leanleft

model:
32B olmo-2 03/25

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00656

"We release all OLMo 2 artifacts openly -- models at 7B and 13B scales, both pretrained and post-trained, including their full training data, training code and recipes, training logs and thousands of intermediate checkpoints. "

Restaurants sue to keep $18 AZ minimum wage measure off the November ballot

The Arizona Restaurant Association is suing to block a ballot initiative that would raise the state’s minimum wage to $18, claiming the union-backed group behind it failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. 

The political committee Raise the Wage AZ has been gathering signatures for a ballot measure called the “One Fair Wage Act” since November 2022. The measure would raise the state minimum wage from $14.35 to $18 per hour, then increase it annually to address inflation.

Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. For the next six years, the drug’s price kept rising. Today, Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history. AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year. Over the past 20 years, AbbVie and its former parent company increased Humira’s price about 30 times, most recently by 8 percent this month. Since the end of 2016, the drug’s list price has gone up 60 percent to over $80,000 a year, according to SSR Health, a research firm. AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie’s success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.

“Humira is the poster child for many of the biggest concerns with the pharmaceutical industry,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”

Lawyers for the unnamed girl said her parents took her to Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, southeast England, with a high fever, drowsiness, and vomiting, Metro reported. These symptoms are "red flags for meningitis and sepsis," according to the BBC News, but doctors sent her home with paracetamol, or acetaminophen.

Her parents returned to the hospital when her condition worsened, and doctors diagnosed her with meningococcal sepsis. She later experienced multi-organ failure.

The severity of her sepsis later led to her needing the quadruple-limb amputations, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel KC, who is representing the family, said, the BBC reported. The girl had above-knee amputations of both legs, and above-elbow amputations of her arms.

Her family argued that if doctors had immediately treated her with antibiotics, she would not have been so ill and might have kept her limbs.

There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. There are no federal laws governing the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.

Every year, a few hundred customers report to the authorities that valuable items — art, memorabilia, diamonds, jewelry, rare coins, stacks of cash — have disappeared from their safe deposit boxes.

But even when a bank is clearly at fault, customers rarely recover more than a small fraction of what they’ve lost — if they recover anything at all. The combination of lax regulations and customers not paying attention to the fine print of their box-leasing agreements allows many banks to deflect responsibility when valuables are damaged or go missing.

“The big banks fight tooth and nail, and prolong and delay — whatever it takes to wear people down,” said David P. McGuinn, the founder of Safe Deposit Specialists, an industry consulting firm. “The larger the claim, the more likely they are to battle it for years.”

More than 105,000 people are on the U.S. waiting list for an organ transplant. Thousands will die before it’s their turn. Thousands more never even get put on the list, considered too much of a long shot.

“The number of organs we have available are never going to be able to meet the demand,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “This is our frustration.”

That’s why scientists are looking to animals as another source of organs. A Maryland man lived two months after receiving the world’s first heart transplant from a pig last January — an animal genetically modified so its organs didn’t trigger an immediate attack from the human immune system. The FDA is considering whether to allow additional xenotransplantation experiments using kidneys or hearts from gene-edited pigs.

If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, the initial experiment will be outside a patient’s body. Researchers would place a pig-turned-humanlike liver next to a hospital bed to temporarily filter the blood of someone whose own liver suddenly failed. And if that novel “liver assist” works, it would be a critical step toward eventually attempting a bioengineered organ transplant — probably a kidney.

More complex is getting human cells to take over.

“We can’t take billions of cells and push them into the organ at once,” Ross said. When slowly infused, “the cells crawl around and when they see the right environment, they stick.”

the potential for insight exists. why not make it freely available?