'How long do I have?' A website on cancer survival rates seeks to help - STAT |
- 'How long do I have?' A website on cancer survival rates seeks to help - STAT
- Fight back against 'fake news' with these free tools to spot disinformation, deep fakes and fraudulent content - Bucks County Courier Times
- SEO Penalties: The 6 Ways Your SEO Strategies Aren't Helping You - Business 2 Community
| 'How long do I have?' A website on cancer survival rates seeks to help - STAT Posted: 15 Jan 2020 01:42 AM PST  Talking about cancer is hard. Talking about your chances of surviving cancer is even harder. Now one of the entrepreneurs behind the drug-pricing information site GoodRx wants to make conversations about cancer easier with a new site called CancerSurvivalRates.com. Launched this month, its mission is to make information about cancer prognoses more accessible to patients and families. The idea is to improve on what people can find on the internet or even sometimes in their doctors' offices, co-founder and drug supply chain veteran Stephen Buck said. Oncologists may be leery of their patients' relying on the web for cancer survival rates or estimates of how long a patient might live, particularly given how many factors come into play for any individual. But Buck, along with oncologists and other experts who have served as advisers on the project, say such information can be the basis for a deeper discussion with clinicians about what the future might hold. advertisement "We designed this site to be extremely simple for people to understand. People aren't versed in odds and survival rates. We wanted to say out of 10 people, how many are alive after one, two, or five years," Buck said. "We want this to be a conversation starter, for someone to take this information and ask their physician, what do you think about my prognosis?" The tool, which is free, asks users to enter information about their age and gender, then more details about their cancer diagnosis. Stage, grade, time since diagnosis, and histology can be entered to compute how many people survive for up to five years. The answers are based on public data gathered by the National Cancer Institute. The need for clear and simple information stems in part from the shock patients and families may feel when they first hear the word "cancer," Buck and his team said. Reeling from the diagnosis, patients may not be able to take in more than that one word. But once they get home, they — or their loved ones — may turn to Google to find out more about a particular cancer, treatments for it, and in the case of advanced or more serious cancers, how much time they may have. "For patients and families, it can be pretty hard to track down accurate information about prognosis. It can get pretty technical pretty quickly," said Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, an internist at Sutter Health in California who focuses on end-of-life care. She also served as an adviser on the project. "What I love about the product Stephen has created is patients can really be proactive if they want and say, well, I have just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I do want to know what the future may hold for me." That's where the conversation with an oncologist ideally comes in, proponents of the site say. Dr. Jennifer Temel, a thoracic oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also studies doctor-patient communication, said she worries in general about online tools that provide prognoses. She said she and her team use the first few visits with patients to help them and their families understand the diagnosis, then later talk about treatments and their goals. She might explain that chemotherapy, for example, could help some patients live longer but won't cure their cancer. "As a thoracic oncologist, many of my patients have a prognosis of months or a year and that is not something you want to find out on the internet without communication with a clinician, support from your oncology clinician, maybe support from social work and palliative care," she said, speaking generally about websites offering information on cancer survival but not CancerSurvivalRates.com in particular. "I worry that some of those objective tools don't take into account some of those things about a patient's health status or well-being," she said. "From my perspective, more importantly, we just want to be there for our patients and families when they are getting information like this." Dr. Jim Murphy, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, San Diego, who is an adviser to the site, said any individual case will be nuanced, but the tool can give patients a big-picture view of their cancer, allowing them to later discuss issues with their doctors. "I think prognosis can be difficult for patients to hear and for physicians to effectively relay this information," Murphy said. Broaching survival estimates can be challenging for doctors, too. Ungerleider cites a study from 2016 showing that only 29% of doctors had received training in how to discuss end-of-life care with their Medicare patients. Making information easier to find and understand falls into Buck's technology wheelhouse from his time at GoodRx. "What you learn after working in Silicon Valley for a long time is you win on the interface and the user experience," he said. "There are other sites out there that have survival information. They're difficult to use. Even the tools on the government website, they have a lot of data. But you have to be somewhat of a sophisticated user to manipulate the data." CancerSurvivalRates.com is hosted by Courage Health, a public benefit corporation, the legal term for an entity whose mission is to serve the public interest. Buck and his co-founder, technology expert Omar Mehmood, funded the 2 1/2-year-old project out of their own pockets. Buck is committed to keeping the tool free for patients and health care professionals, while also considering a variety of income sources: sponsorships, inclusion in electronic medical records, adoption as a tool in training programs in communications. And it could be sold. "To be honest, we'd love to sell the company and site to Google," he said. "It would be ideal to maintain as a free public resource that comes up when someone searches on Google."  |
| Posted: 12 Jan 2020 02:01 AM PST Social media is America's number one and least trusted news source, according to an October 2019 survey of 1,032 adults conducted by the Associated Press and University of Chicago. Israel threatened to nuke Pakistan. Pakistan threatened to strike back. The two countries crept toward nuclear war in 2016 after a bogus article was posted by a now-defunct "news service" website backed by Iran. Flash forward to 2020 and experts predict even more frequent and sophisticated disinformation campaigns to undermine American institutions and public safety. "We are at war — an information war," said Claire Wardle, executive chair of First Draft, a nonprofit that works with news organizations to combat disinformation. "We certainly should worry about people, including journalists, unwittingly sharing misinformation, but far more concerning are the systematic disinformation campaigns." "This isn't a political issue," Wardle added. "Anyone who cares about their community, and wants people to make informed decisions should care about this. If we don't take information pollution seriously, it will have grave implications for our societies. Divisions will grow and people will turn inwards to small groups of people who just reinforce existing views." In some cases, even lives are at risk. Police in Burlington City, New Jersey, recently had to dispel rumors on Facebook that an officer shot a 10-year-old boy. "Obviously some people — not all, but some — are trying to fuel an anti-police rhetoric," said police Chief John Fine. "I've got officers out on a crime scene, trying to interview witnesses and dealing with family. And, we've got people on social media saying the victim was shot by a cop." Since September, First Draft has led 300 journalists through training programs to prepare for 2020 disinformation campaigns, Wardle estimated. "Over the next three months, we will be training 500 more, with the hope that they will act as ambassadors in their own newsrooms and communities so that many hundreds of people will be trained on these techniques ahead of the election. At the global and national levels, the Associated Press started the weekly series "NOT REAL NEWS," debunking a seemingly bottomless trough of false content worldwide. NOT REAL NEWS: Here's a look at what didn't happen this week, even if you saw stories saying it did. https://t.co/kIPbEfVYVH — The Associated Press (@AP) December 7, 2019With so much false content spreading so fast, we need your help. This newsroom is committing resources to battle disinformation at the local and state levels. See something sketchy in a local Facebook group? Get an unusual letter or a robocall that raises eyebrows? Report the details to us. We'll investigate the claims and report on our findings. Americans have chosen social media as their No. 1 source for news. It's content they don't trust. An October 2019 survey of 1,032 adults conducted by the Associated Press and University of Chicago found that the greatest number of Americans — 54% — got their news from social media yet only 11% trusted the news they obtained there. It doesn't take much to fool many people on the net. Two years ago, "Get Out" film director Jordan Peele created a fake video of President Obama giving an address to the nation. Peele was able to make the president do and say anything in footage that appeared an authentic address from the White House. Following a national emergency, someone could post a fake video of an address from any current president. And, it could start a panic, experts warn. Free tools allow you to verify photos and video, and this might have prevented the latest smear campaign against 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. Since gaining international attention as a climate change activist, Thunberg has been attacked by anti-environmentalist groups, which aim to cast her as mentally unstable or an outright fraud. Recently, they used a misleading video that's still trending on social media with thousands of daily viewers. It started Dec. 7. Sports shooter Emmy Slinge, of Stockholm, posted a 18-second video of herself at the gun range. So anyway, I started blasting pic.twitter.com/ea1rp6B7Fm — Emmy _ (@eslinge) December 7, 2019Four days later, multiple Twitter accounts re-posted that same footage, claiming it was Thunberg wielding a AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The content falsely identifying the shooter as Thunberg currently has more than 3 million views on Twitter. "Every time we passively accept information without double-checking, or share a post, image or video before we've verified it, we're adding to the noise and confusion," added Wardle, a former research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. "The ecosystem is now so polluted, we have to take responsibility for independently checking what we see online." Like the Thunberg smear, most fakes are copies or composites of old photos and video ripped from the net, experts say. For example, you could take any one of the thousands of images from the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri and re-post that content online today, claiming it's a current photo of protests in any American city. There are easy steps you can take, however, to spot a fake. To verify an image, save the photo to your computer and upload it to Google Images. Google Images will then search the net for other photos with similar characteristics, allowing you to spot fake and re-purposed content. Free online tools allow you to check the "metadata" of images taken by cellphones and digital cameras. This data can show the date and time the photo was taken. Newer cameras often contain data showing the GPS coordinates where the images or video was shot. Don't be fooled by #FakeNews and re-purposed photos on the net. Free tools like Jeffrey's Image Meta Data Viewer will tell you when and where a photo was taken and the type of camera. https://t.co/lUL6XOTQSo pic.twitter.com/uLwKf7OBrg — James McGinnis (@James_McGinnis) January 3, 2020In addition to Google Images, the free service TinEye tracks where images appear online. Verefix shows the metadata behind an image, and Amnesty USA offers a free YouTube DataViewer. For those using the internet browser Google Chrome, you can also install RevEye Reverse Image Search, which analyzes images on the page in your Chrome browser. Battling bots Doctored images aren't the only thing to be wary of on the 'net. Chances are you're friends with a robot. On Dec. 20, Facebook's head of security policy announced it had removed accounts with "inauthentic coordinated behavior" that "automate posting at very high frequencies and direct traffic to off-platform sites." With free tools, you can spot them. But, it won't be easy. Facebook announced it had removed some 3.3 billion fake accounts — a figure three times the population of China. The social media giant estimates 5% of its accounts aren't real people. At Indiana University, researchers with the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research created "Botometer," a program to spot your social media friends and followers who are likely robots. Rid your world of robots. The "Botometer," a program designed by researchers at Indiana University is designed spot your Twitter bots. They found dozens in my account. Here's the link: https://t.co/5qd1KOeG0b pic.twitter.com/r7c1PKg7Eh — James McGinnis (@James_McGinnis) January 3, 2020Some of the social media you encounter is generated by robots formed by companies and government agencies. For example, in December, Twitter said it removed nearly 6,000 fake accounts created by the Saudi government. Unbeknownst to some users, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter control what you see with operating algorithms designed to show you the most popular content. Even this popularity can be hacked, experts say. In December, researchers working with NATO said they were easily able to purchase thousands of fraudulent comments, likes and views on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, increasing the chances that certain content would go viral. Fake accounts were also used to propagate some of the most viral content of 2019 — like the bogus claim that President Trump's grandfather was a pimp, and his father was a member of the KKK. The claims weren't new or true, but that didn't stop the bogus report from going viral. Bots are typically newborns. Many have profile photos that are stolen from other locations on the net. (You can use the Google Image search to see if a bot's profile photo appears in other places on the net.) Other free tools show when a website or account was first created, who registered the site and whether it's based in the United States. See potential #fakenews on a website? Check that site's domain registration for (1) when it was created (2) where it was created (3) who owns it. Numerous sites offer free web site domain searches including https://t.co/CK2hseToxM pic.twitter.com/V4b1qZJD0v — James McGinnis (@James_McGinnis) January 7, 2020Among them, the website WhoIs.com, provided by New York-based NTT Communications, lets you pull up details about any website domain address. Finally, if you see something on the net which seems suspect, check with multiple news sources to see if it's been reported elsewhere.  |
| SEO Penalties: The 6 Ways Your SEO Strategies Aren't Helping You - Business 2 Community Posted: 15 Jan 2020 03:04 PM PST
You've heard so much about the importance of search engine optimization and what you can do to show up higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so you can get noticed by more and more potential customers and clients. But are you doing too much to increase your SEO? Many search engines like Google are putting tools in place and designing algorithms to protect their users from having to wade through a sea of pages and search results that are too cluttered with keywords or other "tricks" to increase their SEO instead of focusing on providing useful, helpful information. What does this mean for you? It means that some of your SEO strategies may actually be hurting your standing on a SERP. So which "tricks of the (SEO) trade" are outdated or harmful? 1- Keyword StuffingKeywords are definitely your friend when it comes to boosting your SEO. You have great content, and adding a few keywords here and there is a great way to get your content noticed in Google's search algorithm. But adding a keyword or key phrase into your text one too many times is known as "stuffing." Sometimes you might see this show up even as a list of search terms, included out of context of the content, just to get noticed by search crawlers. Keyword stuffing used to be a pretty successful practice—until various search engines caught on and started to penalize websites for adding a key search term into the content too many times. Now? Adding a key search term too many times can actually lower your search ranking—or get you removed from the search results entirely. If you are trying to boost the search rankings for your high-powered blender, and you include that phrase in every other sentence to the point that your text is crammed-full with the phrase "high-powered blender," over and over again, and it seems repetitive or doesn't even make sense? You're guilty of keyword stuffing. But how much is too much? Search Engine Journal offers the following advice: Limit your keyword density to 2% of the overall copy. 2 – Hidden Text and LinksAnother issue similar to keyword stuffing is including "hidden text," which is exactly what it sounds like: Having text embedded on your page that isn't visible to the page's visitors but instead is meant solely to catch the attention of search engines. This also is known as "content cloaking" because even though visitors can't see it, it is still crawlable for search engines, and the developers who oversee the SEO algorithms don't like it one bit. This also includes the idea of hidden links—invisible links included within the copy or hidden on the page. Links are still a strong way to boost your SEO ranking, but unrelated links, the ones that have only been included to add to the number of links and improve a site's SEO, won't help you at all. "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google's search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Why does Google penalize websites that have hidden text or hidden links? Think about it. Hidden text or hidden links aren't at all helpful to those using search engines to find relevant information, and search engines want to be as useful to those browsing the web as possible, so they keep using their search engine. What kind of hidden text and hidden links will be penalized? According to Google, the following infractions will put you lower down within search results:
Instead? Keep all of your text visible and useful, and link to plenty of practical, helpful sites. 3 – Duplicate ContentDo you have duplicate information posted in multiple locations on your website? Duplicate information makes your website less useful to viewers in Google's eye. In fact, duplicate information is not as useful to visitors to your site either. Having unique content that is well crafted, helpful and well written not only is beneficial to your SEO, but it also provides more reliable information for your readers (and potential clients). How can you prevent duplicate content from affecting your SEO rankings? You can use tools like Copyscape to check your content to see if it is original and to check for plagiarism. It's also a useful tool to discover if other websites are stealing your content. 4 – Internal Broken Links, Internal 404s, and Error CodesIt's great to link to other pages within your website to keep readers checking out the incredible information you have available for them—and including links can improve your SEO. But if you've been making lots of updates to your website, whether it's to increase your SEO or freshen up old content, you might have some broken links or links that no longer work because the content (and the link) has been updated. These broken links make for a negative user experience on your website, and most search engines are looking to prevent this kind of thing from happening; they want the people using their search engine to find helpful, credible information and have an easy time locating the information they are seeking. So as you freshen up old content and as links change and your website evolves, it's important to check your website for broken links. Keeping track of your changes as you go will help, but you also can use this handy guide to find broken links and monitor your updates so you end up with fewer broken links and fewer error codes. 5 – Pages with Thin ContentHaving lots of pages to match lots of different possible searches might seem like a great way to bring in new readers, but if your information on these pages is shallow or doesn't have a lot of valuable content, Google could view this as manipulative behavior, only supplying enough content to draw visitors to your website and not much else. An example of pages with thin content would be having far too many landing pages or doorway pages—pages that are designed specifically to bring visitors to your site without providing them a whole lot of relevant content. It may be scraped from other websites or not fully formed, and its presence is merely there to be found by search engine crawlers. Again, it's helpful to think about your website from Google's or another search engine's point of view: They want to provide their users with the most detailed information, in the easiest way possible. 6 – CloakingHave you heard of cloaking? Cloaking is the idea of showing very different content to search engines than to visitors to your website and hiding this content (much like hidden words or links) to promote a higher ranking on a SERP. Cloaking is different from geolocation or mobile detection, which means it's OK for your website to have a geolocating application in effect and for your website to be mobile-responsive. In fact, these additions to your page make it much easier for visitors to navigate through your website. An example of effective geolocation would be showing a French-language version of your website to a viewer in France and an English-language version to someone in the U.K. in order to provide your viewer with the best website experience. Instead, cloaking is the idea of showing one page to your users and another to GoogleBot (Google's web crawler). It's deceptive and misleading. Think about the end-user effect: Is the page a user found through Google the exact same as if they just came to your page themselves? Here is Google's definitive video on cloaking and how to avoid cloaking and the SERP penalty: It really explains what cloaking might look like on your page, so you know how you can keep from being penalized. How do you avoid cloaking penalties?
A Note About Google's Old "First Click Free" PolicyYou may have heard of Google's "First Click Free" SERP penalty policy in the past. It used to be that Google would penalize you for having gated content or content that, once you click on a given search result, brings you to a page that restricts content to users, asking for specific information from them or asking them to register, subscribe or log in to see the full content. However, Google has backtracked on this policy in some ways. Why is that? Because having some gated content is useful. Google has worked with web publishers over the years to gain a deeper understanding of free sampling and using information volunteered by those visiting your site so that you can reach out and convert visitors into customers. Gated content can be extremely useful when you are hoping to convert visitors into customers and even to learn more about who is visiting your website so you can better market to your visitors. So have no fear: Including some gated content will not result in you having a lower SEO ranking. What's more important than padding your pages with SEO tricks and keywords? Creating exceptional content, using inbound marketing strategies to drive visitors to your site instead of trying to cheat the system. You possess so much knowledge about your industry that visitors to your page will find captivating, and it's up to you to provide that content to attract new visitors and convert them into lifelong customers. It's like the old adage says: "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." And you can catch more customers with quality, inbound-focused content than with SEO "tricks."  |
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