Students choose Hitler as parade theme

To celebrate the 62nd anniversary of a school in northern Taiwan, students were invited to choose historical figures and “cosplay” them at a parade Friday.
Liu Hsi-cheng, a history teacher at Hsinchu Kuang Fu High School, suggested to his homeroom class that they go with famous people from Arabic culture, he told the Taipei Times.
But Liu's students had another idea: a theme based on Adolf Hitler.
Liu warned his students that such a theme would be “very controversial,” the paper reported — but ultimately “chose to respect the students' decision and did not veto it” after the class voted on it twice.
On Friday, students from the school in Hsinchu, about 55 miles southwest of Taipei, showed up to the festivities wearing Nazi uniforms and brandishing signs, arm bands and long red banners with swastikas on them.
In one photo that the school has since provided to the media, one student can be seen sitting atop a tank made from cardboard boxes, his arm (albeit his left one) raised in a Nazi salute.
As word of the school activity circulated online, the outrage was swift and widespread. On social media, people in Taiwan and abroad condemned the students' decision as “ignorant” and “a disgusting display of disrespect.”
The incident also drew sharp rebukes from both the German Institute Taipei and the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei, which handle nondiplomatic relations between Taiwan and their respective countries.
Israel's representative office issued a statement Saturday that called the parade “deplorable and shocking” and noted that, less than a year ago, Taiwan had marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day for the first time with the participation of then-president Ma Ying-jeou.
“It is deplorable and shocking that seven decades only after the world had witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, a high-school in Taiwan is supporting such an outrageous action as we witnessed yesterday at Hsinchu Kuang-Fu Senior High School,” the statement read in part.
“We strongly condemn this tasteless occurrence and call on the Taiwanese authorities, in all levels, to initiate educational programs which would introduce the meaning of the Holocaust and teach its history and universal meaning. Israel would support such endeavors as may be necessary.”
Germany's representative office also released a statement saying it was alarmed by the Hsinchu parade.
“In the course of Nazi rule, millions of people in Europe were persecuted and killed,” the statement read in part. “The Holocaust can be regarded as one of the most heinous crimes in human history. Unfortunately, it is clear that the students are not aware that the Nazi symbol means oppression and contempt for human rights.”
That day, Taiwan's Presidential Office ordered an investigation into the incident and the country's education minister, Pan Wen-chung, formally apologized and urged all schools in Taiwan to learn from the mistake, the Central News Agency reported.
The school's principal, Cheng Hsiao-ming, said Saturday he took responsibility for the incident and would resign from his position.
Holding a sheet of paper with both hands, Cheng read aloud a lengthy statement to local reporters in which he apologized to Holocaust victims and to the general public for what had happened.
“Educational institutions have a responsibility to teach students the correct values,” Cheng said. “We should teach students to learn from their mistakes.”
In that vein, Cheng said the school would organize a series of educational activities about the Holocaust, including watching movies such as “Schindler's List” and “Life is Beautiful.” They had invited staff members from Israel's representative office to speak at the school, he added.
Cheng also asked that the public not blame the teachers and students too much, as they had received overwhelming blowback from the public already, and vowed that they would turn this into an opportunity to teach understanding.
Cheng then bowed deeply to reporters.
Liu, the teacher, told CNS that his students deeply regretted their actions — and that he regretted allowing them to proceed with their theme.
“I should have immediately rejected [their vote] on the spot,” Liu told the news agency.
Teachers' groups in Taiwan lamented the incident as a failure of the nation's education system, the Taipei Times reported.
“We feel that we have not worked hard enough, and have allowed this absurd, ignorant and indifferent attitude toward the universal value of human rights to spread and become an international joke,” said a joint statement issued by Our Story Alliance of History Teachers and Action Coalition of Civics Teacher.

Nintendo Shares Fall by 18% After Loss Forecast

Shares in Japan's Nintendo dived by nearly a fifth at the open on Monday after the gaming giant warned it would swing back into the red.
The shares were changing hands at 11,945 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, down 18.43 percent from Friday's pre-warning close.
It later clawed back a bit of the loss to be trading down 13.38 percent at 12,685 yen around 20 minutes after the opening bell.
Nintendo said Friday it expects a loss of 25 billion yen ($240 million) in the year to March, reversing an earlier 55 billion yen net profit forecast.
The dramatic downgrade sent shock waves through a market where the yen's recent depreciation has broadly lifted earnings of export-oriented companies.
It also stands in marked contrast to rivals Sony and Microsoft which have seen huge demand for their new consoles as the firms battle for control of a sector worth about $44 billion annually around the globe.
The company, maker of the Donkey Kong and Super Mario brands, also said it expected to sell just 2.8 million units worldwide of the Wii U, less than a third of it earlier prediction for 9.0 million consoles.
Nintendo's hopes for big holiday season demand to boost flagging sales were dashed, forcing it to chop forecasts as demand for the Wii's high-margin software slumped, it said.

Elastic Glue for Heart Surgery Inspired by Slugs

Researchers in Boston have developed a medical adhesive they say can seal holes in the heart and other tissue, an advance that could replace the use of staples and sutures to close wounds.
The new adhesive, invented by Canadian-born Harvard medical school associate professor Jeffrey Karp, was inspired by the sticking abilities of slugs.
It's both water-resistant and elastic, allowing it to stretch as a beating heart expands and contracts.
In an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks, Karp tells host Bob McDonald that the glue only becomes active when ultraviolet light shines on it, so surgeons can more accurately bind the adhesive exactly where needed.
A biodegradable adhesive in the body offers advantages over metal-based staples or sutures, he added.
“Sutures and staples really are not mechanically similar to the tissues in the body, so they can induce stress on the tissue over time,” said Karp, who is also a co-director of the Center for Regenerative Therapeutics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“This is a material that’s made from glycerol and sebacic acid, both of which exist in the body and can be readily metabolized,” he said. “What happens over time is that this material will degrade. Cells will invade into it and on top of it, and ideally the hole will remain closed and the patient won’t require further operations.”
Researchers from Boston Children’s, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped to develop the nontoxic substance.
The adhesive has been tested successfully on the hearts of pigs and rats, and on the carotid artery of a pig. The researchers hope the product will be on the market within the next two to three years.
To listen to the entire interview, tune in to CBC Radio One at noon on Saturday to catch Quirks & Quarks.

Fridge Sends Spam

A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets.
The fridge was one of more than 100,000 devices used to take part in the spam campaign.
Uncovered by security firm Proofpoint the attack compromised computers, home routers, media PCs and smart TV sets.
The attack is believed to be one of the first to exploit the lax security on devices that are part of the "internet of things".

Poor protection

The spam attack took place between 23 December 2013 and 6 January this year, said Proofpoint in a statement. In total, it said, about 750,000 messages were sent as part of the junk mail campaign. The emails were routed through the compromised gadgets.
About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said.
Instead, the malware managed to get itself installed on other smart devices such as kitchen appliances, the home media systems on which people store copied DVDs and web-connected televisions.
Many of these gadgets have computer processors onboard and act as a self-contained web server to handle communication and other sophisticated functions.
Investigation by Proofpoint into the internet addresses involved in the attack revealed the presence of the smart gadgets, said David Knight, general manager of Proofpoint's information security division.
"The results spoke for themselves when the addresses responded with explicit identification, including well-known, often graphically branded interfaces, file structures, and content," he told the BBC.
Mr Knight speculated that the malware that allowed spam to be sent from these devices was able to install itself because many of the gadgets were poorly configured or used default passwords that left them exposed.
He said attacks such as this would become much more routine as homes and furnishings got smarter and were put online.
"Many of these devices are poorly protected at best and consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur," he added.

The Technology of 2014

Electric cars take to the track

As the name suggests, Formula E is all about electric power. The arrival of this new petrol-free motor racing competition is a significant step for both the car and the environment. Two years ago motorsport's international governing body, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), announced its ambitious plan for an electric car race that would mimic the hugely popular F1 series. As the arrival of Formula E looms, experts predict that it could have a big impact on the future of car manufacturing.

Initially, the cars in the competition will be powered by enormous battery engines. Each battery weighs 200 kilograms, producing around 200 kilowatts of power. Depending on the speed, the electric engines will last anywhere from a few hours to just 25 minutes and the cars can reach speeds of up to 220 kilometers per hour.

"If you look in the past, a lot of development in the car industry has come from racing," said Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag. "The transfer of technology is potentially very big."

Space tourism blasts off

After a number of false starts and delays, Virgin Galactic is finally poised to lift off in 2014. Billionaire Richard Branson's planned commercial spacecraft underwent a successful test flight last year over California, making a commercial launch this year a distinct possibility.

In September 2013, Branson's Virgin Galactic said SpaceShipTwo completed an important test, breaking the sound barrier as it climbed from 42,000 feet to 69,000 feet over the Mojave Desert before descended using its tilt-wing "feathering" maneuver. It was the second successful powered flight for SpaceShipTwo -- a craft designed to carry up to six passengers.

Initially, Virgin Galactic flights are scheduled to be suborbital, but the hope is to take passengers further into space as the technology is refined. Already, a host of famous names have signed up to head into near orbit including Katy Perry, Stephen Hawking and Ashton Kutcher.

"We couldn't be more delighted to have another major supersonic milestone under our belts as we move toward a 2014 start of commercial service," said Branson after the test flight last year.

Wind power blows stronger

As scientists look to find alternatives to traditional fossil fuels, a number of major projects, including Cape Wind (in Massachusetts' Nantucket Sound) and Deepwater Wind (near Block Island, Rhode Island), are vying to become the first offshore windfarm in the U.S.

Alongside power from volcanoes, waves, biomass and the sun, wind power is set to become a significant alternative energy source in 2014.

Are we finally heading to Mars?

A new type of engine, called the VASIMR (or Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) will be tested in space in March. If successful it is estimated that it could reduce the time it takes to get to Mars from nine months to just three months. The technology -- an "advanced plasma space propulsion system" -- will be tested by NASA on the International Space Station, taking the prospect of interplanetary exploration one step closer.

Synthetic biology begins to grow

Marcus Fairs, the editor of dezeen.com, a highly influential online design magazine, says that in his view 2014's most significant emerging technologies will be in the field of synthetic biology.

"This emerging field started to hit the headlines at the end of last year and will be huge in 2014," Fairs say. "It involves the creation of new types of artificial life forms that perform useful functions. At the smallest scale it could mean man-made microbes that live inside your body and detect illness; at the largest scale it could mean synthetic creatures that are released into the wild to clean up pollution or attack parasitic species."

Wearable technology is on trend

Wearable technology fired some preliminary warning shots in 2013 with the release of the Samsung Galaxy Gear and Pebble smartwatches, but this year will see the arrival of a selection of truly innovative wearable devices. Most notably, Google Glass is expected to launch this year, offering head-mounted computing that could, ultimately, make smartwatches and mobile phones a thing of the past.

Alongside Google's new high-tech glasses, Fairs says that in 2014 "technology will migrate onto the body as digital services are miniaturized and embedded in our clothing or worn against our skin. We already have Google Glass and wearable fitness trackers, but a vast array of services -- from health monitoring to augmented information (telling you what's around you and helping you navigate) will become commonplace."

Fairs points to clothing with in-built solar panels, devices that scan your body for disease, and self-repairing trainers as some of the more exciting wearable technologies on the near horizon.

Tim Meyer, Head of Strategic Planning and Communications at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, agrees. "This year's Las Vegas CES show is revealing new wearable technology, but what we're going to see this year is the development and test-marketing of smart clothing, not just smart gadgets," Meyer says. "New fibers, new micro-sensors, and new communications protocols will allow your clothes to actually work for you and collect and process information. I suspect we'll see some fashion statements first: clothes that change shape or color. Then we'll see clothes that do computing; first step will be storing information. My socks will store today's to-do list."

Dark matter

Meyer also believes that 2014 will be a significant year for physics, particularly in the search for dark matter: "Dark matter is being searched for in everyone's sock drawer as well as deep underground and with satellites. The underground experiments are likely to find something before the Large Hadron Collider turns back on to try "making" it. We could see a conclusive discovery of weakly interacting, massive dark matter particles this year. That will blow your mind."

Crowd-funding comes of age

Mid-way through 2014 new laws (known as the JOBS act) will allow anybody to buy equity in start-ups through new online crowd-funding marketplaces. This will make it almost as easy for individuals to fund new technology ventures as it currently is to support a Kickstarter project, bringing a flood of new capital to fledgling tech companies. "The ability to aggregate a bunch of individuals around a common funding goal is absolutely game changing," Vince Molinari, founder and chief executive of GATE Technologies, an online trading company said.

With these new laws in place, the rapid technology developments of 2014 may be dwarfed by innovations in 2015 and beyond. Watch this space.