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Saturday, August 4, 2007

On the second day of Wikimania 2007 in Taipei, Group Sessions continued, while the Virtual i.d.ea Interactive Net Art 2007 Exhibition attracted visitors and participants. This exhibition shows the creation of interactions by using creative contents. Four college teams and two individuals exhibited their work.

This exhibition is mainly focused on Interactive Net Art. Visitors can interact with those artworks, such as “Many Me”, “Not One Less”, and “One Million Heartbeats”, which explored identity, information and community behavior .

Kevin Lam from Hong Kong and Marius Watz from Norway also brought “Mobile Brush” and “Neon Organic / Electro Plastique” artworks to show the culture of freedom of Interactive Net Art.

The Wikimania 2007 Conference will end on August 5. Submitting free-licensed works for the Wikimania Awards is still in progress, the deadline being 8:00 a.m. August 5 (Taipei time). Wikimania Award winners will be announced at the Closing Ceremony.

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Wednesday, September 7, 2005

The United States’ third-largest airline operator, Delta Air Lines, will cut 1,000 jobs due to a planned service reduction at their Cincinnati hub. The carrier also announced they will sell 11 of their Boeing 767-200 planes to an air-cargo company, ABX Air Inc., since they are the least fuel-efficient aircraft in the fleet.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport lost 9 destinations, but the carrier said there would be no inconvenience to passengers. Delta will fly to 20 new “business destinations” from Atlanta and Salt Lake City, instead. Also 41 international connections are to be maintained or expanded.

The changes took place due to the difficult financial situation of the company, which suffered $10 billion in losses since 2001, and warned that they would file for bankruptcy if unsuccessful in lowering costs.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

In an opinion piece published by CNN on Tuesday, Georgetown University law student and women’s rights advocate Sandra Fluke insisted she will not allow slurs from critics to silence her and other women from continuing to speak out on issues regarding women’s health and contraception.

Fluke has faced slurs and personal attacks after speaking before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee in the United States House of Representatives about women’s health and contraception. She was called a “slut” and a “prostitute” by talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh. In response to these attacks, Fluke has received public support from women, members of the media, and politicians including the President of the United States.

In her piece for CNN, Fluke took the opportunity to thank her supporters, writing, “By now, many have heard the stories I wanted to share thanks to the congressional leaders and members of the media who have supported me and millions of women in speaking out.” She characterized the “opponents of reproductive health access” who issued personal attacks against her as being motivated by an attempt to change the topic of conversation away from a dialogue about women’s health, and “to silence women’s voices regarding their own health care.”

Fluke wrote that the efforts by some to drown out women from speaking out about women’s health were unsuccessful. She came to this conclusion due to the multitude of positive comments and encouragement sent to her by both female and male individuals urging that contraception medication be considered a medical necessity.

Asserting that she would not remain silent on this issue of women’s health, Fluke wrote, “Attacking me and women who use contraception by calling us prostitutes and worse cannot silence us.”

She noted that a significant majority of women have utilized contraception medication, and commented that there exists a social disconnect between politicians attempting to make it more difficult for women to access this type of health care, and the views of society-at-large about the matter: “Restricting access to such a basic health care service, which 99% of sexually experienced American women have used and 62% of American women are using right now, is out of touch with public sentiment.”

Fluke concluded her piece by emphasizing that those in power should not govern based on ideology: “I am proud to stand with the millions of women and men who recognize that our government should legislate according to the reality of our lives — not for ideology.”

After being banned by Congressman Darrell Issa from speaking before a Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on February 16 which consisted mainly of male panelists, Fluke appeared before a meeting of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee convened by Minority leader of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on February 23.

Fluke spoke to the committee about the need for contraception to be covered by health care plans offered by employers, as a matter integral to women’s health. She cited multiple cases where women take contraception medication as part of their health care for treatment of medical conditions unrelated to birth control, including two women who suffer from polycystic ovarian syndrome, a woman who is afflicted with endometriosis and another who takes contraception in order to prevent seizures.

Speaking before the United States Senate on February 17 along with fellow members Patty Murray, Kirsten Gillibrand, Barbara Boxer, and Charles Schumer, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire expressed her support for Fluke. Like Fluke, Senator Shaheen pointed out the need not to silence the voices of women in the public government debate about women’s health care: “Time and time again, women have been silenced in this discussion, a discussion about our own very personal health care decisions.” Senator Shaheen concluded her remarks with an explanation as to why she believes women should have significant representation in discussions about their health care: “Women deserve a voice in this debate because, after all, in the end this is about our health and it is about a health care decision that is between women, their families, their doctors, and their own faith.”

President Barack Obama called Fluke on March 2 to express his support for her courage to speak out on issues of women’s health. In his first press conference of 2012 on March 6, he discussed his reasons for deciding to call Fluke.

The President cited his personal thoughts about his own two daughters: “And the reason I called Ms. Fluke is because I thought about Malia and Sasha [Obama’s daughters], and one of the things I want them to do as they get older is to engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on. I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”

President Obama went on to state that Fluke served as a positive role model for citizen participation in democracy and society: “And I wanted Sandra to know that I thought her parents should be proud of her, and that we want to send a message to all our young people that being part of a democracy involves argument and disagreements and debate, and we want you to be engaged, and there’s a way to do it that doesn’t involve you being demeaned and insulted, particularly when you’re a private citizen.”

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Marvin Schur, a 93-year-old man from Bay City, Michigan has died after the electric company limited his electric use due to his failure to pay over US$1,000 in past-due payments.

Bay City Electric Light & Power installed a power-limiting device on his home on January 13. The device would limit the amount of power the resident uses and would essentially shut it off if that limit is reached, or if the resident fails to pay the outstanding bill within 10 days of installation. In order for the electricity to be turned back on, the limiter must be reset by pushing a button.

Bay City power says that a warning, indicating that the power was to be turned off and a limiter installed, had been placed on Schur’s front door. Despite that, the company says that they are now “looking at our website and possibly doing an automated phone message. We obviously need to get the word out.”

The autopsy performed on Schur’s body concluded that he had died “a slow, painful death” caused by hypothermia. Dr. Kanu Virani, who performed the autopsy, explained: “Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly. It’s not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they’re burning.”

It was less than 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Centigrade) in Schur’s home when neighbors found Schur dead on January 17. Virani commented that it was his first time performing an autopsy on a body in which “the person froze to death indoors.”

“His furnace was not running – the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him,” said George A. Pauwels Jr., who was with his wife when they found Schur’s body.

In Michigan it is illegal for a utility company to disconnect power to any home between November 1 and March 31 when a resident is over the age of 65. Limiters are also not supposed to be used during that time frame. However, municipally-owned electric utilities like the one in Bay City, are not regulated by the state. The Michigan state attorney general’s office has launched an investigation into the incident.

Residents around Schur’s home say he was hard of hearing, and the city states that the device’s function and operation were never explained to him. When word of the story got around, people from all over the United States began to call the city in anger.

“I’ve taken calls from Canada, Massachusetts, Texas, New York, Alabama – and that’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head,” said Melody Roth of the city’s administrative office, who also added that people from all over are “calling all city departments, not just our office.”

Schur has no known children, and his wife had died several years prior to the incident.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

In findings published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell, a team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China have announced the first-ever cloning of a primate from post-embryonic cells, namely two macaque monkeys. They used somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same method that was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.

In somatic cell nuclear transfer, scientists remove the nucleus, which is the organelle that contains the chromosomes, from an unfertilized ovum, or egg cell, and implant the nucleus from a somatic cell, or non-reproductive cell, into that ovum. The ovum is then stimulated and develops in the normal way, growing into a whole organism that has the same nuclear DNA as the donor organism, though it will have all of the ovum’s mitochondria and other cellular machinery. Clones like these have been described as identical twins to their donors, but younger.

The scientists implanted 21 ova into surrogate mother monkeys, resulting in six pregnancies, two of which produced living animals. The young clones were named “Zhong Zhong” and “Hua Hua,” both derived from Zh?nghuá, the Chinese-language word for the Chinese people. They are both cynomolgus monkeys, or crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis). The scientists also attempted to clone macaques using nuclei from adult donors. They implanted 42 surrogates, resulting in 22 pregnancies, but there were still only two infant macaques, and they died soon after birth. The Scotland-based team that created Dolly the sheep in 1996 required 277 attempts and produced only one lamb.

Generally, the older the donor organism, the more difficult it is to get the DNA from the harvested nucleus to reactivate the genes that allow the clone organism to grow. Previous efforts to clone rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using embryonic donor cells have been successful, but the current attempt used significantly older donors: fetal fibroblast cells, which are key cells in connective tissue, and adult monkey cumulus cells.

“We’re excited — extremely excited,” said study co-author Muming Poo. “This is really, I think, a breakthrough for biomedicine.” He went on to say that the cloned monkeys could be used as test subjects for the study of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. Primates are already a popular model organism for neurological studies. In the United States, for example, non-human primates are used in less than 0.3% of all animal experiments, most of them involving neuroscience, and macaques in particular are a well-established animal model of atherosclerosis, which causes heart disease.

“I think it’s a very exciting landmark. It’s a major advance,” agreed reproductive biologist Dieter Egli of Columbia University. “It should be possible to make models of human disease in those monkeys and study those and then attempt to cure it.”

About 90% of the laboratory animals used in the United States are rodents. Although the first cloned mouse was born in 1998, cloned mice are not currently common in laboratory settings. This may be because producing inbred mouse lines is still relatively effective.

Although the announcement raised enthusiasm from researchers, it also drew caution from bioethicists. “Cloning one individual in the image of another really sort of demeans the significance of us as individuals,” says Harvard Medical School’s Dr. George Daley, speaking specifically of cloning humans. “There’s a certain sort of gut sense that it violates sort of natural norms.” While Muming Poo concedes it is now theoretically possible to clone a human, he says his lab has no plans to do so.

Although somatic cell nuclear transfer was used successfully in amphibians as early as 1952, getting it to work in mammals took much longer. Dolly, the first cloned mammal, was born in 1996. Teams have been trying to clone monkeys for decades, but primate DNA is notoriously difficult to work with. “The trick is we choose the right chemicals to turn on these genes we transfer into the egg,” Mu-ming Poo told the press. “So that’s what we did different. I think that’s the key.” One of the agents used to treat the ova was messenger RNA from the human Kdm4d gene.

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

United States President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday, that Rex Tillerson will no longer serve as the Secretary of State. Trump will nominate Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director as Tillerson’s successor, and Deputy Director Gina Haspel will be nominated to replace Pompeo. The Secretary of State is the U.S. equivalent of a foreign minister in most other countries.

Trump first made the announcement in an early morning tweet at 5:43 AM ET (UTC?04:00). The State Department said in a statement, Tillerson “did not speak to the President and is unaware of the reason” for his dismissal from office.

The President spoke to the press on the South Lawn of the White House later on Tuesday, saying “I’ve worked with Mike Pompeo now for quite some time. Tremendous energy, tremendous intellect. We’re always on the same wavelength. The relationship has always been very good and that’s what I need as Secretary of State.”

Trump wished Tillerson well, adding that “Rex and I have been talking about this for a long time. We — we got along actually quite well, but we disagreed on things,” continued the President. “When you look at the Iran deal, I think it’s terrible. I guess he thought it was OK. I wanted to either break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently.”

According to NBC News and Reuters, there have been months of disagreements between Trump and Tillerson leading up to the dismissal.