So, it turns out that the study linking Vaccines to Autism was an outright fraud.  This outcome has been a long-time coming, as the original study was retracted almost a year ago and in May the researcher behind the study was stripped of his medical license.

I'm troubled that it took so long to discover, given the damage done by the subsequent furor, the errors and data falsification in the study.  It speaks to a lack of good follow through by mainstream media, as well as the damage that can be done when they try to give a "balanced" perspective on a story.  In this case, giving vaccine skeptics such a prominent role lent credence to their claims, which were based on little or bad science.  These finding will do nothing to change the minds of the die-hard believers either.

What can we do to increase scientific literacy?

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,'  British journal finds.

HT: The Fraud Behind Autism-Vaccination Scares

You think you'd have a better plan than to completely end subsidies cold-turkey like this. Maybe a plan to gradually remove them over a year or two so that markets can adjust and that the new revenues can be put to work visibly.  Instead, you get protests, rioting, and people stockpiling basic necessities.

Protests surged as gasoline prices soared by as much as 73 percent and diesel by 83 percent. The cost of food and transportation also reportedly increased.

For Bolivia's president, subsidy cut could have political price - CNN.com

Lessons: Use Cases matter, and programmers (the users in this case) will choose tools that are both simple, in that they are not complicated/over-engineered, and easy to use, requiring little setup and code to accomplish a task. For parsing data with PHP, contrast using something like SimpleXML or DOMDocument (which is light-years better than where we were in parsing XML just 5 years ago), to just doing json_encode() or json_decode().

In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this.

James Clark's Random Thoughts: XML vs the Web