China anti-textbook protests grow larger

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Chinese protests against the publication of a Japanese government textbook continued for a second day in China, (Sunday) as an estimated three thousand protesters marched on the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou. Thousands of protesters also marched in Shenzhen, throwing objects at Japanese businesses.

The protesters repeated their demands for a boycott of Japanese goods, to block Japan from obtaining a seat on the U.N. Security Council, and for Japan to change textbooks which they say whitewash Japan’s war atrocities. Protesters burned Japanese flags while singing and shouting anti-Japanese slogans. They also carried anti-Japanese signs along with Chinese flags.Chinese view the textbook as “whitewashing” the events and actions of Japan to cast them in a more positive light.

The protests are against the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which is publishing a high-school textbook that refers to the Nanjing Massacre as an “incident” (translation) and de-emphasizes the roles of comfort women as well as the contemporary issues surrounding Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine, in honor of Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese government has claimed that the demonstrations have an “anti-Japanese sentiment,” for which China should apologise.In Tokyo, Japan formally summoned Wang Yi, China’s ambassador to Japan, concerning China’s actions on Sunday.

“We formally demanded China’s apology and compensation,” said Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura. He also said that Wang Yi replied “No” when asked for an apology.

While not issuing a formal apology through diplomatic channels, Wang claimed that China did not approve of the violent aspects of the protests.

“The (Chinese) government does not agree with extreme action,” he said.

Back in Beijing, the People’s Daily reported that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang deflected blame away from China for the recent downturn in Sino-Japanese relations.

“Japan must adopt an earnest attitude and appropriate ways to deal with major principled issues concerning the feelings of the Chinese people,” Qin said. “The Japanese have to do more things conducive to enhancing mutual trust and maintaining the relations between the two countries, rather than doing the reverse,” he said.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

A Delta II rocket blasted off from NASA’s Cape Canaveral launch pad today, carrying five satellites designed to investigate the northern lights and the electromagnetic storms that cause them. The launch had been twice delayed due to bad weather, but was eventually performed at 23:00 UTC.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have collectively invested $200 million in the mission, known as the THEMIS Project. Through this mission, they hope to develop better techniques to forecast electromagnetic storms, in order to protect communication satellites, power grids, and spacewalking astronauts. Scientists from the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary also helped with the project.

The Sun continuously sends a stream of charged particles, called the solar wind, at the Earth. We are generally protected from the solar wind by the Earth’s magnetosphere. During substorms, however, the magnetosphere gets overloaded by the solar wind and the magnetic field lines stretch until they eventually snap back, energizing and flinging electrically charged particles towards Earth.

Scientists want to find out what snaps in the overloaded magnetosphere to trigger a substorm.

Monday, June 23, 2008

2008 COMPUTEX Taipei, the largest trade fair since its inception in 1982, featured several seminars and forums, expansions on show spaces to TWTC Nangang, great transformations for theme pavilions, and WiMAX Taipei Expo, mainly promoted by Taipei Computer Association (TCA). Besides of ICT industry, “design” progressively became the critical factor for the future of the other industries. To promote innovative “Made In Taiwan” products, pavilions from “Best Choice of COMPUTEX”, “Taiwan Excellence Awards”, and newly-set “Design and Innovation (d & i) Award of COMPUTEX”, demonstrated the power of Taiwan’s designs in 2008 COMPUTEX Taipei.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Consumption of grilled or baked fish at least once a week can preserve the brain structure of seniors and reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by three to five times, according to the results of a recent US study.

The study, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, asked 260 volunteers with an average age of 76, about the frequency of their fish consumption. Ten years later, brain scans were carried out on those being researched. Those who regularly ate fish were found to have better preservation of parts of the brain related to memory. An additional five years later, 31% of those who did not regularly consume fish contracted mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Of those who ate fish at least once a week, between three and eight per cent contracted the aforementioned medical conditions.

According to The Daily Telegraph, consumption of grilled or baked fish increases the intake of Omega 3 fatty acids, providing a greater amount of blood flow to the brain; therefore prompting a reduction in inflammation and internal gathering of plaque encountered in the lead-up to Alzheimer’s disease. Fried fish does not reduce the risk of contracting Alzheimer’s disease due to the low amount of Omega 3 it contains.

Dr. Cyrus Raji, who took leadership of the study, called it “the first study to establish a direct relationship between fish consumption, brain structure and Alzheimer’s risk.” Raji concluded that “people who consumed baked or [grilled] fish at least one time per week had better preservation of grey matter volume on MRI in brain areas at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”

The Alzheimer’s Society’s research manager, Dr. Anne Corbett, stated: “This moderately sized study adds weight to existing evidence suggesting that eating fish reduces your risk of developing cognitive decline.” However, she contested these findings, saying they “did not account for lifestyle factors such as other foods or exercise”, which may have affected the overall outcome. Dr. Corbett advised consumers to “eat a healthy diet including fruit and vegetables along with taking regular exercise and giving up smoking” to reduce the risk of contracting dementia.

Meanwhile, Alzheimer’s Research UK lead researcher, Dr. Simon Ridley, believed the study had not clarified “whether other underlying factors may have contributed to the lower risk in people who eat fish.” There is “a clear need for more conclusive research into the effects of dietary fish on our cognitive health,” according to Dr. Ridley.

The results of the study are to be presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Thursday, July 7, 2005

A Florida man is being charged with 3rd degree felony for logging into a private Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) Internet access point without permission. Benjamin Smith III, 41, is set for a pre-trial hearing this month in the first case of its kind in the United States.

This kind of activity occurs frequently, but often goes undetected by the owners of these wireless access points (WAPs). Unauthorized users range from casual Web browsers, to users sending e-mails, to users involved in pornography or even illegal endeavours.

According to Richard Dinon, owner of the WAP Smith allegedly broke into, Smith was using a laptop in an automobile while parked outside Dinon’s residence.

There are many steps an owner of one of these access points can take to secure them from outside users. Dinon reportedly knew how to take these steps, but had not bothered because his “neighbors are older.”

Wednesday, November 30, 2005File:Turing1.jpg

More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.

The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg

Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.

Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.

In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.

Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.

Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”

Monday, July 18, 2005

Utah Senator Chris Buttars has decided not to introduce a bill requiring the teaching of “divine design” in Utah schools, at least for this year. Buttars withdrew after State Board of Education director Patti Harrington assured him that Utah public school curriculum does not teach that man descended from apes.

Buttars had hoped his divine design proposal would escape the controversy of creationism or intelligent design. “The only people who will be upset about this are atheists,” he stated on June 6 when he announced his intention to run the bill.

Utah is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints also known as the Mormon Church. On the surface it would seem Utah would be a likely scene of intense religious pressure in public schools over the teaching of evolution. But unlike states with a strong Christian conservative presence, Utah’s LDS leaders have avoided some of the more contentious separation state and church battles.

On the topic of divine design, official LDS church spokesmen have been largely silent at least in public. But with more than 90% of the legislature made up of members of the LDS faith, few in Utah would deny the influence of the church on public policy.

Groups on both sides of the issue are gearing up for what many consider an inevitable fight. The ACLU of Utah has posted a paper on divine design on its web site (http://www.acluutah.org). The Eagle Forum which wields significant policital power in Utah has expressed its support for Buttars proposed legislation.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

The U.K. government defined Intelligent Design along with creationism as religion and ruled that neither has a place within the country’s school science curriculum.

This was in reaction to an electronic petition launched by James Rocks of the “Science, Just Science” campaign, a group formed to oppose “Truth in Science” and other groups in the anti-evolution lobby in the UK. The petition was signed by 1,505 people.

In the petition details, Rocks wrote, “Creationism & Intelligent design are greatly featured in the media and are being used disingenuously to portray science & the theory of evolution as being in crisis when they are not. Moreover groups such as Truth in Science are targeting our nation’s children and their science education with material that is not only non-scientific but have been rejected by the scientific community. These ideas therefore do not constitute science, cannot be considered scientific education and therefore do not belong in the nation’s science classrooms.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office wrote: “The (UK) Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The [UK] Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science.”

The government will also be “publishing guidance for schools, on the way creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching”.