Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Opinions rooted in racism, sexism, homophobia are commonly unacceptable to express in public or in polite company. Michael Richards shouted down a black heckler by yelling, “Shut up!” followed by “He’s a nigger!” and gave his already dormant career less of a chance of ever reviving. When Isiah Washington called a co-star on Grey’s Anatomy a “fag,” his contract was not renewed.

None of this would have happened to either actor if instead of racist or homophobic terminology they had said, “Shut up, fattie!” or “Fat ass!” It’s not an easy time to be fat in America. A fat person is seen as weak-willed, as suffering from an addiction to food, as unhealthy and deserving of ridicule. It goes without saying that people who are overweight are, indeed, people with a full range of emotions and feelings that are as easily hurt as a thin person’s.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone met Kira Nerusskaya, a documentary filmmaker, at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Her film The BBW World: Under the FAT! is in production and post-production. She is a self-described Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) and she hosts the website TheBBWWorld.com; she is also one of the leading voices that has recently emerged for fat acceptance. In researching her film she has traveled to Russia, London, Paris, Ireland and all over the United States to interview fat women about their obesity and their place in their respective societies.

Below is an interview with Nerusskaya about the health, issues, public reactions to and sexuality of a BBW.

Monday, February 14, 2005

The Brazilian Regional Council of Medicine has protested against a Ministry of Education decision to accept the diplomas of Cuban medical school graduates without subjecting them to a more rigorous evaluation process.

Under the Brazilian 44045 Edict of July 19, 1958, all students of Medicine, Brazilian or non-Brazilian, who studied in a foreign institution must undergo a strict evaluation before their professional registration is granted. The law aims to ensure that the physicians who graduated at foreign universities are properly prepared for and familiarized with the particular medical conditions of Brazil. Some diseases like malaria and dengue for example are very rare in some countries but are more common in Brazilian territory.

However the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) has come to an agreement with the Cuban government to allow medical students who studied in Cuba to go through a less rigorous examination. Furthermore the MEC wants to exempt the students from the Cuban Escola Latino Americana de Medicina (Latin American Medicine School) or ELAM located in Havana from the examination. Under the agreement, the diplomas of ELAM students would be automatically recognized as valid in Brazil. The Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed the endorsement of this agreement last year during his visit to Cuba.

The Brazilian Regional Council of Medicine from São Paulo is opposed to the idea of accepting the Cuban diplomas and is to dispute the deal in Court. The council says the government decision is unfair and disadvantages Brazilian students. It also says that the decision puts the Brazilian community at risk because of differences between Cuban and Brazilian medical education. Cuban physicians are prepared for Cuban conditions and necessities in health which differ from Brazilian ones. Additionally the council argues that the decision is against the law because the Brazilian 44045 Edict demands that all medical students from foreign schools have to pass a careful examination.

The Cuban First Secretary of Technical and Scientific Collaboration in Health, Filisberto Perez, recognizes that both Brazil and Cuba have different models of apprenticeship in medicine. However he believes that Cuba and Brazil can recognize each other’s diplomas without difficulty.

Early this year, a team of Brazilian inspectors visited the leading medical schools in Cuba to evaluate them so the degrees can be formalized.

The MEC’s decision has angered some Brazilian students. “Why would I study for two years so I could get admitted to a Brazilian school if it would be easier to “buy” my diploma in Cuba?” asks Artur Oliveira Mendes in a email sent to a academic organization. He added: “…our schools of medicine are demoralized before the president’s declaration.”

The Brazilian students who are in Cuba were selected by the PT, PCdoB, and MST.

Senator José Agripino Maia (PFL) asked the Minister of Education Tarso Genro to explain before the Senate Education Commission why the students from Cuba are being favoured by the Brazilian government.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The European Commission currently has proposals on the table to extend performers’ copyright terms. Described by Professor Martin Kretschmer as the “Beatles Extension Act”, the proposed measure would extend copyright from 50 to 95 years after recording. A vast number of classical tracks are at stake; the copyright on recordings from the fifties and early sixties is nearing its expiration date, after which it would normally enter the public domain or become ‘public property’. E.U. Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy is proposing this extension, and if the other relevant Directorate Generales (Information Society, Consumers, Culture, Trade, Competition, etc.) agree with the proposal, it will be sent to the European Parliament.

Wikinews contacted Erik Josefsson, European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.), who invited us to Brussels, the heart of E.U. policy making, to discuss this new proposal and its implications. Expecting an office interview, we arrived to discover that the event was a party and meetup conveniently coinciding with FOSDEM 2008 (the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The meetup was in a sprawling city centre apartment festooned with E.F.F. flags and looked to be a party that would go on into the early hours of the morning with copious food and drink on tap. As more people showed up for the event it turned out that it was a truly international crowd, with guests from all over Europe.

Eddan Katz, the new International Affairs Director of the E.F.F., had come over from the U.S. to connect to the European E.F.F. network, and he gladly took part in our interview. Eddan Katz explained that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is “A non-profit organisation working to protect civil liberties and freedoms online. The E.F.F. has fought for information privacy rights online, in relation to both the government and companies who, with insufficient transparency, collect, aggregate and make abuse of information about individuals.” Another major focus of their advocacy is intellectual property, said Eddan: “The E.F.F. represents what would be the public interest, those parts of society that don’t have a concentration of power, that the private interests do have in terms of lobbying.”

Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the U.K.’s Open Rights Group (O.R.G.), joined our discussion as well. “The goals of the Open Rights Group are very simple: we speak up whenever we see civil, consumer or human rights being affected by the poor implementation or the poor regulation of new technologies,” Becky summarised. “In that sense, people call us -I mean the E.F.F. has been around, in internet years, since the beginning of time- but the Open Rights Group is often called the British E.F.F.“

Saturday, October 14, 2006

An American inventor has patented a pair of new time formats with a footprint less than 50% of that of conventional four-digit time. The more unusual of the two new formats, called “TWELV”, dispenses with numerals altogether. In place of clock hands or digits, the new clock uses color to convey the hour and a moon image to convey the minute, which moon slowly grows throughout the course of an hour from a narrow crescent to a full-fledged circle.

The second and more approachable of the new formats retains numerical digits to indicate the minute but uses colors to convey the hour.

Early critics question whether the aesthetic benefits of the moon-clock will be sufficient to encourage users to learn the color-based time-telling system. However, the size advantages of the new system may make it particularly suitable for mobile applications, particularly cell phones, wearable computers, and head-mounted displays.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Four years ago, on February 9, a major Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza published a report detailing a hoax in Polish Wikipedia entitled Henryk Batuta. The author of the report was Konrad Godlewski; several weeks later, Godlewski began editing Polish Wikipedia. The results of his work include one featured article – pismo chi?skie (Polish for “Chinese character”) – as well as various articles relating to China.

During our interview, Godlewski discusses memes, hoaxes, and the Batuta Army – the creators of the hoax his paper reported on. From February this year, a special project on the Polish Wikipedia, BATUTA, saw a makeshift taskforce work on improving the quality of content. BATUTA stands for “Bezwzgl?dna Akcja Troskliwego U?ród?awiania Tysi?cy artyk?ów”, roughly translated as “Ruthless Action of Carefully Adding References to Thousands of Articles”.