Osiris Therapeutics - A trip to the underworld and back

Michael Schermann

Jan 09, 2019

Introduction¶

On November 2, 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Osiris Therapeutics for fraudulent financial statements. Osiris Therapeutics settled the case by paying a penalty of USD 1.5 million.

The SEC alleges that Osiris Therapeutics routinely overstated company performance and issued fraudulent financial statements for a period of nearly two years. According to the SEC’s complaint, the company improperly recognized revenue using artificially inflated prices, backdated documents to recognize revenue in earlier periods, and prematurely recognized revenue upon delivery of products to be held on consignment. Osiris Therapeutics and its executives also allegedly used pricing data that they knew was false and attempted to book revenue on a fictitious transaction, among other accounting improprieties. (Source: SEC Press Release, highlights added)

The full SEC complaint can be downloaded here: Case 1:17-cv-03230-CCB

An update on the loaded climate dice

Michael Schermann

Dec 02, 2018

One of the recurring claims you will find in discussions of climate change is that the climate in general not only becomes warmer but also more extreme. For instance, the latest report on climate change by the U.S. Administration is covered in the news as follows:

"While summers become more extreme, the harshness of winter is expected to ease." (Jason Samenow, Washington Post, November 27)

But does the data support this?

The climate dice are loaded: A replication

Michael Schermann

Oct 02, 2018

^{(Source: Popovich & Pearce (2017): *[It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/28/climate/more-frequent-extreme-summer-heat.html)*, New York Times)}

On July 28, 2017, the New York Times published an article by Nadja Popovich and Adam Pearce with the intriguing title "It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter". As the title suggests, the article makes the claim that summers are getting hotter and hotter. The main argument of the article is the visualization depicted above. It shows "how summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades".

This is a very effective visualization because it communicates relatively complicated scientific information (a distribution of temperatures) in an approachable way. All you need to understand is that temperatures move to the right, which means summers get hotter. (The article also features an animated visualization, which shows how the temperature distribution has changed over the decades.). This post replicates the visualization and reflects on the underlying data preparation and data wrangling activities.