Archives July 2022

Friday, August 26, 2005

A Midland, Michigan hotel was temporarily quarantined Thursday night when a letter with suspicious white powder was opened at the Ashman Court Hotel on Main Street.

A hotel employee is said to have opened the letter around 16:00 UTC time on Thursday. Shortly after, the police, FBI and HAZMAT teams were called to the building. Preliminary results from FBI tests showed that the envelope did not contain the deadly bacteria anthrax, as first thought.

The letter contained “a threat” according to local reports, however details were not released. It is also unknown as to what substance the white powder is.

This is the second anthrax scare on the city this year, exactly four months ago the Midland Daily News office, located across the street to the hotel, was sent a similar envelope with suspicious powder. It is not known if the two cases are related or not.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Members of Australia’s Health Services Union (HSU) will go on strike in Victoria next week in a dispute over stalled wage and career structure negotiations. Over 5000 physiotherapists, speech pathologists and radiation therapists will walk off the job next week, effectively closing the state’s 68 largest health services.

The strike will force the closure of intensive care units and emergency departments across the state.

It is feared the strike could continue into Easter.

National secretary of the HSU, Kathy Jackson said admissions would be crippled, while intensive care patients would have to be evacuated to New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia as hospitals will not be able to perform tests or administer treatment.

“When an ambulance shows up you can’t admit a patient without an X-ray being available, you can’t intubate them and you can’t operate on them,” she said.

“If something goes wrong in an ICU you need to be able to X-ray, use nuclear medicine or any diagnostic procedure,” said Ms Jackson.

Ms Jackson said the HSU offered arbitration last year, but the state government refused. “They’re not interested in settling disputes, they hope that we are just going to go away.”

“We’re not going away, we’ve gone back and balloted the whole public health workforce in Victoria, those ballots were successful, 97 percent approval rating,” she said.

The HSU is urging the government to commence serious negotiations to resolve the dispute before industrial action commenced.

The government has offered the union a 3.25 per cent pay increase, in line with other public sector workers but the union has demanded more, but stopped short of specifying a figure.

Victorian Premier John Brumby said the claim would be settled according to the government’s wages policy. “The Government is always willing and wanting to sit down and negotiate with the relevant organisations . . . we have a wages policy based around an increase of 3.25 per cent and, above that, productivity offset,” he told parliament.

The union claims it is also arguing against a lack of career structure, which has caused many professionals to leave the health service. Ms Jackson said wages and career structures in Victoria were behind other states.

Victorian Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said he was not in support of the proposed strike and called on the government to meet with unions. “There could not be a more serious threat to our health system than has been announced today.”

“We now have to do whatever is possible to stop this strike from proceeding,” he said.

The opposition leader will meet with the union at 11:30 AM today.

Victorian Hospitals Industry Association industrial relations services manager Simon Chant said hospitals were looking at the possible impact and warned that patients may have to be evacuated interstate if the strike goes ahead.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Virgin Media announced weak results last week, in part due to competition from Sky. Virgin Media lost 47,000 customers from January to March 2007, while Sky gained 51,000 customers in the same time period.

Franklin Mutual Advisers, which has 9.4% of the Virgin Media shares (Sir Richard Branson owns 11%) wants to have a meeting with Virgin Media about its “strategic direction, corporate governance and management”. Franklin Mutual Advisers is known to take great interest in the companies in which it invests.

This has caused many of the other investors of Virgin Media to demanding meetings with the management of the company. The demands are due to confusion among shareholders at the direction in which the company is heading, The Guardian reports. After the attempt to buy ITV was stopped last year, the shareholders think that Virgin Media may lose its battle with Sky and TalkTalk.

Another issue causing concerns amongst investors is the £25.2 million pay cheques for the top seven executives of Virgin Media. Virgin Media reported a £15.3 million loss last year.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

In the United States of America and other parts of the word, as Christmas and the holidays draw near, shippers have released information on shipping deadlines. Remember to always clearly label and address your holiday packages.

Friday, May 22, 2020

A study published in journal Astronomy & Astrophysics last month reported astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and elsewhere discovered a black hole in the Telescopium constellation. The study stated the black hole is about 1010 ± 195 light years (310 ± 60 parsec) away from the Solar System, meaning it is the nearest known black hole from the Earth. The nearest previously known black hole — V616 Mon — the study noted was usually estimated at more than 3000 light years away.

The black hole described in the study is located in the HR 6819 stellar system of Telescopium constellation, making it the first system visible to the naked eye to contain a black hole. HR 6819 contains two stars, and they are visible from the Southern Hemisphere. The astronomers started observing the system in 1999. Initially, they thought it was just a binary system, consisting of two stars. However, upon examination, the researchers concluded there was a third unseen object in the system. One of the two stars in the HR 6819 system is close to the black hole and orbits the black hole in just 40.333 ± 0.004 days.

This newly discovered black hole does not have an accretion disk. A black hole forms an accretion disk when a significant amount of matter orbits the black hole, as depicted in the image. Accretion disks often emit electromagnetic radiation. Since this black hole does not have an accretion disk, researchers had to rely on the gravitational effect of the black hole on the nearby star in order to discover it.

Researchers used the binary mass function to conclude the black hole had a mass of at least 4.2 M_? (Solar masses; 1 Solar mass = mass of the Sun). Its companion star, which orbits the black hole in about 40 days, is classified as a B3 III star. The outer star is classified as a Be star. Be stars rotate very quickly around their axes. Since the outer star rotates so rapidly, the star is not exactly spherical, but instead oblate, bulged at its equator, forming a gas disk around the equator.

The research suggested HR 6819 was very similar to another system LB-1. The HR 6819 system is estimated to be between 15–75 million years old (myr). The inner star has estimated mass of at least 6.3 ± 0.7 M_?. Using the mass and the speed at which the inner star rotates, the researchers concluded the black hole had an estimated mass of 5.0 ± 0.4 M_?. Researcher and co-author of the study Thomas Rivinius told Wikinews the inner star and the black hole are closer than the Sun and the Earth (1au; 150 million km; 93 million miles).

The researchers dedicated the paper to Stanislav Štefl, one of the fellow researchers who died in a car accident in 2014 in Santiago, Chile.

Wikinews caught up with Thomas Rivinius to discuss about this discovery.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

The Oxford University Press in Australia has released a list of the most-used words in a study of nearly 4,000 writing samples from children in their first three years of school. After removing names of people, places and brands, the top 307 words were published. “I” topped the list, with “my” in 7th place and “me” at 33rd. By comparison, “we” came in 9th, “he“, “they” and “she” were 13th, 16th and 21st respectively, with “you” at 31st. Family also featured highly in the top 100, including “mum” (34th), “dad” (36th), “brother” (78th) and “sister” (99th), with “friends” making it to 91st place.

Some of the other popular topics on the full list include:

This word list is the first of its kind to be compiled in Australia in 30 years. The previous list, referred to as the “Salisbury Word List”, was based on a 1978-79 study undertaken by the Education Department of South Australia and comprised 2,000 words. A research paper, released in conjunction with the Oxford list, looked into similarities and differences of the words used between children of different generation (based on comparisons with the Salisbury list), gender, ethnic background, socio-economic status, and area of residence (i.e. urban or rural). The paper found a drop in the level of formality of children’s writing when compared to the previous list, with words such as “mother“, “father“, “Mr” and “Mrs” falling out of favour, while the less formal “mum” and “dad” retained their popularity.

The study also found that the children tended to share a common core vocabulary, evident particularly in the top 100 words which varied little according to the various factors, but that differences often highlighted similar differences in cultures. For example, children of a non-English speaking background were more likely to write about less active past-times (such as “movie”, “garden” and “computer”) and family activities (using words such as “family”, “ate” and derivatives of “cousin”) than their counterparts, who did not use “cousin” or “family” in their top 100 words, and referred to more active pursuits as “soccer” and “swimming”.

While comparisons were made between child vocabularies of other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, the researchers pointed out issues in doing so due to the different methodologies involved. According to the researchers, “[t]he Oxford Wordlist […] has been presented as a resource freely available to all Australian educators”.

Monday, September 7, 2015

The US economy added 173,000 jobs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. The unemployment rate fell from 5.3 to 5.1 percent, the lowest since April 2008.

Although August job gains were lower than most economists forecast, job growth numbers for June and July were revised upwards by a combined 44,000. Average job gains over the past three months stand at 221,000, compared to March-May’s 189,000 monthly average. Over the past twelve months, job growth has averaged 247,000 per month.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent, or 8 cents, marking the largest increase in earnings in seven months. Hourly earnings had risen by 6 cents in July. Wages have risen by 2.2 percent over the past year.

Job growth in August was primarily concentrated in the health care and social assistance, financial activities, and professional and business services sectors. Those three areas of the economy added a combined 108,000 jobs. Food service and drinking places employment increased by 26,000 over the month, and other economic sectors saw employment hold steady. Manufacturing, on the other hand, saw employment decline by 17,000 in August. A stronger dollar and worldwide economic weakness make US exports less desirable, leading to a flattening in manufacturing employment so far this year after steadily rising in the early years of the US economic recovery.

The solid overall job gains led analysts to slightly raise expectations for a decision by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this month. Investors raised the likelihood of a September rate increase from 26 percent before the jobs report to 30 percent, and stocks dropped by over one percent on Friday. “The payrolls data is certainly good enough to allow for a Fed rate hike in September,” said Deutsche Bank’s head of currency strategy, Alan Ruskin. “The big question is still whether financial market volatility will scupper the plans.”

“This is the first time the market has looked at a Fed meeting and really has no idea what the Fed is going to do,” said Mark Kepner, a New Jersey equity trader with Themis Trading. “Right now you’re looking at the overall uncertainty and that’s what’s hanging on the market. I don’t think this number in and of itself changes how somebody’s going to vote.”

Monday, February 4, 2008

For the first time in Texas’s history, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is conducting an online vote to help decide which license plate design the state will use beginning in early 2009.

The week-long vote is being held at dot.state.tx.us. It started Monday at noon and will end on February 11 at the same time. Anyone can vote for one of five license plate designs, including the current design.

The designs are:

• Traditional Texas — This simple design features blue highlights at the top and bottom and a gold star.
• Lone Star Texas — This design uses a mountainous landscape under a bright, cloudy sky as its background. In the top left corner is a white star amid a splash of red and blue.
• Natural Texas — The background is a field filled with wildflowers.
• New Texas — This red, white and blue design features a skyline composed of landmarks from major Texas cities including Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. A large gold star is faintly visible in the background.
• My Texas — This is the current license plate that was introduced in 2000. It features silhouettes of a desert landscape with an oil derrick and a man on horseback, as well as a starry night sky with a space shuttle.

All of the designs incorporate the state’s name, an outline of the state, and the state’s nickname, “The Lone Star State”. TxDOT says they took legibility and reflectivity into account when making the designs, in order to promote safety and law enforcement.

The decision to allow a public vote was made because the state was running out of six-character combinations to assign to drivers. The new license plates will have seven characters, regardless of the public’s decision.

“By the end of this year, we will be out of license plate combinations for the three letters and three numbers that we currently put on the general-issue plate,” said Rebecca Davio, director of Vehicle Titles and Registration. “Because we need to change the plate, we thought it was the perfect time to invite Texans to participate in a design selection.”

According to TxDOT, it took 33 years to exhaust the number of six-character combinations, and using current population growth figures, they project it will take 35 years to run out of seven-character combinations.

The Texas Transportation Commission must give final approval of the design. TxDOT says the commission is “enthusiastic” about giving the public an opportunity to vote for the new design.

TxDOT considered allowing the public to submit designs, but ultimately decided that it would use a “substantial amount of state-worker time” and wouldn’t be a “prudent use of taxpayer money”.

At the time of this writing, an unofficial vote count showed the “Lone Star Texas” design in first place with over 22,000 votes. “Natural Texas” was second with over 14,000, followed by “Traditional Texas”, “New Texas”, and the current design “My Texas”.