and neglect as a family offense for which one can seek an order of protection; permitting confidential, rather than anonymous, reporting of child maltreatment allegations; and improving child protective agencies' practices and procedures for conducting investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to take a fresh look at a discussion about the distinct existences argument that took place between David Armstrong and Frank Jackson more than 50 years ago. I will try to show that Armstrong's argument can be successfully defended against Jackson's objections (albeit at the price of certain concessions concerning Armstrong's view on the meaning of psychological terms as well as his conception of universals). Focusing on two counterexamples that Jackson put forward against Hume's principle (which is central to Armstrong's argument), I will argue that they are either compatible with Hume's principle, or imply a false claim. I will also look at several other considerations that go against Hume's principle, such as, for example, Kripke's origin essentialism and counterexamples from aposteriori necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts the scope of the associated regularity to circumstances that are 'fitting' to the domain in question. This observation reveals a way of responding to scepticism while, at the same time, doing justice both to the role of counterfactuals in science and to the complexities inherent in ordinary counterfactual discourse and reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authorship of Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969) is almost forgotten in Sweden today. This essay has the overarching aim of recovering her work and restoring it to the gendered contributions of Swedish twentieth-century literature, and in turn to assert its general importance. The analysis revolves around the significance of the body to literary representation and reception. In order to claim the authority to speak as a woman and outsider, Bjerne performed a new type of woman and testified to her experience. She asserted the significance of the body which devalued her, challenging the false claims to the universalism and transcendence of male subjectivity, and hence the literary values based on them. Bjerne aimed to give literary representation to unrepresented female embodied experience and to render an alternative female subjectivity, making a new type of woman accessible to thought. The analysis of her autobiographical trilogy shows how a feminist critique leads to an affirmation of female embodied experience through the political power of testimony, given literary representation through narrative form and imagery. At the end of the third volume, Botad oskuld (Innocence Remedied), radical non-belonging and constant movement become the prerequisites for the female subject in genesis. This is the foundation of Bjerne's authorship, devoted to the communication of the unspoken female experience through the experience of her embodied self, in order to write as a woman and make herself, and thus the voice of a new type of woman, heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the underlying assumptions and choices of the European regulatory process for health claims. The latter are scientifically substantiated statements, usually in the form of food labels, regarding the health benefits that a food may confer upon its consumer. We show that the European regulator (the European Food Safety Authority, EFSA) has adopted a particular construction (or definition) of a 'standard consumer' of foods with health claims, as well as chosen to give preeminent importance to one particular objective of this regulation (protecting consumers from false claims). EFSA's choices of standards of proof (establishment of causality between food intake and desired outcome) and scientific methodology (randomized controlled trials) are coherent with this objective and the adopted definition of the consumer. We argue that it is not clear if consumers will react to the regulation as intended by the regulator, due to the possibility that only a fraction of consumers actually correspond to the regulator's definition of a standard consumer of foods with health claims. We conclude that only empirical research on actual consumer uptake of the EU regulation would allow for an assessment of its effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted an updated epidemiological study of Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) in Australia by using registry data to establish the risk of vision loss among different LHON mutations, sex, age at onset, and mitochondrial haplogroup. We identified 96 genetically unrelated LHON pedigrees, including 56 unpublished pedigrees, and updated 40 previously known pedigrees, comprising 620 affected individuals and 4,948 asymptomatic carriers. The minimum prevalence of vision loss due to LHON in Australia in 2020 was one in 68,403 individuals. Although our data confirm some well-established features of LHON, the overall risk of vision loss among those with a LHON mutation was lower than reported previously—17.5% for males and 5.4% for females. Our findings confirm that women, older adults, and younger children are also at risk. Furthermore, we observed a higher incidence of vision loss in children of affected mothers as well as in children of unaffected women with at least one affected brother. Finally, we confirmed our previous report showing a generational fall in prevalence of vision loss among Australian men. Higher reported rates of vision loss in males with a LHON mutation are not supported by our work and other epidemiologic studies. Accurate knowledge of risk is essential for genetic counseling of individuals with LHON mutations. This knowledge could also inform the detection and validation of potential biomarkers and has implications for clinical trials of treatments aimed at preventing vision loss in LHON because an overestimated risk may lead to an underpowered study or a false claim of efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only did a pandemic break out in 2020. There was also an outbreak of a so-called "infodemic" of previously unforeseen magnitude, as information regarding the new corona virus, both accurate and inaccurate, rapidly flooded the Internet. Among the falseand misleading information that quickly startedtospread, threethemes were among someof the most commonly occurring: the origin of the virus, alternative medical advice, curesand treatment and the vaccine. This paperdiscussesthe three themes based upon recent research, and argues that they were each fairly predictable. Not only wasthe demand forinformation regarding the new virusenormous -and understandably so - but the groundwork for misinformation on the different themes had already been laid. Some of the false information therefore got off to a flying start. The paper concludes that remedies to address this kind of information suffer from the inherently very high level of uncertaintythat follow significant health emergencies, which in turn sets the bar very high in terms of accurately addressing false claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]