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Tasked with the unenviable job of trying to create order in Greece's chaotic financial-data system is Diomidis Spinellis, a former professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was recently appointed secretary general of the information systems for the Ministry of Finance. He's got grand plans for using technology to make the system more efficient - and make it harder for people to cheat. But that's his second priority. "Before we talk about radical undertakings, we have to deal with the basics," he says. An expensive auditing system, for example, has been languishing unused...
Wakefield's methods were the subject of what was almost certainly the longest medical-misconduct inquiry in British history. The General Medical Council, which licenses British doctors, ruled on Jan. 28 that Wakefield and two of his co-investigators had acted dishonestly and irresponsibly and shown "callous disregard" for the 12 children in the study, which suggested that symptoms of autism in eight of the children and gastrointestinal trouble in all 12 were somehow linked with exposure to the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine...
...there were other lapses in the way Wakefield recruited research participants: in one instance, he paid children about $8 apiece at his son's birthday party to give blood. The General Medical Council also concluded that Wakefield had unnecessarily carried out invasive procedures on some of the children in the 1998 study, including spinal taps and colonoscopies, without ethical approval...
Wakefield, who is associated with the Thoughtful House Center for Children, an autism center in Austin, Texas, could not be reached for comment. He maintains a devoted circle of supporters, several of whom appeared with him on Jan. 28 in London for the General Medical Council ruling. The formal repudiation of his 1998 paper may only reinforce their belief that there's a conspiracy on the part of the medical establishment to suppress his work...
Even as the company was catching the global No. 1, General Motors, the reputation of Toyota's cars was slipping. Spear, who apprenticed in its factories, says the problem was that the Toyota way--in which knowledge accumulated by élite cadres of engineers and assembly workers over many years is shared across the company--got diluted by the demands of production. "Even in the late '90s, people in Toyota would say, 'This is going to bite us in the ass,'" says Spear. "They just didn't know when...