The database provides a clearinghouse for human health and environmental studies, as well as basic material information, and is maintained by continuously monitoring journals, government reports, company-sponsored research, and available literature to enable analysis of documented conclusions.
That sort of evidence is known as "Brady material," information that could point to a defendant's guilt or innocence.
As of May 2009, the database incorporates 1784 patients with associated clinical data with 60 parameters (e.g. tumor staging, treatment, cancer relapse) and 16400 different material information as well as biomolecular measurements (including qPCR for 400 genes from 125 patients, 820 FACS parameters from 40 patients, 20 tissue microarray assays for 600 patients).
Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that U.S. companies may report material information such as quarterly results on Twitter, as long as investors are alerted in advance.
If the answer is no, then it is hard to see this as anything other than material information.
"We normally think of material information as specific to the mortgages, not somebody's prediction about the future course of macroeconomic events," Professor Ferrell said.
He wants to impose a "positive obligation" on companies to disclose material information as it occurs and in plain English, not legalese.Mr Pitt already claims success on the thorny issue of Wall Street analysts and their conflicts of interest.
In some cases, they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which executives were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew their firms were about to collapse.
However, proof of intent to harm may be inferred from the willful non-disclosure by a fiduciary, such as a corporate officer, of material information he has a duty to disclose.
Several smaller hedge funds are now examining their own internal communications to ensure information obtained from outside sources cannot be misinterpreted by federal regulators as material nonpublic information.
