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The time is 4:45 UTC and this an Audio Wikinews Brief for Wednesday, October 17, 2007.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The Auckland ‘Boobs on Bikes’ parade for next weeks annual sex industry convention, Erotica Expo which features naked woman on motorcycles has been approved by Auckland City Council’s events and promotion staff despite disapproval by Auckland Mayor, Dick Hubbard and 13 other Auckland City Council councillors.

The mayor and the other councillors have signed a petition to withdraw the permit. Hubbard said “I think such a parade down Queen Street is totally inappropriate because it’s shamelessly promoting a pornography trade fair. It’s particularly degrading to women.”

However, the organiser of the expo, Steve Crow, says Mr Hubbard’s opposition is morally based.

All other previous parades had been held informally. Steve Crow, organiser of the parade and expo said “He only asked the council and the police if they wished to be involved as a matter of courtesy, and the parade will go ahead regardless. It’s legal under New Zealand law. They can basically go to hell; we’re going to do it.” Crow said the only reason they asked for permission this year is to have police involvement for spectators’ safety.

A spokeswoman for the Mayor said “The proposed route for the tour would pass a kindergarten and school. It’s the councillors that have got upset about it due to huge public reaction by people saying they didn’t want it,” the council has received numerous complaints to the parade.

Bob McCoskrie, Family First national director said “[We are] offering support for the topless porn girls by making bras and sweatshirts available. Typical of Auckland weather, there’s a high likelihood it’ll either be cold and/or wet. We’re genuinely concerned for their welfare and health.”

The Councillors are meeting today, August 16, to try and withdraw the permit that gives the parade green lights throughout Queen Street. Their decision is due sometime late today.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample.

If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it may lead the way for the use of robotic surgery in even more delicate procedures, such as heart surgery. Note that this is not a fully automated system, as a human doctor controls the operation via remote control. Laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery is a treatment for obesity.

There were concerns that doctors, in the future, might only be trained in the remote control procedure. Ronald G. Latimer, M.D., of Santa Barbara, CA, warned “The fact that surgeons may have to open the patient or might actually need to revert to standard laparoscopic techniques demands that this basic training be a requirement before a robot is purchased. Robots do malfunction, so a backup system is imperative. We should not be seduced to buy this instrument to train surgeons if they are not able to do the primary operations themselves.”

There are precedents for just such a problem occurring. A previous “new technology”, the electrocardiogram (ECG), has lead to a lack of basic education on the older technology, the stethoscope. As a result, many heart conditions now go undiagnosed, especially in children and others who rarely undergo an ECG procedure.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005File:Plastic bag stock sized.jpg

They are cheap, useful, and very plentiful, and that is exactly the problem, according to researchers. A report issued on Feb. 23 by a cadre of environment and economics researchers suggested that Kenya should ban the common plastic bag that one gets at the checkout counter of grocery stores, and place a levy on other plastic bags, all to combat the country’s environmental problems stemming from the bags’ popularity.

Friday, December 15, 2017

On Tuesday, parents of baby Vanellope Hope Wilkins and representatives of Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England reported to the press that Vanellope has survived three weeks after being born with her heart outside her chest, a rare birth defect known as ectopia cordis. She has been operated on three times, initially less than an hour after her birth on November 22, and will need further surgery; doctors believe she is the first baby in the United Kingdom to survive being born with the condition.

Vanellope’s parents, Naomi Findlay and Dean Wilkins, live in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire; Vanellope is Naomi’s third child. They learnt about the defect from a prenatal scan, but opted not to terminate the pregnancy. She was delivered prematurely by caesarian section by 50 people including four teams, placed in a sterile plastic bag and operated on 50 minutes later for the first of three times so far. Frances Bu’Lock, a consultant paediatric cardiologist at Glenfield, noted that unlike some cases of ectopia cordis, she does not have any heart defect or other displaced organs; at nine weeks, part of her stomach also protruded, but by sixteen weeks, only her heart was affected. Dr. Bu’Lock had originally told her parents she had only a “remote” chance of surviving.

Ectopia cordis is very rare and reportedly occurs in fewer than eight of every million babies born alive. It usually leads to a stillbirth when the pregnancy is not terminated, and with the likelihood of other associated congenital defects, plus the risk of infection, Vanellope’s survival is very unusual. Dr. Martin Ward-Platt, a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, stated “we wouldn’t expect a case like this to happen in the UK more often than once every five to 10 years.”

Her mother said they called her Vanellope after a character in the Disney film Wreck-It Ralph because she was born with “a glitch”.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

A story about a man carrying over 30,000 (sometimes reported as 40,000) volts of static electricity in his body, allegedly generated by a wool sweater and nylon jacket combination, is circulating through major news outlets. The story, carried first by the Warrnambool Standard, says that the man, Frank Clewer, a 58-year old cleaner from Dennington, involuntarily created a scene by causing fire departments to evacuate three buildings where he had left his mark, before he realized he was causing the burn marks on carpets and allowed the fire department to help him.

The story has been picked up by The Register, Guardian, BBC, USA Today, Reuters, local agencies of ABC, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other news outlets.

Several unanswered objections mark the story as a possible hoax:

• Clewer enters and exits his car several times in the story — if he opened the car by touching its presumably metal lock, he would surely release some electricity into the car through his hand; everyone has at some point experienced the painful shock of touching a door handle or car keys to a lock. Though the car might not be grounded, it would still be at a lower potential and thus energy would be transferred. This would be noticeable; the story does not comment that Clewer understood what was happening to him.
• Firefighters supposedly “used a device to check static electricity on him and his belongings.” While firefighters would be likely to carry a high-voltage multimeter around to measure the current and voltage ratings of downed power lines, it is unlikely that the same device could measure such a large voltage resulting from a very small amount of static energy without de-electrifying it.
• For such a large voltage to be stored, humidity would have to have been extremely low on that day for the air around him not to ionize and source current, removing the static energy.
• If he was carrying such a large voltage, his hair would probably have stood on end, as this is a notable effect when one touches a Van de Graaf generator. Note: It is uncertain at what voltage this effect begins, and since Van de Graaf machines routinely exceed Megavolts of electric potential, this may not be a verifiable objection.
• This statement: “Firefighters took possession of Clewer’s jacket and stored it in the courtyard of the fire station, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current.” (Reuters UK) First, there is no reason they would need to take possession of the jacket — the static electricity could be dealt with by simply dumping water on it. Second, the jacket could not “give off” an electric current without some continuous source of energy, which, in storage, is impossible. It is possible that the jacket could hold a voltage, but the effects of this would not be visible — if they were, they would be short-lived as the jacket would lose its static energy. In any event, the current would be miniscule.
• The amount of energy stored on Clewer’s person and possessions could not have been more than a few Joules; this is unlikely to have burned carpet.

The equation for stored energy in capacitors is:

Where U = energy, C = capacitance, and V = voltage. A human body by itself typically has a capacitance of around 250 pF, which would mean a voltage of 30,000 V would produce energy of 0.11 joules. Even if Clewer’s possessions resulted in a parallel capacitance of 1 microfarad, this would still only result in an energy storage of 450 J. This amount of energy would be insufficient to burn carpet or char plastic, although a spark could ignite flammable vapor or gas.