Thursday, September 28, 2006

The Health Board of New York City on Tuesday presented a plan to ban trans fatty acids (or trans fat) from the eateries in the city. The ban would not involve grocery stores, or natural trans fat that is present in dairy products or meat from ruminants.

The proposal follows a campaign last year to encourage restaurants to cut down on using trans fat themselves, but recent surveys show that the campaign was unsuccessful. In 2003, the city already instituted a smoking ban in restaurants, which was met with protest, but the measure has been copied in many other states since.

In Western countries, most trans fat in food today is the result of industrial processing, and has been linked to coronary heart disease. Frying oils, shortening and margarines with trans fats have easier storing requirements. Artificial trans fat is considered by some experts to be even more dangerous than natural trans fat.

The new limit would be at 0.5 grams of trans fatty acids per menu item, whereas a typical serving of French fries contains about 8 grams. It would be instituted in several phases, allowing time for eateries to adapt.

The plan would also have serious implications for both fast food chains and restaurants. A spokesperson for the New York State Restaurant Association reacted with disbelief, stating that “Labeling is one thing, but when they totally ban a product, it goes well beyond what we think is prudent and acceptable,” referring to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s requirement for food labels to list trans fat, a measure taken last January.

The Boards Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden on the other hand said the ban would be a challenge for cooks, but substitute oils can easily be found. Comparing it to lead paint, he said “It is a dangerous and unnecessary ingredient”, adding that “No one will miss it when it’s gone.”

A similar ban is being considered in Chicago, but would only target companies with annual revenues over $20 million, thereby targeting exclusively major fast-food restaurants. The U.S. brands Wendy’s, Crisco, Frito-Lay, Starbucks, Subway, and Kraft’s have already taken action to remove trans fat from some of their products.

Denmark became the first country in the world imposing strict regulations on trans fatty acids in March 2003. McDonalds consequently started using trans fat-free oils in Denmark, but has not yet switched over in the United States.

A public hearing is scheduled on October 30, and a final vote on the proposal is scheduled for December.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Wikinews extended invitations by e-mail on March 23 to multiple candidates running in the Texas’ 6th congressional district special election of May 1 to fill a vacancy left upon the death of Republican congressman Ron Wright. Of them, the office of Democrat Daryl Eddings, Sr. agreed to answer some questions by phone March 30 about their campaigns and policies. The following is the interview with Ms Chatham on behalf of Mr Eddings, Sr.

Eddings is a federal law enforcement officer and senior non-commissioned officer in the US military. His experience as operations officer of an aviation unit in the California National Guard includes working in Los Angeles to control riots sparked by the O. J. Simpson murder case and the police handling of Rodney King, working with drug interdiction teams in Panama and Central America and fighting in the Middle East. He is the founder of Operation Battle Buddy, which has under his leadership kept in touch with over 20 thousand veterans and their families. He was born in California, but moved to Midlothian, Texas. He endeavours to bring “good government, not no government”. Campaign manager Faith Chatham spoke to Wikinews on matters ranging from healthcare to housing.

An Inside Elections poll published on March 18 shows Republican candidate Susan Wright, the widow of Ron Wright, is ahead by 21% followed by Democrat Jana Sanchez with 17% and Republican Jake Ellzey with 8% with a 4.6% margin of error among 450 likely voters. The district is considered “lean Republican” by Inside Elections and voted 51% in favour of Donald Trump in last year’s US presidential election. This is down from 54% for Trump in 2016’s presidential election, the same poll stated.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Installations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) security cameras into schools in the Australian state of New South Wales has alarmed teachers.

Over 50 schools in New South Wales already have surveillance cameras in playgrounds and outside dining areas. The concern from teachers arises from the pending installation of further cameras inside classrooms and also corridors.

Teachers have expressed concerns about privacy and misuse of the equipment. Senior vice-president of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, Bob Lipscombe, said that teachers are worried about the footage being used improperly, as well as the fact that both teachers and students would be filmed at work by the cameras.

The increase in security cameras being used in schools is an attempt to protect valuable schooling equipment from theft and damage, in particular computers in computer rooms. Lipscombe said that installations in computer rooms will potentially affect many teachers, as all subjects can be taught with the integration of technology.

CCTV surveillance is preferred by some schools over fitting alarm systems and physical bars on entrances to the room, as it is cheaper to install.

Lipscombe said that the Teachers Federation isn’t against CCTV systems provided they are operated properly and with appropriate consent. A solution proposed is to only have the surveillance system record during times when the room is unattended.

A spokesperson for the New South Wales Department of Education and Training has said that the footage obtained is confidential and used to assist police in investigating criminal activity.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

An American football coach has been shot at his school gym in Iowa, United States. Ed Thomas was shot in front of his students at around 8.00 am local time. Thomas was in the weight room at the time of the shooting. An adult male has been arrested suspected of his murder.

Thomas was the head football coach at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. He had coached 37 seasons of High School football in his career and has a career record of 292-84 of which 156-31 is with Aplington-Parkersburg. He led Parkersburg to 19 state playoffs and won state titles in 1993 and 2001. He was named NFL High School Coach of the Year in 2003 and previously coached four active NFL players including Brad Meester, Jared DeVries, Casey Wiegmann and Aaron Kampman.

Thomas was well known in the local community for his work. When Parkersburg was hit by a tornado in the summer of 2008 Thomas worked endlessly to restore the damaged football field. County Sheriff Jason Johnson said that “Coach Thomas is the pillar of the community. Anything that affects him affects Parkersburg.”

No students were injured during the shooting.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Penske Automotive Group, Inc., an Ohio-based investment group and Telesto Ventures have indicated separately that they are interested in purchasing the Saturn auto brand from General Motors (GM).

According to The Wall Street Journal, Nissan-Renault is interested in purchasing Saturn. Bloomberg, however, indicated that Nissan-Renault may be a partner of Penske’s potential bid. If Penske acquired the brand, they would distribute Saturn vehicles and outsource the assembly.

GM revealed that the Saturn brand along with Saab and Hummer were up for sale when unveiling their restructuring plans to Congress for governmental loans. While the Pontiac brand was originally to be a niche brand, GM had changed their plans recently and decided to eliminate the brand.

Telesto Ventures is an investment group that includes private equity firm Black Oak Partners LLC of Oklahoma City and several Saturn dealerships. Initially, Telesto will purchase Saturn branded cars from GM then act as a general retailer for foreign brands. Telesto is in talks with several foreign manufacturers.

The Ohio group includes many former senior auto company managers plus private financial backers, chemists and engineers who live in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Florida. This group plans to initially purchase cars from GM then purchase existing but closed plants due to automaker restructuring. Additionally, one of the partners indicated a willingness to accept some “legacy” cost in relation to the United Auto Workers. The Ohio group is also pursuing possible loans or other support from national and state governments.

GM is reviewing several offers for Saturn. GM has contracted with S.J. Girsky & Co. to advise them on the sale.

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?

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Earlier this week, Wikinews interviewed Sarah Walsh, a former Australian women’s national soccer team (Matilidas) player, about women’s football in the country.

The Australian women’s team is currently ranked ninth by FIFA, down one spot from the previous quarter when they were tied at eighth with the North Korea women’s national football team. Meanwhile, Australia’s men (Socceroos) are currently ranked 59th in the world, between the Burkina Faso and Slovakia national football team. Walsh retired from the national team in September of last year, after scoring 32 goals in 71 appearances. She was on Matildas side that qualified for the World Cup for the first time while playing in the Asian Football Confederation instead of the Oceania Football Confederation. She also played in two World Cup quarter-finals for the team. Playing in Australia’s top level domestic league, the W-League, she won the league championship in 2009. She retired from the league this year. Walsh played professionally in the United States for Sky Blue FC and Saint Louis Athletica.

((WN)) : The Socceroos are ranked 59th by FIFA. The Matildas are ranked 8th by FIFA in the latest rankings. Should media coverage correlate to team performance and internationally rankings? Is there an element of tall poppy syndrome in the coverage of the Socceros? What other factors can be used to explain the relative differences in media attention other than performance?

Sarah Walsh: Traditionally in Australia, male sports have dominated media coverage. Slowly we are seeing women’s sports feature more frequently in mainstream media publications. There is a growing interest in women’s sports, especially women’s national teams in general here in Australia. With time, the public will be exposed to more female sports on a daily basis and perhaps will build the same affections for these female sports. As a teenager, I was exposed to NRL living in Sydney, so naturally I have a strong interest in this game along with football (soccer). Young female teenagers today, have the option to turn the TV on and watch the W-league and follow their heroes. I believe in 5–10 years’ time we will see a cultural change with regards to media coverage and gender bias.

((WN)) : What’s the difference in style of play between the men and women’s national teams?

Sarah Walsh: Men

They appear to play a possession-based game working at effective possession combined with a developing system of pressing using our natural athleticism and high work rate as well as our cultural mental strength.

Sarah Walsh: Women

The women seem to employ a more defensive and well organized “block” making it hard for teams to play through particularly in the middle and our back thirds utilizing transitional moments (BPO – BP) to good effect with quick attacks through the natural speed of certain players.

((WN)) : Why are the Matildas more successful in international competitions and ranking wise than the Socceroos?

Sarah Walsh: There could be a number of contributing factors. One in particular could be dues to financial reasons. Given there is more financial support for men’s national teams globally in general, I believe the competition across the board is more extensive. Due to this, there are more teams that compete at a higher level, so effectively this would make it difficult for the Socceroos to reach the same ranking as Matildas.

((WN)) : Why do you think men don’t watch the Matildas in the same numbers as they watch the Socceroos?

Sarah Walsh: Answer similar to question 1.

((WN)) : Does the media feed into traditional Australian gender stereotypes by not covering elite women’s sports?

Sarah Walsh: Similar to question 1.

((WN)) : What is your role in sports? Journalist? Academic? Sport administrator? Player? Please provide one to two sentence biography to contextualize your answers.

Sarah Walsh: I started playing football at 5 years of age. I made my debut for the Matildas at 21 (2004–2012) I have spent the past two years working in community football at FFA delivering a Drug and Alcohol program. I am currently the Women’s Football Coordinator and Female Elite Player mentor at FFA. Actually on wikipedia if you would like to cut and paste all that info!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

A large forest fire that started on Monday, June 9 is still out of control in the municipality of Froland in southern Norway. The fire is the largest forest fire to occur in Norway since World War II.

The fire has spread extensively and it is estimated that approximately 2,500 acres of forest have been damaged. Approximately 15 cabins are reported to have burned to the ground, but as of yet, no permanent dwellings or farms have been damaged. However, many inhabitants have been evacuated due to the fire threatening their homes, including the entire villages of Mykland and Belland. There have also been some power outages due to power lines being damaged.

Approximately 140 persons, including fire-fighters from several fire departments, and personnel from the Civil Defence and the Home Guard are working to curtail the fire. Four fire helicopters have been deployed. The fire fighting is focused on areas where the fire threatens buildings.

Extremely dry weather, and difficult wind conditions, have caused severe difficulties in fighting the fire. Fire-fighters first had hope of gaining control on the morning of Thursday, June 12, but the wind changed direction during the day, causing a large extension of the fire. There is some hope that the weekend will bring some rain; however, this will likely not be enough to stop the fire. It could take several weeks before the fire is completely extinguished.

Saturday, July 2, 2005

Ujjal Dosanjh, Canada’s Minister of Health, has set out a plan to stop U.S. cities and states from purchasing drugs in bulk from Canadian suppliers. The plan is being criticized as potentially destroying a number of mail order and internet-based pharmacies operating in Canada that ship prescription drugs to the United States. It is said the result may simply cause orders to shift to suppliers in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, as well as possibly Mexico.