xldlife.com

Wednesday, April 29, 2009THEMIS space probes discovered that the Northern lights are seen when electrical tornadoes, rotating faster than a million miles an hour, hover about 40,000 miles (60,000 km) above the earth. The energy spins down to the Earth’s ionosphere where the tornadoes become unstable, and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Professor Karl-Heinz Glassmeier, director of the Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics in Braunschweig Germany, explains, “When these space tornadoes reach the upper atmosphere their enormous energy heats the air so strongly it starts glowing. That is what generates the aurorae.”

“It is here that all the energy is released, forming the aurorae. What we see as beautiful lights and colors are actually the product of a violent electrical storm in space. While these electrical discharges do not cause any direct harm to humans, they can damage man-made structures such as power transformers and communications systems,” said Andreas Keiling, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) are five probes launched by NASA in February 2007, which orbited Earth recording the volume and electrical current which was higher than 100,000 amperes.

Scientists had previously concluded that aurorae are caused by electrically charged particles discharged as solar winds from the sun which interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. However, these solar discharges strike the Earth where the sun is shining and the aurorae occur in the opposite hemisphere and are visible in the night sky.

This anomaly was cleared up by THEMIS satellites which showed that the Earth’s magnetic field held the charged particles before deflecting them from the day side of the planet across to the opposite side of the planet where the particles massed into huge clouds. There the accumulated charge expands continuously until finally the cloud becomes unstable releasing its energy as a geomagnetic tornado which travels down towards the earth along magnetic field lines becoming visible as aurorae in the sky.

The scientists presented their findings at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna, Austria just this week.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The provincial election was called today in British Columbia. Alongside with the election, the citizens of the province will also be debating if they should change their electoral system from Single Member Plurality to Single Transferable Vote (STV). The vote for both the election and the referendum is to be held on May 12th.

According to the Angus Reid Strategies online poll, the issues before the candidates this year are the economy, crime and public safety, and health care.

Gordon Campbell is the current Premier of British Columbia, and leader of the Liberal Party. Three new tax measures have been proposed, increasing apprenticeship training tax credits, reducing small business income tax, and raising the revenue definition for small business. “Keep B.C. Strong” is the Liberal slogan.

The New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Carole James is focusing her election platform on supporting a green economy, eliminating the carbon tax, offering families tax relief, freezing post-secondary tuition, raising the minimum wage, and providing a small business tax holiday. The NDP slogan is “Take back your B.C.”

The Green Party, led by Jane Sterk, is focused on environmental issues, crime and police, and a ‘green economy’. The Green Party is in support of the carbon tax and will be campaigning in favour of the new STV voting system that is being proposed again. The Green Party slogan is “A better plan for B.C.”File:Carole james.jpg

Wilf Hanni is at the helm of the Conservative Party which opposes the Recognition and Reconciliation Act, privatization of BC Hydro Bill 42 ‘gag law’, and the carbon tax. They propose to reduce senior civil employee pay scale, as well as personal and corporate income tax.

Other parties running candidates are the Democratic Reform under Graeme Roger, the Marijuana Party under Marc Emery, the Work Less Party under Conrad Schmidt, the Refederation Party under Mike Summers, the Sex Party under John Ince, and the Communist Party under George Gidora.

For 60 days before the election, each party may campaign with an allowable CA$1.1 million, in the final 28 days, $4.4 million may be spent. $70,000 is allowed by candidates before the writ is dropped, and another $70,000 in the midst of campaigning.

The referendum will allow BC voters to choose between two voting systems. The Single Member Plurality system is the current system in all Canadian provinces, and is also used to elect Members of Parliament in Ottawa. The other system is BC-STV, which would replace 85 single-member ridings with 20 larger ridings in which between two and seven Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) would be elected. The total number of MLAs will not change. Voters would rank the candidates in order of preference, as many or as few as they wish. When the results are tallied, votes are transferred to the next preference on the ballot when the first preference has been elected or eliminated. The system is designed to ensure that every vote helps to elect someone, every vote counts as fully as possible, and every voter is represented by a candidate they voted for, as nearly as mathematically possible.

Previous elections held under the current Single Member Plurality (also known as First Past The Post) system led to odd results in certain elections, such as the 2001 election where the winning party obtained 77 of the 79 seats of the legislature with just 58% of the vote, and the 1996 election, in which the party with the most votes failed to win the election. The recommendation to switch to STV was made by the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, a group formed in 2004 of randomly selected citizens. They spent a year learning about voting systems around the world and consulting with BC citizens.

It’s the fourth referendum in the country and the second in the province within the last 4 years. The previous referendum held in 2005 also voted on these same electoral systems and came within 2.3% of the 60% threshold. In order for the referendum to be binding, BC-STV will again need 60% of the popular vote and 50% of votes in 51 of the 85 ridings in BC. If the change is approved, it will be the first province in the country to adopt reform of the electoral system in recent history.

Fair Voting BC, recognized as the official proponent group, argues that STV will lead to fairer election results, effective local representation and greater voter choice. They argue that BC-STV will give voters the power to hold politicians and political parties accountable, by giving every voter a vote that actually makes a difference. If the STV system is approved, then it will be put into use for the first time for the 2013 provincial election.

The recognized opponent group is the No STV Campaign Society. Their arguments are that STV will give larger ridings, voters would be unsure of whom their MLA would be, there would be unequal geographic representation, that the counting method is too complicated, the electoral system results are unverified in practical usage, the system results in a higher probability of minority governments and the subsequent coalition of parties. They also argue that other countries who use systems similar to STV have had problems with their election results.

$500,000 in public funding has been given to both the proponents and the opponents of the referendum.

[edit]

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Wikinews interviewed author Nancy Many about her book My Billion Year Contract, and asked her about life working in the elite Scientology group known as the “Sea Org“. Many joined Scientology in the early 1970s, and after leaving in 1996 she later testified against the organization. Published in October, Many’s book has gone on to become one of the top selling new books on Scientology at Amazon.com.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Dell Inc. announced on Tuesday that it will partner up with the Microsoft-Nortel Innovative communications alliance (ICA) team to sell Unified Communications and VoIP products.

The announcement on Tuesday the 16th of October 2007 includes Dell selling VoIP, data and wireless networking products from Nortel and the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and other unified communications products.

The partnership with both manufacturers should allow Dell to provide a pre-integrated solution.

In March 2007, competitors IBM and Cisco announced they would join in the competition for developing unified communications applications and the development of open technologies around the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) client platform an application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime.

“We want to make it simple for our customers to deploy unified communications so their end users can get access to all their messages in one place – whether its e-mail, phone or mobile device. This will pave the way for more business-ready productivity tools,” said vice president of solutions, Dell Product Group, Rick Becker.

• Customers have four options:
  • Core Office Communication Server 2007 – provides instant messaging and on-premise Microsoft Live Meeting.
  • Office Communication Server: Telephony – enables call routing tracking and management, VoIP gateway and public branch exchange (PBX) integration.
  • Audio and Video Conferencing – allows point-to-point conference, video conference and VoIP audio conference.
  • Exchange Unified Messaging – provides voicemail, e-mail and fax in Microsoft Outlook, and anywhere access of Microsoft Outlook Inbox and Calendar.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Crown Office are staying quiet about possible prosecutions after an inquiry found medical failures caused three deaths at NHS Lanarkshire.

In response to a specific question as to the possibility of prosecutions, a Crown Office spokesperson told Wikinews today that “The three deaths were fully investigated by the Procurator Fiscal and reported to Crown Counsel [laywers] to consider. Crown Counsel concluded that, given the facts and circumstances of the deaths, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) was the appropriate forum to consider the circumstances of the deaths.” It was further noted that “[a] FAI cannot make any findings of fault/blame against individuals.”

However, Crown Office did not specifically rule out prosecutions for offences such as cuplable homicide despite the spokesperson noting this was a direct response to such a question. They also declined to comment on National Health Service care as “it would not be appropriate to comment on the provision of NHS services” and entirely ignored questions about Crown Office satisfaction in the inquiry’s outcome and the length of time it took to reach a conclusion. The inquiry wrapped up last week but the deaths were in 2006.

Agnes Nicol, George Johnstone, and Andrew Ritchie died within a three-month period following keyhole surgery to remove their gall bladders.

Later expanded to look at all three deaths, the inquiry initially established to look into the case of Nicol, 50, who received surgery in late 2005. A surgeon at Wishaw General Hospital mistakenly cut her bile duct and her right hepatic artery. Whilst suturing her portal vein, her liver was left with 20% of its normal blood supply; the errors were not discovered until her transfer to liver specialists at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary.

By then, her liver was seriously damaged. She developed septicaemia, dying from multiple organ failure in March 2006.

Johnstone, 54, underwent the same procedure at Monklands District General Hospital on May 9, 2006. A consultant surgeon accidentally damaged, possibly severing, his bile duct. He died two days later in intensive care from the combined effects of multiple organ failure and a heart ailment.

Ritchie, 62, died in intensive care a week after an operation in June 2006. He died from intra abdominal haemorrhage caused by errors during the surgery.

Different surgeons were involved each time and the inquiry, under Sheriff Robert Dickson, found no evidence of poor training or inadequate experience. Dickson noted that in each case there was lack of action on a “growing body of evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with the patient” and surgeons failed to contemplate their own actions as potentially responsible. He agreed with two professors that it may have been possible to save their lives “had the post-operative care been to the standard which they expected, and had there been a proper management plan which staff could have worked to” and noted that all the patients suffered from a lack of adequate medical notes being available after their surgery. He described the care as having “clear faults”.

NHS Lanarkshire apologised and said improvements had been made regarding “these types of cases” as well as with document management. Wikinews got in touch seeking details of the changes made but the health trust failed to respond.