Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Liberia is expected to see thousands of new Ebola cases within the next three weeks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.

The current outbreak of the virus in West Africa is believed to have killed 2,100 people, including 79 health workers. As well as Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone are at the centre of the outbreak, with Nigeria, and Senegal also effected.

Liberia is proving particularly vulnerable to the spread of the virus. Before the outbreak, the country had only one doctor for every 100,000 inhabitants, and a severe shortage of beds. The WHO stated that “as soon as a new Ebola treatment facility is opened, it immediately fills to overflowing with patients”.

The UK military have said they will build a 50 bed centre near Sierra Leone’s capital, with the US saying it would send a 25 bed field hospital. This falls short of the 1,000 beds an investigative team from WHO says is needed in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, alone.

WHO says a three- to four-fold increase in the efforts of those combating the outbreak is needed.

The African Union also warned of the economic impact of the outbreak, urging a lifting of travel bans and border closures. WHO have previously warned that such travel restrictions increased the chance of food shortages. An agreement made yesterday is expected to lead to those restrictions imposed in the last few months being lifted.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Last Thursday, British sensory biologist Dominic Clarke and other authors published research about detection of floral electric fields by bees in journal Science. The research involved studying bees’ reaction to flowers with different electric fields. The researches concluded that bees can choose flowers based on their electric fields, and remember them as they do with color and other characteristics of flowers.

This Friday Wikinews interviewed Dominic Clarke about the research.

((Wikinews)) What caused your initial interest in electric fields of flowers?

Dominic Clarke: There has been a considerable amount of speculation in the scientific literature since the 60s about the role of electric fields in pollination. It has been suggested that the electric field that arises between a charged bee and a grounded flower may be responsible for increasing the efficiency of pollen transfer between the two. We looked at this literature as sensory biologists and naturally formed the question ‘can bees sense these fields?’. Since we couldn’t find any answers to that question in the literature, we decided to find out for ourselves.

((WN)) How was the new phenomenon discovered?

DC: We use what’s called ‘differential conditioning’, where bees are trained to find a sucrose reward from an array of flowers, where only half of the flowers contain the reward. In our experiment, the flowers that were rewarded (with a sugary solution) were marked with a small electric field (about the same strength as around a flower in the wild). The ones that were not rewarded were not marked with fields. Since the electric field is the only thing that differs between the two flowers, we know that if the bees can learn to tell them apart, they can sense the electric field. Our bees were able to pick the rewarded flower 80% of the time when the electric field was present as a cue. When the electric field was switched off, they could only get it right half the time, which is the same as if they were just picking flowers at random.

((WN)) How many species of flowers and bees did you study during your research?

DC: We focus on one species of bee, the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. And we look mainly at Petunia flowers (P. integrifolia). These two species provide the bulk of our data, but we do consider other flowers like geraniums, daisies, clematis and foxglove, and other species of bee (particularly the honeybee Apis mellifera).

((WN)) Do you have diagrams, sketches, or drawings of electric field around a bee and a flower?

DC: I have attached a picture of a computer model of the electric field around a flower called “Flower Potentials and Fields”.

((WN)) Was it known that bees have a charge before?

DC: Yes, reports as early as the 70s have measured electrical charge on bees, but it was not known before whether or not they could sense such charges.

((WN)) What environment did you study the flowers and bees in? A laboratory? A garden? Natural environment?

DC: The behavioural tests were carried out in a laboratory because we needed to be able to precisely control the environment in which the bees were tested. Future work will be aimed at trying to get out into the bees’ natural environment and trying to figure out exactly what role(s) this sense plays in their lives.

((WN)) What equipment was used during the research? How did you measure the charge?

DC: Charge was measured using a device called a “Faraday Pail”. It is basically an electrically shielded metal cup, the voltage of which changes according to how much charge is inside it. We can measure this voltage when a bee flies in and so measure its charge. We did this with 51 individual bees.

((WN)) What were the roles of the people involved in the research? What activity was most time-consuming?

DC: It was very collaborative in all aspects of the research. I carried out the bulk of the experimental work and data analysis, but the process of designing the experiment, figuring out how to do the analysis, choosing which ideas to follow and which to put on the shelf etc., that is highly collaborative. Then of course comes the long period of writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, sending out to colleagues for feedback, re-re-re-writing, submission, peer-review, editing re-submission etc. which is also a collaboration between all the authors. A large part of doing science is talking as well; meeting, planning brainstorming. It feels to me like putting together the paper took the longest, but perhaps that’s just because it’s the most fresh in my mind.

((WN)) What do you see as possible directions for future research in this field? What do you think possible applications of the discovery can be?

DC: The two big questions now are “how do the bees do this?” and “why do they do this?”. The first is a case of pinning down the sensory mechanism used by the bees to detect the fields, and the second will involve a great deal of field-based experiments. We need to get out of the laboratory and understand the role this phenomenon plays in the lives of bees in the wild.

((WN)) Thank you for sharing your insight and details. Have a good time.

Friday, June 2, 2006

Katharine “Kerry” Close, a 13-year-old 8th-grader from Asbury Park, New Jersey, spelled “ursprache“, a word for the ancestor of a language or language group, to win the 79th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. Close beat out 274 other contestants from 9 to 15 years old. This was Close’s last year of eligibility; she was one of only two contestants this year to be in her fifth year at the national competition. She finished seventh in 2005, having gotten a better ranking every year she’s competed.

This is the Bee’s first appearance on network television, with the finals airing on ABC; earlier rounds were televised in the afternoon on ESPN. Close, who enjoys running, music, reading, and her puppy, is the first New Jersey resident ever to win the competition, which she prepared for up to two hours each day.

Saryn Hooks, 14, was nearly eliminated in the eighth round, with “hechsher”, a symbol indicating that a food has been certified kosher. The judges mistakenly had the word down as “hechscher”; after being removed, she was reinstated in the next round after the judges received the correction. Hooks, who spent six months reading the entire dictionary to prepare, came back with confidence and finished in third place, missing “icteritious” in round twelve. This is the first time the judges have made such a visible error in the televised broadcast.

Kendra Yoshinaga, 12, of Thousand Oaks, California, a favorite for the finals, was knocked out in the seventh round just before the ABC broadcast began by “cointise”, a scarf worn on a lady’s headdress. Yoshinaga said that this third national bee she’s competed in felt “a lot more rigid” than the previous two.

This year’s schedule was rearranged for the ABC news broadcast: previous championships have been held earlier in the day. The spellers have all been given more media attention; for this reason Yoshinaga is perhaps one of the few who didn’t want to win, claiming that it would be too much. She has already received her share of attention, as co-author of The Spelling Bee And Me: A Real-Life Adventure In Learning, a children’s book about her experiences.

“People I don’t know very well seem to make a big deal about it, but my really close friends know that it’s not a really huge part of my life,” she says, of her relative fame. Keenly interested in politics and social issues, Yoshinaga spent a large portion of her last two trips sightseeing in Washington, but this trip, she says, has been more focused on studying.

“My mom sometimes finds words for me from books and magazines,” says the homeschooler, who studied over 30,000 words in the week preceding the national bee. Paige Kimble, bee coordinator, wouldn’t have been surprised to see her break into the top ten.

Another favorite eliminated earlier on in the competition was Samir Patel, who tied for second in last year’s 19-round marathon and placed third in 2003. Patel misspelled “eremacausis” in round 7, joining Yoshinaga and 6 others in a tie for 14th place.

The studious 12-year-old has one more chance at the national finals; Yoshinaga has two, as students may compete from their fourth through eighth grade years.

Cody Boisclair, a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Georgia, misses the competition. He competed in the 1997 and 1998 finals, placing fourth in his second try. The Bee has changed since he began participating, becoming more international, and with increased media attention putting more pressure on spellers. Though many critics claim that the rote memorization and drilling of spelling bees is not a particularly beneficial activity, Boisclair believes his experience in the bee helped his knowledge of language rather than serving as a simple display of memory.

“I was one of those people who tried to dissect the word into its component parts, to find similarities to other words that I was familiar with,” says Boisclair, who began reading at the age of two. “Although I did do some drilling, I tried to find relationships to help me remember words, and even tried to analyze the words I was studying as I studied them.” His analysis skills led him not to a career in lexicography or linguistics but rather to graduate study in computer science.

Boisclair, who spent the evening watching the Bee on television while in a chat room with several other former national finalists, looks back on the competition as one of the highlights of his school years. “I think the best thing about it was a sense of camaraderie—for once, I really felt like I fit in somewhere. I was with people my age who were, by and large, ‘on the same wavelength’.” Also, Jasmine Kaneshiro, 14, from Honolulu, Hawaii, was not a favorite, having done quite badly last year, did better. She moved up from 72nd place in the 2005 bee to 45th place. It was her second year. “I’m pleased with my performance this year,” Kaneshiro said.

Monday, February 8, 2010

A man from the Naperville, Illinois, United States area has been accused of allegedly threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend via messages posted on her Facebook account. 

Nineteen-year-old Christopher J. Bensfield was arrested Jan. 28 at his home in unincorporated DuPage County near the far west-central part of Naperville. He is being held on a $12,500 bond at the DuPage County Jail in Wheaton. He is scheduled to appear at the DuPage County Circuit Court on a felony charge of harassment via electronic communication. Police Sergeant Gregg Bell said the ex-girlfriend, a Naperville-resident, asked Bensfield to stop sending the messages many times before she submitted printed copies of the threatening messages to Naperville police.

Court records indicate Bensfield is already on probation after pleading guilty last September to possession of a controlled substance. He was arrested in August 2008 after disobeying a stop sign in Naperville. Police searched his car and found marijuana and drug paraphernalia. This was the third time Benfield had been arrested for having marijuana since April 2007, when drugs were found in his possession at Naperville Central High School. Last October, a judge issued a fine and required him to join the DuPage County Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program. He has also received five tickets within three months in 2008 for driving violations, including speeding, driving without insurance, transportation of an open alcohol container, and driving too fast for conditions.

Bensfield’s mother also has an order of protection against him. Ms. Bensfield stated that he asked her for money in late December; he then broke into her home in Naperville’s far southeast-side, punching holes in the walls and breaking various items before leaving. Christopher was arrested Dec. 29 and faced a misdemeanor charge of criminal damage to property. He “suffers from bipolar disorder and has not been taking his medication,” according to information the Naperville Daily Herald has received from Ms. Bensfield.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone is currently, courtesy of the Israeli government and friends, visiting Israel. This is a first-hand account of his experiences and may — as a result — not fully comply with Wikinews’ neutrality policy. Please note this is a journalism experiment for Wikinews and put constructive criticism on the collaboration page.

Dr. Yossi Vardi is known as Israel’s ‘Father of the Entrepreneur’, and he has many children in the form of technology companies he has helped to incubate in Tel Aviv‘s booming Internet sector. At the offices of Superna, one such company, he introduced a whirlwind of presentations from his baby incubators to a group of journalists. What stuck most in my head was when Vardi said, “What is important is not the technology, but the talent.” Perhaps because he repeated this after each young Internet entrepreneur showed us his or her latest creation under Vardi’s tutelage. I had a sense of déjà vu from this mantra. A casual reader of the newspapers during the Dot.com boom will remember a glut of stories that could be called “The Rise of the Failure”; people whose technology companies had collapsed were suddenly hot commodities to start up new companies. This seemingly paradoxical thinking was talked about as new back then; but even Thomas Edison—the Father of Invention—is oft-quoted for saying, “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”

Vardi’s focus on encouraging his brood of talent regardless of the practicalities stuck out to me because of a recent pair of “dueling studies” The New York Times has printed. These are the sort of studies that confuse parents on how to raise their kids. The first, by Carol Dweck at Stanford University, came to the conclusion that children who are not praised for their efforts, regardless of the outcome’s success, rarely attempt more challenging and complex pursuits. According to Dweck’s study, when a child knows that they will receive praise for being right instead of for tackling difficult problems, even if they fail, they will simply elect to take on easy tasks in which they are assured of finding the solution.

Only one month earlier the Times produced another story for parents to agonize over, this time based on a study from the Brookings Institution, entitled “Are Kids Getting Too Much Praise?” Unlike Dweck’s clinical study, Brookings drew conclusions from statistical data that could be influenced by a variety of factors (since there was no clinical control). The study found American kids are far more confident that they have done well than their Korean counterparts, even when the inverse is true. The Times adds in the words of a Harvard faculty psychologist who intoned, “Self-esteem is based on real accomplishments. It’s all about letting kids shine in a realistic way.” But this is not the first time the self-esteem generation’s proponents have been criticized.

Vardi clearly would find himself encouraged by Dweck’s study, though, based upon how often he seemed to ask us to keep our eyes on the people more than the products. That’s not to say he has not found his latest ICQ, though only time—and consumers—will tell.

For a Web 2.User like myself, I was most fascinated by Fixya, a site that, like Wikipedia, exists on the free work of people with knowledge. Fixya is a tech support site where people who are having problems with equipment ask a question and it is answered by registered “experts.” These experts are the equivalent of Wikipedia’s editors: they are self-ordained purveyors of solutions. But instead of solving a mystery of knowledge a reader has in their head, these experts solve a problem related to something you have bought and do not understand. From baby cribs to cellular phones, over 500,000 products are “supported” on Fixya’s website. The Fixya business model relies upon the good will of its experts to want to help other people through the ever-expanding world of consumer appliances. But it is different from Wikipedia in two important ways. First, Fixya is for-profit. The altruistic exchange of information is somewhat dampened by the knowledge that somebody, somewhere, is profiting from whatever you give. Second, with Wikipedia it is very easy for a person to type in a few sentences about a subject on an article about the Toshiba Satellite laptop, but to answer technical problems a person is experiencing seems like a different realm. But is it? “It’s a beautiful thing. People really want to help other people,” said the presenter, who marveled at the community that has already developed on Fixya. “Another difference from Wikipedia is that we have a premium content version of the site.” Their premium site is where they envision making their money. Customers with a problem will assign a dollar amount based upon how badly they need an answer to a question, and the expert-editors of Fixya will share in the payment for the resolved issue. Like Wikipedia, reputation is paramount to Fixya’s experts. Whereas Wikipedia editors are judged by how they are perceived in the Wiki community, the amount of barnstars they receive and by the value of their contributions, Fixya’s customers rate its experts based upon the usefulness of their advice. The site is currently working on offering extended warranties with some manufacturers, although it was not clear how that would work on a site that functioned on the work of any expert.

Another collaborative effort product presented to us was YouFig, which is software designed to allow a group of people to collaborate on work product. This is not a new idea, although may web-based products have generally fallen flat. The idea is that people who are working on a multi-media project can combine efforts to create a final product. They envision their initial market to be academia, but one could see the product stretching to fields such as law, where large litigation projects with high-level of collaboration on both document creation and media presentation; in business, where software aimed at product development has generally not lived up to its promises; and in the science and engineering fields, where multi-media collaboration is quickly becoming not only the norm, but a necessity.

For the popular consumer market, Superna, whose offices hosted our meeting, demonstrated their cost-saving vision for the Smart Home (SH). Current SH systems require a large, expensive server in order to coordinate all the electronic appliances in today’s air-conditioned, lit and entertainment-saturated house. Such coordinating servers can cost upwards of US$5,000, whereas Superna’s software can turn a US$1,000 hand-held tablet PC into household remote control.

There were a few start-ups where Vardi’s fatherly mentoring seemed more at play than long-term practical business modeling. In the hot market of WiFi products, WeFi is software that will allow groups of users, such as friends, share knowledge about the location of free Internet WiFi access, and also provide codes and keys for certain hot spots, with access provided only to the trusted users within a group. The mock-up that was shown to us had a Google Maps-esque city block that had green points to the known hot spots that are available either for free (such as those owned by good Samaritans who do not secure their WiFi access) or for pay, with access information provided for that location. I saw two long-term problems: first, WiMAX, which is able to provide Internet access to people for miles within its range. There is already discussion all over the Internet as to whether this technology will eventually make WiFi obsolete, negating the need to find “hot spots” for a group of friends. Taiwan is already testing an island-wide WiMAX project. The second problem is if good Samaritans are more easily located, instead of just happened-upon, how many will keep their WiFi access free? It has already become more difficult to find people willing to contribute to free Internet. Even in Tel Aviv, and elsewhere, I have come across several secure wireless users who named their network “Fuck Off” in an in-your-face message to freeloaders.

Another child of Vardi’s that the Brookings Institution might say was over-praised for self-esteem but lacking real accomplishment is AtlasCT, although reportedly Nokia offered to pay US$8.1 million for the software, which they turned down. It is again a map-based software that allows user-generated photographs to be uploaded to personalized street maps that they can share with friends, students, colleagues or whomever else wants to view a person’s slideshow from their vacation to Paris (“Dude, go to the icon over Boulevard Montmartre and you’ll see this girl I thought was hot outside the Hard Rock Cafe!”) Aside from the idea that many people probably have little interest in looking at the photo journey of someone they know (“You can see how I traced the steps of Jesus in the Galilee“), it is also easy to imagine Google coming out with its own freeware that would instantly trump this program. Although one can see an e-classroom in architecture employing such software to allow students to take a walking tour through Rome, its desirability may be limited.

Whether Vardi is a smart parent for his encouragement, or in fact propping up laggards, is something only time will tell him as he attempts to bring these products of his children to market. The look of awe that came across each company’s representative whenever he entered the room provided the answer to the question of Who’s your daddy?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Six people are confirmed dead after Tuesday’s heavy rains in Slovenia. Up to 300 mm of rain fell in just a few hours across the country, with swollen rivers, torrential streams and landslides sweeping away cars, houses, bridges, and whole sections of roads. In some areas, public services have not yet been restored, and healthcare and drinking water are being provided by mobile units. Some major roads are still closed. The damage includes the destruction of the resistance Hospital Franja, a museum site from the Second World war.

Worst hit was the valley town of Železniki, where three people died, 350 houses were flooded and over a hundred cars were swept away by the swollen river Sora. The dead included a woman who was swept away by the river in her car. The local health facilities and the elementary school are closed. Road communication to several surrounding villages was cut off by landslides. The flood also badly damaged local industry. The lower-lying town of Škofja Loka was also badly hit by the flood. A 31-year-old volunteer fire fighter was killed during the rescue effort in Cerklje.

Other badly affected areas include those along the rivers Sava, Savinja and Dravinja. All three rivers and many of their tributaries overflowed and flooded fields and towns. The low-lying parts of Celje, Laško and Nazarje were flooded by up to 2 meters of water. A 34-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman were killed in Podgorje near Braslov?e when their house was buried in a landslide. Two older people managed to leave the house unharmed.

Damage was widespread across the country and many roads were blocked by landslides. Velenje was cut off from the world for more than a day. The main road connecting the mountainous Bohinj valley to the central part of the country was closed, leaving only the mountain road to Tolmin.

Near the town of Cerkno, which was itself flooded, the museum site of Hospital Franja was nearly completely destroyed. The partisan resistance hospital from the Second World War, situated in a narrow mountain canyon above the town and named after the young doctor who worked at the site, treated hundreds of wounded resistance fighters and remained undiscovered by the Wehrmacht throughout the war. The hospital consisted of 12 wooden cabins and a miniature hydroelectric power plant. The power plant and all but one of the wooden cabins and were swept away by the swollen stream. Hundreds of exhibits, including medicine containers, locally produced medical equipment and an x-ray machine were lost or badly damaged.

The government of Slovenia directed €500,000 from the emergency fund to immediate rescue and repair operations, and has promised to help the affected municipalities and population with funds from the budget. The government has also pledged to rebuild the Hospital Franja museum site.

[edit]

Saturday, August 6, 2005

The Finnish police isolated the ports of Katajanokka and Länsisatama on Saturday. The ports were isolated at around 9.30 p.m. local time and the isolation was called off at around 11.30 p.m.

Finnish police received reports from Estonia that a shipping container loaded with explosives could be coming from Estonia Saturday evening. They checked every truck that passed the ports with the assistance of the Border Guard Service. There are still two ships due to arrive in Helsinki tonight, but they were already checked in Tallinn.