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Lies, damn lies and statistics
The cost of corporate rot
Kahlua, Courvoisier pick kosher partner
Congress OKs $3.7bn nanotech bill
Soy equals statins for heart effects
GM
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Bias and selectivity by both
advocates and opponents have clouded the results of farm-scale trials of
genetically modified crops in Britain, says the president of the Royal
Society, Lord May.
Lord May was speaking before a
meeting of the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE)
about the implications of the research. The results
were published in October. They showed there are pros and cons to GM
crops.
"To declare all GM is bad or
all GM is good for the environment as a result of these experiments is a
gross over-simplification,” Lord May said. “Rather than closing the
case for or against GM crops, these results should drive society to ask
more questions, not just about GM crops, but about agriculture generally.
They should be a catalyst for a debate about the future of modern
agriculture."
ACRE is taking evidence in public
from experts and stakeholders about this. "The UK has already
experienced a pronounced loss of biodiversity,” he said. “If this
trend is to be halted, we need to decide now best to achieve that. It
could be through working with the grain of nature, such as targeting land
for non-agricultural purposes, or by growing our food more efficiently,
such as using techniques like GM to develop crops that need fewer
chemicals.”
Society has to choose what social
and environmental conditions it wants to live in, he said. Then techniques
such as GM could be applied to achieve it.
Corruption
The cost of corporate rot
No only is corporate corruption
widespread, but it is far more costly to society than street crime, says
University of Arkansas researcher Vikas Anand.
Anand and Blake Ashforth from
Arizona State University have uncovered three mutually reinforcing
processes that undermine corporate ethics: institutionalisation,
rationalisation and socialisation. Their results will appear in the 2004
edition of Research in Organizational Behavior.
“In most instances, the behaviour
creeps up on people. They are not intentionally evil and they don’t
normally start out to be corrupt, but these processes take over and make
their behaviour seem normal within their group,” says Anand.
The complexity of many routine
business processes allows an initial corrupt decision or act to become
embedded in the processes to the point that it becomes routine. For
example,
someone at a national pharmacy
discovered that Medicare denied 10% of all claims due to errors by
Medicare, but Medicare did not correct them errors and the pharmacy lost
the money. A pharmacy official decided that, rather than fight with
Medicare or take the loss, they could simply duplicate every tenth claim.
Because the work is divided among employees, no one person realises what
is happening. The data entry operator, for example, has no idea why she
was instructed to duplicate every tenth entry; it is just how the job is
done. The fraud becomes institutionalised.
Next, ritual stories “explain”
such acts and outcomes and make them seem to conform to social norms, eg
fairness. For example, the pharmacy official argued that they were not
taking any more money than was due to them – they were just being
“creative” in circumventing the bureaucratic problems at Medicare and
ensuring that their stockholders were not penalised by other agencies’
bookkeeping errors.
“Rationalizations are patently
self-serving attempts to legitimate questionable acts,” said Anand,
“but because they are for internal consumption, the issue is not their
objective validity, but whether the group accepts them.”
This acceptance depends on the
socialising power of the organisation and their previous experience of
corruption by those who join the organisation. Without them, the
corruption would die out when the instigators left the firm.
“There is a strong pretend
quality to these normalising techniques,” Anand said. “Peers act as if
theft, illegal dumping, false advertising and so on are permissible, if
not desirable. Because the goal is to change the attitude toward specific
behaviours that would otherwise be repugnant, the group may overlay
positive attributes, praising the newcomer by calling the newly-learned
corrupt behaviours ‘aggressive,’ ‘with-it’ or ‘loyal’.”
Newcomers who do not respond to
social influence threaten the corrupt subculture. They will be told in
different ways to fit in or leave – it’s my way or the highway.
All three processes must be present
for corruption to become an ongoing, collective undertaking. So prevention
is better than cure.
Ashcroft and Anand believe that
leaders should instil high ethical values and awareness and hold
individuals at all levels accountable for the means as well as the ends.
“Organisations tend to get the respect they deserve,” say Ashcroft and
Anand. For instance, electronic surveillance of staff may communicate
distrust and provoke retaliation through corruption.
Remedial actions should not be
aimed at managing the corporate image, said Anand. “Unfortunately, some
executives design ethics codes to stop staff acting against the company
rather than to control corrupt activities on behalf of the company.”
Brands
Kahlua, Courvoisier pick kosher
partner
Expect Kahlua- and Courvoisier-branded
sauces and flavoured beverage concentrates to emerge from a licensing deal
between Allied Domecq’s North America spirits division and kosher
specialist Vita Food Products.
Vita Foods' plans to make Kahlua
dessert sauces, Kahlua cappuccino concentrate, Courvoisier Dill Dijon
Mustard sauce and Courvoisier cappuccino concentrate.
Buyer presentations will begin in
December with a planned launch to consumers scheduled for January 2004.
Allied Domecq’s vice president
for new business innovation, David Hayes, said "Our partnership with
Vita Food Products for these new Kahlua- and Courvoisier-branded products
marks another important step forward in Allied Domecq's brand extension
programme." Other licensing deals include Sauza, Kahlua and Malibu
non-alcoholic cocktail mixers from American Beverage Corporation in the
US, and Sara Lee Kahlua ice cream in Australia.
Vita Foods supplies the herring and
retail packaged salmon markets in the US, as well as cream cheese,
cocktail sauce, tartar sauce and horseradish. More than 95% of Vita's
sales are in kosher foods.
Materials
Congress OKs $3.7bn nanotech bill
While the UK and Europe worry about
the ethics of nanotechnology, the US is to spend nearly $3.7bn over four
years from October 2004 on nanotechnology research and development
A bill passed by Congress sets up a
White House National Nanotechnology Program office and a network of
university-based advanced technology centres. They will include medical
ethics, legal, and environmental issues.
Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the
House Science Committee and one of the bill's sponsors, said “The
capability will have enormous consequences for the information industry,
for manufacturing, and for medicine and health.”
Diet
Soy equals statins for heart
effects
Soy foods appear as effective in
lowering cholesterol as statin drugs, according to reports from the
University of California at Berkeley and also from Cornell University.
Research into the Portfolio diet,
which features soy foods, such as tofu and soy milk, found that the diet
"worked as well as the drug and much better than the low-fat diet,
reducing total cholesterol by about one-third in only a few weeks,"
Berkeley sources say.
In a Cornell study, 46 men and
women with high cholesterol were assigned to a vegetarian diet containing
soy protein. Test patients on the diet with soy protein had an average
decrease of 28.6% in their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, about equal to the
loss for a group receiving a statin drug. Those on a traditional low-fat
diet saw a decrease of only 8%.
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